If you’re a CEO about to lose your single biggest source of sales, and you’re sitting on billions in cash and short-term investments, it might be time to go shopping.
If you’re the CEO of Pfizer — which will face generic competition for Lipitor in 2011, and which holds cash and short term investments worth more [...]

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The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence issued new guidelines to improve access to life-extending drug therapies for individuals facing terminal illnesses, under certain circumstances. NICE ruled that the current threshold at which a drug is deemed cost-effective can now be extended for patients with rare terminal illnesses, including certain types of cancer.

For [...]

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FDA sanctioned Roche Molecular Diagnostics’ cobas TaqScreen MPX Test that screens for three types of HIV as well as HCV and HBV in donated blood plasma and tissue. It is a qualitative nucleic acid in vitro test for comprehensive single-assay detection of HIV-1 Group M RNA, HIV-1 Group O RNA, HIV-2 RNA, HCV RNA, and [...]

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Abbott’s been selling its blockbuster drug Humira since 2002. But it was just a few days ago that Bayer sued Abbott in federal court, arguing that Humira infringes on a patent granted to Bayer in 1997.

Here’s a copy of the complaint, filed in the Eastern District of Texas; here’s the Bayer patent.
There’s a simple logic [...]

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One in five white people carries a gene fault which could raise their risk of high blood pressure, research suggests.
The STK39 gene variant was found after scanning the entire genetic code of hundreds of people in the US and Europe.
Those with the variant had raised blood pressure compared with those carrying other versions.

The US research [...]

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President-Elect Barack Obama’s recent appointment of four scientific luminaries to major posts in his new administration marks an ambitious attempt to improve U.S. science policy and implementation, especially in light of President Bush’s  reluctance to move forward on addressing global warming and his opposition to new embryonic stem cell research initiatives.
Obama named John Holdren, Ph.D., [...]

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There’s fresh data suggesting that weight-loss surgery helps ease diabetes. This time, the research spotlighted obese teenagers.
The study in the current issue of Pediatrics focused on 11 severely obese adolescents with Type 2 diabetes who underwent bariatric surgery. After the surgery, all but one of them showed evidence of remission of their diabetes.

A comparison group [...]

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An international team’s work on alternative splicing, the process that produces 75,000 of the proteins in human cells, found that small changes in the environment near an alternative splice could produce a large change in the proteins produced.

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Physically “acting out” dreams when asleep could be an early warning sign of dementia or Parkinson’s disease.
Canadian researchers studied 93 people with “REM sleep behaviour disorder”, which can involve punching or kicking out while dreaming.
The Neurology study found more than a quarter were diagnosed with a degenerative brain condition over the next five years.
UK experts [...]

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As we begin to contemplate what next year has to offer, it is useful to consider some key events of this year. Singling out one life science discovery as the breakthrough of the year is an impossible task. Here, we look at a few research segments —stem cells, genetic testing, HIV, cancer, and Alzheimer’s—and some [...]

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