Health

Reuters - U.S. President Donald Trump directed his health department on Tuesday to work with Congress on revamping a law that allows Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, seeking to introduce a change the pharmaceutical industry has lobbied for.

Drugmakers have been pushing to delay the timeline under which medications become eligible for price negotiations by four years for small molecule drugs, which are primarily pills and account for most medicines.

That would align with the 13-year wait until more complex biotech drugs become eligible for Medicare price negotiations.

 

1440 -The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first clinical trial to test whether gene-edited pig livers can temporarily support people with sudden liver failure who are ineligible for human organ transplants. Instead of receiving a new liver, the patients will be connected to an external device that filters their blood through a pig liver for 72 hours, giving their own liver time to recover and hopefully regenerate....

Roughly 35,000 patients are hospitalized each year in the US for acute or acute-on-chronic liver failure, many of whom can’t get a timely human transplant.