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Physician access limitations to those with cold or flu in Spain.  Big investments in AlphaFold’s AI.  Vaccination tipping point? New CMS legislation on prior authorization. Republican candidates on health care.

Quantifying The Value of Reduced Health Disparities: Low-Dose CT Lung Cancer Screening of High-Risk Individuals within the US

That is the title of a paper currently published (well, in pre-prints) at Value in Health. Co-authors include Jaehong Kim, Moises Marin MA, Sangeetha Ramsagar, Mark Lloyd Davies, Kyana Stewart, Iftekhar Kalsekar and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below: ObjectiveTo measure the value of increasing lung cancer screening rates for high-risk individuals and its impact…

Opioid prescriptions after surgery decline

That is the finding from a JAMA Network Open paper by Zhang et al. (2023). The authors use 2016-2022 data from the IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription Database, which claims to capture 92% of retail pharmacy prescriptions. First, fewer opioids prescriptions were made (extensive margin): During January 2016 to December 2022, the monthly surgical opioid dispensing rate…

Strong year for drug discovery

2023 was a strong year for drug discovery. Mullard et al. (2024) report: The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 55 new drugs in 2023, as the small molecule and biologic pharmacopoeia continues to grow. This cohort is nearly 50% bigger than the new approval class of 2022, which fell below the…

Treatment Patterns and Healthcare Resource Utilization of Patients With Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria: A Retrospective Claims Data Analysis

That is the title of my new paper published today in Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis with co-authors Denise Clayton, Glorian Yen, Soyon Lee, Lincy Geevarghese, Yulin Shi, Luyang He, Ying Shen, and Anem Waheed. The abstract is below: Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) is a rare, acquired hematologic disorder commonly treated with complement inhibitors such as…

How are drugs developed and financed? An overview

I just came across a nice overview article titled The financial ecosystem of pharmaceutical R&D. The white paper was developed for the Netherlands government and provides an overview of the drug development process and how (and by whom) it is financed. The white paper answers the following questions: What do different players do within the…