Pfizer announces Q2 shareholder dividend, CareCloud gets $15M and new CEO (Morning Read)

TOP STORIES The board of directors of Pfizer Inc. declared a 28-cent second-quarter 2015 dividend […]

TOP STORIES

The board of directors of Pfizer Inc. declared a 28-cent second-quarter 2015 dividend on the company’s common stock to shareholders of record at the close of business on May 8, 2015 – payable June 2, 2015.

Novartis will look for bolt-on acquisitions costing between $2 billion and $5 billion in the next year or so.

CareCloud announced $15M in new funding and the appointment of Silicon Valley leader Ken Comée as its new CEO.

LIFE SCIENCE

GSK’s malaria vaccine looks to start African trials in October.

The Asia Pacific Medical Technology Association – the first major Asian medical device trade group – will be announced Friday.

Notable Hep C news: Merck is feeling good about the latest results of its C-EDGE Hepatitis C trials. Meanwhile, AbbVie gets FDA priority review for its treatment of chronic Hepatitis C.

Another call to stop human gene editing (CRISPR-cas9).

The latest trials of Aerie Pharmaceuticals’ glaucoma drug didn’t go well (there were some bright spots). This doesn’t look good.

Juno Therapeutics and AstraZeneca will test their drugs together to create a new cancer therapy.

Johnson & Johnson held its 127th Annual Meeting of Shareholders – preliminary voting results are in.

The FDA has provided new criteria for accepting medical device clinical data from foreign studies and outlines how the agency accepts data for medical device premarket registration submissions.

The US Department of Health and Human Services says it will shield the manufacturer of the investigational Ebola virus treatment ZMapp from legal liability under a federal law intended to incentivize the development of new medical products for medical emergencies.

Here’s an illustrated perspective on the anti-vaxxer viewpoint:

PAYERS-PROVIDERS

Here are three reasons hospitals are choosing to affiliate instead of merge.

A New Jersey hospital has found that house calls cut down readmissions.

Insurers have included prominent cancer centers in their health insurance exchange plans more often than initially estimated, according to a new survey from Avalere Health.

Avalere determined that 75 percent of the 20 cancer centers it surveyed said they’re covered by at least some of the exchange plans offered by most insurers in their state. Of those cancer centers, 13 percent said they’re covered by all the exchange plans in their state.

Flakka is yesterday’s news. Now watch out for a synthetic drug called spice.

Healthcare goes to Cuba: Roswell Park Cancer Institute with a Cuban cancer center to work on a lung cancer vaccine.

TECH

Rock Health has put cash in Arsenal Health, 1DocWay and Caeden.

EyeNetra will use its technology to offer at-home sight testing.

A new way to determine 3-D structures of large biomolecules such as proteins from 2-D images is being explored, although it’s complex.

Marcus Brubaker and a couple of pals at the University of Toronto in Canada say they have found a way to dramatically improve a 3-D imaging technique that has never quite matched the utility of x-ray crystallography.

POLITICS

A new national survey has determined that people are more satisfied with Obamacare than other alternative healthcare options.

Depending on how the Supreme Court rules in King v. Burwell, if the subsidies go away, so will the 90-day grace period unless federal officials step.

“The disappearance of the ACA’s 90-day grace period could make life more difficult for many of the 8 million-plus Americans now receiving subsidies,” said Pro’s Brett Norman. “Not only would they see premiums spike because of the lost tax credits, they would lose that extra time to pull the money together to make up the difference and avoid plan cancellations.”

A LITTLE EXTRA

Is it possible for a chicken’s egg to have another egg in it? It’s unclear if the video of a man cracking a large egg and finding another smaller egg inside is actually real, but the idea is apparently plausible.

While extremely rare, a hen can lay an egg within an egg: It is caused by a counter-peristalsis contraction. This happens when an egg is forming in the hen’s oviduct and another oocyte is released too soon, causing a contraction that pushes the first egg back up.

The Morning Read provides a 24-hour wrap up of everything else healthcare’s innovators need to know about the business of medicine (and beyond). The author of The Read published it but all full-time MedCity News journalists contribute to its content.

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