Clinical

What we're reading, July 28, 2016: CMS released first hospital quality ratings; Anthem is prepared to fight the government over Cigna purchase; and regulations are falling behind stem cell clinics.

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that patients who have access to both the prices charged by a testing laboratory as well as reference pricing, they choose lower-cost laboratories, resulting in overall cost savings.

What we're reading, July 27, 2016: UnitedHealth and Aetna are looking to join California's Medicaid program; the World Health Organization is considering removing transgender identity from list of mental disorders; and medical schools rethink how to treat addiction.

The monoclonal antibody daratumumab (Darzalex) has been granted breakthrough designation, the second for this drug, for use in combination with either lenalidomide and dexamethasone or bortezomib and dexamethasone, for patients with multiple myeloma who have received at least 1 prior therapy.

A collaborative pilot that includes the California Department of Public Health, is studying whether near—real-time reporting of cancer diagnoses by pathologists will permit providers to make more informed and timely treatment decisions.

Like the influential Model List of Essential Medicines maintained by the World Health Organization, there should be a list of key tests every country should have available, with high quality standards, write a group of experts.

According to a news report in Nature, scientists at Sichuan University’s West China Hospital are on track to initiate a clinical trial that will administer CRISPR-Cas9—edited immune cells in patients diagnosed with lung cancer.

A letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine provides narrative of a clinical interference that has been documented with the much hailed multiple myeloma drug daratumumab.

Data from the phase 3 METEOR trial presented at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology showed that cabozantinib reduced the risk of death in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma by 34%, compared with everolimus.

A proof-of-concept study in ovarian cancer shows advantage of using liquid biopsy for the earlier detection of disease relapse.

On an earnings call yesterday, Novartis announced that the FDA has sent a complete response letter for their product pegfilgrastim, biosimilar to Neulesta.