AstraZeneca

Bio-IT World announced the winners of its tenth annual Best Practices Awards competition this morning in a plenary session at the 2014 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston. Grand prize winners were named in five life sciences categories highlighting best practices in clinical trial IT, research infrastructure, bioinformatics, cloud computing and data management from AstraZeneca and Tessella, U-BIOPRED, the Pistoia Alliance, Baylor College of Medicine, and Genentech. Read More »

Doctors who were fed meals costing even less than $20 later prescribed certain brand-name pills more often than rival medicines, according to a new analysis published on Monday of a federal database. And in most cases, costlier meals were associated with still higher prescribing rates for Medicare Part D drugs made by the same companies that provided the food. The findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, are likely to intensify an ongoing debate over the extent to which ties between drug makers and doctors unduly influence medical practice and the nation’s health care costs...

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One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake”...

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Lack of funds is threatening the smooth progress of India’s unique Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project, a first of its kind attempt to develop drugs for neglected diseases, when it is entering a crucial phase of research. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had in February announced that OSDD, the pet project of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), had identified a lead (potential drug candidate) for tuberculosis (TB).  

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A few days ago, the AHA stole the attention of headlines across the globe with a report that sounded like it was straight out of the 1990s: Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association. In this report, the AHA doubled down on their attacks against coconut oil and saturated fat. Frank Sacks, lead author on the report, reportedly said that he has no idea why people think coconut oil is healthy...

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Bio Model Analyzer, a Microsoft cloud-based tool that biologists can use to model cell interactions and communications, is now available as open-source on GitHub under a MIT license. Researchers use Bio Model Analyzer (BMA) to create computer models that can compare the processes within healthy and diseased cells. 

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The chemotherapy docetaxel is widely accepted as a standard therapy for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. But 10-20 percent of patients will have adverse side effects that force discontinuation of treatment. These patients may have been better off with another treatment in the first place, but who’s to know before trying the drug which patients will go on to experience debilitating side effects? A crowdsourced competition asked this as an open question. Today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology Clinical Cancer Informatics, competition organizers and participating teams report their findings...

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