All News

WILMINGTON, Del--Zeneca Group PLC, London, the parent company of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, has entered into an agreement to purchase a 50% interest in Salick Health Care, Inc., Los Angeles, a provider of health-care services to patients with cancer and other complex illnesses. It may be the first time a pharmaceutical company has purchased a health-care provider.

SAN ANTONIO--Gynecologic evaluation of women taking prophylactic tamoxifen (Nolvadex) should be restricted to patients with endometrial thickening that exceeds 8 mm and possibly to premenopausal women with amenorrhea, a British study suggests.

WASHINGTON--Samuel Broder, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute since 1989, has announced his resignation effective in April. He will become senior vice president and chief scientific officer at IVAX Corp., Miami.

CHICAGO--By creating a virtual reality environment, physicians in the not-too-distant future will be able to move through, around, and into a patient's airways to search for tumors, enlarged lymph nodes, and abnormal masses in the walls of the bronchi and surrounding tissue on a computer screen, David J. Vining, MD, predicted at the annual scientific meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

BETHESDA, Md--Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, has pooled $13.4 million from the budgets of all of the institutes to fund projects at five of them.

PHILADELPHIA--Urinary incontinence probably occurs as a complication of radical prostatectomy more often than series reported in the literature suggest, said Jerry G. Blaivas, MD, in a panel discussion of complications of prostate cancer held at the American Cancer Society's National Conference on Prostate Cancer.

The second part of this three-part series discusses the various types of fraud and abuse laws, reviews the laws on false claims, and provides suggestions for limiting a physician's exposure to fraud and abuse claims. Part 1, which appeared in the January, 1995, issue of Oncology News International (page 18), discussed the Stark statute, which prohibits self-referrals for certain services covered by Medicare and Medicaid, while the final article will review the Medicare and Medicaid anti-kickback statute.

Approximately one third of patients with epithelial ovarian cancer present with localized or early-stage disease. Prognostic features identify certain subsets of patients with good risk characteristics who do not require adjuvant

ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill--SoloPak Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has signed an agreement with Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research to acquire the exclusive worldwide rights to gallium nitrate (Ganite), which was FDA approved in 1991 for the treatment of acute hypercalcemia in cancer patients and had been manufactured by Fujisawa USA (Deerfield, Ill).

NEW YORK--Yogi Berra had the last word at a panel discussion on health-care reform sponsored by the Medical Society of the State of New York. Television talk show host Larry King moderated the discussion and fielded the caustic remarks of doctors, pharmacists, and medical students who packed a Waldorf-Astoria ballroom to debate whether quality medical care can be maintained under health-care reform.

DALLAS--Two pediatricians at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have established the Umbilical Stem Cell Project to procure, test, and store human umbilical cord and placental blood for use as an alternative to bone marrow in allogeneic transplant patients who lack a related compatible marrow donor.

WEST CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa--The Medicines Control Agency, the regulatory agency for the United Kingdom, has granted a product license for the marketing of Ethyol (amifostine), manufactured by U.S. Bioscience, Inc.

NEW YORK--Health-care professionals treating pain are hindered by the lack of an objective way to measure pain, says Johns Hopkins researcher Fannie Gaston-Johansson, DrMedSc, who has introduced a new device that may help the situation (see figure).

NEW YORK--Despite its aim of cost containment, health-care reform threatens to increase the economic toll of pain because it may encourage undertreatment, Daniel Carr, MD, said at a media briefing on pain, sponsored by the American Medical Association and Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical Corp.

WASHINGTON--Samuel Broder, MD, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for the past 5 years, says that he will resign his post in April of this year. He will join IVAX Corporation (Miami), a manufacturer of generic drugs and IV drug delivery devices, where he plans to work on developing new drugs.

LISBON, Portugal--Doxorubicin coupled with cisplatin (Platinol) confers a distinct survival edge over the anthracycline alone in women with advanced inoperable or recurrent endometrial carcinoma, according to the latest findings of the Gynaecological Cancer Cooperative Group (GCCG) of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC).

BETHESDA, Md--As expected, the number of reported AIDS cases increased substantially in 1993 due to the expansion of the surveillance case definition in January of that year, but an adjusted analysis shows only a slight overall increase.

LISBON, Portugal--Recent evidence linking low-grade gastric lymphoma with chronic Helicobacter pylori infection, which is said to trigger antigenic stimulation and lymphoid cell invasion of the stomach mucosa, has raised the provocative question of whether eradication of H. pylori infection can cure gastric lymphoma.

WASHINGTON--The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled in favor of Burroughs-Wellcome, the manufacturer of zidovudine (Retrovir or AZT), on five of six patents that had been challenged by two pharmaceutical companies hoping to win the right to produce a generic version of the drug. The ruling should provide the company with a monopoly on zidovudine until the year 2005.

Physicians need to find more effective ways to determine their patients' preferences about cancer treatment, according to an editorial in the November 7, 1994 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Investigators at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered a second pathway that the Ras proto-oncogene uses to cause cancer. The work sets the stage to develop new approaches for cancer treatment by

LONDON, UK--As Oncology News International (ONI) went to press, we received news that Zeneca Group PLC has agreed to buy a 50% interest in Salick Health Care, Inc (Los Angeles). The agreement is subject to shareholder approval and US regulatory review, the company said.

NASHVILLE--Using a "hairpin ribozyme" gene, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine have managed to stop HIV infection in its tracks by dismantling the virus's RNA.

GENEVA, Switzerland--A newly established United Nations AIDS program based in Geneva has announced plans to initiate large-scale clinical trials of two HIV vaccines as early as mid-1996, probably in Brazil and Thailand. Dr. Peter Piot, chief of research at the World Health Organization's Global Program on AIDS, will head the new group, which will involve six UN agencies.

SAN FRANCISCO--Delays for radiation treatment are longer in Ontario than in the United States, Canadian researchers reported in a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO).

HANOVER, NH--Results of a multicenter study debunk the view that limiting 'futile' life-sustaining treatments for terminally ill patients will produce significant health-care savings. "Cutting off care through strict 'futility guidelines' will save few dollars and not much suffering," said Joanne Lynn, MD, of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

LISBON, Portugal--Combining granisetron (Kytril), a 5-HT3 antagonist, with high and repeated doses of dexamethasone yields superior protection against nausea and vomiting than either agent alone in cancer patients receiving moderately emetogenic antineoplastic agents, Dr. Maurizio Tonato reported on behalf of the Italian Group for Antiemetic Research.

Neutrophil counts drop less and recover faster in chemotherapy patients who take colony-stimulating factors (CSFs), said George Demetri, MD, at the 6th International Symposium on Supportive Care in Cancer. Agents such as G-CSF [granulocyte

ROCKVILLE, Md--The Food and Drug Administration has approved a semisynthetic source of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company's anticancer agent Taxol (paclitaxel), produced from renewable Taxus baccata plant sources.

WASHINGTON--The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is disputing the commercial rights to the newly discovered breast cancer gene BRCA1. In a move that could affect how much women pay for screening when such a test becomes available, scientists at the University of Utah and Myriad Genetics, Inc. failed to include NIH as a collaborator when it applied to patent the gene. The NIH has filed a counter application.