The World Health Organization (WHO) is to launch a pilot project this year to evaluate inexpensive copies of costly drugs for biotechnology cancer to make these drugs more accessible in the poorest countries.
Government News
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Researchers have developed a custom algorithm that predicts the impact of certain foods on an individual's blood sugar, according to a new study published in PLOSComputational Biology.
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The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has launched "The Indian Rare Disease Registry" to meet the unmet needs of patients with rare diseases and to help the country develop data and information to support research and Development and improve innovation.
This India registry launched on 27th April 2017 during The National Initiative for Rare Diseases (NIRD), organized by ICMR, AIIMS, JNU and PRESIDE, seeks to take the first steps to identify patients.
The scope of this registry will evolve over time, maturing from an outreach/community-building effort or a means for a basic understanding of patient and disease characteristics, to a supportive mechanism for research funding and attracting health care providers. It intends to comprehensively cover the spectrum of rare and ultra-rare disorders prevalent in the country but initially it shall only gather data of conditions which have an established treatment available in India or globally. With time, many of the other diseases (some without treatment) would also be incorporated.
The registry is an effort to give Indians who suffer from any form of rare disease a chance to be visible and would initially be based on the hospital or doctor. The Registry is an organized system that uses observational study methods to collect uniform data (clinical and other) to evaluate specified outcomes for a population defined by a particular disease, condition, or exposure, and that serves a predetermined scientific, clinical, or policy purposes.
The benefits of the Registry include monitoring prevalence, incidence & natural history of disease over a period of time towards guiding policy decisions; support research initiatives that aim to better understand the distribution and determinants of rare diseases; facilitating access to innovations in genetics, molecular and computational biology, and other technological advances for patients suffering with rare diseases; and bridge the lack of data on rare disorders in our population thus facilitating access to supportive care for countless individuals suffering from these disorders.
The registry will seek to benefit for the patients as they will be identified and therefore would have increased possibility of access to treatment depending upon the inclusion criteria. For the government, it will know exactly the number of patients and therefore provide resources to help address the patients’ needs. For research bodies, the registry will be a source of plethora of information which will be made available for research and development activities to flourish in India. For publications, the data would form the basis of several publications thereby strengthening the country’s stand as a global leader in healthcare and for clinical trials, the patients and local R&D would also benefit.
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A growing number of healthcare institutions and the growing demand for modernization of health care, according to experts, have made it even more important to set up a robust computer system by the Indian health accessible and affordable.
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The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has set price caps for an additional 15 drugs, including those used for the treatment of heart disease, infections, cancer, hypertension and pain relief.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has posted warning letters to 14 US companies that illegally sell more than 65 products that fraudulently claim to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure cancer. The products are marketed and sold without the approval of the FDA, most often on websites and social media
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The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned two Fortis hospitals in the city of strict action for allegedly reusing disposable angio medical devices and overcharging patients for them.
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Drug pricing regulator National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has revised ceiling prices of 4 scheduled formulations of Scheduled-I under Drug (Price Control) Amendment Order, 2016 and retail price of one formulation under DPCO, 2013.The scheduled formulations are Clotrimazole cream 1%, Ceftriaxone Powder for Injection 1gm, Erythropoietin Injection 2000 IU/ml and Erythropoietin Injection 10000 IU/ml and Monocef-SB 125 mg Injection.
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The Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) directive to the NPPA comes following complaints from several manufacturers that the NPPA is adopting a practice that even when some brands/generic versions of a medicine of a company have less than 1% market share, the market share of all such versions of that medicine of that company is clubbed together.
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The leaked internal e-mails seem to show employees of one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies calling for "celebrating" price rises for cancer drugs, a survey revealed.
When the pharmaceutical giant negotiated the price of pharmaceuticals in Spain, the pharmaceutical giant would have threatened to stop selling cancer treatments unless the Minister of Health agreed to price increases of up to 4,000 percent, The Spanish daily El Confidencial Digital said at the time. Price increases were made possible by a loophole that allows pharmaceutical companies to change the price of drugs if they are no longer branded with the same name.
The staff of Aspen Pharmacare, based in South Africa and having its European headquarters in Dublin, would have been traced to destroy stocks of life-saving drugs during a price conflict with the Spanish health service in 2014.
After buying five different cancer drugs from the British company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the company tried to sell drugs in Europe up to 40 times their previous price, The Times reported. In 2013, the price of a package of a chemotherapy drug called busulfan, used to treat leukemia, rose from £ 5.20 to £ 65.22 in England and Wales.
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