Cancer – Color-powered surgery
Creative, English, Life, Pharmaceutical Science December 24th, 2011
I could not catch all words she said, so I did use Subtitles help (Choose your preferred language at Subtitles Available in).
Hope that these new ideas can be supported and developed much more.
Pharma and Cloud Computing: Are We There Yet?
Pharmaceutical Science, Tech July 8th, 2010
In the past few years, Microsoft has been working hard to create clinical trial platforms for the pharmaceutical industry. This year, the Redmond, WA-based behemoth has moved full-speed ahead with its virtual-server system, dubbed Azure.
Microsoft is not only working on hosted applications, instead the company has established a massive online server or “cloud” that forms the backbone for online software providers (in-house pharma or third party) to host their programs on. Pharm Exec sat down with Microsoft’s National Director, US Life Sciences Michael Naimoli to find out if pharma is ready to move its software from the back room to the cloud.
Is cloud computing catching on with pharma customers?
Pharma companies are very interested in the technology. Right now, I can’t mention their names or what they are doing, but much of it centers around high-performance computing. The fact that Azure is an expandable fabric that allows a company to spin up servers as needed and spin them down when not, allows companies to pay for compute time as they need it rather than maintain their own servers.
Azure is your cloud, but do you have plans to create applications that can sit on the cloud?
We want pharma companies to put their own applications on Azure, because it is a platform for developers. What’s nice about it is that there can be a migration from on-premise to off-premise in terms of the applications. Thinking pharma specific, all the products that these companies develop are essentially data–it’s not like manufacturing chairs. You must be able to converse and make sense around the data. A service that allows people to put data on it and then have applications there to have the sense making opens up all sorts of possibilities with respect to pipeline and portfolio management.
So who is your customer, the pharma companies or the software developers?
There are software vendors that we would like to see move their software onto our platform–that would be ideal. But we are also looking to enable the developers in pharma as well. It’s a little bit of both.
Can you give me an example how a pharma company can move one of their in-house software platform to the cloud?
Look at all the data that goes into protein folding. Companies that are developing large molecule products–usually they are called monoclonal antibodies. The activity of that molecule is bound up in how it folds itself. During the discovery process they like to look at the primary sequence of that product and they want to do calculations about how it’s going to fold. They have traditionally maintained a large number of CPUs that have to be spun up around that activity and it can take 70 hours to finish up the whole protein folding analysis. With a cloud-based utility model, the servers don’t have to be on all the time, Something like that, that you don’t do all the time, scientists can work with the data when they need to, and the servers don’t have to be spinning when they are not needed.
How does compliance work? If the software is already compliant, does that mean Azure is too?
Ultimately it is up to the sponsor to decide if it is a validated application. It depends on what the server is being used for.
Microsoft sells a clinical software (Amalga). Are there plans to make that a hosted application?
I can’t speak to that. As far as I know there are no plans to make a cloud version of Amalga.
Are companies forced to stay online when they move their software to a cloud-based system?
The customers get to pick and choose what commodity applications they want to host in the cloud and if they want to move some applications to the cloud today and others tomorrow they are able to. They can do a combination of on-premise and off-premise. That’s the big competitive difference with a Google where software is all or nothing in the cloud.
Pharma is notoriously nervous about new technology. Has there been a huge buy-in so far or are companies simply dipping their toes in the water? Is it hard to get pharma to jump into SaaS?
Pharma is in the same area that a lot of other industries are. They are willing to take the risk when you are talking about business functions and applications that aren’t mission critical to pharma. I think we are definitely going to be in a place, in the not too distant future where you are going to see companies take their portfolio of products and pushing them up to a data exchange and sharing that information out. They can’t get to all the work, and a risk profile for one company is different from a risk profile from another company so they might want to push that information up and have other companies look at it.
If they want to in-license it, they can do the work around the data rather than hirer teams of people to move the data over. I think that we are coming to a situation where R&D will be collaborative in the cloud and the cloud is going to host data around all products and development and in the end the world will have access to pharmaceutical products to develop and ultimately get market because they won’t have to wait for someone to discover it in their data center because they don’t have time.
By GEORGE KORONEOS
http://blog.pharmexec.com/2010/06/16/pharma-and-cloud-computing-are-we-there-yet/
Tags: pharmaceutical, tech
World top pharmaceutical companies ranking in sales of 2008
Biz, Pharmaceutical Science, Research June 10th, 2010
According to Wikipedia, here are the top 3 pharmaceutical companies in sales in the world (2008).
1-Pfizer (US)
Short profile
It produces Lipitor (atorvastatin, used to lower blood cholesterol); the neuropathic pain/fibromyalgia drug Lyrica (pregabalin); the oral antifungal medication Diflucan (fluconazole), the antibiotic Zithromax (azithromycin), Viagra (sildenafil) for erectile dysfunction, and the anti-inflammatory Celebrex (celecoxib) (also known as Celebra in some countries outside the USA and Canada, mainly in South America). Its headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.
2-GlaxoSmithKline (UK)
GlaxoSmithKline plc (LSE: GSK NYSE: GSK) is a British pharmaceutical, biological, and healthcare company. GSK is the world’s fourth largest pharmaceutical company after Roche, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, by revenue[3]; and a research-based company with a wide portfolio of pharmaceutical products covering anti-infectives, central nervous system, respiratory, gastro-intestinal/metabolic, oncology, and vaccines products. It also has a Consumer Healthcare operation comprising leading oral healthcare products, nutritional drinks, and over the counter medicines. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
3-Novartis (Switzerland)
Novartis manufactures drugs such as clozapine (Clozaril), diclofenac (Voltaren), carbamazepine (Tegretol), valsartan (Diovan), imatinib mesylate (Gleevec / Glivec), ciclosporin (Neoral / Sandimmun), letrozole (Femara), methylphenidate (Ritalin), terbinafine (Lamisil), and others. Novartis owns Sandoz, a large manufacturer of generic drugs. The company formerly owned the Gerber Products Company, a major infant and baby products producer, but sold it to Nestlé on 1 September 2007.
The top 15 pharmaceutical companies by 2008 sales are:
| Rank | Company | Sales ($M) | Based/Headquartered in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pfizer | 43,363 | US |
| 2 | GlaxoSmithKline | 36,506 | UK |
| 3 | Novartis | 36,506 | Switzerland |
| 4 | Sanofi-Aventis | 35,642 | France |
| 5 | AstraZeneca | 32,516 | UK/Sweden |
| 6 | Hoffmann–La Roche | 30,336 | Switzerland |
| 7 | Johnson & Johnson | 29,425 | US |
| 8 | Merck & Co. | 26,191 | US |
| 9 | Abbott | 19,466 | US |
| 10 | Eli Lilly and Company | 19,140 | US |
| 11 | Amgen | 15,794 | US |
| 12 | Wyeth | 15,682 | US |
| 13 | Teva | 15,274 | Israel |
| 14 | Bayer | 15,660 | Germany |
| 15 | Takeda | 13,819 | Japan |
Top 10 US and Global Products of 2008 (Click on the image for larger size)
Top 10 global pharmaceutical products of 2008 - Adapted from http://pharmexec.com
Recommended further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmaceutical_companies_by_country
Adapted from:
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- http://pharmexec.com
Tags: pharmaceutical, sales
Accelerator mass spectrometry – and “3,000-year-old rice grains”
Pharmaceutical Science, Research May 27th, 2010
It has been come to my attention that recently, Vietnam scientist have found some “3,000-year-old rice grains”. And some of these rice grains have sprouted well.
I am so surprised with this news and wondering that it is true or not! I hope that it is not just another “science trick”. If this discovery is true, it should be one of the greatest discovery of the year 2010.
Now the bottom line is that how we will determine the age of these “3,000-year-old-rice grains”?
After asked Mr. Google, I see this one, a usable method for determining the age of stuff in archeology
Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) differs from other forms of mass spectrometry in that it accelerates ions to extraordinarily high kinetic energies before mass analysis. The special strength of AMS among the mass spectrometric methods is its power to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighboring mass (“abundance sensitivity”, e.g. 14C from 12C).[1] The method suppresses molecular isobars completely and in many cases can separate atomic isobars (e.g. 14N from 14C) also. This makes possible the detection of naturally occurring, long-lived radio-isotopes such as 10Be, 36Cl, 26Al and 14C. Their typical isotopic abundance ranges from 10-12 to 10-18. AMS can outperform the competing technique of decay counting for all isotopes where the half life is long enough.[2]
Applications of AMS
The applications are many. AMS is most often employed to determine the concentration of 14C, e.g. by. Archaeologists for radiocarbon dating. An accelerator mass spectrometer is required, over other forms of mass spectrometry, because of their insufficient abundance sensitivity, and to resolve stable nitrogen-14 from radiocarbon. Due to the long half-life of 14C, decay counting requires significantly larger samples. 10Be, 26Al, and 36Cl are used for surface exposure dating in geology. 3H, 14C, 36Cl, and 129I are used as hydrological tracer.
Accelerator mass spectrometry is widely used in biomedical research.[5][6][7]. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Currently, there are about 180 AMS facilities in the world (Wikipedia) – and there is no one in Vietnam 
So now just hope that is true and wait for the analytic results coming from a foreign AMS facility.
Tags: 3000-year-old rice grains, AMS
Creative – to alleviate children’s fears of doctors and medical facilities.
Funny, Life, Pharmaceutical Science, Research May 11th, 2010
A LITTLE TLC: Leonie, left, and a medical student “operated” on a stuffed animal at the “Teddy Bear Hospital” of the Virchow Clinical Centre in Berlin Monday. The “hospital” is meant to alleviate children’s fears of doctors and medical facilities. (Timur Emek/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
Studies clash on vitamin benefits
Pharmaceutical Science, Research April 20th, 2010
To take the multivitamin or to not take the multivitamin: That is the question researchers are still trying to answer.
New research on vitamins has offered conclusions that weren’t crystal clear. But researchers generally recommend getting vitamins from foods, not supplements, to boost your health.
Vitamin supplements and cancer
A study done on women in Puerto Rico, presented Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research, found that multivitamin and calcium supplements have a protective effect against breast cancer. But a large Swedish study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that taking multivitamin supplements may increase the risk of breast cancer.
The Puerto Rican study, which was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, looked at the capacity of DNA to repair itself in the face of damage. A low DNA repair capacity has previously been linked to cancer risk, said Jaime Matta at the Ponce School of Medicine. Researchers surveyed 268 breast cancer patients and 457 healthy controls and took samples from them to analyze their DNA repair capacity.
They found that participants who took multivitamin supplements reduced the odds of having breast cancer by 30 percent, and those who took calcium had a 40 percent decreased risk. Statistical analysis suggested that the calcium effect could be explained by the DNA repair capacity, but the vitamin effect was independent. Taking supplements of individual vitamins such as A, C and E had no effect, Matta said.
The Swedish study, which looked at more than 35,000 Swedish women, found that those who reported taking multivitamins were 19 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who said they didn’t take them.
Both studies should be looked at in the broader context of research on the subject, which has consistently found no association between multivitamins and cancer, said Joanne Dorgan, epidemiologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A 2009 study of more than 160,000 women in the U.S. Women’s Health Initiative found no link between multivitamin use and the likelihood of developing cancer or cardiovascular disease, or of dying. Other large-scale studies similarly have not found connections between breast cancer and multivitamin use.
The Swedish study, which also has a large sample, should be followed up, Dorgan said.
Although the Puerto Rican study is small, it generates a useful hypothesis about DNA repair capacity that should be looked into also, said Dr. Banu Arun, professor of medicine at University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. It is important to explore why some people may benefit from vitamin intake more than others, and DNA repair capacity is a possible factor in that, she said.
Arun’s bottom line: “Don’t take all of these multivitamins with the intention that it will decrease breast cancer risk. Getting the vitamins and minerals from natural sources — food source — is the best.” Those with deficiencies because of genetics or chronic illnesses should compensate with supplements, she said.
Vitamins in diet and the heart
Getting nutrients from foods gets more support from a large Japanese study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Researchers looked at more than 23,000 men and 35,000 women, ages 40 to 79. They used questionnaires to assess how much folate, vitamin B-6 and vitamin B-12 participants had in their diets.
They found that greater intake of folate and vitamin B-6 was linked to fewer deaths from heart failure in men. These nutrients were also linked to fewer deaths from stroke, heart disease and overall cardiovascular diseases in women.
When researchers controlled for cardiovascular risk factors and took out the participants who used supplements, the folate and vitamin B-6 continued to show these benefits.
Previous research has found that higher levels of homocysteine, an amino acid in the blood, may be related to blood clots and artery lining damage. B vitamins such as folic acid help break down homocysteine, but this study does not prove a direct cause.
The study represents a substantial source of data to further evaluate or expand upon dietary recommendations, said Linda Van Horn, nutrition researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
The large sample size and the standardized food frequency questionnaire give credence to the study, Van Horn said.
“These particular nutrients — there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t be as important in an American population as they are in a Japanese population,” she said.
Still, the findings may not be entirely generalizable to the United States, as the Japanese dietary intake is different, and the country’s population is less obese as a whole. There should be a similar assessment in the United States to determine if the findings can be applied there, researchers said.
The message is to eat foods that contain B-vitamins, Van Horn said. These include dark green leafy vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, dried beans, peas, lentils and kidney beans, and chickpeas. Many cereals are also fortified with the vitamins.
Source: CNN
How Should I Respond to an Angry Client?
Biz, Life, Pharmaceutical Science, Research April 15th, 2010
Angry clients can be difficult to mollify; do you have any suggestions on how to make the best of such situations?
Response from Bonnie L. Senst, MS, RPh
Whether the client is a patient, a nurse, or a physician, some basic principles of communication can help ease an otherwise tense interaction. As the angry person explains his or her problem or need, it is very important to listen attentively. Do not interrupt, or you may escalate his or her anger. The book Crucial Confrontations [1]discusses the need to dissipate the emotion before you can address the content of the argument. The author lists several things that you should not do:
- Don’t get hooked. Don’t allow yourself to become angry in response.
- Don’t try to “one up” the other person. Stay focused on the central problem, and don’t introduce your own problems.
- Don’t patronize. Telling people to calm down only throws gas on the flames.
Once the client’s anger is de-escalating and you get an opportunity to respond, acknowledge the complaint and say that you are sorry. Ask for additional details or suggestions for an acceptable resolution of the problem. Be sure to keep a positive attitude. Show the client that you are intent on solving his or her problem. Describe what steps you will take and follow through on your commitments. Thank the individual, and encourage him or her to let you know if any other issues arise in the future.
Some people believe that saying “I’m sorry” is admitting guilt and therefore have suggested the alternative term “I regret…” Quint Studer, founder of the Studer Group, an outcomes-based healthcare consulting firm, maintains that saying you are sorry does not mean you are admitting a mistake.[2] He suggests using such phrasing as “I am sorry you are disappointed” or “I am sorry that we are not meeting your expectations.” (// Cuong: Then “What would you like us to do?” see: References 2)
The resources listed below describe additional customer service tools and techniques.
References
- Patterson K, Grenny J, McMillan R, Switzler A, Covey SR. Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises,Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; 2005.
- Studer Q. Conversations with Quint Studer. “I won’t say I’m sorry if it’s not my fault.” (“And by the way, don’t script me!”) December 9, 2009. Available at: http://quintsblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/i-wont-say-im-sorry-if-its-not-my-fault-and-by-the-way-dont-script-me/ Accessed January 18, 2010.
Suggested Reading
- Clark PA, Malone MP. Making it Right: Healthcare Service Recovery Tools, Techniques, and Best Practices. Marblehead, MA:HCPro, Inc.; 2005.
- Baker SK, Bank L. I’m Sorry to Hear That: Real Life Responses to Patients’ 101 Most Common Complaints About Health Care. Gulf Breeze, FL:Fire Starter Publishing; 2008.
- Diering SL. Love Your Patients! Improving Patient Satisfaction with Essential Behaviors that Enrich the Lives of Patients and Professionals. Nevada City, CA: Blue Dolphin Publishing; 2004.
Credit: Medscape Pharmacists 2010
Tags: client, communication, Pharmacy, skill
The Indiana University Center for Pharmacogenetics and Therapeutics Research in Maternal and Child Healt
Pharmaceutical Science April 4th, 2010
The Indiana University Center for Pharmacogenetics and Therapeutics Research in Maternal and Child Healt
Site: http://www.pregmed.org/index.html
Tags: pharm
