Abstract
A collection of recently published news items.
Following criticism by President Donald Trump about the high cost of drugs, several pharmaceutical giants announced that they will limit price increases for the rest of 2018. Companies that made the pledge included Novartis, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Celgene, Merck, and Roche.
London, UK–based biomedical research charity Wellcome Trust will devote $ 330 million to funding high-risk projects through the new Wellcome Leap Fund. “We want to take advantage of the surprising, left-field ideas that pose the question ‘what if?’ and support them in a new way that complements our existing funding structures,” said Wellcome director Jeremy Farrar. The fund will run for 5 years starting in 2020.
NewLink Genetics cut one third of its staff to reduce costs while continuing to develop its IDO inhibitor, indoximod, as a first-line treatment for acute myeloid leukemia and diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, and as a therapy for recurrent pediatric brain cancer. The company previously announced it would not initiate a phase III trial of the drug in combination with pembrolizumab (Keytruda; Merck) for advanced melanoma, and it “deprioritized” research on pancreatic cancer after the drug did not improve median overall survival in a phase II trial.
The FDA approved a magnetic device system for guiding lymph node biopsies in patients with breast cancer who are having mastectomies. The Magtrace and Sentimag Magnetic Localization System (Endomagnetics) uses magnetic detection during a sentinel lymph node biopsy to identify those that should be removed. The approval was based on a trial in which the system detected 94.3% of sentinel lymph nodes, compared with 93.5% detection with the standard gamma-probe approach.
Globally, lung cancer mortality rates among women could rise 43% by 2030, according to a recent study (Cancer Res 2018;78:4436–42). Researchers analyzed mortality data from 52 countries and predicted that the age-standardized mortality rate for women with lung cancer will increase from 11.2 to 16 deaths per 100,000 person-years between 2015 and 2030.
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