Gilead gets FDA priority review of hepatitis C combo drug | Wall Street Journal
The Food and Drug Administration has granted Gilead Sciences priority review of an experimental combination drug treatment for hepatitis C. A decision on the new combination drug, which contains Gilead's blockbuster hep C treatment Sovaldi and another drug, velpatasvir, could come by June 28.
Lumos Labs fined by FTC over brain-game claims | Wall Street Journal
The Federal Trade Commission has levied a $2 million fine against the maker of Lumosity, a mobile app which was marketed to help train the brain, for unfounded claims in advertising. The agency said Lumos Labs' marketing claims preyed on consumers' fears of cognitive decline by suggesting the app could help boost memory and cognitive function, without providing any science to back up the claims.
The connected medicine cabinet: Bluetooth pregnancy test makes debut at CES 2016 | Wall Street Journal
The Consumer Electronics Show every year offers up dozens of personal health products from the questionable to the groundbreaking. The Journal provides a roundup of some of the more useful products debuting this year, including a UV-exposure patch and a bluetooth epi-pen tracker and app.
Heavy use of CT scans raises concerns about patients' exposure to radiation | Kaiser Health News
Diagnostic imaging can help diagnose patients without performing unnecessary exploratory surgery, but it has also become a $100-billion-a-year business that has some experts worried the technology could be inflating costs and causing patient harm due to repeated radiation exposure in imaging procedures like computed tomography scans.
Reproducible research practices and transparency across the biomedical literature | PLOS Biology
Scientists are doing a poor job of publishing research protocols and data sets, and that could be part of the field's trouble with reproducibility, according to a study published this week in PLOS Biology. The study authors reviewed 441 randomly selected biomedical journal articles published between 2000 and 2014. They found that none of the reviewed articles made raw data readily available, and only one provided full protocol.
The study also tracked changes in conflict and funding disclosure. There was some improvement in the number of statements of conflict--94.4% omitted such statements altogether in 2000, while 34.6% omitted the data in 2014. When it came to funding disclosure, the authors found that clinical medicine studies were nearly twice as likely to omit information on funding and be privately funded.
The authors suggest the new study could be used as a baseline for tracking improvements in transparency and data access.
