Highlights of the important and interesting in the world of healthcare:
Universal Health Services buys rival. Universal Health Services Inc. in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, has acquired rival Psychiatric Solutions Inc. for $3.1 billion, making the now $7 billion company the country’s largest owner of freestanding inpatient psychiatric facilities, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
AstraZeneca shopping medical device unit. AstraZeneca Plc is seeking to sell Astra Tech, a Swedish unit that makes dental implants and medical devices, for about $2 billion, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
$1B-worth of help for small biotechs. In all, 2,923 companies in 47 states and the District of Columbia received 4,606 Therapeutic Discovery Project Program awards, for a total of $1 billion in grants and tax credits for biomedical research through the program created by health reform law, according to American Medical News.
Cerulean raises $24M for nanoparticle drugs. Cerulean Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has closed a $24 million Series C funding round to fuel development of nanoparticle drugs, the first of which is aimed at fighting lung cancer, reports Xconomy Boston.
You say Coumadin, I say Xarelto. A new blood thinner, rivaroxaban (Xarelto), made by Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development and Bayer Healthcare, might be a viable alternative to warfarin (Coumadin), the decades-old standard for treating patients with atrial fibrillation, according to a Drugs.com.
Seniors need medical homes, too. A lot of data could be mined from electronic health records to identify best practices, enable the FDA to measure outcomes in the new Sentinel program, and provide doctors at the point-of-prescribing alerts that will help optimize drug choices (and lower costs) for senior patients, according to Dr. Jerry Avorn in a HEALTHpopuli blog report.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Hurdles ahead for medical home. Provisions of new federal health care reforms will move the country toward a primary care medical home for patients, but the nation may not have enough primary care doctors to handle the workload, according to a study by the University of Michigan Health System.
