One in four new drugs approved in the US between January 2008 and December 2017 received direct funding from public resources for late stage research or through spin-off companies created from public research institutions, a study published in the BMJ on Wednesday found.  As the drug pricing debate has accelerated in recent months, the debate over whether public or private entities do the majority of drug development work has continued, with the general assumption tha...

Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) re-introduced a bill from 2015 last week that would permanently repeal a 2.3% medical device tax that was delayed for two years but took effect at the beginning of this year. The re-introduction of the bill, originally included in the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), highlights how many device companies are in Massachusetts. And similar to the 2015 legislation, the Massachusetts Democrats are looking to pay fo...

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Wednesday grilled President Donald Trump's HHS secretary nominee and former Eli Lilly executive Alex Azar on drug prices, and he vowed that the issue would be his top priority. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and others questioned Azar on how he would oversee an industry that he used to work for. "I don't have pharma's policy agenda," A...

Millions of Americans are implanted with various medical devices each year, though the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) still lacks the ability to track which devices prematurely fail or are recalled based on claims data. At a hearing Tuesday at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called on CMS to update the Medicare claims form to include a line for the unique device identifier (UDI) to kno...

As US Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) patients may be hit with a 50 to 70 times more expensive price for a steroid they have been importing from the EU and Canada for about $1,000 per year, eight Democratic senators sent a letter on Friday to Marathon Pharmaceuticals questioning the orphan drug Emflaza’s (deflazacort) $89,000 list price, while three Republican senators on Friday also asked the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into orphan drugs in ge...

Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Al Franken (D-MN) and 17 of their Democratic and Independent colleagues on Tuesday sent a letter to President-elect Donald Trump, urging him to combat the pharmaceutical industry’s “abusive tactics” that “price lifesaving drugs out of reach for those in need.” The senators lay out five actions to address the rise in pharmaceutical prices, including: Allowing the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate drug pric...

Incorporating unique device identifiers (UDIs) into health insurance claims forms could help improve the postmarket tracking of medical device safety concerns and performance, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wrote in a letter earlier this week to the chair of an Accredited Standards Committee. The Virginia-based committee is tasked with recommending changes to electronic claims forms, with the latest version of standards slated for release 1 Dece...

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) questioned the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) opposition to incorporating the unique device identifier (UDI) for medical devices into insurance claims forms. By not adding UDIs to insurance claims forms, Warren and Grassley warn that Medicare is making it more difficult to monitor device safety, which has resulted in millions of claims that could have been avoided with better monitoring. In ...

Senators on both sides of the aisle offered their support for Robert Califf to be the next commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at the confirmation hearing Tuesday despite a couple of heated questions on drug pricing and industry’s influence on him. Califf did his best to quell any concerns over industry influencing his decisions as head of the agency and the majority of senators at the hearing seemed confident that his experience makes him the right...

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has unveiled plans to introduce new legislation she says will require pharmaceutical companies found guilty of regulatory and legal non-compliance to pay large fines, all in the hopes of providing a new funding stream to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Premise: Big Profits Come From Government In a speech at a healthcare conference on 22 January 2015, Warren—a populist Democrat whose meteoric rise to popularity has left some ...