Lilly drug for Alzheimer’s gets limited Medicare coverage
Lilly officials said they will push ahead with the first-of-a-kind imaging chemical, despite the mostly negative ruling by Medicare officials.
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Junkyard cleans up mess after IDEM finds violations
The state says a Hancock County salvage yard had made headway in fixing environmental violations found during a March inspection. The owner still faces an unrelated lawsuit from county officials.
KENNEDY: Enough meat grinding, already
Congressman Marvin Stutzman is hardly alone in waging what seems like a mean-spirited campaign against the “least of us.”
Returning to run franchise, Bird hopes to take ‘another step’
A recharged Larry Bird, 56, will succeed Donnie Walsh, 72, as president of basketball operations for the Indiana Pacers. His return comes almost exactly a year after he stepped down, citing health concerns.
DAVIS: Some solid ways to move Indy forward
Three promising efforts are under way in Indianapolis to unite the community and propel us forward. I hope we pursue each initiative with a sense of urgency and change the trajectory on our health, skills and economic prosperity.
Company news
It looks like Eli Lilly and Co. has a winner. The Indianpaolis-based drugmaker’s experimental diabetes drug dulaglutide helped patients with Type 2 diabetes lose weight while suffering only manageable side effects, according to Phase 3 clinical trial data released over the weekend at the American Diabetes Association meeting in Chicago. According to Bloomberg News, dulaglutide, if approved, may be a significant competitor to Novo Nordisk A/S’ Victoza, which generated $1.64 billion in 2012. A clinical trial comparing the drugs may report results by the end of the year. “We look at the space and we feel we have an opportunity to offer a significant new product,” said Sherry Martin, senior medical director for diabetes development at Indianapolis-based Lilly. The company plans to submit the drug to U.S. regulators for approval by the end of this year. Dulaglutide is projected to sell $835 million in 2018, according to the average of six analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Martin said the drug would be the only weekly injection in the class that doesn’t require patients to prepare the dose for administration.
The California Public Employees Retirement System saved $5.5 million, or 19 percent of its affected medical claims, under a two-year pilot project with Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. that steered patients away from high-cost health care providers that don’t produce better outcomes. WellPoint executives told Bloomberg News that the cost-capping, or reference-pricing, policy employed in the pilot program is now gaining momentum among employers. The California pension program, known as Calpers, became a partner in the pilot program after a WellPoint analysis found similar hip and knee surgeries cost anywhere from $15,000 to $110,000 per patient, with no difference in patient outcomes, according to Bloomberg. So in 2011, Calpers and WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross unit began steering patients toward 46 hospitals that agreed to keep their costs below $30,000—known as the program's “reference price.” If workers went to another provider, then they were responsible for any costs above $30,000. About 400 members opted for the designated hospitals in 2011, a 21-percent increase over previous years. Calpers’ in-patient costs for hip and knee surgeries dropped to an average of $28,695 from $35,400, according to WellPoint. The study was conducted by HealthCore, a research unit owned by WellPoint, and released Sunday at the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting in Baltimore.
Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine blocked the progression of Type 1 diabetes among newly diagnosed patients using a drug originally sold to treat psoriasis. In a clinical trial involving 49 patients, those who were given the drug alefacept (sold under the brand name Amevive) kept producing the same amount of insulin over the next year, while patients receiving a placebo saw their level of insulin drop over the same period. If the results are repeated in studies involving more patients, the drug could enable Type 1 diabetics to maintain some insulin production and avoid the debilitating complications caused by the disease, said Dr. Mark R. Rigby, a professor of pediatrics at the IU medical school. Nearly 3 million people are estimated to have Type 1 diabetes in the United States. Although the disease can be managed with insulin injections, it cannot be reversed or cured. Long-term complications can include visual impairment, heart disease, stroke, problems in the extremities leading to amputation, and other problems.
An Indiana University School of Medicine researcher has received a $3.8 million three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study estrogen as a treatment for schizophrenia using an unreleased drug developed by Eli Lilly and Co. A team led by Dr. Alan Breier, a professor of psychiatry at the IU medical school, will use a drug discovered by Lilly scientists that mimics some of the actions of the hormone estrogen, but without many of the side effects, such as feminization in men and uterine cancer in women. Breier's study is one of nine projects to receive support from a new NIH program called Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules.
WellPoint’s respite from criticism will be short-lived
With recent attention focused on hospital prices, WellPoint and its peers have been enjoying a nice break from their long-running status as Public Enemy No. 1 in the nation’s health care debate. They shouldn’t expect it to last.
MAURER: Public education, another lost source of civic pride
What if we had a public school system the entire city could be proud of?
Report: Charitable giving by Americans on the rise
Americans gave an estimated $316.2 billion to charity last year, continuing a string of small philanthropic gains. What cause got the bulk of the bounty?
Governments helped fuel nursing-facility developer’s rise
Carmel-based Mainstreet Property Group has built 13 nursing homes in Indiana and Illinois since 2008. Six of the dozen Indiana properties benefited from municipal-backed credit or tax breaks, and a seventh received a reduced-impact fee. Mainstreet also received $345,000 in state economic incentives.
STUART: Spend more on quality pre-K education
Fundamental to the American experience is the belief that our children have opportunity to reach whatever heights to which they aspire.
KENNEDY: Mom-and-pops keep skin in the game
Sometimes, the more we learn, the more complicated things get.
Sales of boomer-owned businesses deemed close at hand
Several factors have aligned to spark the long-expected trend.
Summer basketball league has become big draw for NBA, college stars
Carlos Knox runs The Knox Indy Pro Am Summer League, one of only a few nationwide where basketball fans can find top college and professional hoops stars facing off against one another on the hardwood.
KENNEDY: Green over irrational hostility
A study recently published in Archives of General Psychiatry has linked the growing incidence of autism to early-life exposure to pollution.
RACE: From Cardiff to Indianapolis, livable cities are universal
The capital cities of Wales and Indiana have much in common and are designing for the future.
SOWELL: Undoing university brain-washings
This time of year, as college students return home for the summer, many parents may notice how many politically correct ideas they have acquired on campus. Some of those parents may wonder how they can undo the brainwashing that has become so common in what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning.
SHEPARD: Session gave training huge shot in arm
Though issues like Medicaid expansion and reducing the income tax were most visible during the recent legislative session, the General Assembly may have also set the stage for substantial future shifts in how Indiana goes about producing a work force prepared for the 21st century economy.
Company news
St. Vincent Health will lay off an unspecified number of employees across its 22-hospital network by June 30 in a cost-saving move the hospital blamed on Obamacare, cuts to Medicare reimbursement, and lower-than-expected volumes of patient procedures. Indianapolis-based St. Vincent, which is the second-largest hospital system in Indiana, employs nearly 18,000 workers. The Catholic organization is the sixth-largest employer in the state. St. Vincent spokesman Johnny Smith on May 23 declined to give an estimate of the number of people who will lose their jobs in the restructuring, saying St. Vincent executives had more work to do to discern which positions to eliminate. He said the job losses would be among both permanent workers and contract employees. He also said St. Vincent will look for expense reductions in its administrative functions, supply purchasing, and programs and services. He said he could not provide specific examples at this time. Other hospitals have been cutting expenses, too. Indiana University Health, the state’s largest hospital system, earlier this year delayed plans to expand its Methodist Hospital downtown. Also, IU Health CEO Dan Evans has said the hospital system intends to cut $1 billion—or more than 20 percent of its expenses—over the next four years, which would likely include staff reductions. Also, Community Health Network has cut out more than $100 million in annual expenses since 2009. It hopes to trim out a total of $300 million by 2015.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. was one of 13 insurers selected to participate in California’s state health exchange, according to Bloomberg News. The selection is important for WellPoint, because the exchanges are likely to become the most common way its large numbers of individual and small-business customers buy insurance in the future. While the premiums the insurers will charge vary widely depending on a person’s location and income, the director of the exchange said May 23 that premium increases will be less than the 30-percent jump projected by consulting company Milliman Inc. However, few other states have followed California in having the state government be an “active purchaser” of health plans, which may help hold down premiums more than in other states’ exchanges.
Eli Lilly and Co. signed its fourth deal in the past year with a company to help it produce companion diagnostics to accompany its experimental drugs. On May 23, Denver-based Corgenix Medical Corp. announced that it would collaborate with Indianapolis-based Lilly for diagnostic tests to identify the patients most helped by Lilly’s experimental cancer drugs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Nearly a year ago, Lilly inked a deal with Massachusetts-based PrimeraDx to develop companion diagnostics for cancer and other types of drugs. Then in January, Lilly signed on to a similar arrangement wth Dako, a Denmark-based unit of California-based Agilent Technologies Inc. And in February, Lilly said it was expanding its partnership with Germany-based Qiagen, N.V., to develop companion diagnostics for all kinds of drugs. Qiagen already helped Lilly and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. develop a test to identify subsets of patients that benefit most from the cancer drug Erbitux.