They showed that Vytorin, a combination of the generic cholesterol drug Zocor and the newer medicine Zetia, did not reduce ultrasound readings of thickness in the neck artery any more than Zocor alone.
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The government is now reviewing the authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to oversee and control reproductive medicine.
Farmeron is a Web data service that farmers can use to aggregate the troves of information produced about their animals: diet, health, reproduction, milk production and medicine or drug dosage.
In summary, Precision Medicine, defined as rules (algorithm) based medicine by Clayton Christensen seems on the horizon, where medicine and drug discovery will ultimately be supported by intelligent systems (compare Watson) that will enable completely new therapeutic concepts, not least with the advent of mobileICT-based companion (monitoring)diagnostics.
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Bristol-Myers Squibb (nyse: BMY - news - people ), which spent years between drug approvals, last year had a promising new schizophrenia medicine approved and may get an AIDS drug onto the market this year.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved Increlex, a medicine developed by biotech Tercica to treat a hormone deficiency that causes short stature and other health problems for 6, 000 children.
Novartis says it hopes next year to apply for approval for three additional drugs for various tumors types, including a new treatment for ovarian cancer, a new lymphoma medicine and a drug for Cushing's disease, a benign tumor in the pituitary gland.
Yesterday, Orexigen, which seemed to have abandoned its obesity drug Contrave after the Food and Drug Administration asked for a giant study to prove the medicine is safe, jumped back in the weight-loss game .
The choice of purification methods and the source of the drug will determine the nature and amount of contaminants in the final medicine. (Nothing is ever 100% pure.) Moreover, protein folding, various kinds of enzymatic modifications and impurities inevitably introduce variation, sometimes with unexpected results.
Also exciting: a stop-smoking pill, a long-delayed inhaled insulin, an osteoporosis medicine, a sleep drug and an antibiotic that can treat infections in a single dose.
Other medicines, including multiple myeloma drug Velcade, from Millennium, and rheumatoid arthritis medicine Enbrel, from Amgen.
Pfizer has gone a decade spending more than any other company with only a handful of moderate-sized successes, including the pain medicine Lyrica and the cancer drug Sutent.
Some lawmakers have been complaining that pharmaceutical companies benefit from Medicare Part D while seniors have to choose between buying medicine and food since the drug benefit passed in 2003.
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You can see the effect of the U.S. dominance in biology and medicine in the behavior of big drug companies.
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They already have contributed to the development of the antibiotics erythromycin and tetracycline, the cancer chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, Wyeth's transplant drug Rapamune, and Merck's cholesterol-lowering medicine, Mevacor.
Emanuel spoke with Topol and Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, on a panel about personalized medicine at the Aspen Ideas Festival this month.
The problem for regulators, though, is that interactions between drug company sales representatives and doctors occur behind closed doors--and just because a doctor is prescribing a medicine for an unapproved use doesn't mean the drug firm suggested that he do so.
Wood, dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and chair of the Food and Drug Administration panel that looked into Vioxx's risks in February.
The licensing of medicine by America's Food and Drug Administration has become slower since 2004 when a pain-killer, Vioxx, was withdrawn by its maker, Merck, because it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
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Marcia Angell, a lecturer at Harvard University, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About Drug Companies, wrote in an e-mail that ghostwriting practices are "evidently very common" in medicine.
Before a new medicine is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it is usually subjected to the scrutiny of a panel of experts selected by the FDA who then vote on whether or not the product should actually be made available for sale.
"It's not any different from what we knew back in February, " says Eric Holmboe , a vice president for evaluation research at the American Board of Internal Medicine who served on the Food and Drug Administration panel that looked at the risks of common pain drugs.
It did not matter which medicine drug patients took so long as both inflammation and cholesterol were reduced.
If Medicaid were a new medicine applying for approval from the Food and Drug Administration, it would be summarily rejected.
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The patent on a new drug starts running out the second the medicine is invented, and it can take many, many years to get these big clinical trials done.
"I think most physicians think it is unethical to take a drug like that and market it with only one cholesterol-lowering medicine, " says Richard Stein, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Medical Center.
In the long term, researchers hope a detailed understanding of the genome's permutations will lead to a new era of customized medicine, in which drug regimens, diagnostic tools and medical devices are tailored to individual genetic codes.
Wyeth is also developing another medicine to treat menopause symptoms and a new drug for osteoporosis, a treatment for the side effects of morphine, and an improved version of its Prevnar vaccine, which prevents certain bacterial infections in infants and toddlers.
Patients get that medicine for a smaller co-payment, and drug companies will vie for that spot.
And once a drug goes generic, the firm that created the medicine must deal with fierce competition from other manufacturers.
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