Here is another good news/bad news column about the 112th Congress.

With fakes of the cancer drug Avastin popping up in U.S. clinics in the past few months, patients are naturally worried about whether their medicines are safe.  Considering eighty percent of the ingredients in U.S. medicines come from overseas – mostly from China and India because their products are generally...

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) economist  Roger Bate shares his expertise on counterfeit drug networks that pose a growing threat to combating diseases like malaria.

Knowing where all our ingredients come from is the first step toward improving drug quality.

Patients who take a close look at medical science in search of treatments are often appalled by what they discover. On the one hand, there's academic research, a self-contained and self-absorbed universe of its own where data may be internally consistent (on a good day) and robustly reproducible, yet often has little relevance to real-world clinical conditions.

In an attempt to protect poor, uninsured and underinsured Americans from unsafe drugs, we are making sure that some go without drugs completely. It is time the law was changed.

Today, URL Pharma was acquired by Takeda for nearly $800M.  The story here in brief is that for hundreds of years, colchicine was used for the treatment of gout and other conditions; it was an effective drug but had to be used carefully. URL invested in the formulation development and clinical studies required for colchicine, and ultimately received FDA approval in 2009.