Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another working week. We hope the weekend respite was invigorating and refreshing, because that oh-so familiar routine of online meetings, phone calls, and deadlines has returned. But you knew this would happen, yes? After all, the world, such as it is, continues to spin. So time to give it a nudge in a better direction with a cup or three of stimulation. Our choice today is strawberry cream. Please feel free to join us. Meanwhile, we have assembled a few items of interest to help you get started. We hope you have a smashing day and achieve your wildest dreams. And of course, please do keep in touch. …
An AstraZeneca immunotherapy, given both before and after surgery, improved survival rates in patients with bladder cancer, results that could reshape how muscle-invasive bladder tumors are treated, STAT reports. The regimen using Imfinzi, the company’s anti-PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor, cut the risk of death by 25% compared to treating patients before surgery with chemotherapy alone, and also lowered the risk of disease recurrence by about a third. The company will talk with regulators about the data, but experts will be watching to see if an ongoing debate about clinical trial design could pose a problem in this case. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been taking increasing issue with studies that combine results from pre-surgery and post-surgery settings. The concern is that, if companies do not split out the data by setting, it is not clear how much each part of the trial is contributing to the overall results.
Walgreens Boots Alliance agreed to pay $106.8 million to settle charges it fraudulently billed the U.S. government for prescriptions that were never dispensed, Reuters writes. The U.S. Department of Justice said Walgreens violated the federal False Claims Act between 2009 and 2020 by submitting payment claims to Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs for prescriptions it processed but which were never picked up. This caused the pharmacy chain to receive tens of millions of dollars for prescriptions it never provided to patients. Walgreens did not admit liability in agreeing to settle. “Due to a software error, we inadvertently billed some government health care programs for a relatively small number of prescriptions our patients submitted but never picked up,” Walgreens said in a statement. “We corrected the error, reported the issue to the government and voluntarily refunded all overpayments.”
