Pharmaceuticals
New index rates drug companies in fight against 'superbugs' | The New York Times
GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson are the best in the fight against superbugs, according to a new index. Companies were judged based not only their development of new antibiotics but also on how they steered doctors to prescribe smartly.
Information technology
More data needed in health emergencies, lawmakers told | Medpage Today
Witnesses in a Senate committee hearing said the federal government should more effectively help public health agencies aggregate data during public health emergencies. "For the most part, public health agencies don't have the resources or analytics to see what's going on in healthcare records across the country," said the director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Seeker Health uses social media advertising to support clinical trial recruitment for cancer, rare diseases | Medcity News
The startup buys ads on Facebook and Google to find participants for clinical trials. Pharmaceuticals—mostly small- and medium-sized—view would-be participants' data on Seeker's portal.
Transformation
NIH to plow $190M into genome editing therapy drive | Fierce Biotech
The U.S. lags behind China in work on CRISPR. This new funding might help it catch up. The money will go to a six-year project that includes work on how to get gene-editing drugs into certain tissues, how to edit genes, and safety tests.
In other news
The internet is filling up because Indians are sending millions of 'good morning!' texts | The Wall Street Journal
As millions of Indians gain internet access for the first time, they're sending tons of "good morning" messages to each other. That's causing smartphones to freeze, as they're inundated by the messages and run out of space.
