January, 2023

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STAT+: Pfizer is scolded by a U.K. trade group for remarks its CEO made about vaccination

STAT

After weeks of deliberation, Pfizer was scolded by a U.K. pharmaceutical industry trade group after its chief executive officer made misleading statements in a media interview about the need to vaccinate young children against Covid-19. The fracas began when the Pfizer chief, Albert Bourla, gave an interview to the BBC and discussed the idea of vaccinating children between five and 11 years old, a course of action that had not yet been approved by regulators in the U.K.

Vaccines 363
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Forks in the road lead one medical expert to a ‘game changing’ liver treatment

PharmaVoice

Durect’s chief medical officer altered his retirement plans to take a leading role at the company, which is developing a treatment for severe alcohol-associated hepatitis.

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Google and DeepMind share work on medical chatbot Med-PaLM

pharmaphorum

Google and DeepMind have developed an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot tool called Med-PaLM designed to generate “safe and helpful answers” to questions posed by healthcare professionals and patients. The tool is an example of a large language model or LLM, which are designed to understand queries and generate text responses in plain language, drawing from large and complex datasets – in this case, medical research.

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Health Canada gives approval to Enhertu for breast cancer treatment

Pharmaceutical Technology

Health Canada has granted approval to Enhertu (trastuzumab deruxtecan) to treat unresectable or metastatic HER2-low (IHC 1+ or IHC 2+/ISH-) breast cancer. Enhertu has been approved to treat HER2-low breast cancer adult patients who have previously received at least one line of chemotherapy in the metastatic setting or who have seen disease recurrence during or within six months after the adjuvant chemotherapy.

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Position Your Pharmacy for Expansion

Speaker: Chris Antypas and Josh Halladay

Access to limited distribution drugs and payer contracts are key to pharmacy expansion. But how do you prepare your operations to take the next step? Meaningful data: Collect and share clinical data regarding outcomes, utilization, and more Reporting: Limited distribution models require efficient tracking and reporting systems Workflows: Align workflows with specific pharma and payer contractual requirements For in-depth, expert insights on pharmacy expansion, watch this webinar from Inovalon.

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Personalised cancer immunotherapy granted fast track designation

European Pharmaceutical Review

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted fast track designation (FTD) for Evaxion Biotech’s personalised cancer immunotherapy. The FTD is for EVX-01, in combination with Keytruda ® for patients with metastatic melanoma (MM). ”We are extremely pleased that our cancer vaccine candidate EVX-01 has received the FDA fast track designation, as it enables a potentially faster approval of the vaccine,” stated Per Norlén, CEO at Denmark-based Evaxion.

Immunity 123
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New Report: More than 160 medicines in development for mental illness

PhRMA

Mental illness represents a broad spectrum of health conditions affecting mood, thinking and behavior. These conditions include depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance use disorder, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, among others. Each of these illnesses often varies in its degree of severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe, and may occur together.

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After ‘limping along,’ Novavax sees a path forward

PharmaVoice

With a new CEO and a long-term booster strategy, the company believes there’s plenty of room to grow in the COVID-19 vaccine space.

Vaccines 274
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FDA pulls AZ’s Evusheld for COVID, citing lack of efficacy

pharmaphorum

AstraZeneca’s revenue boost from COVID-19 therapy Evusheld looks set to be curbed early, as the FDA withdraws authorisation for the antibody on the grounds that it is ineffective against most subvariants now circulating in the US. Evusheld (tixagevimab and cilgavimab) was cleared by the FDA towards the end of 2021, becoming the first antibody to be authorised for prevention of COVID-19 infection, and it rapidly found use among people with compromised immune systems, such as cancer chemothe

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AI continues to gain momentum in the biopharmaceutical industry in 2023

Pharmaceutical Technology

While the biopharmaceutical industry has been impacted and pressured by various factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation, the Ukraine-Russia war, ongoing supply chain issues, and a challenging economic environment, collaboration between pharma companies and emerging technologies providers continues to grow, especially in the research and development (R&D) field, offering some resilience in times of geopolitical and economic disruptions.

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First CAR T-cell therapy recommended on NHS

European Pharmaceutical Review

Yescarta ® ▼(axicabtagene ciloleucel; axi-cel) is now the first chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy and first personalised immunotherapy to be recommended for routine use on the NHS in England. This is based on final draft guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The therapy by Gilead Sciences and Kite is indicated for eligible adults with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL) who have already bee

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5 Reasons to Upgrade Your Pharmacy Management Software

Are you still using workarounds to manage your daily operations? To achieve peak performance, it's time to explore other options for specialty and infusion pharmacy software. Streamline pharmacy operations and improve clinical performance with automated processing, real-time data exchange, and electronic decision support. Download this helpful infographic to: Drive efficiency and patient adherence from referral receipt to delivery and ongoing care – all with our Pharmacy Cloud.

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Let’s Get Social: The Ascendancy of Social Media to the Top of the Media Mix

PharmExec

Fran Pollaro talks with Amanda Powers-Han, chief marketing officer at Greater Than One, a full-experience marketing agency dedicated to healthcare, about what’s trending in early 2023 for pharma media mixes.

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Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

STAT

The percentage of U.S. kindergartners who’ve received standard childhood vaccines took a small but notable dip into the 2021-2022 school year, health officials said Thursday, amid disruptions related to Covid-19 and fears that anti-vaccine sentiment stirred up by the pandemic could be spreading to other shots. Vaccinations among children remain high, but the trend — with coverage dropping from about 95% in the 2019-2020 school year to 94% in 2020-2021 to 93% in 2021-2022, according

Vaccines 363
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Patients are using social media — clinical trial experts can learn from that

PharmaVoice

Why an alliance of industry leaders is exploring the potential of social media as a treasure trove of real-world patient experience insights.

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A new dawn of the genomic age: five areas set to be transformed in 2023

pharmaphorum

2022 was a banner year for genomics. In March, the collaborative T2T consortium published the first complete telomere-to-telomere sequence of the human genome, filling in the last 8% of the 3 billion base pairs that make up our DNA. And in the UK specifically, genomics remained high on the national agenda, with several significant government programmes and investments announced – including the Newborn Genomes Programme in healthcare and the Precision Breeding Bill in the agricultural sector.

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Are we entering the era of biologics for COPD?

Pharmaceutical Technology

In 2023, the pharmaceutical industry will mark 20 years since Xolair, an anti-IgE antibody, became the first biologic approved to treat asthma. Since then, the US FDA, EMA, and other agencies have approved several biologic antibodies targeting the inflammatory cytokines IL-4, IL-13, IL-5, and others for asthma. Approaches like bronchodilator inhalers focus on treating both asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

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Limiting microbial hazards in inhaled cannabis products

European Pharmaceutical Review

There are major concerns about microbial contamination in cannabis, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) researchers observed in a study. Multiple cases have been reported of infections associated with cannabis use caused by fungi and bacteria in immunocompromised individuals using inhaled cannabis material. Investigational New Drug (IND) applications for cannabis as therapeutics tested in clinical trials must comply with FDA’s requirements and standards for drug products.

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Stars Aligned for Pricing Model? Value-Based Contracts May be Poised for Takeoff

PharmExec

As new forms of cell and gene therapies continue to be developed, life sciences companies and payers need to find alternative ways to pay for these expensive treatments. Value-based contracts, though slow to gain traction so far, may provide the solution these groups are looking for.

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For people with disabilities, reproductive health care comes with deep-rooted barriers

STAT

Pregnancy, for the average person, is an exercise of extremes — swelling body, welling emotions, surging hormones. For people with chronic conditions and other disabilities, the experience can be even more jarring, full of additional barriers, stigma, and risks. But it’s not just pregnancy. In the United States, disabled people are less likely to be taught comprehensive sexual education and given access to contraceptives, and are more likely to have unintended pregnancies.

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Space — the next frontier in drug development

PharmaVoice

Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and others are taking small R&D steps in space that could lead to giant leaps for patients.

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Bayer taps Google’s quantum power for drug discovery

pharmaphorum

Bayer has signed an agreement with Google aimed at using high-level processing power to handle quantum chemistry calculations used to predict the chemical and physical properties of drug molecules at the atomic scale. The deal with the tech giant’s Google Cloud unit revolves around its tensor processing units (TPUs), artificial intelligence-powered accelerators designed to run machine learning models and computationally-intensive workloads that can be customised to specific applications.

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Cell therapies might revolutionise treatment for multiple sclerosis patients

Pharmaceutical Technology

While the treatment options for multiple sclerosis (MS) patients are growing each year with the approval of new agents, all of the currently marketed treatments only slow the disease’s progression and sometimes carry risks of severe side effects, such as liver failure or the development of viral infections. However, new mechanisms of action (MoAs) are in constant development, with some of the more innovative ones utilizing cell-based therapies.

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Is machine learning the answer for long-acting injectable drugs?

European Pharmaceutical Review

Machine learning models used to guide the design of long-acting injectable drug formulations have been successfully tested by scientists at the University of Toronto. The research results signal the potential for machine to reduce reliance on trial-and-error testing, which slows the development of long-acting injectables (LAIs). The study was published Nature Communications and is one of the first to apply machine learning techniques to the design of polymeric long-acting injectable drug formula

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Amvuttra recommended by NICE for amyloidosis

Pharma Times

Therapy is among the first to receive a positive draft recommendation under streamlined pilot process

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STAT+: Medicare Advantage insurers to repay billions under final federal audit rule

STAT

The federal government will audit Medicare Advantage insurers aggressively under a rule finalized Monday, which is expected to result in billions of dollars in overpayments going back toward Medicare’s trust fund and patients over the next decade. However, federal officials watered down one of the auditing policies by giving insurers seven years of immunity from having the samples of their diagnosis coding errors extrapolated to their broader Medicare Advantage membership.

Immunity 361
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Vaxxinity eyes global COVID-19 vaccine market with ‘next-gen’ booster

PharmaVoice

The biotech aims to complete rolling submissions with regulators in the U.K. and Australia in the first half of 2023.

Vaccines 264
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AI and the Big Data paradigm – big ambitions in novel drug discovery

pharmaphorum

Over the past few decades, data generation has veritably exploded. However, the ‘Big Data paradigm’ is not so much concerned with the volume of that data, but how businesses and, indeed, industries can derive meaningful insights from what has become a glut of information. With the currently popular approach to artificial intelligence (AI) focussing on the Big Data paradigm, also, pharmaphorum spoke with Adityo Prakash, CEO of Verseon, about the whys and wherefores, delving deeper into the proces

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Current and future players in the lupus market

Pharmaceutical Technology

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a systemic, inflammatory, chronic autoimmune disease that can affect multiple organs simultaneously or sequentially, with a relapsing and remitting nature. While SLE can affect multiple major organ systems in the body, one of its most severe manifestations is renal (kidney) involvement, known as lupus nephritis (LN).

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Switzerland and US sign drug inspection agreement

European Pharmaceutical Review

A Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) relating to pharmaceutical Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) has been signed between Switzerland and the US. Under the agreement with the Swiss Confederation (Switzerland), the Swiss Agency for Therapeutic Products (Swissmedic) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be able to utilise each other’s GMP inspections of pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities, avoiding the need for duplicate inspections.

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Technology as a New Evolution in Fighting Disease

PharmaTech

Advancing the use of AI to understand the whole of a disease can reveal drug development insights that lead to drug discovery breakthroughs.

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Medical schools are missing the mark on artificial intelligence

STAT

Ready or not, health care is undergoing a massive transformation driven by artificial intelligence. But medical schools have barely started to teach about AI and machine learning — creating knowledge gaps that could compound the damage caused by flawed algorithms and biased decision-support systems. “We’re going to be at a point where we’re not going to be able to catch up and be able to call out the technology defects or flaws,” said Erkin Ötleş, a

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This biotech CEO secured two billion-dollar Big Pharma deals during the pandemic

PharmaVoice

With the industry focused on cancer and COVID-19, Marc de Garidel made deals centered on cardio.

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Free access to Zolgensma curbed, says Novartis

pharmaphorum

Novartis’ programme providing free access to its spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) gene therapy Zolgensma is being scaled back to a dozen countries worldwide, according to the company. First introduced in 2020, the global Managed Access Programme (gMAP) has provided Zolgensma (onasemnogene abeparvovec) free of charge to nearly 300 children with the genetic disorder across 36 countries where the therapy has not yet received approval or in which no formal access pathway exists.

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Hospital Universitario and Josep Carreras develop cell therapy for leukaemia

Pharmaceutical Technology

Spain’s Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre researchers, along with the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, have developed a new cell therapy based on STAb cells to treat a type of leukaemia. The Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC) provided funding for the new STAb therapy development. It could be used for T-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (T-ALL) treatment in patients for whom bone marrow transplantation and chemotherapy failed to work.

Hospitals 110
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UK medical cannabis manufacturer granted GMP registration

European Pharmaceutical Review

The first good manufacturing practice (GMP) registration of a UK pharmaceutical facility for high Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) cannabis active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) has been granted since the legalisation of medical cannabis in 2018. Celadon Pharmaceuticals’ Midlands site is now registered by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for GMP manufacturing.

Labelling 111
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Can machine learning accelerate drug formulation?

Outsourcing Pharma

Research emerging from the University of Toronto found that using machine learning models was able to guide the design of long-acting drug formulations.

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