News

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has unveiled a fresh plan of attack on avoidable hospital deaths in England, as around 1,000 patients are unnecessarily losing their lives every year because of staff errors or poor care.

Cell Therapy of Wales has raised nearly £700,000, setting a world record for biotech crowdfunding to finance its breakthrough stem cell medicine, Heartcel.

Europe’s pharma and biotech companies are taking action to stop a new Italian law promoting off-label use of drugs, saying the measure is aimed solely at saving money.

The Institute of Cancer Research is calling on the Scottish Medicines Consortium to reconsider its decision to bar patients with prostate cancer from access to Janssen’s Zytiga (abiraterone) before they have had chemotherapy.

The cream of the clinical research world across the Atlantic is to gather in North Carolina at the end of this month to see who will be crowned winners of this year’s PharmaTimes Clinical Researcher of the Year – The Americas.

A new academic study says it is feasible that global hepatitis C treatment could be achieved if the manufacturing and monitoring costs of the new generation of drugs “were minimised in the same way as was done with HIV”, by lifting patents to allow them to made by generics firm.

Some parts of England will need a 50% increase in community GPs by 2020 to meet the demands of the growing population, the Royal College of General Practitioners has warned.

Shares of Achillion Pharmaceuticals shot up as much as 20% Monday morning as it emerged that patients with hepatitis C taking its investigational therapy were cleared of the virus after just six weeks.

Heavyweights in the pharmaceutical world have met with other stakeholders in Adelaide to explore investment and growth for the South Australian healthcare sector.

European regulators have expanded the label on Johnson & Johnson’s multiple myeloma drug Velcade to cover mantle cell lymphoma.

The US Food and Drug Administration has expanded approval on Roche’s eye blockbuster Lucentis.

AstraZeneca will behave as a biotech and “externalise” its business model to get maximum value from its promising pipeline.

Health think tank the King’s Fund has issued a scathing attack on the government’s stewardship of the NHS, particularly the Health and Social Care Bill.

Tributes have been flooding in for Margaret Hamburg after she confirmed that she is stepping down as commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration.

Patients with invasive breast cancer will soon get wider access in England to a multi-gene test able to predict the likely benefit of chemotherapy as well as the risk of disease recurrence.