Wishard attacking crime
I appreciated Mickey Maurer’s [June 10] commentary drawing attention to the fact that the overwhelming percentage of violent crimes is committed by repeat offenders.
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Lilly’s experimental diabetes drug helps patients lose weight
Lilly’s drug, if approved, may be a significant competitor to Novo Nordisk A/S’s Victoza, which generated $1.64 billion in 2012.
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.
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.
ACLU says prisons not complying with court order
A federal judge has ordered the Indiana Department of Correction to come to her courtroom Wednesday and explain its "precise plans" for improving the treatment of mentally ill prisoners.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Company news
Eli Lilly and Co. and Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH submitted their long-acting insulin for market approval in Europe, using the pathway for generic biotech, or biosimilar, drugs. If approved, the drug, known as insulin glargine, would finally allow Indianapolis-based Lilly to catch up with competitors Sanofi-Aventis SA and Novo Nordisk N/A in offering a once-a-day insulin for diabetics. France-based Sanofi launched the first long-acting insulin, Lantus, in 2000. Denmark-based Novo followed with its own version, Levemir, in 2004. Analysts predict sales of Lilly’s insulin glargine could top $1 billion by 2020, with some of that revenue flowing to Germany-based Boehringer.
The federal Medicare issued a mostly negative reimbursement proposal for Eli Lilly and Co.’s Amyvid imaging agent for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in living patients. According to Bloomberg News, the federal health plan for seniors will pay for the brain scans using Lilly’s drug only for patients participating in approved clinical studies. The $3,000 test, approved last year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, identifies clusters of the brain protein amyloid, which is an indicator of Alzheimer’s disease. Previously, such protein clusters could be viewed only during an autoposy. The ruling is an unexpected setback for Amyvid after European Union regulators endorsed it in January. Lilly paid $300 million in 2010 to acquire the drug and its developer, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc.
The private equity firms that own Warsaw-based Biomet Inc. want their money back, according to the Financial Times. They are considering relisting the maker of orthopedic implants as a public company or selling it whole to other investors, the London newspaper reported, citing three unnamed sources. Biomet was purchased in 2007 for $11.4 billion by four private equity firms: Blackstone, KKR, TPG and the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs. The volume of hip and knee surgeries has declined since Biomet was purchased, but Biomet’s financial performance has improved, anyway. The company concluded its most recent fiscal year with $3 billion in sales and $946 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Still, the Financial Times says current stock prices for Biomet’s competitors suggest the company may have a value of $8 billion—less than what its owners paid for it.
Major Health Partners will decide in the next six months whether to spend $23 million to maintain its existing hospital in downtown Shelbyville or spend $100 million to build a new hospital in the Intelliplex business park north of town. According to the Shelbyville News, Major Health Partners has been gradually moving to Intelliplex since 2005, opening outpatient centers focused on oncology, orthopedics, cardiology and obstetrics. Now hospital officials have drawn up tentative plans to build a 240,000-square-foot facility in Intelliplex. Major officials also said they could build a “shell” facility at Intelliplex and then add services there, while maintaining its existing, 61-bed hospital. “At some point, we will have to move, but when do we pull the trigger? That is the tough question," Major CEO Jack Horner told the Shelbyville News. Major, which is owned by the city of Shelbyville, will hold community forums before making a decision.
Indiana University Health lost a four-month battle to convince the Illinois Medicaid program to pay for a multi-organ transplant for two patients. The surgeries were expected to cost more than $1 million each, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, yet no hospitals in Illinois are capable of performing them. That’s why the two patients, a 32-year-old woman and a 67-year-old woman, came to IU Health in Indianapolis. An ethics panel called the procedures, which IU Health’s surgeons have performed 38 times, experimental. Also, the Illinois Medicaid program cited a dearth of resources in declining to cover the procedures.
Want Cliffs Notes on health reform? Look at Wishard
Soon to change its name to Eskenazi Health, the county-owned hospital in Indianapolis is using a business model that tries to promote patients’ health, rather than merely treat their diseases.
KENNEDY: Equality economics hitting home
When it comes to the culture-war politics of same-sex marriage, our governor and legislators would be well advised to listen to Indiana’s business and corporate leadership and forgo their pious pandering to the shrinking number of Hoosiers spooked by social change.
Company news
Eli Lilly and Co. said it will test its experimental Alzheimer’s drug in patients with early stages of the disease after the medicine failed to slow the condition in more advanced patients. According to Bloomberg News, the trial of 2,100 patients, called Expedition III, will measure patients’ ability to do daily tasks like cooking or driving, and to remember words after a delay. Lilly is pushing ahead with the drug, called solanezumab, as potentially the first medicine to demonstrate that it treats Alzheimer’s causes rather than just the symptoms. The drug targets the buildup of plaque known as beta amyloid in the brain that’s thought to be a basis of Alzheimer’s. The trial should take about 22 months to complete. In earlier clinical trials, solanezumab failed to show overall effectiveness, but did appear to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s in patients with mild forms of the disease. Lilly’s new trial will use new tests for biological signs of the disease to help enroll early-stage patients and to see whether their illness is advancing. More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, and the number is expected to surge to as many as 16 million by 2050 as the population ages, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. No drugs on the market have been shown to slow the disease. The market for medicines may be worth $20 billion annually, Deutsche Bank estimated last year. Merck & Co., Novartis AG, Roche AG and other large drugmakers are pursuing treatments.
San Diego-based American Specialty Health Inc., a wellness-program provider, plans to open an office in Carmel by March, employing at least 300 in “an operations, customer service and redundancy center.” Sources familiar with the situation said Carmel may also become the company’s corporate headquarters. Founded in 1987 in CEO George DeVries’ extra bedroom, ASH operates 13 subsidiaries that offer health-and-wellness services to employer groups, health plans and insurance companies nationwide. Its Healthyroads unit, for example, provides a Silver&Fit “healthy aging” program to Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. ASH and other players in the wellness industry are expected to keep growing thanks to provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act that create incentives to promote health-management programs. Privately held ASH reported revenue of $221 million last year, up 64 percent from 2009, when the company first appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of the country’s fastest-growing businesses. DeVries is a graduate of Culver Academies in northern Indiana and serves on its board. ASH already has a nine-person office on 96th Street in Indianapolis, and Freeman said those employees eventually will move to Carmel.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. will pay $1.7 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to resolve allegations it left the information of more than 612,000 members available online because of inadequate safeguards. According to the Associated Press, between Oct. 23, 2009, and March 7, 2010, security weaknesses in an online application database left the information of 612,402 people accessible to unauthorized users. That information included names, birthdates, addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, and health data. WellPoint, the nation’s second-largest health insurer, reported the breach to the Health and Human Services Department. The agency then started an investigation, saying WellPoint's actions may have violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
Catarmaran Corp., a pharmacy benefits manager, plans to hire 205 people within two years at a hub it's building in Jeffersonville, according to the Associated Press. The Illinois-based company has committed to hiring 104 full-time, permanent employees next year and a total of 205 by 2015. The jobs paying an average of nearly $24 per hour will include pharmacists, technicians, call-center employees and others.
IU to use Conour funds to help fraud victims
Indiana University plans to use $450,000 donated to its Indianapolis law school by former attorney William Conour to aid the clients defrauded of more than $4.5 million. Conour pleaded guilty to fraud charges Monday morning.
Marian’s med school quest was leap of faith
Marian University, a small Catholic college started by Franciscan nuns, next month will launch just the second medical school in Indiana. Marian President Dan Elsener is credited with pulling off the audacious move with a mix of big dreaming, careful planning, deft networking and “don’t take no for an answer” fundraising.
Teen arrested after ambulance theft
Indianapolis police arrested a 16-year-old male early Friday after he allegedly stole an ambulance parked near St. Francis Hospital South. The teen, who is from Evansville, took the ambulance about 3 a.m. to avoid going to a mental health facility at St. Francis. He was pulled over near New York Street and Chester Avenue about an hour later.
Company news
Eli Lilly and Co. will freeze pay this year for most workers, including executives, in a move designed to save $400 million by the end of 2016, according to Bloomberg News. The Indianapolis-based drugmaker, which employs more than 38,000 workers worldwide, is reducing expenses and counting on emerging markets, animal health products and experimental diabetes drugs to revive growth as it loses revenue from top products to generic competitors. Cymbalta, a depression pill that at $5 billion a year is the drugmaker’s biggest seller, loses U.S. patent protection in December. That development, as well as the 2014 expiration of patents on the osteoporosis drug Evista, will slash Lilly’s revenue 20 percent, the company said.
Indianapolis-based ApeX Therapeutics, a cancer drug discovery firm, received a $240,332 grant from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health via the Small Business Innovation Research program. ApeX, which uses technology licensed from Indiana University, will use the grant to develop an oral or injectable medicine to treat leukemia and other tumors in children. ApeX previously received funding from Indiana University's Innovate Indiana Fund and Indianapolis-based Pearl Street Venture Fund.
Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures invested $50,000 in Evansville-based Curvo Labs LLC, which has developed a data platform to help hospitals, surgery centers and medical device companies share information. Curvo uses supply purchase histories and surgeon preference data from hospital and surgery centers to identify business opportunities for medical device companies. It also helps hospital administrators drive down their costs of purchasing medical devices. Elevate Ventures is a private organization charged with investing funds provided by the state of Indiana.
People
Tennessee-based Centerstone promoted Meagan Terlep to assistant director of children and family services for its mental health operations across southern Indiana. Terlep joined Centerstone in 2009. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Franklin College and a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the University of Indianapolis.
Mark Guinan, chief financial officer of Hill-Rom Holdings Inc., has resigned to become the CFO of New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics Inc. Hill-Rom, a Batesville-based maker of hospital beds and equipment, has launched a search for Guinan’s replacement. Until then, Michael Macek, Hill-Rom's treasurer, will act as interim CFO.