A pharmaceutical company stands accused of putting profit before patients after withdrawing a drug used in the treatment of a chronic debilitating disease – ahead of relaunching it at a price predicted to be up to 20 times higher.
Three of Britain's leading neurologists have written to the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to protest at Genzyme, part of the multinational drug company Sanofi, halting supplies of the drug alemtuzumab for multiple sclerosis.
The drug is currently licensed for the treatment of leukaemia. But it has been known for 20 years also to be effective in MS patients suffering from an aggressive form of the disease.
Neurologists have used the drug in these patients "off label" – prescribing it on their own initiative even though it was not licensed for multiple sclerosis – following encouraging results from a large placebo-controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998. Alemtuzumab, which is given in two courses a year apart, costs markedly less than other drugs for multiple sclerosis to which it is thought to be superior – around £2,500.
In the neurologists' letter to the Health Secretary, professors Neil Scolding of the University of Bristol, Neil Robertson of the University Hospital of Wales and John Zajicek of the University of Plymouth say that Genzyme's decision has "serious implications for vulnerable UK patients with MS". They say patients who have already started treatment will "not be able to get their vital second course", and new patients may "miss their window of therapeutic opportunity" putting them at risk of "progressive, severe disability".
When licensed, they say, the drug's price is expected to be "15 to 20 times greater", and its withdrawal sets an "inappropriate precedent". They add: "It shows little regard for patients whose opportunity to alter the course of their disease is time-limited, and may represent an over-enthusiastic attempt by the parent company to profit from the current situation."
Professor Zajicek said he had personally treated about 150 patients with the drug, and 400 to 500 had received it across the UK. "Many of us think it is the best drug for patients with aggressive MS in the early stages of the disease. It's the greedy behaviour of the drug company that upsets me. They are just trying to rebrand it and put the price up. It is morally corrupt."
A spokesperson for Genzyme said: "Our goal is to ensure that Lemtrada is approved by regulatory authorities and made available to multiple sclerosis patients as quickly as possible. Until approved risk-management programmes are established, the use of Lemtrada for MS should occur only in clinical trials. Off-label use of alemtuzumab in MS has always been at the discretion of individual clinicians without reference to the company."
"In the UK, our price for Lemtrada and the value it brings to patients will be subject to the usual health economic evaluation by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence."
Doug Brown, Head of Biomedical Research at the Multiple Sclerosis Society, said: "Alemtuzumab shows real promise as a potentially new medicine for many people with relapsing-remitting MS. There is no good reason why people with MS who have been allowed to benefit from the treatment should now be denied it.
"Genzyme need to come up with a scheme, quickly, that makes their product available to all those people currently being treated and, if it's licensed, price the drug reasonably so it is deemed cost effective on the NHS."
A Department of Health spokesperson said: "We know how important this drug is for some MS sufferers and are working closely with the company and the NHS to help make sure these patients can still access it."
Case study: 'I have seen the way my mother is suffering'
Oritse Williams, 25, of the platinum-selling boyband JLS, knows the suffering caused by multiple sclerosis since his mother, Sonia, 54, was diagnosed over a decade ago. He and his brother pledged when in their teens that they would do all they could to help her.
"We decided that when we grew up, my brother would become a scientist and I would try to make money from my music. That way we would have both the means and the ability to find a cure." Williams cared for his mother through his childhood and until he appeared in the final of The X Factor in 2008.
The drugs company: Sanofi
Sanofi, based in Paris, is the world's fourth-largest pharmaceutical company, employing 113,000 people worldwide.
Last year the company made a profit of almost €6bn on revenue of €33b. Its products include Clomid, for female infertility, the anti-clotting agent Plavix and the cancer drug Taxotere.
The company is the world's largest producer of vaccines through its subsidiary Sanofi Pasteur. It acquired Genzyme, a US biotech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011.
In 2010 Sanofi sacked 1,700 US employees citing growing competition from non-branded generic manufacturers. It denied the action was related to its purchase of Genzyme.
Last week, the Paris-based company announced plans to cut almost 1,000 jobs in France despite protests condemning the move.
A few days ago i was trying to find a tumblr theme with a compact main page. I searched around one hundrend themes but i wasn't able to find what i was looking for so i decided to create my own.
Here we are ... Theme is still in alpha version and has some bugs i am trying to fix. I install it though because i wanted to test it with some real posts.
There are also some things i want to add as well but thirst i have to fix the bugs. Here is the complete "to do" list:
Widget sticky posts
Widget also like posts
Slideshow on main page as first post
Fix the bug with the border around flash videos on main page
Move CSS to seperate file
Move Javascript to seperate file
Rewrite Javascript to a more compact way
Get rid of clear divs and put clearafter in their place
Get rid of all pictures from Technologic theme and make my own
Although after 48 minutes of play was losing 2-0, Barcelona won the game 3-2 with 2 amazing goals from Fabregas and one from Villa at injury time.
For Sevilla everything looked perfect. Trochofski gave them the lead (He had scored against Real Madrid as well) at 26 ', while Negredo at 48' with his 80th goal overall in the Spanish league (and first against the Catalans) gave them a big advantage.
The first defeat in the league was closer than ever but Barcelona which until that moment had not committed any foul, decided to put some passion and magic in their game.
First Fabregas scored an amazing goal at 52', then the charismatic midfielder was the reason Mendel saw the red card leaving Sevilla with 10 players and at 89' , after a pass from Messi, he levelled the score.
At injury time Villa scored the winning goal. With this result Barcelona has 6 wins in 6 games in Spanish league and they lead the championship race.
Amazing Video: One-legged Soccer Player Scores Amazing Goal!
Senior Forward Nico Calabria, #13, scores on a corner for Concord-Carlisle Regional High School in Concord, MA. Nico was born with one leg and in addition to playing for CCHS, is currently a member of the US Amputee National Team.
People who give up easily should take this as an example.
Adding titles to tumblr photo or video posts with JQuery
One of the biggest problems in tumblr blogs is that photo or video posts can't have a title. Let's see how we can solve this problem with JQuery.
First of all we need to import JQuery to our of theme if it doesn't have it already. This can be done easily. Google hosts JQuery for us. So the only thing we need to do is to tell our theme where to find it. We do this by adding the following code:
You know need a final step. To add custom CSS in your theme and make class multititle look like the title of a text post. I can't help with that without knowing your theme.
Notes:
You can do it with much less JQuery code. This one is easier to understand though that's why i used it.
If you don't want clickable links you can skip the first script (The one with multititle a).
Multititle is just a class name i gave for the titles of posts and videos. You can give that class whatever name you want.
This is NOT a SEO guide. We just fix the appearance of our theme. If you care about SEO use text posts and embed photos there.
You can see this guide like on http://killmytime.tumblr.com .
It will be better if you bold the first paragraph of your post and add append( $('.copy p:first-child strong', this) ); We do this to target only the specific first-child. If you check the effector theme for example it was another div inside .post-panel for the source:. This is also a first-child. So if your title is:"Apple maps are bad" the result will be "Apple maps are badsource:blabla".Again it depends on your structure of your theme. Just send me a message and i can help you.
You can do the same things with pure CSS. .p:first-child strong and style it. There are 2 problems with this approach. 1) The styling is easy. The positioning is HARD and different in each theme so i can't write a guide about that. You need to use some absolute positioning. You can find out more here. 2) You can't change the title to h2 or h1. It will still be a paragraph. I don't know if google crawls it as h2 or h1. I think google still sees it as a paragraph. If someone knows for sure send me a message.
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