Policymakers are often as sensitive to overall health care spending as they are to increases in Medicare spending, and the latest report on both brought some good news and some bad news. The good news is that overall health care spending was essentially flat as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018, but the bad news is that Medicare spending jumped 6.4%, thus renewing the troublesome historical trend of outpacing typical GDP growth.
The Chapel Hill, N.C.-based non-profit Digital Health Institute for Transformation (DHIT) and Tanjo Inc., a machine learning company headquartered in Carrboro, N.C., will launch their Community Health Utility Grid (HUG) Initiative in North Carolina in early 2020. The collaboration aims to improve healthcare outcomes for underserved populations in the state by collecting, analyzing, and sharing individual, household and community level health data.
The patent lawsuit of Athena v. Mayo revisits previous case law where patent subject matter eligibility is concerned, and numerous parties have weighed in urging the Supreme Court to hear the case. However, the U.S. Solicitor General has not responded with its own friend-of-the-court brief, an omission that would seem to take some of the pressure off the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Ann Arbor, Mich.-based startup Endra Life Sciences Inc. started out focused on a photoacoustic imaging tool for mice in the lab, but in recent years it has shifted gears. Now, it aims to secure the go-ahead next year from European and U.S. regulators to launch a thermo-acoustic enhanced ultrasound system designed to quantitatively assess liver fat, known as TAEUS.
The impending resumption of the 2.3% tax on medical devices has industry actively seeking at least a new suspension. Now, the Tax Foundation, of Washington, has issued a report saying that the tax would cost more than 21,000 Americans their jobs and impose a $1.7 billion hit on the U.S. economy.
With today’s 18-5 vote in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to send Stephen Hahn’s nomination to the full U.S. Senate, the oncologist who currently serves as chief medical officer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center is just a step away from being confirmed as the next FDA commissioner.
A study published in the Nov. 27, 2019, advance online issue of Nature manages a rare feat. It is both a vindication of and egg in the face for cardiac stem cell research.
Commissioner of the FDA for five years starting in 1984, Frank Young relished his position “at the vortex of controversy” as he sought to deal with the AIDS crisis and public furor over drug tampering, said his son, Jonathan Young, co-founder and chief operating officer of South San Francisco-based Akero Therapeutics Inc.
One necessary step to fend off a dystopian future of medical care without antibiotics is the development of new antibiotics. Another is improved deployment of existing ones, a feat which will take, among other things, better antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). “I’m astounded that we can get men to the moon, and we are using practices [dating] almost back to the age of Robert Koch to identify bacteria,” Deborah Hung told BioWorld MedTech. “The standard practice takes amazingly long.”
Huntington’s disease is a fatal hereditary disease that results in the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain. It erodes a person’s physical and mental abilities, usually beginning in their 30s and 40s, and to date has no cure. Now Austin-based Asuragen Inc. is joining forces with Wave Life Sciences USA Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., to develop companion diagnostics (CDx) for Wave’s investigative allele-selective therapeutic programs targeting the genetic cause of the disease.
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