The cost of new anticancer drugs increased more than fivefold from 2006 to 2015, but a new analysis suggests that cancer patients and insurers may be getting less for their money, according to a Reuters report. Anticancer medications account for the lion’s share of global drug spending, and the average…
The FDA has approved osimertinib (Tagrisso, AstraZeneca) for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors have epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations (exon 19 deletions or exon 21 L858R mutations), as detected by an FDA-approved test.…
The largest U.S. manager of prescription benefits is telling drug-makers that the current pricing model is broken and is taking aim at Amgen and other makers of new migraine medicines to try and fix it, according to a Reuters report. Express Scripts told Reuters it is pressing them to forego the usual…
The FDA has approved burosumab-twza (Crysvita, Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical), the first drug approved to treat adults and children 1 year of age and older with x-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH), a rare, inherited form of rickets. XLH causes low levels of phosphorus in the blood. It leads to impaired bone…
The FDA has approved fostamatinib disodium hexahydrate (Tavalisse, Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc.) for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in adult patients with chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) who have had an insufficient response to a previous treatment. Fostamatinib is an oral spleen tyrosine kinase…
The FDA has authorized the first test to identify the emerging pathogen Candida auris, which can cause serious infections in hospitalized patients. Specifically, the FDA permitted marketing for a new use of the BRUKER MALDI Biotyper CA system (Bruker Daltonik GmbH) for the identification of C. auris,…
