Today U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI), Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman Ted Kennedy (D-MA), and Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) were joined by House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A.
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The American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) announced that National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting (NASPER) has received preliminary funding to begin implementation. The Omnibus Appropriations Bill (H.R. 1105) includes $2 million in appropriated funds for NASPER in 2009.
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American Medical Association (AMA) launched a new online learning center to provide physicians with the information and tools they need to make informed decisions about electronic prescribing (ePrescribing). The learning center can be found at http://www.ama-assn.org/go/eprescribing.
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Medicine packages barrage consumers with information, some required to be “prominent” and “conspicuous.” But marketing claims and brand names still overshadow critical fine print on nonprescription medications, Michigan State University researchers found.
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AARP today testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection for its hearing on “The Protecting Consumer Access to Generic Drugs Act of 2009″ (H.R. 1706).  The legislation, sponsored by Reps. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and Henry Waxman (D-CA), will help bring lower cost generic drugs to market sooner by preventing abuses in patent settlements between generic and brand prescription drug companies.
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A recent discovery by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine could clear the way for a new drug that inhibits tumor growth in cancer patients and could potentially help in the healing of wounds.
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A new study by researchers at the Swiss Tropical Institute (Basel) and CNRS (Paris, France) has found that populations of the single-celled ciliate Paramecium caudatum can influence each other using signals that pass through glass, affecting fundamental aspects of cellular life such as growth and energy uptake.
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Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered a process that controls the amount of fat that cells store for use as a back-up energy source. Disruption of this process allows cellular fat to accumulate a key factor in age-related metabolic diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. The study is published in the online version of Nature.
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Georgia Tech and Saint Joseph’s Hospital have joined together to begin the first regional research program to study the genetics and cell biology of pancreatic cancer. Tissue and serum samples from patients with cancer are being scrutinized to identify the differences in genetic and cellular features between normal and tumor cells.
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Lucy Shapiro may be the only artist who ever truly enjoyed organic chemistry. So much, in fact, that the newly graduated Brooklyn College fine arts major set aside her paintbrushes and devoted her life to biological research. “It was clearly as much of a challenge as Dante, but more fun,” said Shapiro, PhD, a professor of developmental biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine who also studied literature and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the Florentine poet.
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