Implantable microchips can provide life-saving data in emergencies. Opposition to them is too often based on misinformation about what they can do

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Businessweek.com

By David Brown
Widespread use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets and state-of-the-art drugs have succeeded in cutting malaria deaths in half in two countries most heavily affected by the disease, the World Health Organization will report tomorrow.

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Washingtonpost.com

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The World Health Organization said that a small but significant percentage of the main influenza virus causing illness this winter is resistant to the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu.

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NYTimes.com

By ALEX BERENSON
The fine would settle a civil and criminal investigation into the company’s marketing of an antipsychotic drug.

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NYTimes.com

The combined supercomputing power of the UK and US ‘national grids’ has enabled University College London (UCL) scientists to simulate the efficacy of an HIV drug in blocking a key protein used by the lethal virus. The method – an early example of the Virtual Physiological Human in action – could one day be used to tailor personal drug treatments, for example for HIV patients developing resistance to their drugs.

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Biosciencetechnology.com

Can doctors do better than just treat childhood diabetes? Can they prevent it?

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Forbes.com

The biopharmaceutical company's shares tumbled after it announced it needs to lower the dosage of its experimental hepatitis C drug.

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Forbes.com

Pfizer researchers assess ways to improve biologics manufacturing

THE PHARMACEUTICAL industry is making great strides in developing cleaner and more efficient syntheses—that is, greener chemistry—for manufacturing small-molecule drugs. But how green are manufacturing processes for biopharmaceuticals, such as monoclonal antibodies, peptide hormones, and vaccines? And can those processes be greener?

Those are questions Sa V. Ho and colleagues at Pfizer's Global Biologics unit, based in Chesterfield, Mo., are trying to answer. The researchers have set out to determine the type and amount of resources required and the wastes generated by mammalian-cell-culture and microbial fermentation processes that are used to make therapeutic proteins. Their goal is to promote cost-saving process improvements that are also environmentally friendly. In doing so, they hope to stimulate other pharmaceutical companies to join them in developing metrics that illuminate the degree of greenness in biologics manufacturing processes, Ho says.

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Chemical & Engineering News

American Chemical Society

Western custom chemical companies build plants and partnerships in Asia to address their competition head on

"ASIAN TIGERS" is the name economists have used for years to describe fast-growing countries in the Pacific Rim. Today, China and India rank among the world's largest economies and are growing faster than many of the smaller original tigers.

But when the tigers were born a few decades ago, India, for example, was the "tiger in the cage—and the cage was bureaucracy, corruption, and protectionism," says Excelsyn Chief Executive Officer Ian Shott, who has traveled to Asia many times during his career. In the mid-1990s, after India agreed to follow international trade and intellectual property (IP) laws, "the tiger was still in the cage, but the gate was open," he adds.

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Chemical & Engineering News

American Chemical Society

Statins are among the most prescribed drugs in the world, and there is no doubt that they work as advertised — that they lower not only cholesterol but also the risk for heart attack.

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NYTimes.com