December 2014

(Business Wire India); Tata Capital, the financial services arm of the Tata Group, as part of its Do Right initiative, concluded a first-of-its-kind Survey to identify the major challenges facing our country today. The “Tata Capital India4India” Survey was conducted online on the website – doright.in & saw voting from more than 5000 respondents across the country. The top five challenges that emerged as the most concerning for the Indian public were Basic Healthcare, Illiteracy, Child Rights, Women Empowerment and Food Scarcity.

IP Addendum-2015 to IP-2014 has been released on 28.11.2014 by Sh. Lov Verma, Secretary Health & Family Welfare and Chairman, India Pharmacopoeia Commission in the presence of senior officers of Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and Scientific Staff of IP Commission.

AstraZeneca announced that MOVENTIG® (naloxegol) has been granted Marketing Authorisation by the European Commission (EC) for the treatment of opioid-induced constipation (OIC) in adult patients who have had an inadequate response to laxative(s). MOVENTIG is the first once-daily oral peripherally-acting mu-opioid receptor antagonist (PAMORA) to be approved in the European Union (EU).

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers have taken what they describe as “the first step toward a pill that can replace the treadmill” for the control of obesity, though that shift, of course, would not provide all of the many benefits of exercise.

One of the reasons cancer is so deadly is that it can evade attack from the body's immune system, which allows tumors to flourish and spread. Scientists can try to induce the immune system, known as immunotherapy, to go into attack mode to fight cancer and to build long lasting immune resistance to cancer cells. Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) show a non-surgical injection of programmable biomaterial that spontaneously assembles in vivo into a 3D structure could fight and even help prevent cancer and also infectious disease such as HIV. Their findings are reported in Nature Biotechnology.