The Blood Alliance Debuts Smartphone App

One of the First in the Nation for a Community Blood Bank

The Blood Alliance, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, with operations in North Florida, and regions of Georgia and South Carolina, is one of the first community blood banks in the nation to introduce a smart phone App. Blood banks throughout the country often struggle with low blood donor participation. Of the 60% of healthy Americans who can donate, only 5% do. The Blood Alliance is reaching out to younger donors with hopes that its new App, coupled with a high school iPad promotion, will make committing to donate a whole lot easier and more convenient!

The iDon8 App offers eligible donors the opportunity to keep a record of their previous donations, alert them of their next available date to donate, and conveniently provides locations of blood drives via Google Maps. iDon8 also provides donors with area notifications when the community blood supply becomes low or critical. Convenience is the best resource in reaching donors, and the blood bank’s App offers donors the ability to become a hero – by saving lives from the palm of a donor’s hand.

In conjunction with the blood bank’s new App, its iPad promotion is expected to attract thousands of new, younger, donors. The high school iPad promotion gives students a chance to win an iPad when they register to donate blood twice at regional participating schools.

“We are always looking for creative ways to encourage our younger community members, especially high school students, to become donors, and we thought this might be a great way to provide them with an incentive to start donating,” said Valerie Collins, Chief Operating Officer of The Blood Alliance. “With our iPad promotion and our smart phone App, we feel we are speaking their language.”


FDA Approves Bionovo’s Clinical Development Plan for Menerba

  • Author: Health Informer
  • Filed under: Health News
  • Date: Nov 10,2010

Key FDA Clinical Meeting Held; Company on Track to Initiate Phase 3 Trials for Menerba

Bionovo, a pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of safe and effective treatments for women’s health and cancer, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the company’s total clinical development plan for Menerba, the company’s drug candidate for menopausal hot flashes.

“We had a very positive meeting with the FDA on our clinical program for Menerba. As anticipated, they agreed with our overall clinical development plan which included the number of clinical trials, number of subjects and length of exposure as well as non-clinical studies necessary for New Drug Application (NDA) submission for a non-estrogen drug such as Menerba. They also provided useful suggestions for improving the clinical trial protocols,” said Mary Tagliaferri, M.D., Bionovo’s President and Chief Medical Officer. “While we are awaiting the formal minutes from the FDA meeting, we are moving forward to implement the agency’s suggestions and have forwarded the approved clinical trial design to our investigators and their investigational review boards, or IRBs.”

“Menerba is a first-in-class, unique drug candidate that is intended for a large medical need, for the safe and effective treatment of menopausal symptoms,” said Isaac Cohen, Bionovo’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We want to do everything necessary to bring Menerba to market for the treatment of hot flashes, while we also investigate its potential use in the treatment of breast cancer prevention. Now that we have agreements with the FDA and the EMA (the European Medicines Agency) on the overall development of Menerba, we have accelerated discussions with potential partners to successfully bringing Menerba to market.”


Major Gains in Physician Use of Genetic Tests Reported in New Study

  • Author: Health Informer
  • Filed under: Health News
  • Date: Nov 9,2010

While the vast majority of physicians recognize the contribution of genetic tests for improving medication response by guiding the prescribing and dosing of many widely-used medications, most doctors don’t feel they know enough about these tests to put them into practice.

However, new data from the Medco Research Institute — a research subsidiary of Medco Health Solutions — shows that when both physicians and patients are informed about choices regarding testing and the process is made convenient, the adoption of genetic tests is substantially increased – an advance that can lead to safer and more effective use of medications.  The new data were presented this past weekend at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics.

The use of genetic testing in patients on the blood thinner warfarin and the breast cancer prevention drug tamoxifen has been low in routine practice.  But according to the analysis, when a proactive pharmacy-based pharmacogenomic testing program was implemented, the incidence of testing in patients on warfarin was nearly 45-times higher, and was nearly 7-times higher among patients on tamoxifen as compared to the pre-program time period.

“It’s quite remarkable that we saw such a huge jump in the adoption of genetic testing following the proactive outreach to physicians and patients to inform them about the availability of the tests,” said Eric Stanek, PharmD, Medco’s senior director of personalized medicine research and the study’s lead researcher.  ”It shows quite convincingly that physicians and patients can understand the value of these tests when choice, information, genetic testing, and results reporting are made accessible and convenient.  This is a very important step in establishing a model that can substantially move the genetic testing needle forward and expedite its adoption in routine clinical care on a broad scale.” Read the rest of this entry »


Arena Pharmaceuticals and Eisai Inc. reported that top-line results from the one-year lorcaserin BLOOM-DM trial demonstrate statistically significant weight loss in obese and overweight patients with type 2 diabetes.

In this trial, lorcaserin met all three co-primary efficacy endpoints. In addition, as described below, lorcaserin patients taking lorcaserin 10 mg twice daily (BID) achieved statistically significant improvements in multiple secondary endpoints, including HbA1c, as compared to patients randomized to placebo.

The BLOOM-DM study evaluated 604 obese and overweight patients with type 2 diabetes. Patients were randomized to lorcaserin 10 mg BID (N=256), lorcaserin 10 mg dosed once daily (QD) (N=95) or placebo (N=253). To expedite enrollment, randomization to the lorcaserin 10 mg QD dose was discontinued after approximately 300 patients were enrolled in the trial.

The three primary efficacy endpoints at Week 52 were as follows: the proportion of patients who lose at least 5% of their baseline body weight; change from baseline in body weight; and the proportion of patients who lose at least 10% of their baseline body weight. Using Modified Intent-to-Treat Last Observation Carried Forward (MITT-LOCF) analysis, lorcaserin 10 mg BID met the three primary efficacy endpoints by producing statistically significant weight loss compared to placebo (p<0.0001). At Week 52, 37.5% of patients treated with lorcaserin 10 mg BID achieved at least 5% weight loss, more than double the 16.1% of patients taking placebo. Patients treated with lorcaserin 10 mg BID achieved mean weight loss of 4.5% (4.7 kg), compared to 1.5% (1.6 kg) for placebo. Also, at Week 52, 16.3% of lorcaserin 10 mg BID patients achieved at least 10% weight loss, compared to 4.4% of patients taking placebo. Read the rest of this entry »


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