If anti-aging drugs are to become widely available and adopted, especially in the U.S., they have some serious hurdles to overcome. And those hurdles aren’t all in the lab or clinic. With classes of anti-aging drugs already in the pipeline, “the biggest hurdle is FDA approval. Then reimbursement,” said George Kuchel, a professor and director of the UConn Center on Aging at the University of Connecticut. Read the final installment of BioWorld’s multipart series on extending the human lifespan.
Amid the ongoing war Russia is waging in Ukraine, representatives of several Western biopharma and medical device companies met with Russian health officials this week to discuss an uninterrupted drug supply, maintenance of medical equipment in Russia and software updates. Russian Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko told the group his agency’s top priority is an uninterrupted drug supply. He recognized that dialogue between the government and manufacturers is necessary to maintain that supply.
As a last-ditch effort to preserve skinny labeling for generics, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Federal Circuit split opinion in Glaxosmithkline plc v. Teva Pharmaceuticals that upset the status quo of the generic marketplace.
Amid the ongoing war Russia is waging in Ukraine, representatives of several Western biopharma and medical device companies met with Russian health officials this week to discuss an uninterrupted drug supply, maintenance of medical equipment in Russia and software updates.
COVID-19 is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving. The U.S. CDC unwrapped one of those “presents” in a July 12 report that showed the threat of antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) infections has worsened — with resistant hospital-onset infections and deaths in the U.S. each increasing at least 15% during the first year of the pandemic.
The revised Build Back Better bill Democrats in the U.S. Senate are looking to pass in the next few weeks could deliver savings of $18 billion to $24 billion per year from 2028 through 2031 through drug pricing reforms that include direct Medicare price negotiations, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.
Another biopharma consultant got on the wrong side of the U.S. SEC for insider trading. To resolve the allegations, Hugh Lee Sweeney, a longtime consultant for Catabasis Pharmaceutical Inc., agreed to a cease-and-desist order, disgorgement of $57,931 and prejudgment interest of $2,499.71, and civil penalties of $57,931.
A few weeks ago, the odds of the deeply divided U.S. Congress passing drug pricing reforms that would allow direct Medicare negotiation seemed pretty slim. But those odds improved significantly July 6 when Senate Democrats reached a compromise on their version of the pricing provisions included in the Build Back Better bill, H.R. 5376, passed by the House last November.
While the U.S. Congress struggles to patch together statutory restraints on prescription drug prices, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), with the FDA’s help, is taking steps to cut back the patent thickets some drug companies are using to ward off the competition that would bring those prices down.
The U.S. FDA is hailing two revised draft guidances it released July 5 as “critical steps” toward implementing the electronic drug tracing requirements of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act.
