Lions Den | Spoken Communications

HIV ‘cure’ setback

Hopes that treating newborn HIV+ babies  with drugs could cure the infection have suffered a major setback, according the the journal Nature.  Researchers hoped that if they treated babies early, they could prevent the build up of reservoirs of the virus in the gut and brain.

Their optimism was based on a girl known as the Missippi Baby. She was treated with anti-retrovirals as soon as she was born, then the drugs were stopped after 18 months.  Unfortunately, the virus re-emerged years later.

Today’s report in Nature says that research on monkeys has shown that the reservoirs of virus form even earlier than previously believed.

Report here:  http://tinyurl.com/k7taw44

‘War Cabinet’ to fight bacterial resistance

The UK government has acted quickly after a report last week calling for more collaboration in the fight against Anti-Microbila Resistance (AMR).  They’ve announced that’s exactly what’s going to happen.  Surely this can’t be because we’re in the pre-election build up? (No, that’s just me being cynical.)

For the first time all seven research councils will collaborate on AMR research.  The cross-council AMR initiative will coordinate the work of medical researchers, biologists, engineers, vets, economists, social scientists, mathematicians and even designers, in a multi-pronged approach to address all aspects of the multi-faceted problem.

The MRC, which will lead the initiative, has calculated that in the UK alone £275 million has been spent on researching the problem since 2007. Yet, to date, no effective solutions have been found and it has been estimated that current antibiotics will be all but useless within the next two decades.

Details here: http://tinyurl.com/lt49hpy

Pharma reputation dilemma

I’ve run two workshops on pharma reputation recently, so this new survey caught my eye:

Thought-provoking survey shows that only 23% of pharma execs think the industry knows what to do in order to improve reputation.  Or to put it another way, more than three-quarters of them think it doesn’t know. That’s what the eyeforpharma Industry Healthcheck found when it surveyed 1600 pharma executives from around the world. They also predicted that healthcare services will become central to pharma’s strategy.

Many thanks to John Mack, aka PharmaGuy, for this link. His version is here: http://tinyurl.com/k2owvbq

To download the full results, along with commentary from US industry thought leaders such as Craig A. DeLarge, Eric Rothstein – both Merck and Dr. Christoph Schmidt, Actelion click here –http://www.eyeforpharma.com/multichannelusa/content-healthcheck-pmn.php

If you would like LionsDen to run your own specially-designed reputation workshop, get in touch.