Health Tips

Gilead Sciences and the Yale School of Medicine are joining forces in the latest collaboration between industry and academia to hunt for new drugs.

Gilead, known mostly for its line of medicines for HIV/AIDS, will pay $40 million for a four-year effort that could be extended to 10 years and a total of $100 million as part of its plan to expand its product portfolio to include cancer. It plans to tap Yale’s expertise in oncology, genomics and clinical medicine in a bid to discover new drug targets and design molecules to hit them.

In the past year, the company has acquired three smaller firms with compounds for cancer and inflammatory diseases in early stage development. The Yale pact “is another piece of the puzzle,” Howard Jaffe, president of the Gilead Foundation, tells the Health Blog.

The initiative will be led by Joseph “Yossi” Schlessinger, director of Yale’s Cancer Biology Institute, whose history of success in drug development was a draw for Gilead. Schlessinger has helped found three companies, including Sugen, now owned by Pfizer, and Plexxikon, whose promising experimental drug for advanced melanoma led Daiichi Sankyo of Japan to agree to acquire it in February for $805 million plus as much as $130 million in milestone payments.

Schlessinger tells the Blog that cheap genetic sequencing is driving an explosion of discovery of new mutations, including those that can cause cells to become cancerous. He will lead a six person committee – three from Yale and three from Gilead – that aims to link mutations to specific cancers with the hope of findings promising targets for new drugs.

“It sounds easy,” he says. “It’s not so easy. But if this would bring one or two new drugs, it [would be] well accomplished.”

Yale’s Richard Lipton, who head’s the university’s Center for Genomic Analysis, and Thomas Lynch, director of the Cancer Center, are also participating in the venture. Gilead will have first option to license any promising discoveries the effort produces.

Sanofi-aventis recently announced plans for a research collaboration with University of California, San Francisco; Pfizer has linked up with UCSF and researchers from seven major academic research centers in New York. Merck and Roche’s Genentech unit are among other drug companies that recently established new ties with industry.

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wsj/health/feed/~3/jibZtXY8Paw/

House Speaker John Boehner signaled Thursday that a compromise is coming with Democrats on immediate cuts in government spending, as Tea Party supporters rallied near the Capitol demanding House Republicans to fight for bigger spending cuts or else just let the government shut down.Boehner noted that Republicans are fighting for the biggest spending cuts they [...]

from: http://online.worldmag.com/2011/03/31/boehner-signals-compromise-in-budget-talks/

Should “wandering” be considered a medical diagnosis that doctors and hospitals can bill for?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering recommending the concept of wandering off — intended for those with autism-spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities who might pose a danger to themselves if they do so — for inclusion into the U.S.’s official medical code book, the International Classification of Diseases. (Read the CDC’s proposal on wandering on p. 17.)

The ICD is put out by the World Health Organization and is used in the U.S. for billing purposes and as a basis to code and classify mortality data on death certificates, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group.

But the potential recommendation is garnering controversy from some autism advocates. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network and others are petitioning against the CDC’s stance because say that medicalizing the behavior could lead to increased and unnecessary restraint or seclusion of these individuals.

“The intention here is good,” says Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. “You’ve got people here who have wandered off and maybe get injured or even died. But they [the CDC] haven’t really thought through the unintended consequences.”

Having wandering as a diagnostic code will allow researchers to better gather information and characterize the problem and addresses families’ difficulties getting reimbursement for certain services, such as tracking devices, for instance, according to the CDC’s Coleen Boyle, acting director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

Health Blog Bonus: If you really want to get into the weeds about the debate, check out this transcript from a recent meeting of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Meeting (the wandering discussion begins on p. 11).

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wsj/health/feed/~3/55MXV-UQP8o/