Top of the morning to you. And a fine one it is here at the Pharmalot campus, where the official mascots are snoozing away thanks to the unusual heat for this time of year. Summer fun? Why not? To celebrate, yes, we are downing a cup of stimulation — blueberry cobbler is our preference today. Feel free to join us. As always, here are your tidbits. Hope your day goes well and you conquer the world. And of course, do stay in touch. …
President Trump has repeatedly said his deals with drugmakers would bring down prescription drug prices in the U.S., but a report released by Senate Democrats finds prices have continued to climb — in some cases, sharply, NBC News says. The report — released Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, ahead of a hearing focused on drug prices — found that companies that signed drug pricing deals with Trump have raised the cost of hundreds of medications and launched new ones at an average price of $353,000 a year. The price hikes include expensive gene therapies, cancer medications, and multiple sclerosis drugs. The report also said the companies that signed deals with Trump have made huge profits during his second term in office — a combined $177 billion, up from $107 billion the year before.
A review of research spanning a decade concluded the clinical benefit of new Alzheimer’s drugs is negligible, The New York Times reports. But the way the review was conducted spurred heated criticism from many Alzheimer’s experts, including some who had been skeptical of some of the drugs. The review evaluated studies that were conducted on seven monoclonal antibody drugs developed over the last two decades to target amyloids, proteins that form plaques in the brains of people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Some experts said the conclusions were meaningless because the review swept under one umbrella drugs that had shown very dissimilar results and worked differently. The experts noted that data from the two most recent drugs studied — Leqembi and Kisunla — showed they could slow cognitive decline, which led to U.S. regulatory approval and made them the only anti-amyloid drugs available to patients.
