Tag: Pharmaceuticals

  • Nation & World

    Break it up

    Researchers at Harvard and Cornell have discovered exactly how a reactive copper-nitrene catalyst could transform a strong carbon-hydrogen bonds into a carbon-nitrogen bond, a valuable building block for chemical synthesis.

    5 minutes
    Erving Professor of Chemistry Theodore A. Betley and graduate student Kurtis Carsch
  • Nation & World

    What’s behind high U.S. health care costs

    A Harvard study confirmed that the U.S. has substantially higher spending on health care, worse population health outcomes, and worse access to care than other wealthy countries; but there’s more to it than that.

    5 minutes
    doctor and nurse looking at chart
  • Nation & World

    Push for name-brand drugs

    More than a third of U.S. physicians responding to a national survey indicated they prescribed brand-name drugs when appropriate generic substitutes were available.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Problem with generic meds

    Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital have found that some patients who receive generic drugs that vary in their color are over 50 percent more likely to stop taking the drug, leading to potentially important and potentially adverse clinical effects.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Health care savings, naturally

    Though questions persist about whether natural remedies are as effective as their pharmacological cousins, one Harvard researcher is trying to understand the economic benefits people receive by relying on such traditional cures.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Initiative challenges drug crisis

    Taking aim at the alarming slowdown in the development of new and lifesaving drugs, Harvard Medical School is launching the Initiative in Systems Pharmacology, a comprehensive strategy to transform drug discovery by convening biologists, chemists, pharmacologists, physicists, computer scientists, and clinicians to explore together how drugs work in complex systems.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Peering into gearworks of FDA

    Daniel Carpenter’s new book, “Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA,” probes the workings of a crucial federal safety agency that often is either lionized or demonized.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Clinicians override most medication safety alerts

    Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely instead on their own judgment.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Researchers successfully track voyage of single stem cell

    The title of the letter in the Dec. 3 edition of the journal Nature — “Live-animal tracking of individual haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells in their niche” — doesn’t begin to describe it, this real-life, real-time view of a single stem cell making its way to its ultimate home inside the bone-marrow cavity of a living mouse.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Increasing growth hormone release reduces abdominal fat

    Treatment with an investigational drug that induces the release of growth hormone significantly improved the symptoms of HIV lipodystrophy, a condition involving redistribution of fat and other metabolic changes in patients receiving combination drug therapy for HIV infection.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scientists identify gene responsible for statin-induced muscle pain

    Statins, the popular class of drugs used to lower cholesterol, are among the most commonly prescribed medications in developed countries. But for some patients, accompanying side effects of muscle weakness and pain become chronic problems and, in rare cases, can escalate to debilitating and even life-threatening damage.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Politics of pain — from Percodan to Kevorkian

    On a rainy Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 6), physicians, historians of science, and members of the general public gathered in the gymnasium at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to hear about pain.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Study probes academic, industry relationships

    A study led by members of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy (MGH-IHP) has found that institutional academic-industry relationships — financial relationships companies have with medical schools or teaching hospitals rather than with individual physicians or scientists — are as common and pervasive as individual relationships. The report, the first nationwide look at…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    HSPH study suggests taking wraps off drug safety data

    For years, pharmaceutical companies have sought to restrict public access to drug safety data collected in clinical trials on the basis that it is proprietary information, arguing that competitors could use that information in the development of their own products. However, a number of recent cases of drugs found to have dangerous side effects after…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Over-the-counter pain relievers increase the risk of high blood pressure in men

    Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that the three most commonly used drugs in the United States, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and aspirin, increase the risk of developing high blood pressure in middle-aged men. These findings are published in the Feb. 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Practical way to target cancer cell mutations demonstrated

    A study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University provides the first demonstration of a practical method of screening tumors for cancer-related gene abnormalities that might be treated with “targeted” drugs.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Spray-dry vaccine for TB developed

    Bioengineers and public health researchers have developed a novel spray-drying method for preserving and delivering the most common tuberculosis (TB) vaccine. The low-cost and scalable technique offers several potential advantages over conventional freezing procedures, such as greater stability at room temperature and use in needle-free delivery. The spray-drying process could one day provide a better…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Viruses get the silent treatment, any disease is a target

    What do you do if you’re sure you’ve found a way to knock out the AIDS virus but you can’t get the medicine into infected cells? That was the problem faced by Judy Lieberman, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sengupta wins $4.1 million ‘Era of Hope’ award for breast cancer advances

    An assistant professor of medicine at Harvard has won a $4.1 million “Era of Hope” scholar award from the U.S. Defense Department’s Breast Cancer Research Program in support of his cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research aimed at fighting breast and other types of cancer.

    3 minutes