Speed Raisies Risks for Alzheimer’s Research

Drugmakers hurrying experimental Alzheimer’s drugs into late-stage testing may be undermining their ultimate chance at success.
The halting progress in the race to develop new Alzheimer’s drugs was on display at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Chicago this week. Great expectations and a desire for quick results were tempered by the setbacks of some [...]

Myriad Wonders What Might Have Been in Alzheimer’s

Myriad Genetics planned a glorious coming-out party at the Alzheimer’s Association’s scientific conference this year. The company, best known for genetic tests, has been angling to get into the drug business and was poised to show off the results of one of the biggest, longest trials to date of a drug that aimed to alter [...]

Feds May Fund Program to Counter Drug Rep Sales Pitches

The government could start paying impartial experts to visit doctors to talk about the safety, effectiveness and cost of prescription drugs and other treatments. The idea would be to give presentations along the lines of those given by company drug reps. But the federally funded presentations would provide a counterweight to the industry messages on [...]

If Bristol Buys ImClone, Who Will Buy Bristol?

If Bristol-Myers Squibb winds up buying ImClone, Bristol itself could become a more appealing acquisition target. Bristol — a perennial buyout candidate — has been busy turning itself into a biotech-pharma hybrid. The company already owns about 17% of ImClone, and the two companies co-market ImClone’s cancer drug Erbitux. Buying ImClone would give Bristol full [...]

Bristol-Myers Offers $4.5 Billion for ImClone

Dear Carl,
You were right all along. ImClone was worth a lot more than people thought. How about $60 a share, and we’ll call it a deal? Let’s talk.
Sincerely,
Jim
Bristol-Myers Squibb offered to buy ImClone Systems, maker of cancer drug Erbitux, for $60 a share, or about $4.5 billion this morning. The companies, which jointly market the [...]

House Votes to Give FDA Power Over Tobacco

It’s an odd era for the FDA: The agency is criticized from some quarters for not doing its job, even as many in Washington want to give it more power. The latest twist came yesterday, when the House voted to give the FDA regulatory control over tobacco. The bill passed by 326-102 vote (to see [...]

Hey, Drug Researchers, Lotsa Luck!

We couldn’t let the day pass without drawing your attention to a thoughtful piece on the role of dumb luck in the search for new drugs. Name a drugmaker that isn’t struggling to come up with breakthrough medicines. Research costs have ballooned while output at many companies has slowed to a trickle. Technology that was [...]

Drug Industry’s ‘Bad-Dream’ Team: Grassley and Dingell

When drug industry lobbyists in Washington whisper about what worries them most these days, the conversation often turns to what some call an “unholy alliance” between their two loudest critics, Sen. Chuck Grassley, a conservative Republican, and Rep. John Dingell, a liberal Democrat. (That’s Dingell on the left and Grassley on the right, natch.)
Despite the [...]

Amid Bad News for Alzheimer’s Drugs, Some Good Signs

Given the recent disappointing results for a few big experimental Alzheimer’s drugs, it certainly isn’t the best of times for Alzheimer’s drug research. But neither is it the worst of times. Drug makers big and small continue to pour money into research, and experimental drugs are still progressing through clinical trials.
“There’s a sufficient number of [...]

Heart Association Chief: ‘Good Intentions Aren’t Enough’

Cass Wheeler, CEO of the American Heart Association, is retiring at the end of the year, after 11 years at the helm of one of the nation’s best-known health-advocacy philanthropies. Normally, the Health Blog turns to cardiologists to talk about advances in heart disease, but we thought the time was right to get an executive’s perspective [...]

Wyeth, Elan Tumble On Chilly Response to Alzheimer’s Drug Data

Shares of Wyeth are off more than 10% this morning and Elan is down more than 30% as the market frets over the future of an Alzheimer’s drug the companies are developing.
Yesterday, the companies released the full results of a mid-stage trial that failed to show an overall benefit in cognitive function for Alzheimer’s patients [...]

Minnesota Governor Wants Online Health Records for All

Online personal health records got a boost from Minnesota’s governor yesterday.
Tim Pawlenty (pictured) said 50,000 state employees would be able to access their health records online next year, with a plan to extend access to everyone in the state by 2011, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
The PHR is a popular idea in health IT circles [...]

Wyeth, Elan Push Forward With Alzheimer’s Drug

Wyeth and Elan are pushing ahead with research on an Alzheimer’s drug designed to clear toxic plaques from the brain, despite mixed results in mid-stage testing. An Alzheimer’s plaque The companies had already revealed data showing the drug, called bapineuzumab, helped people who were free of a form of a gene that’s a risk factor for Alzheimer’s. [...]

Insurer Sends Patient Info to the Wrong People

Those worried patient-privacy advocates may have a point. In yet another example of the health industry mishandling private patient records, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia sent some 202,000 explanation of benefits letters to the wrong addresses last week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The letters, which were mistakenly directed to the addresses of other [...]

Deadly Drug Flubs Rise at Home

Heath Ledger’s accidental overdose from a combination of painkillers, anti-anxiety drugs and sleep aids was part of a dramatic rise in documented accidental deaths from medication mistakes at home.
Researchers from the University of California at San Diego found that deaths from fatal medication errors increased to 22,770 in 2004 from 3,954 in 1983, according to [...]

Internet Venture Puts Patients in Drug-Development Driver Seat

An Internet entrepreneur and melanoma survivor is tapping the Web to speed up drug research.
Jay Tenenbaum, a multimillionaire and e-commerce veteran, has started a company called CollabRx that aims to build “virtual biotechs” to study potential therapies for less common diseases, the WSJ reports. The idea is to contract with many labs to carry out [...]

Meta Moment: WSJ Health Blog on Health Blogging

We’re usually too busy coming up with our next post to think very much about what it means to blog about health. But today will be different. Our own Jacob Goldstein (pictured) is leaving the keyboard behind and heading to Washington for a panel discussion with the weighty title: “The Health Blogosphere: What It Means [...]

Privacy Advocates Sound Alarm About Electronic Prescribing

Where there’s a push to make medical records electronic, there’s a worried patient-privacy advocate.
In an interview with USA Today, Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, raised a red flag about electronic prescribing: “Any time you put something in a digital format and standardize it, it becomes much more profitable and [...]

Health Insurers Lightly Squeeze Medical Imaging Costs

A couple of weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office suggested that Medicare consider mimicking private insurers’ use of prior approval of diagnostic imaging tests to curb unnecessary scans.
Everybody who pays health-care bills is struggling with exploding expenses from diagnostic imaging. So we noted with interest a report out this morning on the subject from the [...]

Vaccine Proponents Not Immunized From Criticism

Many parents, concerned about risks from childhood vaccines, are putting the kibosh on shots for their kids despite advice from government officials, the medical establishment and academics. Gaps in immunization are starting to show. A lack of vaccination against measles was known or suspected in 63 of 64 U.S. cases of the disease in the [...]

Chantix Versus NicoDerm: Marketing Meets Science

Pfizer’s smoking-cessation drug Chantix edged out GlaxoSmithKline’s nicotine patch NicoDerm CQ in a study published today. The study was funded by Pfizer, and it’s a bit of good news for a drug that’s seen U.S. sales fall sharply amid concerns about the drug’s side effects.
Oddly enough, we wouldn’t have heard about the study (it’s published [...]

Cosmetic Patients Go First Class, While Others Sit in Dermatology Coach

Here’s one more sign that in health care, as elsewhere, money talks.
Patients heading to dermatologists for Botox and other cosmetic procedures pay cash and often get the kind of treatment we’d all like at the doctor’s office: The office takes their calls, it’s easy to get an appointment and there’s quick and thoughtful follow-up after [...]

Another Disappointing Year for Alzheimer’s Drugs

It’s been rough times for the development of Alzheimer’s drugs. Last month, Myriad Genetics said its late-stage trial of its experimental drug Flurizan failed to show any benefit for Alzheimer’s patients. Another late-stage study, of Alzhemed from Canada’s Neurochem, failed last fall.
The results of the Flurizan study will be unpacked this week at a big [...]

Pfizer CEO: R&D Needs To Be More Efficient

Pfizer’s giant R&D effort is getting more efficient, but there’s still a ways to go. That’s the diagnosis from CEO Jeff Kindler himself, who sat down with Bloomberg for a video interview that’s online today — exactly two years after Kindler got the top job at the company.
“There absolutely need to be more efficiencies in [...]

Medical ‘Wikipedia’ Is Looking For a Few Good Doctors

An online medical encyclopedia launching later this year aims to have have the open-source, ever-evolving, comprehensive nature of Wikipedia. But — in a key departure from Wikipedia’s all-comers sensibility — the new encyclopedia will be edited only by those with advanced degrees in medicine and biomedical science.
The site, Medipedia, launched a preview this week (see [...]

Glaxo Says, ‘Lights, Camera, Action!’

Doctors do it. Patients do it. Now GlaxoSmithKline is jumping into the self-publishing video game on YouTube.
The company says it’s a way to talk more directly to the public. Glaxo, as were first learned from Pharmalot, posted a couple of corporate videos on YouTube earlier this month. In a previous foray on YouTube, Glaxo had [...]

Glaxo Says ‘Lights, Camera, Action!’

Doctors do it. Patients do it. Now GlaxoSmithKline is jumping into the self-publishing video game on YouTube.
The company says it’s a way to talk more directly to the public. Glaxo, as were first learned from Pharmalot, posted a couple of corporate videos on YouTube earlier this month. In a previous foray on YouTube, Glaxo had [...]

Dems Put Safety on Medicare Cost Trigger

Way back in 2003, Congress set up a legal trigger for Medicare costs: If more than 45% of Medicare funding came from general revenues (rather than the Medicare trust fund) for two years straight, the president had to submit a plan to cut Medicare spending, and Congress had to consider the plan.
Medicare trustees pulled the [...]

Drugmakers Fund Journalism Group

Doctors and medical associations have taken plenty of lumps for relying on drug companies to sponsor continuing medical education courses. Critics say the sessions are often biased in favor of a particular medicine or drugs over alternative treatments for disease. Corporate sponsors abound at the Unity meeting of journalists at Chicago’s McCormick Place Now add journalists to [...]

How Much Should Medicare Pay for Prescription Drugs?

It was dueling reports yesterday on Capitol Hill, as Democrats argued that Medicare is paying way too much for prescription drugs and Republicans countered that the spending is on target.
Henry Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee and a longtime critic of the Medicare Part D drug benefit, led the Democratic offensive. “Medicare Part D [...]

Street Fentanyl Tied To Many Deaths

Illicit versions of the painkiller fentanyl were linked to more than 1,000 deaths in this country between 2005 and 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday.
The powerful painkiller, often mixed with cocaine or heroin and taken by injection, first caught the attention of the CDC in 2006, after it was connected to [...]

High Gas Prices Drive More People to Mail-Order Drugs

Fresh from the unintended consequences department, we learned today that high gas prices are helping pharmacy benefits managers. Some patients are skipping the drive to the drugstore and opting instead for mail-order medicines, which are more profitable for PBMs. During an earnings call for Medco, the big PBM, this morning, CEO David Snow called the [...]

Scrap Medicare Fee-For-Service System, Doctor Says

They way Medicare pays doctors encourages excessive testing and discourages spending time with patients, a doctor argues today on the New York Times op-ed page.
The fee-for-service system reimburses doctors not only for their time, but also for overhead — which includes the costs of expensive machines used to run tests such as CT scans. This [...]

Bristol-Myers Could Cut More Jobs

Last year, Bristol-Myers Squibb said it was cutting some 4,000 jobs as part of a plan to save $1.5 billion. This morning, the company said it’s planning “an additional $1 billion of cost savings by 2012” — suggesting more jobs could get the ax.
The company said details about the plan — which in the upside-down [...]

Retail Clinics Aren’t Gold Mines

The retail clinic, one of the pretty young things beloved of the market-driven health-care crowd, is hitting a rough patch. After a few years of rapid growth, the number of retail clinics nationwide actually fell last month, to 969 from 981, according to a tally cited in this morning’s Chicago Tribune.
It was the first time [...]

Nexavar Works for Liver Cancer, But It Isn’t Cheap

The study of Nexavar for liver cancer that was the talk of last year’s ASCO conference gets its closeup this week, with publication of the full results in the New England Journal of Medicine. The basic findings are the same as they were at ASCO: In patients with late-stage disease, median survival was 10.7 months [...]

Bush Administration Opposes FDA Regulation of Tobacco

Is another health-related veto fight brewing in Washington? The Bush administration would “strongly oppose” a bill that would give the FDA the power to regulate tobacco, according to a letter Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt sent to House Republican Joe Barton. The Associated Press reported on the letter yesterday.
The bill — which takes [...]

Parsing Obama’s Promise to Lower Insurance Premiums by $2,500

Barack Obama says his plan to re-tool American health care would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family.” In a page one story this morning, the New York Times digs into the details behind that promise.
First of all, the article points out, the $2,500 figure includes not only the portion of premiums paid [...]

Global Growth Props Up Pfizer’s Chantix Against U.S. Decline

Pfizer released its second-quarter earnings this morning, and the Health Blog rushed to see what happened with Chantix. The smoking-cessation drug, which quickly became popular after it went on the market in 2006, has come under scrutiny in recent months as psychiatric side effects and other possible problems were linked to the drug. That worries [...]

Viagra May Ease Sexual Problems of Women on Antidepressants

For both men and women, sexual problems are a common side effect of antidepressants for both men and women. Viagra and similar drugs have long been prescribed to men in this situation. Now a study suggests Viagra may help women as well.
The study looked at 98 premenopausal women with major depression who started to have [...]

Generics Are Cheap, but They Could Be Cheaper

Generic drugs are viewed as a rare bright spot when it comes to the cost of the U.S. health-care system. By switching to them, patients can often save a bundle.
But for some in the health-care industry, generics can mean big money. And the irony is that patients often don’t realize their savings from generics could [...]

Merck & Wyeth Swap Spots in Investors’ Eyes

Fortunes in Big Pharma sometimes turn on a dime.
Last year, Merck was the darling of the industry, as sales of some new products grew at a healthy clip and the company turned the corner in litigation over Vioxx. Shareholders rewarded Merck handsomely, driving its share price up 33% in 2007, making it the second-best performer [...]

As Music Plays, Doctors Advertise Online

Many doctors are being pulled kicking and screaming into the electronic age. But some are jumping right in, going so far as to make online videos to promote their practices. These videos aren’t exactly Hollywood productions, though some have higher production values than others. But most, as Victoria Knight of Dow Jones Newswires reports, are trying [...]

So Whatever Happened With Merck’s and Schering’s Earnings?

News about Vytorin has a way of pushing everything else about Merck and Schering-Plough to the wayside. But the two companies did indeed report their earnings yesterday, after their Vytorin-related delay contributed to big drops in the companies’ shares. Here’s a recap.
For Merck, prior concern from Wall Street about sales of cervical-cancer vaccine Gardasil [...]

Medicine Starts Thinking Green

Here’s a reason we hadn’t heard before to support a move to electronic medical records: It’s environmentally friendly. Medical waste and other garbage washed onto a 10-mile stretch of Lake Michigan beaches earlier this month. (AP Photo/News Advocate,Dan Wrzesinski) The tree-sparing virtue of electronic records was a plus for a Washington medical practice that’s switching to a [...]

Jalepeño Pepper is Smoking Gun in Salmonella Outbreak

Jalapeño peppers for sale in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull) At long last, the federal government may have found a smoking gun in the salmonella outbreak. Yesterday, the FDA confirmed that the feds have found a jalapeño pepper contaminated with the rare Saintpaul strain of salmonella that’s been the problem.
The strain was in a Mexican-grown pepper [...]

Can Roche Retain Genentech’s Top Talent?

We explained yesterday how Genentech, now the target of a takeover bid from Roche, has in many ways become a Big Pharma company. But as Genentech’s master after a full-blown buyout, Roche would face a huge challenge: Hanging on to Genentech’s biotech talent. Happier days for Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech, and Richard Grasso, New York [...]

Blogging About Apple Pays Better Than Practicing Medicine

Here is the zeitgeist, boiled down to a sentence: An M.D. is quitting his medical practice to blog full-time about Apple. Apple customer (Kevin Edwards not Arnold Kim) celebrates being the first customer to purchase the new iPhone at the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif., Friday, July 11, 2008. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) The doctor in [...]

Roche’s Genetech Offer: The Rules of Engagement

Swiss drug giant Roche is offering $89 dollars a share for the 44% of Genentech it doesn’t own already, as you may have heard by now. The offer price is about 9% more than Genentech’s Friday close and represents a pretty thin premium compared with those paid by other drugmakers for lesser biotech companies. Genentech [...]

Blogging About Apple Pays Better Than Practicing Medicine

Here is the zeitgeist, boiled down to a sentence: An M.D. is quitting his medical practice to blog full-time about Apple. Apple customer (Kevin Edwards–not Arnold Kim) celebrates after being the first to buy the new iPhone at the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) The doctor in question is one Arnold Kim, who [...]

Roche’s Genetech Offer: The Rules of Engagement

Swiss drug giant Roche is offering $89 dollars a share for the 44% of Genentech it doesn’t own already, as you may have heard by now. The offer price is about 9% more than Genentech’s Friday close and represents a pretty thin premium compared with those paid by other drugmakers for lesser biotech companies. Genentech [...]

Live Blogging the Vytorin Study Call

Merck and Schering-Plough postponed their earnings announcements today to wait for an update on a study of Vytorin, the cholesterol drug they co-market. (A description of the study, which looked at the drug in patients with a condition known as aortic stenosis, is online here.) Shares of both companies are down so far today. We’re [...]

U.K.’s Nice Nixes Second Tries With Rheumatoid Arthritis Meds

NICE isn’t being so nice to anti-TNF drugs. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which evaluates the cost-effectiveness of medications, said it doesn’t support a second try with another one of several big-selling drugs for rheumatoid arthritis after a patient has failed treatment with a different medicine in the class.
It’s a blow [...]

Roche Bid Marks Genentech as Big Pharma

Roche Chairman Franz Humer thinks Genentech would be a great fit. (AP Photo/Keystone, Georgios Kefalas, file) The story of Genentech is the story of biotech. Founded more than 30 years ago in a marriage of venture capital and scientific can-do, the company applied the then-new technology of gene splicing to use microbes to make protein drugs. [...]

Merck, Schering-Plough Postpone Earnings on Vytorin News

Merck and Schering-Plough were supposed to be reporting second-quarter earnings this morning, but they’re holding off on those announcements until the afternoon. The reason: A Norwegian researcher is going to present “an update” from a study of Vytorin — the cholesterol drug whose problems have been a big issue for both companies this year.
The study, [...]

Q&A: Will Masks Help Olympic Athletes in Beijing?

Some Olympic athletes will be walking around Beijing wearing face masks this summer to protect themselves from the city’s pollution before they compete. Today’s WSJ examines some of the awkward cultural issues this could raise, but the Health Blog has a simpler question: Will the masks do any good? Beijing, July 8. Photo via Getty. In [...]

Is Roche Lowballing Genentech’s Other Shareholders?

Roche, which already owns 56% of Genentech, just offered to buy the rest of the company for about $43.7 billion, the WSJ reports.
The offer of $89 per share in cash represents an 8.8% premium to where the stock closed on Friday, and a 19% premium to where the stock closed a month ago. At a [...]

Q&A: Will Masks Help Olympic Athletes in Beijing?

Some Olympic athletes will be walking around Beijing wearing face masks this summer to protect themselves from the city’s pollution before they compete. Today’s WSJ examines some of the awkward cultural issues this could raise, but the Health Blog has a simpler question: Will the masks do any good? Beijing, July 8. Photo via Getty. In [...]

Should a Surgeon Be Punished for Operating on the Wrong Side?

A few weeks ago, a surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center operated on the wrong side of a patient. This is a grievous error, one of the so-called “never events” that’s just not supposed to happen anymore. It still does happen though, so what was perhaps most striking about this incident was the openness [...]

Q&A: Will Masks Help Olympic Athletes in Beijing?

Some Olympic athletes will be walking around Beijing wearing face masks this summer to protect themselves from the city’s pollution before they compete. Today’s WSJ examines some of the awkward cultural issues this could raise, but the Health Blog has a simpler question: Will the masks do any good? Beijing, July 8. Photo via Getty. In [...]

Should a Surgeon Be Punished for Operating on the Wrong Side?

A few weeks ago, a surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center operated on the wrong side of a patient. This is a grievous error, one of the so-called “never events” that’s just not supposed to happen anymore. It still does happen though, so what was perhaps most striking about this incident was the openness [...]

Malaria Researcher Calls for Sustained Funding to Fight Scourge

This year Japan started awarding a medical prize that it hopes will someday rival the Nobel in significance: the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize, named after a scientist who worked on yellow fever in Latin American and Africa in the early 20th century. Brian Greenwood in Yokohama, Japan. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) Japan gives the prize, which comes with [...]

Insurance Cancellation Questions Could Spread Beyond California

Today’s Health Blog jargon of the day is rescission, the insurance industry’s practice of revoking individual insurance policies because of health-related mistakes or omissions on the application for coverage. The companies say this is a key step for fighting fraud, but they’ve come under criticism in California by those who accuse them of going over [...]

Wine to the Doctor’s Health

Ever wondered how to show your doctor your appreciation for the help you got with that pesky medical problem? Try a nice bottle of wine. WSJ’s attending wine specialists Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher write in their latest column that they noticed three constants in the inner sanctums of their many doctors: “medical certificates, pictures of [...]

More Glum News for AIDS Vaccines

In a distant aftershock of last year’s AIDS vaccine failure from Merck, the federal government said yesterday that it’s canceling an ambitious plan for a global test of another experimental AIDS vaccine.
The vaccine, created by an NIH researcher, uses a cold virus as part of its delivery mechanism. The same virus was implicated in the [...]

One in Four Americans is Obese

The obesity rate in the U.S. went up again. While this may fall solidly into the dog-bites-man category of unsurprising news, the latest figure — 25.6% — puts us across a threshold: For the first time, according to an ongoing federal survey, more than one in four Americans is obese.
The data, published yesterday by the [...]

Taking Sedatives to the Streets

How should the police deal with people who are behaving in wild, dangerous ways because of profound mental illness, heavy drug use or both? One that’s apparently been gaining favor lately is calling in paramedics, who have the option of giving an injection of an old, but potent sedative called Versed. A recent report from [...]

Low-Carb & Mediterranean Options Beat Low-Fat Diet

There may be some good alternatives to the low-fat diet that’s been standard fare for weight loss in this country.
A study in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine randomly assigned more than 300 moderately obese people to one of three diet styles: Mediterranean, low carbohydrate, or low fat. After two years, those on the [...]

Big Pharma Emissaries Talk Over Ad Options With Hill

Drugmakers are negotiating to preserve their right to advertise medicines directly to consumers as lawmakers turn up the heat for reform. Tobacco execs taking the oath before testifying on Capitol Hill in 1994. (AP Photo/John Duricka) Job One for the industry is to avoid any more embarrassing Congressional hearings like the one on direct-to-consumer advertising in [...]

A $50 Billion AIDS Bill, and a Stable Price for Malaria Drugs

Fighting disease in the developing world requires lots of money and plenty of business savvy (among other things). The planet just got a dose of both, with a huge funding package passed by Congress and a new deal on malaria drugs brokered by Bill Clinton’s foundation.
The Senate last night passed a bill that will spend [...]

Three Changes In Store for Medicare Patients

That Medicare bill that Congress voted into law over President Bush’s veto this week garnered attention mostly for its elimination of a pay cut for doctors. But the elderly and disabled folks who get their health insurance through Medicare will also see some changes in their coverage because of the law, notes this morning’s WSJ. [...]

Teva Eyes Barr Buy

More generic M&A action: The Israeli generics giant Teva is in talks to buy Barr Pharmaceuticals, a U.S. generics shop with market cap of about $5 billion, the Israeli business paper Globes reported.
Barr’s stock shot up nearly 20% in after-hours trading on the report.
While the branded drug industry has been ailing, the generics business has [...]

Do Pre-Meds Really Need That Year of Organic Chemistry?

Organic chemistry, c. 1973.
Photo by david55king via Flickr. Has organic chemistry — tormenter of young souls, perennial weeder of would-be doctors — run its course as a fixture of the pre-med curriculum? Pre-meds do need some basic instruction in o-chem before they can take on biochemistry, an essential subject for the modern physician. But does a [...]

Feds Consider New Rule on Abortions and Emergency Contraception

A rule under consideration by the Bush administration could broaden employment rules that now cover abortion to include emergency contraception.
Under the proposed rule, employers that get federal funds would be required to guarantee that they won’t refuse to hire health-care workers who object to providing abortions, the New York Times reports.
Federal employment law already prohibits [...]

Which Drugs Do — And Don’t — Increase Fall Risks for the Elderly

Among the underappreciated risks of growing old is the damage a seemingly simple fall can wreak. Getty Images Falls are the leading cause of injury deaths for people 65 and older, and they’re the most frequent reason for trauma admissions among the elderly, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
The drugs older people take [...]

Emergency Room Patients Unclear on Doctors’ Instructions

The ER can be a hectic place, and it can be hard to follow what’s going on– especially if you’re a sick or injured patient. Overall, 78% of patients interviewed by researchers as they were leaving the ER failed to understand key information about their situation, a new study says. The researchers broke patients’ comprehension [...]

A (Partial) Comeback for Drug-Coated Stents

The safety scare over drug-coated stents may be passing, but they still don’t rule the market quite the way they used to.
Some 73% of stents implanted in the U.S. last month were drug-coated models, up from a low of 62% in December, the WSJ reports. But that’s still down from the 88% share they held [...]

Plan to Ban Industry Gifts to Docs Stalls in Massachusetts

Massachusetts legislators yesterday scrapped a plan to ban drug industry gifts and free meals for doctors, the Boston Globe reports. They also got rid of language in a bill that would have required companies to report payments to doctors for consulting and speaking gigs.
The revised bill instead requires drug makers to adopt a code of [...]

Congress Overrides Veto On Medicare Bill

The Medicare pay cut saga is over — for now. Late yesterday, both houses of Congress overturned President Bush’s veto of a bill that blocks a planned 10.6% pay cut for doctors treating Medicare patients. The override makes the bill a law.
It was only the third time a bill became law after an override of [...]

Injured By a Spacecraft? There’s a Diagnostic Code for That

So we’ve got this patient here who was injured in this spaceship accident. You know, just a routine, uh, orbital mishap. But how do we account for that? Oh, right, it’s ICD-9 code E845 — “Accident involving spacecraft.”
Apropos of nothing in particular, this billing code popped up on a couple of medical blogs last week [...]

More Fallout for Bristol-Myers on Drug Pricing Investigation

A bunch of state attorneys general are crowing today about how much Bristol-Myers Squibb is paying to settle allegations that the company bilked money out of Medicaid through price inflation, kickbacks and the like. A few states that have crossed our radar screen: New York says it’s getting $40 million; Massachusetts will receive $9 million; [...]

Note to Pharma: ‘Your House Is On Fire, and You’re Still Smoking in Bed’

When members of the pharmaceutical industry came under fire from Congress this year, Billy Tauzin, the president of PhRMA, didn’t mince words. “Your house is on fire, and you’re still smoking in bed,” he warned drug makers in a conference call.
After announcing a new voluntary code of conduct for drug makers last week, told the [...]

In Tough Times, Genentech and J&J Keep Rolling

Two remarkably sunny reports just in from the stormy seas of the drug business: Genentech and Johnson & Johnson reported solid second-quarter earnings. The moral of the story is familiar but worth repeating here: Biotech specialty drugs and diversified business lines are two good defenses against the problems facing the drug business these days.
Late yesterday, [...]

Ranbaxy Shares Falling as U.S. Investigates Generic Quality

Ranbaxy shares fell again today in London on news that the U.S. government is investigating the Indian generics giant.
The feds are looking into whether the company manufactured substandard drugs, including those given to HIV patients in Africa as part of a U.S.-funded program, the WSJ reports.
U.S. investigators are looking into possible fraud, false claims and [...]

Sunshine: Harmful and Healthy

Sunshine is bad for you. Getting too much of it increases the risk of skin cancer.
Sunshine is good for you. Getting too little of it — and the vitamin D it produces in your body — puts you at higher risk for big killers like heart disease and several types of cancer, WSJ’s Melinda Beck [...]

Bush to Veto Medicare Bill Today

We knew the veto was coming, but we didn’t know just when. The mystery ends today when President Bush will veto a bill blocking Medicare pay cuts to doctors, Congressional Quarterly reports.
The bill cuts subsidies from some privately managed Medicare plans backed by Bush and many Republicans.
But the veto is really the start of the [...]

The Top Life Science & Health Deals of ‘08, So Far

Our colleagues over at Deal Journal shot a report over to us this afternoon with some stats on recent M&A activity in life sciences and health care. The first quarter came in a little light–with nearly two-dozen deals–compared with the same period in recent years. But the I-bankers got rolling in the second quarter, when [...]

Amgen, J&J Come To Truce in Oncology Marketing Suit

Amgen and Johnson & Johnson have come to a truce a two-and-a-half year battle over marketing of rival oncology products.
Amgen has agreed to pay $200 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit by Johnson & Johnson over discounts and incentives that Amgen offered to cancer clinics buying its Aranesp, Neupogen and Neulasta. J&J, which makes competitor [...]

Should Medicare Stop Medical Imaging Before It Starts?

Medicare has been trying to clamp down on burgeoning costs from medical imaging. But a new GAO report suggests the agency might have more success if it were to stop unnecessary CT scans, MRIs and the like before they happen in the first place.
To cut imaging costs, Medicare is focusing most heavily on the back [...]

Obama Wants Tax Credit for Small Firms Offering Coverage

Obama at a conference Sunday of the National Council of La Raza. Photo: Associated Press Barack Obama shed some new light on his health-care proposals this weekend, suggesting a $6 billion-a-year plan to offer tax credits to small businesses offering health insurance to employees.
Our Washington Wire blog notes that Hillary Clinton had made a similar proposal [...]

Growing Old May Not Be So Bad After All

Contrary to popular belief, recent research suggests that older and wiser may also mean older and happier.
For more than three decades, researchers have been conducting thousands of detailed interviews with Americans, asking questions year after year so they can make solid comparisons. “One important finding was people who were biologically older are happier than younger [...]

Justice Dept. Says Generics Maker Ranbaxy Forged Documents

In a development unlikely to improve skittish patients’ views of generic drugs, Indian generics maker Ranbaxy Laboratories is being probed for allegedly forging documents involved in an existing investigation into the quality of its drugs. The Justice Department earlier this month filed a motion in federal court in Maryland alleging that Ranbaxy falsified the documents, and [...]

Grassley Targets Psychiatric Association for Industry Ties

If you need convincing that the drug industry’s decision to stop giving doctors pens and the like won’t stop the controversy over conflicts of interest, look no further than the American Psychiatric Association.
Last Thursday, the same day doctors started contemplating the notion of buying their own pens, Sen. Charles Grassley sent a letter to the [...]

Michael E. DeBakey: Pioneering Surgeon, Educator & Inventor

Perhaps no doctor is more linked to the rise of modern medicine –- and certainly to the rise of modern heart surgery–- than Michael E. DeBakey, the trailblazing Baylor cardiovascular surgeon who died late Friday at age 99. Heart surgery pioneer Dr. Michael E. DeBakey. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) In a career spanning more than 70 [...]

Q2 Earnings Coming Soon: J&J, Amgen, Merck, Pfizer and Genentech

It seems like we just finished blogging first-quarter earnings, but the season is upon us again. A story from Dow Jones Newswires (not online) reminds us this afternoon that several drug makers are set to report Q2 earnings in the next few weeks. Here’s a look at what’s happening with the companies, with some links [...]

Medicare Repo Men Find Millions

Letting outside auditors scour Medicare bills sure can turn up a lot of overbilling. A pilot program that netted the government nearly $700 million from three states is now being expanded to recover more Medicare money gone astray.
In all, Medicare says the Recovery Audit Contractor program caught $1.03 billion of improper billing in New York, [...]

Q2 Earnings Coming Soon: J&J, Amgen, Merck, Pfizer and Genentech

It seems like we just finished blogging first-quarter earnings, but the season is upon us again. A story from Dow Jones Newswires (not online) reminds us this afternoon that several drug makers are set to report Q2 earnings in the next few weeks. Here’s a look at what’s happening with the companies, with some links [...]

After Medicare Victory, Dems May Push Insurance for Kids

Remember SCHIP? The State Children’s Health Insurance Program was at the center one of the biggest health policy fights in Washington last year. But the issue fell out of sight after President Bush vetoed a bill that would have dramatically expanded the program, and Congress couldn’t muster the votes for an override. Now, the Democrats’ [...]

Computers Wouldn’t Have Helped in Overdoses of Texas Babies

After 17 babies got overdoses of the blood thinner heparin at a Texas hospital, a hospital-quality group pointed to the incident as one more reason to push for computerized systems for ordering drugs withing hospitals. Photo by Joe Mitchell/Getty Images The call to action invoked one of the health-care buzz-phrases of the moment: computer physician order entry, [...]

FDA Told to Skip ‘Black Box’ on Epilepsy Drugs and Suicide

Until yesterday, the FDA had been rolling steadily toward slapping a black-box warning on epilepsy drugs because they may increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
But a committee of outside experts convened by the FDA thinks that’s a bad idea. The panel voted 14-4 against the black-box warning yesterday, with three abstentions, the WSJ [...]

Congress Cuts a Deal for Mental Health Parity

More health-care action from Congress: After long negotiations, the House and Senate have come to an agreement on mental health parity.
After wrangling over the issue for more than a decade, a deal has emerged that seems to satisfy a pretty wide range of interest groups, the WSJ reports.
Under the bill, employers who offer mental health [...]

Anybody (Other Than a Doctor) Need a Pen? Clipboard? Clock?

So now that drug companies won’t be handing out those ubiquitous pens and other trinkets to doctors any more, what are they going to do with the leftovers? Turns out getting rid of this stuff is a delicate matter, as we learned from talking with AstraZeneca today. This “doesn’t mean we’re dumping stuff out there, [...]

Lawsuit Links Botox to Deaths, Side Effects

Speaking of lawsuits against drug makers, there’s also news today of one against Allergan over Botox. A handful of Botox users and their relatives are claiming that Allergan failed to warn them of the drug’s dangers, according to the Los Angeles Times. The suit links Botox to three deaths, all among patients who used it [...]

Why Medicare Pay Cuts for Doctors Will Be Back

Yes, the Senate voted to block Medicare pay cuts to doctors. But the issue will return next year, just as it returned last year and the year before that. Why does this keep happening? The answer lies in a big budget bill Congress passed in 1997, which introduced something called the “sustainable growth rate” for [...]

9 Republicans Changed to ‘Yea’ on Medicare Bill Vote

After the Senate narrowly failed to block Medicare’s pay cuts to doctors a couple weeks ago, Republicans who voted against the measure were hit by a barrage of criticism from the American Medical Association and its allies. Yesterday, when the Senate gave it another go and passed the measure by a veto-proof 69-30 margin, nine [...]

Widow Sues Pfizer Over Chantix After Husband’s Suicide

Where there’s a drug-safety controversy, there’s a lawsuit waiting in the wings.
In Pfizer’s case, the suit over the smoking-cessation drug Chantix was filed by the widow of a man who shot himself to death in January, Dow Jones Newswires reports. He’d started using Chantix in late October 2007, according to the suit, filed by Linda [...]

Novartis Buying Company That Developed Cast-Off Blood Pressure Pill

Alice Huxley was working at Novartis when it was in the early stages of research on the blood pressure drug that’s now known as Tekturna. But Novartis didn’t want to see it through at the time, so Huxley left and started her own company, Speedel, to work on it. Now, Novartis plans to acquire Speedel [...]

Drugmakers Pulling Plug on Free Pens, Mugs & Pads

Doctors, it’s time to head to Staples to stock up on pens! Responding to a steady stream of criticism over its efforts to curry favor with doctors, Big Pharma is putting a lid on some of the most visible practices. PhRMA, the drug-industry trade group, says says it’s banning some of the freebies that sales [...]

Heparin Overdoses Hit Babies in Texas Hospital

Between overdoses and adulteration, the bad news about heparin keeps coming. Photo by Joe Mitchell/Getty Images This time, it’s more infant overdoses: 17 babies at a Texas hospital got too much of the blood thinner; one has died, though hospital officials told CNN that it remains unclear whether the heparin contributed. Nurses keeping IV lines clear apparently [...]

As Kennedy Returns, Senate Votes to Block Medicare Pay Cut for Doctors

High drama on the Senate floor! First Ted Kennedy, who had been away from the Senate since he was diagnosed with brain cancer in May shows up this afternoon during a vote to block Medicare pay cuts to doctors. The voting breaks off as the senators break into applause. Kennedy votes for the bill. Then, [...]

Better Hospital Manners by Mandate

Coming soon to a hospital near you: Rules for good behavior — for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others.
Even well-run hospitals are fraught with tensions beyond the life-and-death concerns of treating the sick and wounded. Doctors yell at underlings. Nurses can be passive aggressive. Surgeons have even been known to hit subordinates for making mistakes in [...]

Glaxo Sheds Early Drugs That Don’t Fit In

Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, forged in the wave of mega mergers that swept the industry over the past decade, is looking to slim down a little now. CEO Andrew Witty tells the Health Blog he is considering spinning off into a separate company some early-stage drugs that don’t fit disease areas he wants Glaxo to focus [...]

Glaxo Shedding Early Drugs That Don’t Fit In

Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, forged in the wave of mega mergers that swept the industry over the past decade, is looking to slim down a little now. CEO Andrew Witty tells the Health Blog he is considering spinning off into a separate company some early-stage drugs that don’t fit disease areas he wants Glaxo to focus [...]

Death of a Euphemism: The End of FDA’s ‘Approvable Letter’

Approvable letter — that sounds pretty good, right? Like, basically, something is on the verge of a green light? Not if you get one from the FDA about a drug you hope to market.
When the agency sends a drug company an approvable letter, about the best you can say is that that your application to [...]

Drugs Give No Advantage to Older Men With Early Prostate Cancer

A cancer diagnosis seems like a call for dramatic action, but sometimes it may be better just to hold off on doing anything. Take the case of early-stage prostate cancer in elderly men.
Despite a lack of evidence, hormone-altering drugs are sometimes given to men with early-stage prostate cancer who don’t want or shouldn’t get therapies. [...]

Tallying the Cost of McCain’s Plan to Insure the Uninsurable

What should the nation do about people who aren’t offered insurance through work, aren’t old enough for Medicare, aren’t poor enough for Medicaid and aren’t healthy enough to afford private coverage on the open market?
John McCain wants to beef up federal funding for state high-risk pools that cover people in this dicey situation. Earlier this [...]

One Group of Docs Not Worried About Medicare Cuts: The Dead

The nation’s doctors are plenty steamed at pending cuts in Medicare reimbursement. But they can take comfort in one small fact: If they can submit new claims after they’re dead, Medicare will keep paying for years.
The agency paid $92.8 million worth of claims submitted under the names of dead doctors between 2000 and 2007, according [...]

When Patients Googlestalk Their Doctors

Old doctors barely know what the Web is. Baby docs just out of residency would rather take a job in the Arctic than get rid of their Facebook page. And all of them are likely to get Googlestalked now and again by creepy patients.
That’s what a couple of Harvard psychiatrists say (albeit somewhat less glibly) [...]

Nurses: Have You Been Assaulted On the Job?

“I’ve been hit, I’ve been kicked and spit on,” a psychiatric nurse says in this morning’s New York Times. “I’ve had a knife pulled on me. I love what I do and many of the patients I work with, but I don’t love the conditions I work in.”
Apparently, this sort of thing happens all the [...]

Doctor Gets 10 Years in Prison for Surgery Scam

A surgeon accused of performing hundreds of unnecessary operations just got sentenced to 10 years in prison, the Orange County register reports.
William W. Hampton was convicted of health-care fraud last year in federal court. Prosecutors said he operated on patients who were paid to come in for surgeries they didn’t need, often a procedure used [...]

FDA Still Mulling Warning for Pfizer’s Lyrica

When the FDA started making noises earlier this year about stronger warnings for epilepsy drugs, Pfizer said its drug Lyrica shouldn’t be lumped in with other drugs in the class because it didn’t carry the same risks for suicidal thinking.
But FDA documents updated online yesterday show that the drug is still on the list of [...]

Babies’ Gaze May Offer Early Autism Diagnosis

Treating autism at a very young age can improve language skills and IQ scores. But the condition can be tough to detect in the very young, and often isn’t diagnosed until age 4 or so. Researchers are trying to change that by studying children as young as a few months old, paying special attention to [...]

Generics? No Thanks, We’re Glaxo

Others in Big Pharma may be stepping up their investment in generics, but GlaxoSmithKline’s new CEO isn’t going there. “I’ve got no interest in the classic U.S.-style generic marketplace,” he said during a recent interview in London. “It’s a different kind of business. It’s not just about low cost of production. It’s about your aggressiveness [...]

Older Dads Make for Riskier Pregnancies

We’re used to hearing about all the risks that increase for babies of mothers who get pregnant in their late 30s or early 40s. But in the past few years evidence has started to emerge that the age of the father matters, too.
The newest piece of the puzzle comes to us from Europe, where researchers [...]

Second Opinion: Doctor Cartoon in the New Yorker Looks Familiar

The current issue of the New Yorker takes aim at the financial relationships between doctors and drug makers with a cartoon depicting a physician decked out in a lab coat plastered NASCAR-style with the names of “sponsors” like Merck and Amgen. The doctor in the cartoon reviews a medical chart as a patient sits on [...]

Cholesterol Drugs for Kids Could Reduce Heart Attacks in Adulthood

Kids should get screened for cholesterol — and some as young as 8 should get cholesterol-lowering drugs. Those are the recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which today published a new set of guidelines on lipid screening (online here).
The guidelines point out that atherosclerosis — the hardening of the arteries that leads to heart [...]

Senate Returns to Wrestle With Medicare Pay Cuts for Docs

Congress is back in session today after a weeklong recess, and dealing with those pesky Medicare cuts is high on the to-do list. The story lands on the front page of this morning’s New York Times; the WSJ has a story news story as well as an editorial. Here are the key pieces of the [...]

Independence Day

In observance of Independence Day, the Health Blog will not publish today.
Photo by Bob Jagendorf via Flickr

Strong Medicine: Doctors Who Signed the Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull. From the Architect of the Capitol. Who knows better than a doctor — witness to birth, sickness and death — that all men are created equal? So it is fitting to recall, this Fourth of July, that the signatures of five physicians are scattered among the 56 names at [...]

Hospital Company Sued for Billing Patients When Insurance Doesn’t Pay

Say you wind up in the hospital. The hospital bills your insurance, but the insurance company thinks the price is inflated and only pays part of what’s billed. So the hospital decides that you owe the portion your insurance won’t pay. This is called “balance billing,” and it’s been debated in health-care circles for decades.
It’s [...]

In Germany, Assisted Suicide Rather Than a Nursing Home

Roger Kusch shows a video of Bettina Schardt.
Photo: Associated Press A 79-year-old German woman killed herself last weekend because she didn’t want to move into a nursing home. Now the case of Bettina Schardt is the talk of the nation, largely because she was advised by Roger Kusch, described in today’s New York Times as “a [...]

Abbott Gets to Join Troubled Stent Market

Abbott just said the FDA approved its Xience stent.
Everyone knew it was in the works; the question now is what Xience means for a U.S. stent market that fell some 40% last year on safety worries and suggestions that the devices, used to prop open clogged arteries, have been overused. Abbott’s in good shape to [...]

Kennedy Lays Groundwork for Expanding Health Coverage

Even as Sen. Ted Kennedy continues treatment for brain cancer, he has instructed his staff to begin planning for a major health-care overhaul that could begin when a new president takes office next January — especially if that president is Barack Obama. The story is in this morning’s Boston Globe.
Kennedy’s aides have started a series [...]

Pfizer Stops Funding Some Classes for Doctors

Doctors and pharmaceutical companies have been getting beat up lately for their intimate ties (see here, here and here). Now Pfizer is backing off a bit from one of its connections to medical practice: funding for physicians’ continuing medical education, or CME, courses.
The drug maker has decided to end payments for CME are provided by [...]

Seroquel and Nexium: AstraZeneca’s Two for Two in Generic Fight

The war against generics is going well for AstraZeneca these days.
A federal judge in New Jersey just granted the company summary judgment in a case where Teva and Sandoz (Novartis’s generics arm) were seeking to sell generic copies of AstraZeneca’s Seroquel. The ruling means the company isn’t likely to face generic competition for the antipsychotic [...]

Roche CEO Won’t Shy Away from Primary-Care Drugs

The big move in pharma these days is away from primary-care drugs for chronic maladies such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and toward high-priced specialty medicines for diseases such as cancer. But Roche, which has tended to focus more on specialty medicines, may be moving in the other direction.
In an interview with the Financial [...]

In Plain Sight, A Woman Dies Unassisted on Hospital Floor

A security guard looks on. Image via NYCLU On June 19, a woman collapsed and lay face down on the floor of the waiting room at a Brooklyn hospital for an hour before anyone checked on her. By that time, she was dead.
Kings County Hospital disclosed the event the next day, but it wasn’t until this [...]

Brain Surgery, Via the Nostril

When you’re navigating around something as delicate as the brain — not to mention cutting things out of it — depth perception helps a lot.
That’s part of the reason so much brain-surgery is still done the old-fashioned way: by cutting open the skull. Endoscopes are great for many types of minimally invasive surgery, but the [...]

Medicare Payment Fight: Coming Soon to Your Living Room

Congress may be home for the 4th of July recess, but special interests never rest. The American Medical Association and America’s Health Insurance Plans — the big groups representing doctors and insurers, respectively — are both rolling out TV ads this week in the fight over Medicare.
A 10.6% cut in Medicare payments to doctors was [...]

U.S. is Tops in Cocaine, Marijuana Use

The U.S. may lag other countries in measures such as education and health, but we’re out in front on cocaine and marijuana use.
Surveys conducted in 17 countries found that 42.4% of Americans have tried marijuana and 16.2% have tried cocaine, according to a paper published this week in PLoS Medicine. On marijuana use, the U.S. [...]

Tomatoes, Salmonella and the 21st-Century Food Chain

The life of a 21st-century tomato is complicated — picked in one place, packed in another, shipped off to a third. A tomato might, for example, be grown in Florida, shipped to Mexico, sorted with tomatoes from lots of other places, repackaged and sent off to the U.S. for somebody to eat.
So when people start [...]