FTC may turn its eye to PBMs

This Thursday the Federal Trade Commission will hold an open meeting with the agenda including “Study on Pharmacy Benefit Managers’ (PBMs) Relationship with Affiliated and Independent Pharmacies.”

The Commission will vote on whether to issue Orders to large pharmacy benefits managers to study the competitive impact of contractual provisions, reimbursement adjustments, and other practices affecting drug prices, including those practices that may disadvantage independent or specialty pharmacies.

Given that “orders” has a capital O, we have to assume they’d be a Pretty Big Deal. Oh, and if you want to share your love of PBMs with the commission, there’s a signup form on the info page.

Artist’s conception

A booster for a booster

Here’s a simple trick to getting more out of a Covid-19 booster or flu shot: Run. Or, you know, do anything that gets your heart rate up to about 120-140 beats per minute. (And before you start having any inappropriate thoughts, you have to keep it there for 90 minutes.)

Iowa State kinesiologists found that “Exercise after influenza or COVID-19 vaccination increases serum antibody without an increase in side effects”.

How? Why? Maybe…

Working out increases blood and lymph flow, which helps circulate immune cells. As these cells move around the body, they’re more likely to detect something that’s foreign.

It’s also possible that the interferon alpha protein produced during exercise “helps generate virus-specific antibodies and T- cells.”

Covid: Not even once

That’s one of the big problems with Covid-19: Even mild cases can have long-lasting effects. The latest to be discovered is serious heart damage — and that’s from a huge study (11 million U.S. veterans) by epidemiologists at the VA’s St. Louis Health Care System.

[R]esearchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 one year earlier, compared with those who didn’t.

Money quote: “Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected.” (Although the risk was lower for people with less-severe initial disease.)

It’s so bad, one cardiologist thinks that, “In the post-Covid era, Covid might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes.”

Captain Obvious can count, too

“3 doses of Pfizer–Biontech Covid-19 vaccine offer more benefits than 2 doses,” says Kaiser Permanente.

New compound(s) tackle diabetes … and more

Good news if you have mice suffering from any aspect of metabolic syndrome — type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, excess body fat, etc. There’s not just a potential new drug, but a whole class of compounds that may help treat it under development.

They’re all based on one that researchers at Washington University called SN-401. It affects a protein called either SWELL1 or LRRC8a depending on who you ask. Whatever its name, when it declines that “may have a central role in the development of diabetes and other aspects of metabolic syndrome.”

Enter SN401, and the related compounds the researchers are working on:

In addition to improving insulin sensitivity and secretion, treatment with the compound also improved blood sugar levels and reduced fat buildup in the liver. Most of these studies were conducted with an injected form of the compound, but the researchers showed evidence that it also could be effective if taken by mouth.

The new Generic Drugs Report is here! The new Generic Drugs Report is here!

Drop everything! The FDA has just released the 2021 Office of Generic Drugs (OGD) Annual Report!

Abbreviated new drug applications! Application supplements! Generic-drug science and research programs! And so much more! (Like supportive therapies for Covid-19, product-specific guidance, and Competitive Generic Therapy (CGT) program updates!)

Click here — NOW! — to get the report, or click here to read the hot new FDA Voices article about it.

Drugs, bones, and old ladies who fall

Looking for predictors of osteoporosis, Swedish researchers focused a lot on how well older women could stand on one leg — but they also found a couple of interesting pharmacological connections, one good, one bad.

Good: statins. They “proved to be linked to improved properties in cortical bone, the hard outer surface layer of various parts of the skeleton.”

Bad: SSRIs. There was “a link between SSRIs and inferior physical function in terms of grip strength, walking speed, and standing up from a chair, as well as an elevated risk of falling.”

Non-pharma, but interesting:
The seven dirty words you can’t have in a relationship

There are seven qualities in a person that will make them a poor choice as a mate, according to Hungarian psychology researchers. And yes, of course they called them the “Seven deadly sins.”

What’s a dealbreaker? “Being abusive, arrogant, clingy, dirty, hostile, unambitious, and unattractive.” (We assume that’s supposed to be “or unattractive.”)