Kelly Davio

January 04, 2019

A recent letter, published in Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, reported on early findings from an ongoing, 18-month, multicenter, observational prospective study conducted among the cohort of the Sicilian Network for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). According to the authors of the letter, these are the first data on SB2 in treating IBD.

January 03, 2019

Researchers found a $2522 mean cost for biosimilar and follow-on filgrastim versus a $2516 mean cost for reference filgrastim.

January 02, 2019

Biosimilars have the potential to deliver substantial savings to the healthcare system, but only insofar as they are adopted and used in clinical practice. A newly published systematic review evaluated US and European healthcare provider knowledge, perceptions, and prescribing behaviors related to biosimilars, and it found that providers are still taking a cautious approach to biosimilars in part because of a lack of awareness of these medicines.

January 02, 2019

Chinese drug developer JHL Biotech has announced that it randomized its first patient in a phase 3 study of JHL1101, a proposed biosimilar rituximab referencing Rituxan.

January 01, 2019

In children, idiopathic nephrotic syndrome (NS) generally responds well to treatment with corticosteroids, but long-term use of steroids in children can produce adverse effects (AEs) such as growth impairment and hypertension. Calcineurin inhibitors, too, are associated with AEs, including toxicity and diabetes. Rituximab has been proposed as an option for difficult-to-treat childhood-onset NS, and a recent study evaluated the efficacy and safety of a single dose of rituximab in this setting.

December 31, 2018

Biologic drugs can effectively treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but the cost of these products can be prohibitive. Biosimilars such as CT-P13 (Remsima, Inflectra), an infliximab biosimilar referencing Remicade, have the potential to drive down treatment costs and enhance access to biologics for the patients who need them.

December 28, 2018

On the heels of the FDA approval of Celltrion’s rituximab biosimilar Truxima in November 2018, December saw the publication of a variety of new data on biosimilars used in hematology.

December 27, 2018

Despite the fact that the World Health Organization classifies insulin as an essential medicine that should be available at all times at a price that patients can afford, US insulin prices have continued to climb in recent years.

December 26, 2018

Germ cell tumors are common malignancies, and chemotherapy with a regimen of bleomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin (BEP) has improved the prognosis for patients with these tumors. However, BEP involves significant myelosuppression, and the safety of pegfilgrastim for the prevention of febrile neutropenia related to myelosuppression has not been well investigated in patients with this tumor type.

December 25, 2018

A recent systematic review of the literature reported on randomized controlled trials and nonrandomized studies on the use of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor therapies (G-CSFs) to reduce the incidence of febrile neutropenia, and found that short- and long-acting therapies, when dosed according to guidelines, have little difference in their efficacy.