Bulldog 100: Three big shout-outs!

ADD’s Personal Care Pharmacy, Forest Heights Pharmacy, and PharmD On Demand were all named to the 2020 Bulldog 100 — the 100 fastest-growing businesses owned or operated by UGA alumni.

Congrats to all three!

Urgent: Another Medtronic recall

This time it’s for the MiniMed 600 Series Insulin Pumps — it might deliver an incorrect dose. It’s already injured at least 2,175 people and caused one death.

Shocker: PBMs are profiting from skyrocketing DIR fees

A new analysis from XIL Consulting* “shows that payers and Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are profiting from [DIR] fees at a rate in excess of 500% per prescription as compared to the average PBM administration fee.”

DIR pharmacy fees overall have skyrocketed by 1,600% in the last five years, totaling $8.5B since 2013. These fees are collected by PBMs and health plans and shared with Medicare.

However, a loophole in the program allows health plans and PBMs to pocket an excessive amount of pharmacy DIR fees rather than offset prescription costs for seniors.

* The CEO is a former high-level exec at Express Scripts

Happy 25th anniversary, Georgia Health Policy Center!

Check out the 25 events going on throughout 2020, from speakers to films, service days to bike rides.

Now it has a name

The disease caused by the Wuhan coronavirus has been officially dubbed “CoviD-19*” which stands for Coronavirus Disease 2019. The virus itself is “SARS-CoV-2.”

Why does it matter? Time explains.

* Or you can refer to it by the name of the U.S. Army Medical Corps doctor who first identified it: Captain Tripps.

Maybe it has a vaccine

San Diego-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals is beginning pre-clinical trials on a vaccine for CoviD-19. “The vaccine has been tested on mice and guinea pigs. It will next be tried on a group of human patients.”

Meanwhile, the head of the National Institutes of Health finds it “very frustrating” that none of the major pharmaceutical companies has stepped forward to create a vaccine — there just isn’t enough profit in it. (Johnson & Johnson did say it was interested, however.)

Could all viruses have an Achilles heel?

Maybe so — at least, that’s what Massachusetts General Hospital researchers think they’ve found. It’s a protein called Argonaute 4 or AGO4.

AGO4 has wide antiviral properties:

[O]nly cells that were deficient in AGO4 were “hyper-susceptible” to viral infection. In other words, low levels of AGO4 make mammalian cells more likely to become infected.

In other words, increase the levels of AGO4 and you might protect against every virus. Here, want some more science?

[Agronautes] are RNA interference (RNAi) and microRNA effector proteins and RNAi is the major antiviral defense strategy in plants and invertebrates. Studies of influenza infected mice have shown that AGO4-deficient animals have significantly higher levels of the virus.

The smoking, er, vaping gun

Juul: We’ve never intended our products for kids.

Massachusetts: So what about these ads on “Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network, Seventeen magazine, and educational sites for middle school and high school students?

The Long Read: Did you know?

“No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.”