Pharma News

Protecting patient safety is at the core of the FDA’s mission. All FDA-approved drugs have benefits and risks which must be weighed and balanced by health care providers and patients when making decisions about medical therapy. Our goal is to ensure that the benefits and risks are clearly articulated in drug labeling. That patients and providers have accurate information. And that the benefits outweigh the risks for the intended patient population.

In general, women who have had children have a lower risk of breast cancer compared to women who have never given birth. However, new research has found that moms don’t experience this breast cancer protection until many years later and may face elevated risk for more than 20 years after their last pregnancy.

The Global Health Innovative Technology (GHIT) Fund announced a total of 520 million yen (US$ 4.6 million) to support four partnerships to develop new lifesaving drugs and vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis, dengue and leishmaniasis. This includes three new projects and one that will receive continued funding.

Ensuring the safety of our nation’s drug supply is a cornerstone of our consumer protection mission. Overseeing the quality and safety of pharmaceutical manufacturing is key to these efforts. With the emergence of new markets, supply chains are more complex. Drug production and testing operations have also become more computerized. These changes represent new opportunities and challenges.

Researchers at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, have created a noninvasive technology that detects when nerve cells fire based on changes in shape. The method could be used to observe nerve activity in light-accessible parts of the body, such as the eye, which would allow physicians to quantitatively monitor visual function at the cellular level. The study was published in the journal Light: Science and Applications. The work was funded by the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

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WHO is proud to partner with Luxembourg, a strong supporter of global health, that contributes more than 15% of its official development assistance to the health sector. Since 2009, Luxembourg has provided 1% of its gross national income to development assistance, one of the few countries that exceeds the United Nations target of 0.7%.  

The bedrock of our mission is our consumer protection role – our obligation to protect patient safety. Part of our mission also inspires us to promote beneficial innovations that can advance patient care.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will fund a series of collaborations with medical research institutions in the southern United States to test new ways of implementing HIV treatment and prevention tools in counties with some of the highest rates of new HIV cases nationwide. The U.S. South overall has the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses, people living with HIV, and HIV-related deaths of any U.S. region.

Tanzania is the first confirmed country in Africa to achieve a well-functioning, regulatory system for medical products according to the World Health Organization (WHO).  This means that the Tanzania Food and Drug authority (TFDA) has made considerable improvements in recent years in ensuring medicines in the healthcare system are of good quality, safe and produce the intended health benefit.