According to a story posted on Fox News, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning letter to medical device maker Zimmer Holdings Inc., mentioning concerns about the manufacture of certain hip implants.
The letter was sent following an agency inspection of the company’s plant in Puerto Rico, which found manufacturing and testing issues related to the company’s Trilogy Acetabular System products — implanted in hip-replacement surgery.
The report came ...
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Researchers in the U.K. have recommended that women not receive all-metal hip replacements because of the procedure’s early failure rate, Bloomberg reports.
In a study published in the Lancet medical journal, scientists who analyzed data from the National Joint Registry for England and Wales found that women experience more problems than men in the seven years after surgery. They also found that “metal-on-metal” resurfacing implants fail more quickly than total hip ...
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Nonprofit organization Public Citizen reports that state settlements with drug companies over Medicaid fraud are at an all-time high.
The report says many states have recovered just as much, if not more, money from pharmaceutical companies accused of defrauding Medicaid programs as they spent on all Medicaid fraud enforcement. A total of $6.6 billion had been recovered from the beginning of 2012 through mid-July by both the federal government and states, ...
continue reading...The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that lawyers representing pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson successfully quashed a subpoena to compel CEO Alex Gorsky to testify about allegations that inappropriate marketing harmed children taking the company’s drugs.
The case involves a 17-year-old boy whose family sued the company because he grew breasts after taking J&J antipsychotic drug Risperdal.
It’s the second of a string of Risperdal trials. The first one concerned a 21-year-old man prescribed ...
continue reading...A former Johnson & Johnson sales manager testified that the company promoted the illegal marketing of its antipsychotic drug Risperdal through tactics such as paying doctors to give favorable speeches and subsidizing golf trips, Bloomberg reports.
In 2003, company officials specifically urged salespeople to visit doctors who treat children, with the intention of getting more children on the drug – at a time when the drug wasn’t approved for children.
The former ...
continue reading...According to an article in the New York Times, 10 of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies are banding together to form a “nonprofit organization” called TransCelerate BioPharma that will be devoted to streamlining clinical trials and getting drugs on the market sooner.
The report quotes unidentified “people behind the effort” as saying this will be the largest cooperative venture of its kind among the pharmaceutical giants. Garry Neil, the interim chief ...
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