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The board of St. Vincent’s Hospital in lower Manhattan threw in the financial towel last night, voting to close in-patient services that had been a medical mainstay in Greenwich Village for 160 years. The decision wasn’t a surprise, having dragged on for six months as the 727-bed hospital tried to come up with a rescue plan [...] GlaxoSmithKline finally got some good news from a study of its diabetes drug Avandia, but some top leading cardiologists remain unconvinced, saying the company’s new research has serious flaws. The results, unveiled late this afternoon at the American Diabetes Association conference in New Orleans, found Avandia doesn’t increase patients’ risk for heart attacks, according [...] The killing of physician George Tiller has renewed attention on the issue to late-term abortions, which make up a small fraction of the 1.2 million abortions each year. Not much is known, however, about who gets them and for what reasons. Nearly 90% of abortions are conducted in the first trimester, but — because of social, [...] In a sign of several things — people’s willingness to spend money on their pets, the promise of targeted therapies for cancer, the drug industry’s push to expand multiple revenue streams — the FDA for the first time approved a cancer drug for dogs. Palladia, a Pfizer drug, is approved for treating advanced mast cell tumors, [...] Aetna shares were down more than 8% in after-hours trading this morning, after the company said higher health costs are likely to take a bite out of its profits this year. Here’s the story from the WSJ. While some analysts suggested the lower earnings had already been priced into the stock, others quickly downgraded the company. [...] A few highlights out of ASCO, the big cancer conference on in Orlando this weekend: Roche’s breast-cancer drug Herceptin extended the lives of some patients with stomach cancer. The drug is used in people whose tumors produce excessive amounts of a protein called her-2. That occurs in about 20%-25% of breast cancer and stomach cancer cases. [...] The hospital industry is starting to push back against a move in Congress to create stricter rules for how much charity care nonprofit hospitals have to provide to earn their tax exemption. “Ask your senators to oppose charity care proposal,” the American Hospital Association wrote in a recent bulletin to its members, the New York Times [...] George Tiller, a gynecologist who performed late-term abortions, was shot dead at his church in Kansas on Sunday. A suspect is being held in the case. Tiller’s willingness to perform abortions later in the course of pregnancy than many other physicians made him the object of years of protests and legal threats. In 1993, this morning’s [...] As the era of targeted cancer drugs has matured, it’s become clear that any single drug stands little chance of keeping cancer in check for an extended period of time in large numbers of patients. So researchers have begun testing combinations of targeted drugs in hopes that a cocktail will prove more effective. This approach [...] |
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