January 2010

What's Unique

Shall I know the future of pharmacy?

Amarin Corporation plc (NASDAQ:AMRN), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on improving the treatment of cardiovascular disease, announced that first patients were enrolled in the MARINE and ANCHOR Phase 3 clinical trials for AMR101, the Company's lead product candidate. These clinical trials are designed to demonstrate that AMR101 lowers triglyceride levels in patients with very high triglycerides (the MARINE Study) and high triglycerides in patients with mixed dyslipidemia being treated with statins (the ANCHOR Study).

Giving beta-blockers within 8 hours of presentation with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) does not reduce in-hospital mortality, a meta-analysis has shown.

Beta-blockers reduce cardiac workload and limit ischemic injury, and professional guidelines support their early use in acute or suspected myocardial infarction (MI). The authors of the meta-analysis point out, however, that these agents also have the potential to depress cardiac output to the point of cardiogenic shock.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced today approval for dalfampridine (Ampyra, Elan/Acorda Therapeutics) extended-release tablets to improve walking in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).

The drug, a potassium channel blocker, was shown in clinical trials to improve walking speeds vs placebo. It is the first drug approved for this use, an FDA statement notes; currently approved MS drugs are indicated to decrease relapse rates or in some cases to prevent accumulation of disability.

Premas Biotech, the representative of Illumina in India launched super high throughput sequencer from Illumina called HySeq 2000.

The HySeq 2000 is primarily intended for users whose project demand the highest throughput at shortest time. This will be a 200GB per run platform with data generation up to 25 GB per day and two billion paired-end reads per run.

Karnataka drugs control department has issued 291 show cause notices to the sales units. The department has also warned four manufacturing units and one blood bank for violating the Drugs & Cosmetics Act. The inspections were carried out from December 1 to 31, 2009.

The enforcement officers had carried out 1744 inspections on sales premises and 23 inspections on manufacturing units.