Health News Roundup: Medicare payments probe, Nobel medicine prize, CAR-T therapies

DaVita unit to pay $270 million to resolve Medicare payments probe

A medical care unit of DaVita Inc has agreed to pay $270 million to resolve claims it provided inaccurate information about patients that caused Medicare Advantage plans operated by private insurers to obtain inflated payments from the government. The civil settlement with HealthCare Partners Holdings, which Denver-based DaVita acquired in 2012 and is in the process of selling to UnitedHealth Group Inc, was announced on Monday by the U.S. Justice Department.

Antares Pharma's testosterone drug gets FDA approval

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Antares Pharma Inc's injectable drug to treat low testosterone levels in men, the company said, nearly a year after being rejected. The drug, however, comes with a boxed warning - the FDA's strongest - flagging risks of a rise in blood pressure that can cause major cardiovascular events.

Scientists behind game-changing cancer immunotherapies win Nobel medicine prize

American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer. The scientists' work in the 1990s has since swiftly led to new and dramatically improved therapies for cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer, which had previously been extremely difficult to treat.

Rare manufacturing glitch raises concern over CAR-T therapies: study

A single leukaemia cell inadvertently got mixed in with a batch of a patient's immune cells that were being manufactured into a CAR-T cell therapy and it acquired resistance to the treatment with deadly results, University of Pennsylvania researchers reported on Monday. The mishap occurred in a 20-year-old leukaemia patient treated with cells manufactured at the university, eventually causing a fatal relapse of the blood cancer, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine.

Philip Morris sues South Korea over e-cigarette info disclosure

Philip Morris Korea Inc. said on Monday it has filed a lawsuit against the South Korean government, demanding the disclosure of information on a recent test that concluded electronic cigarettes contain harmful substances. Seoul's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said in June after a study that up to five cancer-causing substances were found in the heated smoking devices, and the level of tar discovered in two products, including Philip Morris' iQOS, exceeded that of regular cigarettes.

China to lift restrictions where second African swine fever outbreak found

China is set to lift restrictions on an area in central Henan province, where the country's second African swine fever outbreak occurred last month, the agriculture ministry said on Sunday. The local government in Zhengzhou plans to officially lift the blockade on Oct. 1, but it must take measures to prevent recurrence of the highly contagious disease, the ministry said in a statement.

AmerisourceBergen to pay $625 million in U.S. civil fraud settlement

AmerisourceBergen Corp, one of the largest U.S. drug wholesalers, will pay $625 million to resolve civil fraud charges over the sale of syringes containing drugs for cancer patients, double billing, and providing kickbacks to doctors. The settlement announced on Monday by the U.S. Department of Justice boosts AmerisourceBergen's total payout to $885 million over its repackaging and distribution of pre-filled syringes that were not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Preventing tumour spread may not improve quality of life

Cancer drugs that keep tumours from growing may not lead to a better quality of life for patients, a new study suggests. "In countries where patients need to pay co-pays, they can use up all their savings in order to get access to those expensive new drugs and in the end, they may not extend their lives or improve their quality of life," Feng Xie, a professor of health economics at McMaster University, told Reuters Health.

Virus hurts hopes of fatter returns for Russian pork producers

Russia's pork industry is being hampered by African Swine Fever (ASF) as outbreaks of the virus are preventing producers from exporting more to lucrative Asian markets and leaving them with falling prices at home, industry experts say. Russia first reported ASF in 2007 and has registered more than 1,300 cases since then as the highly contagious hemorrhagic disease of pigs has spread from the southern Caucasus region to the country's northwest region and Siberia in the east.

WHO plays down risk to Indian children from the tainted polio vaccine

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday that there was minimal risk of children contracting the polio virus in India from a tainted batch of vaccines. The public health care, which potentially affected thousands of children, put a renewed spotlight on lax pharmaceutical quality control procedures in India.

(With inputs from Reuters)