In a recent issue of P&T, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) described the wide scope of the shortage of fentanyl and the other challenges that health care organizations faced. The ISMP conducted a recent national survey regarding ongoing drug shortages and their threat to patient safety. Surprisingly, only 5% of the 344 respondents [...]
The drug approval process in this country is a rigorous one. There has long been interest in trying to help safe and effective drugs through this process efficiently, and in recent years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has focused increased attention on the development phase, principally to assure that drug developers carry out appropriately [...]
Imagine that many of our readers remember HA1A, a.k.a. Centoxin. How tantaliz-ingly close we once came to a seemingly effective therapy for septic shock caused by gram-negative organisms and their deadly endotoxins. Indeed, our research team at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital (TJUH) in Philadelphia, in collaboration with our colleagues at the University Healthsystem Consortium (UHC) [...]
Speaker: Deborah Hurst, MD, Senior Director of Clinical Development, Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, California. Low-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2) (Proleukin, Chiron), when administered in combination with rituximab (Rituxan, Genen-tech/IDEC) produces positive clinical responses in patients with advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), augmenting the antitumor activity of rituximab via expansion and activation of natural killer (NK) cells.
Speaker: Brian I. Carr, MD, Professor of Medicine, Director of the Liver Tumor Service, and Head of the Starzl Transplant Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Glass beads that release highly targeted p-rays from 90yttrium (Therasphere, MDS Nordion) represent an effective and relatively non-toxic treatment option for patients with unresectable and untransplantable advanced-stage hepatocel-lular carcinoma [...]
Speaker: Ronald B. Natale, MD, Acting Medical Director, Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center, Beverly Hills, California. Targeted therapy with the investigational oral epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor inhibitor ZD1839 (Iressa, Astra Zeneca) was able to shrink tumors in some patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were resistant to treatment with more than two [...]
Tamoxifen as Standard Adjuvant Hormonal Treatment Speaker: Eric P. Winer, MD, Director of the Breast Oncology Center, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Assessing the use of aromatase inhibitors as adjuvant therapy for women with hormone receptor positive (HR+) breast cancer, an American Society of Clinical Oncology [...]
© 2008 HIV/AIDS News & Information