Posted by rob on January 31, 2006 under Uncategorized | 
Smita Deshmukh
Tuesday, January 31, 2006 01:06 IST
MUMBAI: It promises to be a boon for leukaemia patients as well as others looking for affordable anti-cancer drugs.
Gleevec, a drug used to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML, blood cancer), will no longer be the exclusive property of Novartis AG, according to a recent ruling of the patents controller, Chennai.
The price of the drug had escalated from Rs10,000 to Rs1.2 lakh per bottle of 90 tablets after the Centre gave Novartis exclusive marketing rights for the drug.
This forced many of the 30,000 or so CML patients in the country to stop using it.
The patents controller, in his ruling, said Gleevec contains a beta crystalline form of the compound imatinib meyslate.
Arguing that the beta derivative does not show any significant improvement in efficacy over the original substance, the controller denied Novartis the patent.
The Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA), a city-based NGO, had contested Novartis’s application for the patent on imatinib meyslate.
While Novartis could sell Gleevec at Rs1.2 lakh a bottle, nine other manufacturers of imatinib meyslate, the drug’s generic version priced between Rs9,000 and Rs12,000 per bottle, were barred from producing it by a court injunction, forcing thousands of patients to resort to older drugs like Hydrea.
The ruling has brought relief to the NGO, which has 300 patients on the waiting list.
“It is a big victory for our patients, most of whom cannot afford these expensive drugs,” said YK Sapru, CPAA chairman. “We do provide drugs free of cost, but for how long can we do so with such prices?”
This is just the first step towards ensuring justice for patients, said Anand Grover, project director, Lawyer’s Collective, which represented the CPAA. “Drug control committees can further reduce the price of the generic version of Gleevec.”
The CPAA will now approach the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority to make drugs containing imatinib mesylate affordable
DNA – Mumbai – Anti-cancer drug becomes cheaper – Daily News & Analysis
Posted by rob on under Uncategorized |
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentMon Jan 30, 1:44 PM ET
Primary care — the basic medical care that people get when they visit their doctors for routine physicals and minor problems — could fall apart in the United States without immediate reforms, the American College of Physicians said on Monday.
“Primary care is on the verge of collapse,” said the organization, a professional group which certifies internists, in a statement. “Very few young physicians are going into primary care and those already in practice are under such stress that they are looking for an exit strategy.”
Dropping incomes coupled with difficulties in juggling patients, soaring bills and policies from insurers that encourage rushed office visits all mean that more primary care doctors are retiring than are graduating from medical school, the ACP said in its report.
The group has proposed a solution — calling on federal policymakers to approve new ways of paying doctors that would put primary care doctors in charge of organizing a patient’s care and giving patients more responsibility for monitoring their own health and scheduling regular visits.
U.S. doctors have long complained that reimbursement policies of both Medicare and private insurers reward a “just-in-time” approach, instead of preventive care that would save money and keep patients healthier.
“Medicare will pay tens of thousands of dollars … for a limb amputation on a diabetic patient, but virtually nothing to the primary care physician for keeping the patient’s diabetes under control,” said Bob Doherty, senior vice president for the
ACP.
The ACP plan called for innovations such as using e-mail to consult on minor and routine matters, freeing up expensive office visit time for when it is needed. Doctors would be compensated for an e-mail consultation.
The proposals include incentives for doctors to work more efficiently and to provide better care, ACP President Dr. C. Anderson Hedberg told a news conference. “ACP proposals would provide patients with access to care that is coordinated by their own personal physician,” Hedberg said.
YOUNG DOCTORS AVOIDING PRIMARY CARE
The ACP cited an American Medical Association survey that found 35 percent of all physicians nationwide are over the age of 55 and will soon retire.
In 2003, only 27 percent of third year internal medicine residents actually planned to practice internal medicine, the group said, with others planning to go into more lucrative specialty jobs.
“Primary care physicians — the bedrock of medical care for today and the future — are at the bottom of the list of all medical specialties in median income compensation,” the ACP said.
The group, which represents 119,000 doctors and medical students in general internal medicine and subspecialties, joins others that warn the U.S. health care system is untenable.
“If these reforms do not take place, within a few years there will not be enough primary care physicians to take care of an aging population with increasing incidences of chronic diseases,” said Dr. Vineet Arora, chair of the College’s Council of Associates.
Dr. Sara Walker, a Missouri physician, said she believed doctors were leaving general practice because of drops in Medicare reimbursement to doctors.
“A drop in Medicare payments will not only force me to stop taking Medicare patients but could force me out of business,” agreed Dr. Kevin Lutz, a solo practitioner in Denver.
Posted by rob on under Uncategorized |
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentMon Jan 30, 5:06 PM ET
Scientists have found blood stem cells hiding out in the edges of bone marrow, and said on Monday their finding could help ease lifesaving stem cell transplants for diseases such as cancer.
They invented a technique that makes it possible to see a stem cell alive in bone marrow — something never done before.
Scientists usually find the powerful but elusive cells by looking for proteins called markers that are active on the stem cells’ surfaces.
The cells are not clustered throughout bone marrow, as had been thought, but live alongside bone-forming cells on the edges of the marrow, the team at the University of Michigan Medical School and University of Tsukuba in Japan wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This might make transplants easier, said Dr. Doug Engel, who worked on the study. Currently doctors must remove large amounts of bone marrow from a donor and separate stem cells, which are infused into a sick patient.
“Maybe we can find a way to expand the stem cell population in the niche,” Engel said in a telephone interview.
“Then perhaps we can make human bone marrow harvests less invasive and less painful.”
Where the stem cells live might hold a key to their abilities to create all the different types of blood cells, Engel said.
FLUORESCENT GENE
To find the stem cells, Norio Suzuki and colleagues at the University of Tsukuba spliced a green fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish into two genes uniquely used by the blood stem cells, one called Gata-2, and a gene called IS that helps control Gata-2.
This made the stem cells glow under ultraviolet light. “We made a whole mouse that would express green fluorescent protein under the control of the Gata-2 gene promotor,” Engel said.
“We took time-lapse movies of frozen sections from mouse leg bone as seen under a fluorescent microscope,” Engel added.
“They clearly show individual, isolated hematopoietic stem cells at the edge of the bone marrow.”
When bone marrow stem cells, called hematopoietic stem cells, are transplanted, they proliferate, giving rise to immune cells and various other blood cells.
Scientists had presumed they circulated throughout the bone marrow. In fact, they sat still and in contact with osteoblasts — bone-forming cells.
In a second study in the same journal, another team of scientists said they found another unusual source of support for stem cells — prion proteins.
Prions are perhaps best known as the agents that, when misshapen, cause mad cow disease and related diseases. Mad cow disease, known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and similar diseases destroy the brains of other animals and humans.
Prions have a normal function too — but nobody knows what it is.
Susan Lindquist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues found prion protein expressed, or active, in bone marrow stem cells. She said that means prions probably help blood stem cells during the transplant process and might serve as a marker to help find them.
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