‘No added benefit’

Some facts to ponder, fellow taxpayers:

About 11% of Medicare spending was on 27 drugs that — while new and expensive — had no evidence that they were better than existing treatments.

Sure, they were FDA approved; they’re safe and effective. Just not more effective, according to a JAMA paper out of Harvard.

55% of the top-sell­ing Medicare drugs in 2020 “had a low added ther­a­peu­tic rat­ing,” ac­cord­ing to health tech­nol­o­gy as­sess­ments from Ger­many, Cana­da and France.

A better use of the money, they suggest, would be creating an independent body that determined whether a drug was better or just more expensive.

A new kind of Alzheimer’s screening

A simple screening test for Alzheimer’s may be on the horizon — one that uses blood rather than looking at brain proteins.

Swedish researchers found that sugar molecules called glycans^* in the blood are affected by the levels of tau proteins, which are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. And glycans in the blood are a lot easier to measure than tau in the brain.

“We also show that a simple statistical model that takes into account blood glycan and tau levels, the risk gene APOE4, and a memory test can be used to predict Alzheimer’s disease to a reliability of 80 per cent almost a decade before symptoms such as memory loss appear.”

(Side note: In case you keep track of these things, we reported on a different type of early Alzheimer’s detection back in December 2022.)

^* Specifically one called bisected N-acetylglucosamine

… and a new target for Alzheimer’s treatment

As the idea of amyloid plaques being the cause of Alzheimer’s comes under scrutiny, other therapeutic targets are emerging. One of the new ones: blocking an overactive enzyme (CDK5) that appears in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.

Using a peptide on mice that had the condition, MIT neuroscientists…

… found dramatic reductions in neurodegeneration and DNA damage in the brain. These mice also showed improvements in their ability to perform tasks such as learning to navigate a water maze.

Calling the peptide’s effect “remarkable,” the hope is that it’s opening a new pathway to treat dementia patients — at least those with overactive CDK5.

Delivering the drug to the tumor, micro-style

A new device the size of a grain of rice can deliver drugs — nanoscale drugs, of course — directly to pancreatic tumors. The drugs are a monoclonal antibodies (“a promising immunotherapeutic agent” called CD40^*) and because the device is implanted in the tumors, the doses are a quarter of what would normally be necessary.

But wait, there’s more! If there are multiple tumors, the device also shrinks other tumors simply by activating the immune system, according to one of the nanomedicine researchers — this is a thing now — at Houston Methodist.

^* Not to be confused with WD-40, although who knows? WD-40 seems to do everything else.

Pharma moves to #2 in ad spending

We’re not even halfway through the year, and already pharma companies are going nuts with the ads — so much so that the industry is now second in terms of ad spending behind “consumer packaged goods,” displacing technology companies.

This isn’t just traditional “linear” TV ads; it includes commercials on streaming services, digital ads, billboards, and soon the ads that will be beamed directly into your brain when you walk past a pharmacy.

Pro tip: Here at Buzz HQ, we don’t see ads on the Web (including social media!) thanks to uBlock Origin, a free, open-source ad blocker available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera. (No, we weren’t paid to say that. We just hate ads.)

Saving you a click: top 20 pharma companies

In case you’re interested, here are the — well, the title says it: the top 20 pharmaceutical companies by revenue in 2022:

Short Takes

MS treatment could be MS prevention

Some preliminary experiments show that teriflunomide, which is used to treat patients with multiple sclerosis, might also be preventative — it could “stall the onset of symptoms in those with scans showing early signs of the disease.”

Good-bye, monovalent vaccines

The FDA has formally revoked authorization for the OG monovalent Covid-19 vaccines. The newer, bivalent vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna “are now cleared as a single-dose series for first-time recipients.”