Rare Disease

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As patents on some of the most lucrative medicines began to expire, many companies shifted money to rare-disease drugs, knowing that those medicines cost less to develop and will face limited competition.

An experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease sharply slowed the decline in mental function in a small clinical trial, researchers reported Friday, reviving hopes for an approach to therapy that until now has experienced repeated failures.

In it's report, "Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO's Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer," published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 4 newly approved treatments for CLL were predicted to have a dramatic impact on patients with the disease.

Results from a large phase 3 prospective randomized open-label trial, comparing imatinib 400 mg with dasatinib 100 mg daily, were presented by Stephen O'Brien, MD, professor of hematology, Newcastle University Medical School, Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

A poster session on the second day of the 56th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, held December 6-9, San Francisco, was dedicated to trials evaluating therapeutic options in chronic myelogenous leukemia. Data presented included safety, efficacy, managing comorbidities, and biological differences that drive response to therapy.

On the second day at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology 2014, Francois-Xavier Mahon, MD, PhD, Bordeaux Hospital, INSERM 1035, Bordeaux, France, shared the results from the European LeukemiaNet Stop TKI (EURO-SKI) study; the trial used tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in CML to define prognostic markers to increase the rate of patients in durable deep molecular response after stopping TKI.

Health officials from CDC and the state of Texas are reeling in the wake of today's report that a second nurse at the Texas hospital that treated Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for the virus. The news came while health leaders were still trying to determine how 26-year-old nurse Nina Pham contracted Ebola while caring for the first patient diagnosed with the disease on US soil. Meanwhile, the largest nurses' union says its members report that most hospitals are not ready for an Ebola patient.