News (Updated June
12, 2011)
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Jun 10, 2011
(Reuters) - Gilead
Sciences Inc, the leading maker of HIV drugs, said it received a subpoena for
documents related to its manufacture, quality and distribution practices.
News of the subpoena, from
the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California,
sent the drugmaker's shares down 2 percent to $39.39 in after-hours trading. The
shares dipped 2.3 percent during the regular session.
The request applies to
AIDS drugs Atripla, Emtriva, Truvada and Viread, hepatitis drug Hepsera,
pulmonary hypertension drug Leitairis and an experimental fixed-dose combination
of Truvada and Edurant.
Foster City,
California-based
Company spokeswoman Cara
Miller declined to provide further comment. Gilead said in September it received
a warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about manufacturing
problems at the
The U.S. Attorney's Office
did not respond to requests for comment.
"It will likely take
years for full resolution ... The worst-case outcome is likely a fine (which
could be substantial, depending on the outcome)," he wrote in a note to
investors.
(Reporting by Deena
Beasley; editing by Robert MacMillan, Matthew Lewis and Andre Grenon)
(AFP) – 7 June, 2011
The call for action came
at the 47th annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)
held in
The officials called on
President Barack Obama and other world leaders to take concrete action at a
September meeting at the United Nations scheduled to focus on non-communicable
diseases.
The September UN meeting
"presents a monumental opportunity to put cancer on the global
agenda," said Allen Lichter, the ASCO's chief executive officer.
"We urge world
leaders to help save and improve the lives of millions of people living with
cancer or at risk for the disease," Lichter said at a press conference.
The only previous UN
meeting of this type was held in 2001 and focused on the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Lichter said that ASCO
sent a letter co-signed by nearly 300,000 health care professionals to the White
House on Monday asking Obama to participate in the UN meeting.
Cancer kills 7.6 million
people worldwide each year, more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis
combined, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures.
A UN report concluded that
the cancer rate will continue and rise and reach more than 20 million annual
cases in 2030. Most of these new cases are expected to occur in low and
middle-income countries.
As people in developing
countries increasingly flock to polluted cities, smoke, and eat rich foods like
those available in wealthy countries, their cancer rate has risen and is now
similar to those in rich countries.
At the current rate, the
number of cancer cases in these countries will surpass the number of cancer
cases in developed countries by about 2015.
However there is a dearth
of oncologists in poor and developing countries --
The oncologists at the
The goals, aimed at
reducing levels of cancer, include sharp reductions in smoking, drinking
alcohol, rates of obesity, and improvements in access to health care and
universal vaccination programs for hepatitis B and human papillomavirus (HPV)
aimed at preventing liver and uterine cancer.
The declaration has
230,000 signatures. Organizers hope they can obtain one million signatures by
the time of the UN conference in September.
Copyright © 2011 AFP. All
rights reserved.
By LISA LEFF, 11 June,
2011
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) —
Having survived the first and worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when he was
losing three friends to the disease in a day and undergoing every primitive,
toxic treatment that then existed, Peter Greene is grateful to be alive.
But a quarter-century
after his own diagnosis, the former Mr. Gay Colorado, now 56, wrestles with
vision impairment, bone density loss and other debilitating health problems he
once assumed he wouldn't grow old enough to see.
"I survived all the
big things, but now there is a new host of things. Liver problems. Kidney
disease. It's like you are a 50-year-old in an 80-year-old body," Greene, a
Even when AIDS still was
almost always fatal, researchers predicted that people infected with HIV would
be more prone to the cancers, neurological disorders and heart conditions that
typically afflict the elderly. Thirty years after the first diagnoses, doctors
are seeing these and other unanticipated signs of premature or
"accelerated" aging in some long-term survivors.
Government-funded
scientists are working to tease apart whether the memory loss, arthritis, renal
failure and high blood pressure showing up in patients in their 40s and 50s are
consequences of HIV, the drugs used to treat it or a cruel combination of both.
With people over 50 expected to make up a majority of
"In those with
long-term HIV infection, the persistent activation of immune cells by the virus
likely increases the susceptibility of these individuals to inflammation-induced
diseases and diminishes their capacity to fight certain diseases," the
federal health agency's chiefs of infectious diseases, aging and AIDS research
wrote, summing up the current state of knowledge on last September's National
HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day. "Coupled with the aging process, the
extended exposure of these adults to both HIV and antiretroviral drugs appears
to increase their risk of illness and death from cardiovascular, bone, kidney,
liver and lung disease, as well as many cancers not associated directly with HIV
infection."
In San Francisco, where
already more than half of the 9,734 AIDS cases are in people 50 and over,
University of California, San Francisco AIDS specialists are collaborating with
geriatricians, pharmacists and nutritionists to develop treatment guidelines
designed to help veterans of the disease cope with getting frail a decade or two
ahead of schedule and to remain independent for as long as possible.
"Wouldn't it be
helpful to be able to say, are you at high risk, low risk or moderate risk for
progressing to dependency in the next five, the next 10 years, being less
mobile, less able to be functional in the workplace. Are you going to be safe in
your home, are you going to remember to take all those medications? How are they
going to interact?" explained Dr. Malcolm John, who directs UCSF's HIV
clinic. "All those questions need to be brought into the HIV field at a
younger age."
Research so far suggests
that HIV is not directly causing conditions that mimic old age, but hastens
patients toward ailments to which they may have been genetically or
environmentally predisposed. Plus, their immune systems are being weakened over
time even when they are being successfully treated for AIDS, John said.
"That's probably true
for a lot of these things. We aren't saying HIV's starting the problem, but it's
added fuel on top," he said.
Stokes, a patient of
John's who goes by only his last name, is a prime example. At 53, HIV-positive
since 1985 and in substance abuse recovery for the last 11 years, he says he is
happier than he ever has been. Yet the number of ailments for which he is being
treated would be more commonly found in someone 30 years his senior: a condition
called Ramsay Hunt syndrome that causes facial paralysis, a rare cartilage
disorder for which he has undergone four ear surgeries, bone death in the hip
and shoulder, deterioration of his heart muscle, osteoporosis and memory loss.
A specialist recently
diagnosed a Kaposi's sarcoma spot on Stokes' ankle. Although the cancer is not
life-threatening, the sight of young men disfigured by KS lesions was a
harbinger of the early AIDS crisis, and its presence on his own body is
unsettling.
At his therapy group for
men with HIV, aging "comes up frequently," he said. "I say, 'Just
think what we have come through to have a life today.'" At the same time,
he acknowledges sometimes feeling self-conscious about his physical appearance
and worries if "people are not attracted to me and unwilling to go the
length of what it means to be with me, no matter how brilliant my mind or my
zest for life."
Loneliness, financial
worries and concerns about who will care for them and where can weigh on
long-term AIDS survivors in the same way as all adults living in a society that
values youth, Charles Emlet, a social work professor at the University of
Washington, Tacoma, said.
As they get older and
sicker, many feel "doubly stigmatized," he said. Some people who have
lived with the virus for a long time have been getting by on private disability
benefits that will run out when they turn 65, forcing them to move to less
expensive locations or to consider turning to estranged family members. Like
soldiers from a distant war, many lost partners and their closest friends to
AIDS.
Such emotional side
effects, combined with the physical toll of managing chronic health problems,
put older AIDS patients at risk for depression. At the same time, Emlet has
uncovered evidence that a majority of long-term survivors also share another
trait that typically comes with advanced age: that is, the ability to draw
strength from their difficult experiences.
"The older adults
I've interviewed, many of them talk about how much it means to them to give
back, to do something positive with the years they never expected to have,"
he said.
Peter Greene can relate to
that. At times, like the days he is so exhausted he can't get out of bed or the
pain from his multiple maladies is too intense, he asks himself "the Carrie
Bradshaw question--are we really lucky to still be alive?"
As frightening and
uncertain as this phase of AIDS is, he thinks he knows the answer.
"I've tried to make
the time I have count, and really, now that I have the body of an 80-year-old, I
probably have the wisdom of an 80-year-old as well, which counts for a
lot," Greene said. "Everything becomes clear at the end of your life
and in some ways, thinking you've been dying all these years, you get moments of
clarity that I don't think everyone gets."
Copyright © 2011 The
Associated Press.
(AP) – 12 June, 2011
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Ownership of a patent for technology to detect HIV levels in patients' blood was
correctly split between
By a 7-2 vote, the high
court upheld a lower court's decision making the company and the university
co-owners of a patent for technology in HIV test kits.
Stanford asserted it owned
the technology because its discoverer worked there. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act
allows universities to retain rights to research funded by federal grants.
But Stanford researcher
Mark Holodniy also signed a contract that gave Roche the patent to anything that
resulted from their collaboration. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit made Roche and Stanford co-owners, and the high court agreed.
"Nowhere in the Act
are inventors expressly deprived of their interest in federally funded
inventions," said Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority
opinion.
Justices Stephen Breyer
and Ruth Bader Ginsberg dissented.
"I cannot so easily
accept the majority's conclusion — that the individual inventor can lawfully
assign an invention (produced by public funds) to a third party, thereby taking
that invention out from under the Bayh-Dole Act's restrictions, conditions and
allocation rules," Breyer said.
The case is