WASHINGTON – Still haunted by the deaths caused by contaminated heparin that made it into the U.S. drug supply a few years ago and the fact that no one has been held accountable, several senators are calling for drug safety to be elevated to a national security level while creating a level playing field for U.S. drugmakers.
In what could prove to be a tricky balancing act, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pulling out all its tools to enhance access to medicines in the Asia-Pacific region while at the same time supporting the innovation that leads to new drugs and medical breakthroughs.
When analyst Steve Brozak remembers 9/11, he thinks about the what-ifs of life. If he had not been kept up most of the night before by his newborn, he would have been in the World Trade Center that morning for breakfast.
WASHINGTON – It took Congress nearly a decade to pass the first major patent reform bill in nearly 60 years. Now it could take another decade or so for the new act to be thoroughly fleshed out in the courts and the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).
WASHINGTON – Patent reform became a reality Thursday evening when the Senate voted 89 to 9 to send the House version of the America Invents Act to the president for his signature.
When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center 10 years ago, the U.S. woke to a "new normal" – a frightening awareness of the nation's vulnerability.
WASHINGTON – The likelihood that the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will open Oct. 1 as originally proposed is looking dim since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) still needs the go-ahead from Congress before it can launch the new center.
Although they’re the stuff of science, statistics too often lack the power to move us. After all, they’re just numbers. So when companies like Dendreon Corp. and Seattle Genetics Inc. price their cancer treatments at nearly $100,000 or more, we may arch our eyebrows, but we don’t really think about the impact those prices will have on the individual faces and names behind the numbers. Instead, we wonder, as reported in BioWorld Today, why more patients don’t take advantage of promising drugs like Dendreon’s Provenge. Unlike statistics, faces and names have stories that can bring us to tears, that make...
