Key Committee Supports Public Option
(Politico)
Twelve Democrats and one independent on a key Senate committee rallied Thursday behind a $611 billion health care reform bill that includes a government-run insurance plan, seeking to put up a united front as Republicans and some moderate Democrats continue to doubt the need for the public option. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) unveiled a bill that costs significantly less than an earlier, incomplete plan from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that would have topped $1 trillion and left many Americans uninsured.
Genetic Sequencing Gets Personal
(CNNMoney.com) Price competition is coming to the rarified world of genome sequencing. For $48,000, San Diego-based Illumina will sequence your genome -- in other words, your entire genetic code. Until now, the only other company offering personal genome sequencing services is biotech startup Knome. It charges $99,500. Genome sequencing can alert individuals if they have inherited genes that cause illnesses like diabetes, Alzheimer's or cancer. Using the information as a guide, people could alter their lifestyles in an attempt to dodge potentially latent diseases. They also could find out the probability of passing along a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis to their children, or uncover interesting details about their ancestry.
Better Ethics, Cheaper Drugs
(Boston Globe)
As the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its 6 million residents struggle to pay their medical bills, they have a new tool on their side, starting today. A law cracking down on the marketing that pharmaceutical firms do with doctors goes into effect. No one expects miracles from the new rules, but they should ensure that doctors’ prescribing decisions will focus more on patient needs and less on the gifts and fancy meals many doctors have long received from drug companies. All the favors that drug companies do for doctors raise overall health costs in two ways. First, they are a substantial part of the $57.5 billion that the industry spends annually on marketing, a cost that gets added on to each prescription a patient buys. Second, the industry’s goal in influencing doctors is often to get them to prescribe a new, higher-priced medication when a generic or cheaper name-brand competitor is just as effective. Partly as a result of high costs of drugs, one-quarter of original prescriptions for chronic conditions never get filled.
Stem Cells Show Size-Specific Reaction to Nanopatterns
(Nanowerk LLC) Scientists in Germany have found that surface topography can be more important than chemistry for stem cells. Patrik Schmuki of the Frederich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and colleagues looked at how stem cells behave on nanotube-coated surfaces and found that they show a size-specific reaction to the nanopatterns. The researchers propose that nanopatterned surfaces could have potential applications in tissue engineering and in medical implants, such as replacement hips. Schmuki suggests that decorating implant surfaces with patterns on a similar scale to cells (around 10 micrometres) may improve the implant's integration into the body.
Embryonic Stem Cells - and Other Stem Cells - Promise to Advance Treatments
(U.S. News & World Report) For Thomas Clegg, the Obama administration's decision in March to lift certain restrictions on government funding of stem cell research was beside the point. The 58-year-old congestive heart failure patient had received an experimental stem cell therapy before the new president even took office. In November, researchers at Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center in Houston removed some of Clegg's bone marrow and sent it off to a lab, where the best and hardiest of its stem cells were extracted and concentrated. Less than a month after Obama's historic election, those cells were injected directly into Clegg's heart, where the researchers hope they will spark healing and regeneration.
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