Let’s do the time warp again! Today there’s updates on comparative effectiveness research and the NIH’s Cure Accelerations Network, as well as some news that’s just in time for our latest issue.
— South Africa’s Technology Innovation Agency announced on Wednesday that it will be drawing from a newly available ‘patent pool’ to develop drugs for malaria and tuberculosis. The pool of research knowledge was established by GlaxoSmithKline, with recent additions from other companies and academic institutions, and is now overseen by BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), which will help researchers apply the information to their own work. For more on BVGH, check out this month’s Q&A with chief executive Melinda Moree.
— There’s plenty of buzz over comparative effectiveness research (CER), with it taking center stage in both US health care reform and the push for electronic health records. Now editors for several journals, including PLoS Medicine and the Journal of General Internal Medicine, have released a list of 11 standards for CER; among them is a call to make all published studies freely available.
— As we reported in this month’s issue, a group of researchers found that GlaxoSmithKline’s rotavirus vaccine, Rotarix, was contaminated with a pig virus. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has encouraged clinicians to instead use Merck’s Rotateq, but now that vaccine, too, has been found to contain low levels of porcine circovirus. An FDA advisory panel will be discussing both vaccines at a meeting set for today.
— The Cure Accelerations Network (CAN), highlighted in our February issue, is finally picking up speed. Run by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), CAN was approved in March’s health care reform bill, and will eventually distribute grants of up to $15 million a year for drug research. Now, however, the initiative needs a proper budget, says NIH director Francis Collins, who also met with research directors last week to discuss the network’s establishment.
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