Year: 2014

The turnaround prospects for Novartis' loss-making vaccines division were given a boost on Friday as a key committee recommended including the Swiss drugmaker's meningitis B vaccine on Britain's routine vaccination programme. The Basel-based drugmaker said the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) had recommended that infants from two months of age be vaccinated with Bexsero to help protect against "MenB", a bacterial infection that can kill in 24 hours and poses the greatest risk to infants. Bexsero is seen as crucial to Novartis' vaccines business, which has struggled to catch up with the market leaders – GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Merck – and was the only one of the Swiss company's five divisions to report a full-year operating loss in 2013. Novartis is currently considering the future of the business as part of a portfolio review, which is also examining the drugmaker's two other sub-scale businesses, animal health and over-the-counter drugs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The new health care law helps some people, hurts others and confuses almost everyone. Hoping to simplify things a bit, The Associated Press asked its Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus followers for their real-life questions about the program and the problems they're running into as the March 31 deadline approaches to sign up for coverage in new insurance markets.

For decades, scientists accepted that humans could detect only 10,000 scents, putting the sense of smell well below the capabilities of sight and hearing. "Our analysis shows that the human capacity for discriminating smells is much larger than anyone anticipated, said study co-author Leslie Vosshall, head of Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior.

LONDON (Reuters) – French biotech company AB Science has lost an appeal to get the London-based European Medicines Agency to reconsider its rejection of the company’s cancer drug Masican, originally handed down in November. AB Science had been seeking conditional authorization of the drug, also known as masitinib mesylate, for the second-line treatment of malignant gastrointestinal stromal tumor. The company said it now intended to file for full approval with data from an ongoing confirmatory Phase III study. (Reporting by Ben Hirschler)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The new health care law helps some people, hurts others and confuses almost everyone. Hoping to simplify things a bit, The Associated Press asked its Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus followers for their real-life questions about the program and the problems they're running into as the March 31 deadline approaches to sign up for coverage in new insurance markets.

China has launched a nationwide inspection of schools amid rising public anger at revelations that many educational institutions secretly gave children medicine to ward off illnesses and boost attendance, state media said on Friday. No deaths have been reported, but food and drug safety for toddlers is a highly sensitive issue in China after at least six children died and thousands were sickened in 2008 from drinking milk contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical. Local governments have been ordered to inspect schools and particularly kindergartens, to check if they were illegally administering any medicine, the official China Daily said, citing a health ministry notice. A string of reports since last week has revealed that at least six kindergartens in three provinces gave toddlers a cheap antiviral drug without informing their parents.