Category:

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

• Our Newest Board Member - Melissa Shake
• Prescription Transfers
• National Pharmacy
• WHO Launches Global Patient Safety Challenge on Medication Safety
• Continuous Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Organizations
• NCPDP Releases Guide to Ensure Patients Get Their Medications During a Disaster
• FDA Warns of Illnesses and Deaths in Pets Exposed to Fluorouracil
• FDA Revises Final Guidance Documents on Bulk Drug Substances Used in Compounding
• APhA Resource Guide Applies JCPP Pharmacists’ Patient Care Process to Immunization Services
• CPE Training on Older Adult Fall Prevention Available Online
• New FDA Drug Info Rounds Training Video Addresses the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act
• FDA Presents Series of CE Webinars for Students and Clinicians
• E-Prescribed Faxed Prescriptions

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

After several years in which drug makers have been pressured to release clinical trial data, a new analysis finds many companies are still doing an incomplete or inconsistent job of being transparent...95 percent of the 42 companies reviewed – including the 25 largest drug makers, based on sales – had a publicly accessible policy...the specifics often varied wildly in terms of what is disclosed and even how to interpret some of the policies...not every drug maker committed to share results within 12 months of completing a trial...policies were found to be vague, ambiguously worded and internally contradictory...every element of best practice around transparency was committed to by at least one company, [which] strongly suggests that they are all deliverable, and that there are no practical barriers to all companies committing to meet all elements of best practice."...The findings follow years of tussling between drug makers, academics and consumer groups over the issue of transparency. A central concern is the ability for researchers to independently verify study results and, consequently, improve patient treatments that can lead to better health and lower costs...Drug makers, however, are not the only ones to have flaunted transparency...many leading medical research institutions flagrantly violated a federal law requiring public reporting of study results. The violations left gaping holes in a U.S. government database used by millions of patients and medical professionals to compare effectiveness and side effects of treatments.

A research team led by scientists at UC San Francisco has developed a computational method to systematically probe massive amounts of open-access data to discover new ways to use drugs, including some that have already been approved for other uses...The method enables scientists to bypass the usual experiments in biological specimens and to instead do computational analyses, using open-access data to match FDA-approved drugs and other existing compounds to the molecular fingerprints of diseases like cancer. The specificity of the links between these drugs and the diseases they are predicted to be able to treat holds the potential to target drugs in ways that minimize side effects, overcome resistance and reveal more clearly how both the drugs and the diseases are working...Our hope is that ultimately our computational approach can be broadly applied, not only to cancer, but also to other diseases where molecular data exist, and that it will speed up drug discovery in diseases with high unmet needs...I’m (Bin Chen, PhD) most excited about the possibilities for applying this approach to individual patients to prescribe the best drug for each...

Laura Joszt, assistant managing editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Laura Joszt, assistant managing editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

An evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston has published new calculations that indicate no more than 25 percent of the human genome is functional. That is in stark contrast to suggestions by scientists with the ENCODE project that as much as 80 percent of the genome is functional...In work published online in Genome Biology and Evolution, Dan Graur reports the functional portion of the human genome probably falls between 10 percent and 15 percent, with an upper limit of 25 percent. The rest is so-called junk DNA, or useless but harmless DNA…this new study...will help to refocus the science of human genomics...“We need to know the functional fraction of the human genome in order to focus biomedical research on the parts that can be used to prevent and cure disease,” he said. “There is no need to sequence everything under the sun. We need only to sequence the sections we know are functional.”