Novartis Extends Donation of Egaten® (triclabendazole) Until 2022

Novartis has renewed its memorandum of understanding with the World Health Organization (WHO) to lengthen its drug donation for Egaten® (triclabendazole) to 2022 and continues its war against liver fluke. WHO lists Egaten as the only medicine for fascioliasis and also includes it in the Model List of Essential Medicines.

Novartis has promised a donation of 600,000 tablets of Egaten annually as part of this new four-year (January 2019 to December 2022) deal, which it hopes to help 300,000 patients per year. As many as 4 million tablets of Egaten, costing USD 41 million, have been donated by Novartis since the commencement of the donation program in 2005, which has helped treat around 2 million patients with fascioliasis in more than 30 countries globally.

Fascioliasis, also called liver fluke, is an ignored tropical disease affecting about 2.4 million people worldwide. Fascioliasis is reported from every continent; more than 70 countries in all. Egaten is administered in a single-dose for treating fascioliasis.

"This donation will help increase access to treatment in many countries, particularly in communities where cases are clustered and among children of school age who have both the highest prevalence and intensity of infection," said Antonio Montresor, M.D., Medical Officer, WHO Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases.

"Novartis looks forward to its continued partnership with the WHO to reduce the burden of fascioliasis around the world through access to effective treatment," said Patrice Matchaba, M.D., Group Head of Global Health and Corporate Responsibility. "The extension of our donation through 2022 is a testament to our company's long-term commitment to reimagining the fight against neglected tropical diseases."

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System C Signs Contract to Offer Pooled Child Health Record in South West England

System C has signed a contract to develop a collective child health information system in the South West of England. 708,000 child health records from South Gloucester, Bristol, Somerset and North Somerset, Devon, Torbay, Plymouth and Cornwall will be put to use by its CarePlus software.

Data will be collected from 10 acute hospitals in the South West, five clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), 376 GP practices and nine local authorities by the system which is slated to be launched this September.

James Bolt, head of public health commissioning, NHS England South West, said: “Health professionals will be able to manage queries about the health status of an individual child and populations much more efficiently and effectively via a single system. The result will be safer and more joined-up care.”

CarePlus stores data with regard to immunizations and vaccinations taken right from birth to when the person is19 years old, enabling care providers to track children along their preschool and school years.

John Grayland, head of child health services at Health Intelligence, said: “We are very excited to have been chosen to provide the Child Health Information Service in the South West of England. We will be responsible for approx. 708,000 children and have chosen CarePlus as the best software to enable us to run an effective service.”

Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C, added: “We are very pleased to see multiple small child health systems replaced by these large footprint solutions in this way because they are safer and users can manage children’s records much more efficiently. We are looking forward to working with our partners in the South West.”

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Merck Presents 96-Week Doravirine HIV Data Three Months before PDUFA Date

96-week data on doravirine, Merck’s HIV drug, was posted by the drugmaker recently. Merck expects it to outrun drugs like Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Sustiva in combination regimens and antiretroviral drugs from AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson in viral suppression.

Merck believes that the present drugs added to Gilead’s Truvada and ViiV Healthcare’s Epzicom possess certain inadequacies. Bristol-Myers’ Sustiva observed an elevated rate of specific side effects compared to non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs),  and J&J’s Edurant combats excessive viral loads with difficulty. Boehringer Ingelheim’s Viramune and J&J’s Intelence also come with shortcomings.

Merck attempts to take advantage of this scenario by propagating doravarine. Last year, it presented the efficacy of the NNRTI to be at par with a combination of AbbVie’s Norvir and J&J’s Prezista at containing the HIV virus after 48 weeks, followed by a filing for FDA approval with a PDUFA dated October 23^rd.

The 96-week update shows that doravirine exceeded Gilead or ViiV’s drugs in the rate of viral suppression in HIV patients showing a fall by 10 percentage points over the second 48 weeks of the trial. Moreover, it fared better than the Norvir-Prezista combination in the control division with the rate of viral suppression declining by 14 percentage points. The variance in viral suppression in the doravirine and the control group was equal to7.1%. 

 It did not ring any bells for safety hazards during the 96-weeks. Also, it does not lead to a rise in fasting serum blood lipids as seen with the Norvir-Prezista combination and showed a lesser rate of dropouts due to adverse events than the control section.

Merck presents the update three months before the verdict of the FDA on the approval of doravirine as a single drug and in combination with lamivudine and tenofovir.  

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LabCorp won’t Confirm if SamSam is the Ransomware it’s Recovering from

LabCorp, the mammoth medical investigations company, is still recuperating from a major ransomware attack and, almost a week later, won’t reveal how the hackers got entry nor the number of servers that were hit.

On witnessing suspicious activity, officials advised LabCorp to shut down its network on Sunday. Repair efforts temporarily hampered test processes and customer access.

LabCorp’s spokesperson did not confirm or deny the involvement of SamSam even after repeated questioning on Friday. The official stuck to the official statement and wouldn’t say anything further when probed about the actual report.

However, a report from CSO, revealed that thousands of LabCorp’s servers were impacted by the attack, and the infamous SamSam variant was the culprit. SamSam is the very virus that forced the Allscripts platform shut for about a week in January and is famed for its recourse to brute force RDP attacks to breach a system and multiply.

Though LabCorp was able to swiftly control the attack, in the 50 minutes between spotting and correcting, the ransomware was able to encrypt 7,000 systems, 1,900 servers, 350 of which were production servers.

The report said officials confirmed that only Windows systems were damaged. The official statement further stresses that patient data remained intact, which the report claimed LabCorp confirmed through its management and traffic monitoring.

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By Ddu

AI Code of Conduct to be Laid Down by NHS Later in 2018

In the latter part of this year, a code of conduct for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare will be introduced by the NHS, England, announced Harpreet Sood, associate CCIO at NHS England, at The King’s Fund’s Digital Health and Care Congress 2018 on 11 July.

Sood said NHS England was hoping to publish a “basic terminology of what AI means” and a code of conduct later in 2018 in response to a question by an audience member about concerns regarding AI use in the NHS, adding that the documents will help provide ‘principles’, ‘guidance’ and ‘transparency’ for the use of AI within the NHS.

The prospective benefits of AI use in the NHS have garnered a lot of interest among the medical community in recent months. Consequently, the Prime Minister announced in May 2018 that the NHS and technology companies should use AI as a “new weapon” in research.

However, AI use brings with it the issue of data protection. For instance, an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) which looked into Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust transporting data to DeepMind to evaluate an acute kidney injury alert app called Streams.

Eric Topol, an expert in cardiology, genetics and digital medicine, is presently leading a report into the need of training NHS staff to use AI and robotics. It signifies that there are no official guidelines from NHS England.

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Biomedical Blockchain Research Center Opens at Mount Sinai

The opening of a new Biomedical Blockchain Research Center was announced by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare which aims to solve healthcare and medical science issues with new technologies and data.

The new center is welcomed at a time when lots of health systems are inquisitive about the implementation of blockchain and analyst firms in real cases. Gartner and IDC spoke to IT executives suggesting that strategies should be built around the technology or they could be outrun by rival hospitals that do it first. 

The new center would be led by Joel Dudley, executive vice president of Precision Health at Mount Sinai. His research concerns the application of artificial intelligence to crack problems in biology and hence, this center will go together with that work by making use of EHRs, wearables, and linked digital health data to build analytical healthcare applications.

Mount Sinai is hopeful that the new center’s research will build the foundation for its upcoming business partnership program that would be targeting companies interested in biomedical blockchain, a technology that detects and resolves issues in clinical medicine and biomedical research.

“This experience will allow us to address many of the most promising uses for blockchain in biomedicine with the goal of improving healthcare delivery and reducing costs,” Dudley said in a statement. “Many companies are already exploring the use of blockchain technologies in biology and healthcare.”

The technology can be applied in drug production, clinical research trials, enhancing quality control in the pharmaceutical domain to diminish bogus drugs, and augment consistency of research results.

Dudley added, “Our aim is to understand how blockchain and associated technologies can be applied to unmet needs in healthcare and biomedicine.”

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Synopsys Ranks Medical Records Higher than Credit Card Details

Olli Jarva, Synopsys’s Software Integrity Group managing consultant, opined that hackers find healthcare data of more value than credit card or social security details, referring to the recent ransomware attack on Singapore’s government health database.

As many as 1.5 million individuals’, including Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s private medical information was stolen by the cybercriminals.

 “When we are designing and building the systems to be resilient for cyber-attacks, we have to start building security from within, rather than only relying on perimeter defense. This means that before a single line of code is written, we have already started to map down our potential security problems from the design standpoint,” said Jarva about the measures healthcare providers could be taking to safeguard the data.

He added, “Application security problems can be divided to two parts, flaws and bugs. To catch most of these software security problems, we need to identify them early on so that they would not come back to haunt us later on. We have to stay vigilant when it comes to understanding how and what kind of data we are protecting, where it is located, and what kind of security controls we have in place to protect it.”

Jarva commented that such enormous computer systems pose a challenge to security as there may be numerous third-party software attachments with their innate weak security systems which may be difficult to spot and be rectified early on.

Healthcare industries witness other obstacles in shielding data, such as a dearth of security and financial capital and skills to remedy system flaws, if any, and the massive number of devices that need uniform security.

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NHS to Utilize $540 Million New Funding to Boost Hospital IT

Matt Hancock, new Health and Social Care Secretary, announced that information technology would be among his prime subject of focus for the betterment of National Health Service.

In his first speech after being appointed to the post, he revealed a financial backing of about $540 million from the UK for hospital IT. Moreover, an additional $98 million was promised for shifting the trusts that rely on paper to electronic health records.

Hancock said his foremost three priorities for the NHS were "workforce, technology and prevention," and added that the new funding was crucial to enhance the competence and confidence of providers and the attainment of patients.

"You know better than me the pace at which modern medicine moves and so it’s crucial that your training looks to incorporate new technology that can save you time and offer better care," he said, in a speech delivered to staffers at West Suffolk hospital. "I want to make sure you have the access to the skills you need to make the most of these new opportunities."

"Technology and data innovation offers an opportunity to move past this binary approach," he said.

He emphasized the need to improve patient safety with personalized barcodes, enhance communication via mobile technology and develop clinical operations using voice recognition software.

He is well aware that incorporating technology "requires upfront investment." He said the new funding of half a billion pounds could "help jump-start the rollout of innovative technology aimed at improving care for patients and supporting staff to embrace technology-driven health and care.” 

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Takeda CEO Aims to Make China Second-Largest Business in Future

Takeda CEO Christophe Weber aspires to make China its second most important market in the long run, accepting it as a major task in the future.

 “There’s no reason in the long term China shouldn’t be our second-biggest business in the world,” Weber spoke in an interview cited by Bloomberg, believing that China levels with the U.S. and Europe in research, new drug approvals and reimbursement.

Takeda’s revenue from China has staggered in the recent years. Therefore, it might take a long time for it to boost its Chinese sales to equal its results in the U.S. and Japan, or even the U.K.

Takeda’s China management team has seen some major changes during the same time. Two Greater China executives resigned in 2017 alone and the China medical affairs lead walked out recently.  Under the existing Greater China chief Sean Shan, Takeda China was rebuilt into two divisions, one looks after its diabetes, cardiovascular and digestive drugs, the other is a specialty pharma division focusing on its oncology portfolio.

Regardless of the current decline, Weber commented that the company is “very optimistic about rebounding in China” from 2018 onwards due to factors like new drug releases.

It plans to launch seven new products in the subsequent five years in China. Weber said, “We are very pleased that we made a few years ago a dedicated investment to develop products in China for the Chinese market, and we are starting to reap the reward of that by launching new products in the future.”

It launched multiple myeloma drug Ninlaro, in China in May, and is trying to get approvals for its anti-inflammatory medicine Entyvio and gastric hyperacidity drug Takecab soon.

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Novartis Shuts Down Its Antimicrobial Research

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global issue since more than 700,000 people die each year. It is estimated that by the year 2050, AMR could claim up to 10 million lives, more than cancer.

Despite the looming crises, Novartis will be shutting down antimicrobial research at its Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research campus in Emeryville, California. There will be a loss of 140 jobs and the current projects will be put up for sale. This company was working on phase 2 clinical trial of LYS228 against complicated urinary tract infections and complicated intra-abdominal infections. The work on anti-dengue drugs and anti-malaria drugs (KAF156 and KAE609) were already in pipeline.

A spokesperson from Novartis said “while the science for these programs is compelling, we have decided to prioritize our resources in other areas where we believe we are better positioned to develop innovative medicines that will have a positive impact for patients.”

The decision taken by Novartis follows other pharma companies such as Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly as a result of difficulties to develop new drug classes and their low sales.

However, smaller pharma companies are continuing their research in developing new antibiotics. Big pharma companies participate in drug development via public-private consortia including academia sector such as DRIVE-AB and ENABLE initiatives. Additionally, several steps were taken to stimulate R&D into antibiotics by incentivizing biopharma investments in antibiotic development.

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Microsoft, Walmart Merge in AI, Cloud Deal to Battle Amazon

A five-year engineering pact between Walmart and Microsoft was signed on Tuesday to clash with Amazon in the AI, cloud computing and retail sectors.

Both companies have marched into healthcare and have been rivals of the online giant Amazon at individual levels.

Company executives at Microsoft say that its optimized Azure services for a health cloud platform facilitate customers to focus on clinical and operational competence. The company is also offering AI capabilities and Microsoft Genomics, which the  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital utilizes.

Likewise, Walmart already operates pharmacies and a growing healthcare business, a market that Amazon forayed into late last month after acquiring the online pharmacy Pillpack. 

For the new alliance, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will team up on the evaluation, expansion, and maintenance phase of shifting hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native structures. 

 Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said Walmart will gain entry into Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 to speed up transformation.

After having used some of Microsoft’s services, Walmart is now looking up for new possibilities, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and data platforms that bring new capabilities which company officials remarked will make shopping quicker and easier. It also plans to transport a notable segment of walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, including its cloud-powered check-out.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon commented that the affiliation will compel the company’s “ability to innovate further and faster.” 

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Hackers Breach LabCorp Network, Patient Records at Risk

One of the largest clinical laboratories in the U.S, LabCorp Diagnostics of North Carolina faced a security breach by hackers forcing it to shut down on Sunday to combat the cyber attack.

Officials detected suspicious activity, according to a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and advised that the system go offline.

Hackers intruded into the LabCorp’s network over the weekend of July 14^th. Specific systems were immediately put offline in defense against the breach. Consecutively, test processing and customer access to test results were temporarily hampered.

Annually, LabCorp sees more than 115 million patient encounters, which puts such a large number of patient records at risk if they were to be located on the impacted network. LabCorp was not available for comment.

Officials strived to restore full system functionality, with access to test results services “substantially resuming” on Monday. They are attempting to make other systems functional over the next few days.

“Some customers of LabCorp Diagnostics may experience brief delays in receiving results as we complete that process,” officials said. They have notified relevant authorities of the cyber attack.

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Viz.ai Develops AI Software to Detect Stroke

Artificial intelligence based company Viz.ai, currently developing software for the detection of urgent stroke cases, has recently raised $21 million in venture capital to develop its portfolio.

The San Francisco and Tel Aviv Company received FDA clearance in February for its cloud computing platform named Viz LVO, which could analyze the brain scans for occlusions and send a notification to neurovascular specialists immediately.

Viz.ai also grabbed a second FDA clearance in April for CT perfusion analysis for its automated cerebral image processing software named Viz CTP.

Mamoon Hamid, the General Partner of Kleiner Perkins who merged the company’s board of directors said,“We were attracted not only to the technology behind Viz.ai and its impact on patient outcomes but also its adoption model; Many new health-tech solutions struggle to gain traction because they are an outside-in sale to medical teams, requiring changes to procedures and workflows. In contrast, physicians and their teams are driving adoption of the Viz.ai platform because it is not disruptive to emergency room procedures and fits naturally into existing systems.”

Viz.ai submitted its LVO to the FDA for detecting large vessel blockages. An alert notification will be sent to the specialist for an intervention if a blockage is detected.

Robert Ochs, Ph.D., the acting deputy director for radiological health from FDA said, "Strokes can cause serious and irreversible damage to patients; The software device could benefit patients by notifying a specialist earlier thereby decreasing the time to treatment. Faster treatment may lessen the extent or progression of a stroke.”

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Bright.md Collaborates with GOeVisit, Entering Canadian Market with Virtual Care Platform

Bright.md announced a merger with Vancouver-based MyCare MedTech this week for an innovative customer deployment, setting foot into the global marketplace.

Healthcare systems like Providence Health & Services, Presbyterian Health Systems and Rush University were exclusively using the company’s old SmartExam platform till now. However, MyCare MedTech transformed this existing virtual platform into the new-age GOeVisit.

SmartExam connects patients with medical practitioners over any smart device for the treatment of 400+ minor illnesses and injuries, implementing AI to conduct clinical interviews and identify not so grave common conditions effectively. The majority of virtual visits can be conducted in less than two minutes.

“The decision to move to this platform was an easy one; it is a superior service that allows us to continue to offer Canadians a unique way to gain access to medical care.” said Liz Bryant, Chief Operating Officer at GOeVisit. “GOeVisit SmartExam is a user-friendly service that has the ability to keep pace with and integrate new and improved technologies in the coming years. We are confident it will outperform all existing virtual healthcare platforms in the market today.”

 “With GOevisit SmartExam, we wanted to offer virtual care that provides a high-quality experience for both the patient and the clinician, and allows for continuous improvement,” said Dr. Raj Attariwala, Medical Director of AIM Medical Imaging and Medical Director of GOeVisit. “Medical technology doesn’t stand still, and neither can we.”

GOeVisit SmartExam has been available to the Canadian public since the beginning of July, catering to millions of healthcare consumers who had experienced the benefits of SmartExam from top healthcare systems in the United States.

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Microsoft, Walmart Merge in AI, Cloud Deal to Battle Amazon

A five-year engineering pact between Walmart and Microsoft was signed on Tuesday to clash with Amazon in the AI, cloud computing and retail sectors.

Both companies have marched into healthcare and have been rivals of the online giant Amazon at individual levels.

Company executives at Microsoft say that its optimized Azure services for a health cloud platform facilitate customers to focus on clinical and operational competence. The company is also offering AI capabilities and Microsoft Genomics, which the  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital utilizes.

Likewise, Walmart already operates pharmacies and a growing healthcare business, a market that Amazon forayed into late last month after acquiring the online pharmacy Pillpack. 

For the new alliance, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will team up on the evaluation, expansion, and maintenance phase of shifting hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native structures. 

 Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said Walmart will gain entry into Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 to speed up transformation.

After having used some of Microsoft’s services, Walmart is now looking up for new possibilities, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and data platforms that bring new capabilities which company officials remarked will make shopping quicker and easier. It also plans to transport a notable segment of walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, including its cloud-powered check-out.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon commented that the affiliation will compel the company’s “ability to innovate further and faster.” 

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K Health Announces Launch of Free Primary Care App and $12.5 New Funding

K, a new free primary care app was launched by the individualized health information company, K Health. The app’s AI scours through the history of diagnoses and treatments to provide the user with the most likely treatment of their condition and can simultaneously connect them to a network of primary health care providers.

The company also announced a new financial backing of $12.5 million by participants like Mangrove Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Primary Venture Partners, BoxGroup, Max Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Comcast Ventures.

K Health has data resources of more than 1 billion physician notes, lab reports, treatments, prescriptions, and other interactions. It aims at bringing this huge data at the behest of healthcare consumers. The new app’s AI gives users an idea about how their disease has been diagnosed and managed in the past. This makes the consumers aware of the severity of their condition and they can connect with a primary care physician, if required.

It is conspicuous that K Health aspires to be an alternative to ambiguous online search engine results. The app is HIPAA-compliant is available for free on iOS and Android, for adults between 18 to 65 years of age.

Allon Bloch, CEO and co-founder of K Health, said in a statement,“We all know the feeling of waking up at 2 a.m. and researching our symptoms online even though we know it’ll only make our anxiety skyrocket, ultimately making things worse. Today, if you go online and search for something as simple as a cough, you’ll see millions of results ranging from the common cold to cancer.”

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