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Discussions about costs are important. No patient should have to worry about whether they can afford the care they need. At the same time, it is important to look at costs across the health care system and not just the share going toward life changing medicines...new therapies are transforming care for patients fighting debilitating diseases like cancer, hepatitis C, high cholesterol and more. In the midst of all this progress, the share of spending on retail medicines remains the same as it was 50 years ago. In fact, government actuaries project the share of health care spending attributable to medicines will continue to grow in line with overall health care cost growth for at least the next decade...Our updated Prescription Medicines: Costs in Context explains how competition among brand-name medicines, high generic utilization rates and aggressive tactics by insurers and pharmacy benefit managers to negotiate lower prices all help to keep costs under control...

The patient left brain-dead in last week's botched drug trial has died, French authorities said, spurring more questions about how a routine Phase I study went awry and sent 6 volunteers to the hospital…The patient, dosed with an investigational drug from Portugal's Bial, died Sunday, about a week after the company's CRO halted the study in response to serious side effects. The 5 other hospitalized patients remain in stable condition…In the ensuing fallout, regulators and scientists are struggling to piece together what went wrong in the trial… investigators had yet to determine whether the problems were related to the drug's mechanism of action or the result of contaminated doses…"Together with all the relevant authorities, Bial is strongly committed to ensuring, first of all, the well-being of all participants in this trial and to determine thoroughly and exhaustively the causes which are at the origin of this situation," Bial said in a statement.

A molecule that carries the recipe for making drugs inside body cells is exciting scientists and investors alike, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in a scramble for the next promising area of biotechnology… synthetic messenger RNA, or mRNA technology, a new approach to tackling a range of hard-to-treat diseases... In theory, the promise of mRNA is enormous, ranging from cancer to infectious diseases to heart and kidney disorders, since it could be used to tackle the 80 percent of proteins that are difficult to affect with existing medicines…In effect, mRNA serves as software that can be injected into the body to instruct ribosomes, the “3D-printers” found inside cells, to churn out desired proteins…This is a radically different approach from conventional approaches, where therapeutic proteins are produced outside the human body and…then be inserted back into the human body at great complexity and cost…“The field is moving very rapidly,”...“I predict it will have a significant impact.”...

Here's the CliffsNotes version of how most drugs go from idea to reality: Basic academic research provides the foundation for a series of clinical trials, first in animals and then in humans, which eventually tell us whether a new treatment is safe and effective…the reality of drug development is rarely that linear or precise…the path to creating a life-saving treatment can be an extremely long, labor-intensive effort that involves thousands of scientists over many decades...

It’s a battle that seems ripped from a sci-fi film: Scientists are racing to develop new weapons to destroy the slimy colonies of bacteria, known as biofilms, that cause tens of thousands of deaths across the US each year...Biofilms are the leading cause of infections acquired in hospitals. They grow on medical devices such as heart valves, pacemakers, and catheters. They take root inside wounds, pulsing and rippling as they spread...Encased in gooey protective sheaths, biofilms are exceptionally hard to stop. Many are impervious to antibiotics. They also cost the health care system billions each year, as patients often require surgery to remove and replace contaminated implants...researchers and biotech startups are testing new methods of attack, from coating medical devices with spiky coverings to blasting bacteria with electrical fields to interrupting the chemicals that cells inside biofilm colonies use to send messages to each other...researchers at Ohio State announced they’d invented a way to coat the surfaces of medical devices with Y-shaped nanoparticles of quartz in a bid to block biofilms from latching on tight...

• Here’s a look at the battle:
• What are biofilms?
• Is this a new menace?
• Why are biofilms so hard to kill?
• So, what’s being done?

Food and Drug Administration...launched the beta version of precisionFDA, its new collaborative platform for the exploration of next-generation gene sequencing...First announced in August, the platform features more than 20 public and private sector participants…Next-generation sequencing enables researchers to compile a vast amount of data on a person's exact order or sequence of DNA...scientists can look for meaningful differences in DNA that can be used to suggest a person's risk of disease, possible response to treatment and assess their current state of health. Ultimately, what we learn about these differences could be used to design a treatment tailored to a specific individual...The hope is to grow this community and improve the usability of precisionFDA in the coming months and years...One way we'll achieve that is by placing the code for the precisionFDA portal on the world's largest open source software repository, GitHub, so the community can further enhance precisionFDA's features...

Scientists have found a genetic explanation for why the world's first malaria vaccine is not very effective in protecting some African children against the deadly mosquito-borne disease… The analysis…comes at a critical time for the experimental shot from GlaxoSmithKline, when global experts are assessing how it might be deployed…Mosquirix is specifically designed for use by African babies and toddlers. While it has the potential to help prevent many cases of malaria, researchers have been disappointed by its limited efficacy…scientists have discovered that genetic variability in a protein found on the surface of malaria parasites may help explain the patchy response because, while the protein comes in different forms, GSK's vaccine incorporates only one variant.

Rose Bengal (PV-10), a cheap industrial chemical that turns yarn and food bright red, has been used as a diagnostic staining agent for some time. Now, some scientists are looking at its potential to fight various forms of cancer...Provectus Biopharmaceuticals...is testing a reformulated version of the industrial dye on melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer...Rose Bengal’s potential against cancer was discovered by accident. The salt was first patented in 1882 as a wool dye and has been used for years as a diagnostic stain in tests for jaundice in newborns and to detect eye damage...In 1998, scientists....were looking for a safe photoreactive agent to use in an investigation of lasers against cancer. Rose Bengal fit the bill...As it turned out, the Rose Bengal solution appeared to work on its own to dissolve tumors when directed injectly (directly injected) into them...Provectus executives say the small development tab—along with relatively low manufacturing costs and easy handling requirements—could make PV-10 a less expensive new treatment...Provectus plans to put itself up for sale once its drug is approved...

The planned merger of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer with competitor Allergan, aimed in large part at cutting the combined company's tax bill, illustrates a troubling trend in the industry: Firms are focused more on pursuing near-term profits than on the difficult, longer-term research needed to develop truly groundbreaking new drugs. This is unfortunate, because disease may be making a comeback…the accelerating spread of multi-drug-resistant bacterial infections. There are now more than two million cases each year in the U.S. alone. Last month, scientists announced that they had found evidence, in farm animals in China, that genes for antibiotic resistance are being transferred directly among different bacteria -- a trick (horizontal gene transfer) that will allow the resistance to spread more quickly than ever before…The pharmaceutical industry's reshaping doesn’t bode well for humanity's ability to respond. Almost all antibiotics in use today were discovered between 1940 and 1960. Research progress since then has been almost nil.

Three scientists…whose discoveries led to the development of potent new drugs against parasitic diseases…won the Nobel Prize for Medicine…Irish-born William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura won half of the prize for discovering avermectin,…used to treat..river blindness and lymphatic filariasis...China's Tu Youyou was awarded the other half of the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has slashed malaria deaths…She is China's first Nobel laureate in medicine.