The biomedical revolution has begun!

Is it serious?:

 

These developments were being led by personalised medicine and pan-omics (genomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, proteomics and exposomics), which would radically change the way we understand diseases, he said. “We will unpick the omics and patients will be put into a variety of categories based on whether the drug will work and its toxicity.”

http://www.pharmatimes.com/Article/14-10-29/The_biomedical_revolution_has_begun.aspx#ixzz3HhWKx4Lf

Nanomadness?

So this nanoparticle platform we’re talking about essentially does the following: You take a capsule chock full of the nanoparticles, and they absorb into your body and into your bloodstream. These nanoparticles are two thousand times smaller than a single red blood cell. They’re tiny. They’re so little that they can pass through parts of your body, they go through the blood, they go through your lymph system, they just walk around. They’re essentially very benign particles—-there’s already lots of FDA approved nanoparticles for imaging and stuff like that, because they’re simply made out of an iron oxide core, like you take in a One-A-Day Plus Iron pill. And they’re decorated with proteins and amino acids and DNA to make them bind to certain things.

Full story: https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-tricorder-12e1822e5e6a

 

“We are aggressively looking at all alternatives.” No balls - no babies!

The U.S. attempt to block companies from leaving the country for tax reasons wouldn’t stop Pfizer Inc. (PFE) from moving America’s biggest drugmaker overseas if it finds an attractive deal, Chief Executive Officer Ian Read said.

 

“If we believe the value is still there and we believe, under our interpretation of these rules, there is still value, I see no reason why we wouldn’t be able to do an inversion,” Read said yesterday in a telephone interview.

 

Pfizer has been on the hunt for a multibillion-dollar deal that would add to the New York-based drugmaker’s pipeline, cut costs, and help it escape the U.S.’s 35 percent corporate tax rate. Under the strategy called inversion, U.S. companies use mergers to shift their legal address to a lower-tax country without moving their operations.

 

The ideal transaction has all three components, Read said, though U.S. Treasury Department rules announced last month could lower the value Pfizer assigns to the tax advantages. A tax inversion isn’t required for a deal, Read has said.

 

“Certainly I feel a sense of urgency on utilizing our balance sheet and our capital to do deals that are incremental, add incremental value and certainly add revenue growth in the innovative space,” Read said on a conference call with analysts today. “We are aggressively looking at all alternatives.”

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-28/pfizer-lowers-full-year-sales-guidance-on-competition.html

3D printing of a pill...

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/284381.php

The top 10 most expensive drugs of 2013. Future goes orphan!

Among the 20 most expensive drugs, only hep C fighter Sovaldi, Roche's breast cancer drug Kadcyla and Bristol-Myers Squibb's ($BMY) colon cancer drug Erbitux are not orphans, drugs approved under a special program to motivate companies to develop treatments for conditions that usually have patient populations of fewer than 200,000.
http://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/top-10-most-expensive-drugs-2013

Side effects? Who cares?

■Cometriq, a $10,000-a-month drug for metastatic thyroid cancer that has no proven survival benefit and was linked to four deaths during testing. It received a black box warning for causing holes and bleeding in the gastrointestinal system.

■Iclusig, a $9,200-a-month leukemia drug that also has not been shown to lengthen lives. The FDA required a black box warning because clots formed in at least 27% of patients leading to possible heart attacks and strokes, potentially fatal heart failure and potentially fatal liver failure.

■Ixempra, a $7,600-a-month drug that improved the scans of advanced breast cancer patients for about a month and a half, but carried a warning for severe liver toxicity and a type of potentially fatal infection.

Critics say using surrogate measures to determine if a drug should be approved can backfire. Surrogates can mask complications that work against survival or quality of life, said Richard Deyo, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oregon Health and Science University.

"Maybe you live a month longer with a new drug but you are having horrible symptoms or horrible quality of life in the meantime," said Deyo, author of "Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises."

"Patients would want to know that."

And much more...

http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/some-drugs-approved-despite-minimal-benefits-severe-side-effects-b99359283z1-280438692.html

Quote of the day

Personalized cancer vaccines? WTF?

Cancer vaccine developers have seen their fair share of disappointments, and failures have spurred some companies to test their treatments in smaller patient subpopulations. Now, researchers at the University of Connecticut are narrowing their focus even further as they gear up to trial personalized cancer vaccines.

Using genome sequencing to identify the differences between protein sequences--called epitopes--in healthy versus cancerous tissue, they'll start up an initial clinical study for ovarian cancer patients once they nab FDA approval. The team will sequence DNA from the tumors of 15 to 20 women with ovarian cancer, using that information to make a personalized vaccine for each woman.

 

http://www.fiercevaccines.com/story/are-personalized-approaches-solution-troubled-cancer-vaccine-field/2014-10-23?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Basically it means that cancer vaccines do not work... Surprised? I am not...

Because they are worth it!

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/roche-blueprints-18b-rd-complex-pred/2014-10-22?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=rssThey're building a new home for John Reed and Roche's ($RHHBY) pRED research group in Basel--and the pharma giant is thinking big. Roche said today that it is committing $1.8 billion to build a new research center in Switzerland that will encompass four new office and lab buildings to house 1,900 R&D staffers.

The first step of the process will involve construction of an in vivo center for animal research, slated for completion in 2018. And Roche--the top R&D spender in the world with a 2013 budget of $10.3 billion--plans to clear away older buildings to make way for a new office tower as part of a wider building plan that will cost a total of $3.2 billion.

Quote of the day

Fake?

We want a war...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAP1caLoHSs

Size does matters!

That's it!

2014's most successful biotech IPOs

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/special-reports/2014s-most-successful-biotech-ipos
2014's most successful biotech IPOs

The top 10 most expensive drugs of 2013

The top 10 most expensive drugs of 2013 http://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/top-10-most-expensive-drugs-2013

The fantasy: 'spray-on-skin' for leg ulcers... WTF?

A novel spray-on skin treatment consisting of living cells made by Smith & Nephew, which is designed to work with the body’s own cells to help heal leg ulcers, has failed in a late-stage clinical trial.
The product, known as HP802-247, was viewed by some analysts as a key pipeline asset in the company's advanced wound management division and the Phase III failure is a setback for the healthcare group, which is a regular subject of takeover talk.
The unsuccessful North American trial, announced on Monday, is also something of a surprise, given the promise of earlier studies.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/10/13/us-smith-nephew-skin-idINKCN0I20EN20141013?feedType=RSS&feedName=health&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+reuters%252FINhealth+%2528News+%252F+IN+%252F+Health%2529

And he was right...

So what?