An analyst for Robert W. Baird & Co. said Wednesday that biotech drugmakers are still able to raise prices on their products in spite of the new health care overhaul law.
When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March, investors were concerned biotechnology companies would face pressure to limit price [...]

[WSJ] Christopher G. Wayne doesn’t look like a typical family-practice doctor. Known to admirers as the “Rock Doc,” he wears his hair spiked, punk style, and festoons himself with chains, bangles and leather bracelets.
He uses his upscale Miami Beach home as a production studio for Playboy photo spreads, and his MySpace page shows him posing [...]

[NYTimes] When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.
Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who [...]

[PharmTechTalk] The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a report last week that supported continuing research in the emerging field of synthetic biology with some additional federal oversight. President Obama had asked the Commission in May 2010 to study the implications of synthetic biology following the announcement by the J. Craig Venter [...]

[FirstWorld] A report from Public Citizen found that pharmaceutical companies top the list when it comes to defrauding the government, with the industry accounting for 25 percent of all federal fines charged under the False Claims Act.
According to the analysis, drugmakers were the focus of 165 major settlements and have paid $19.8 billion in fines [...]

[VanityFair] Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, [...]

[nytimes] The president’s bioethics commission says there is no need to temporarily halt research or to impose new regulations on the controversial new field known as synthetic biology.
In a report being issued Thursday, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues says that at present the technology — which involves creating novel organisms through [...]

[WSJ] California has purchased a large supply of a drug used in executions from a British pharmaceutical company, according to a spokeswoman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The state ordered the drug before the U.K. last month said it planned to limits exports of the drug, thiopental sodium, because of the U.K.’s “moral [...]

Bioethics faculty say the U didn’t do enough to investigate the death of Dan Markingson.
[HuffingtonPost] Eight professors from the University of Minnesota’s Center of Bioethics sent a letter to the Board of Regents on Monday requesting an investigation into the suicide of a former clinical trial patient by an outside “impartial panel of experts.”
The patient, [...]

[BusinessWeek] A medical device company near Philadelphia pleaded guilty to dozens of crimes Tuesday for conducting unauthorized tests of its bone cement on about 200 spinal surgery patients, three of whom died on the operating table.
Synthes Inc. and its subsidiary, Norian Corp., performed the tests from 2002 to 2004.  The product was approved for use [...]