Pharmaceutical
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How COVID Is Changing Clinical Trials
Read the rest of this entry »Amidst all the uncertainty about a COVID vaccine, at least this one thing is certain: it is changing how clinical trials are conducted.
Instead of taking years to move a potential vaccine from laboratory to trial, the US’s Operation Warp Speed has moved two of six prospective COVID vaccines into Phase 3 recruitment in under six months. Two more are expected to begin Phase 3 recruitment this month.
In the …
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Origami-Inspired Robot Shows It Can Do Delicate Surgery
Read the rest of this entry »A tiny robot, inspired by the paper-folding art of origami, may someday take on surgical tasks as delicate as pushing through a human eye to reach the hair-sized veins inside.
Two engineers recently demonstrated how a device weighing as much as a penny and no larger than a tennis ball can perform such delicate procedures with far more precision than a human. They described their work in the August issue …
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Seattle's Biotech Is Desperate For Workers
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One of the nation’s premier biotech centers is finding it so hard to fill jobs the state's trade association has launched an ambitious marketing campaign to lure workers to Washington state.
“Our industry has jobs. We have jobs at all levels,” said Leslie Alexandre, CEO of the trade group Life Science Washington. “We eagerly welcome people to come and join our ecosystem or to be trained from our schools and …
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Rare Diseases Trial Network Moves Closer to Reality
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As many as 30 million Americans may be living with a “rare disease,” officially defined as a condition affecting fewer than 200,000 people.
The Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center says there are some 7,000 known rare diseases. Most are genetic. Only about 10% of all rare diseases have an approved treatment.
To hasten the development of drugs and therapies, the Food and Drug Administration in 2019 began an initiative …
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Technology Is Transforming the Clinical Research Workforce
Read the rest of this entry »The clinical research workforce is facing a transformation brought about by the rapid changes in how clinical trials are conducted.
New roles are already emerging, while traditional roles are evolving as decentralization and the technology to support the trend require new skills to effectively manage a trial where researchers and patient may rarely, if ever, meet in person.
A new whitepaper from the Association of Clinical Research Professionals details these …
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COVID Trials Raising Awareness of Clinical Diversity
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Minority representation in clinical trials is an issue the coronavirus vaccine trials has brought out of medical publications and journals and into the broader media.
In just the last few weeks, discussions of the need to ensure Black, Hispanic, Asian and other ethnic minority participation in the trials have appeared on NPR, ABC, CNBC and elsewhere.
“If Black people have been the victims of COVID-19, we’re going to …
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Roche Predicted to Top the List of Big Pharma In 2026
Read the rest of this entry »Making predictions is always dicey – especially so in this unprecedented global environment. Yet that isn’t stopping EvaluatePharma from predicting Roche will still be the world’s biggest drugmaker 6 years from now.
If that seems a bold forecast – over the years, Roche has moved up and down the list of largest pharmaceutical firms – EvaluatePharma predicts that Bristol-Myers Squibb will drop from 4th this year to 8th in 2026. …
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Is It the Drug Or Fitbit Making the Difference?
Read the rest of this entry »As if clinical researchers and managers didn’t already have enough to worry about, now add activity trackers to the list.
Smartwatches, Fitbits and similar trackers have the potential to influence behavior, which matters in studies where physical activity is a study endpoint. (An endpoint in a clinical study is an event used to objectively measure the effect of a drug or other intervention.)
If the level of activity is an …
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Drug Industry Invests $1 Billion For Antibiotic Development
Read the rest of this entry »Before the discovery of antibiotics, tuberculosis was the second most common cause of death in the US. Today, thanks to antibiotics, the few who contract the disease rarely die.
But as TB and other once-easily cured diseases grow increasingly antibiotic resistant, the very real fear is that medicine may run out of treatment options, leading to epidemics dwarfing COVID-19.
To head-off that kind of future, two dozen pharmaceutical firms have …
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Wide Scale Testing Beginning for COVID-19 Vaccines
Read the rest of this entry »Researchers are making so much progress in developing a vaccine against COVID-19 that the first wide-scale testing could begin in a matter of weeks.
The New York Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker says a vaccine developed by the 10-year-old biotech company Moderna expects to start wide-scale testing this month. If it does, it would mark an almost unprecedented acceleration of the clinical testing process.
Typically, testing and approving a new vaccine …
