Word: drugging
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Doctors knew Genentech was onto something when early results came in from drug trials on Lucentis. Something so big, in fact, that patients who heard about it were desperate to get the wonder drug - the most effective treatment yet against wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the severe form of a chronic eye disease affecting 1.7 million Americans and a leading cause of blindness in the country...
...Lucentis had yet to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration. That's why in May 2005 Dr. Philip Rosenfeld, a macular-degeneration specialist in Miami, offered an offbeat solution: he proposed administering a drug with a similar molecular structure,?also made by Genentech, which was already approved by the FDA - for treating colorectal cancer. Since then an estimated 10,000 people worldwide have given the drug, Avastin, a shot - literally - by taking an injection of it in the eye. And most of them have had very good results with the Lucentis cousin...
...first place, leaving patients with distorted, wavy vision, and eventually a gap in the center of their vision. Up to 40% (depending on the dosage) of those in Lucentis trials improved their eyesight by at least three lines on a vision chart, and nearly all given the drug at least maintained their vision...
...When Lucentis is approved, it is doubtful Americans will continue to use Avastin for AMD - even though the cheaper drug has worked so well that some 30 states now cover it for macular-degeneration treatment, says Rosenfeld. Doctors predict patients will go for the drug that has the FDA imprimatur, as long as insurance companies pick up the higher cost. Doctors too will most likely turn to the more expensive drug. "Let's just say there's a bad outcome," says Dr. John Sorenson, an AMD expert in New York City. "You can already hear the lawyers say, 'Doctor...
Roosevelt came to believe that government had the right to moderate the excesses of free enterprise. Although his exercises of power seem modest to us now--the breakup of monopolies, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the meat-inspection and industrial-safety laws--it was a shock to the system at the time. Roosevelt--a Republican!--insisted that one of the things government must govern is the economy. Today, when the Justice Department goes after Microsoft or Enron, when the Environmental Protection Agency adjusts mileage standards or the Fed tweaks the prime, somewhere his ghost is smiling...