Pharma News

Compounded drugs can serve an important role in meeting patients’ medical needs that cannot be met by an FDA-approved drug. Outsourcing facilities, a significant part of the industry producing compounded drugs used by hospitals, clinics, providers, and other health care systems, have rapidly evolved since the passage of the Drug Quality and Security Act (DQSA) in 2013. Although compounded drugs can fill an important role for patients and the FDA recognizes the need to preserve access to these products, they may also present a greater risk to patients because, among other things, they are not required to undergo the agency’s premarket review for safety, effectiveness and quality. These risks have become evident during inspections of outsourcing facilities when the agency has found concerning production practices that have resulted in recalls of compounded drug products and enforcement action against some firms.

World Health Organization (WHO) prequalified its first biosimilar medicine – trastuzumab – in a move that could make this expensive, life-saving treatment more affordable and available to women globally.

The number of cholera cases decreased globally by 60% in 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced in a report that points to an encouraging trend in cholera prevention and control in the world’s major cholera hotspots, including Haiti, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

EMA and its European and international partners are launching a pilot programme to increase their cooperation in the inspection of manufacturers of sterile medicines for human use. This new initiative is built on the success of and experience gained from a similar collaboration, the international active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) inspection programme.

In August 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration contracted the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to help advance the development of evidence-based guidelines for opioid analgesic prescribing for acute pain resulting from specific conditions or procedures. NASEM was tasked with providing a framework to evaluate current and future opioid prescribing to support a clinical practice guideline and to identify gaps in the evidence where future research is needed. We greatly appreciate all the work done by NASEM to produce the consensus reportExternal Link Disclaimer released.

Effective treatments for deadly diseases often depend on unlocking the mysteries of how proteins in our bodies behave.

Research at U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory enables these insights, including one breakthrough that led to a promising drug for Ebola.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of Ervebo, the first FDA-approved vaccine for the prevention of Ebola virus disease (EVD), caused by Zaire ebolavirus in individuals 18 years of age and older. Cases of EVD are very rare in the U.S., and those that have occurred have been the result of infections acquired by individuals in other countries who then traveled to the U.S., or health care workers who became ill after treating patients with EVD.

Researchers at Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) have uncovered why certain melanoma cells are more likely to spread through the body. The discovery opens up a potential new avenue of treatment and could be used to help reduce the proportion of patients who progress from stage 3 melanoma to more-deadly stage 4 cancer.

Using lipidomics, a technique that measures the composition of blood lipids at a molecular level, and machine learning, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have identified a blood lipid profile that improves the possibility to assess, several years in advance, the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The blood lipid profile can also be linked to a certain diet and degree of physical activity.

Blood contains hundreds of different lipid molecules that are divided into different classes, such as cholesterol and triglycerides.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have succeeded in extracting a complete human genome from a thousands-of-years old "chewing gum". According to the researchers, it is a new untapped source of ancient DNA.

Caption : During excavations on Lolland, Denmark, archaeologists have found a 5,700-year-old birch pitch. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have succeeded in extracting a complete ancient human genome from the pitch seen in the photo. Credit  Photo: Theis Jensen.

During excavations on Lolland, archaeologists have found a 5,700-year-old type of "chewing gum" made from birch pitch. In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen succeeded in extracting a complete ancient human genome from the pitch.