Biden Administration Announces Actions to Strengthen the Drug Supply Chain
The U.S. must keep the supply chain for drugs and other commodities “stable and secure in the long term to keep preserving a little bit of breathing room for American families,” President Biden said Monday. Fortunately, the administration is making progress, the president noted in a press conference held in the Indian Treaty Room at […]
White House Drug Control Office Focused on Improving Treatment Access
Improving access to addiction treatment and disrupting the supply of illicit drugs will be the big goals this year for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), according to its director, Rahul Gupta, MD, MPH. One big order of business will be to fully implement the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act, which was included […]
Growing Calls to Marry HF Specialists With Cardiac Critical Care
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — With the needs of advanced heart failure (HF) dwarfing the supply of skilled physicians, HF specialists and others are well-positioned to prove their value in the contemporary cardiac ICU (CICU) — and the clock is ticking for training and accreditation to keep up. The problem for the workforce is that CICU […]
Increase in leptin levels in preeclampsia prompts cardiovascular cascade that puts mother and baby at risk
Before a baby is ever born, critical supply chain problems with nutrition and oxygen can result in premature birth or even death and increase the child and mother’s lifelong risk of cardiovascular disease. Scientists have found that a midgestation increase in the hormone leptin, which most of us associate with appetite suppression, produces problematic blood […]
PBMs Under Fire at Senate Hearing
The role of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in the drug supply chain and whether “anti-competitive” practices are driving up healthcare costs was scrutinized by the Senate on Thursday. PBMs are just one player in a “broken supply chain” explained Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), during a Thursday hearing of the Senate Subcommittee for the Committee on Commerce, […]
How Can the U.S. Preserve Its Medical Supply Chain?
WASHINGTON — Onshoring medical manufacturing is part of a strategy to shore up the nation’s medical supply chain, but it can’t be the entire strategy, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). “If you are thinking about onshoring the entire global supply chain, that would be a […]
Sustainable groundwater use could be answer to Africa’s water issues
Tapping into groundwater can help communities in Africa diversify their water supply and strengthen their drought defenses, according to a study led by The University of Texas at Austin. The research, which was published in Environmental Research Letters, tracked long term water storage gains and losses across Africa’s 13 major aquifers and found opportunities for […]
Drug mimics beneficial effects of fasting in mice: Blocking arginine metabolism leads to improved metabolic health, weight loss
An investigational cancer drug that starves tumors of their energy supply also shows evidence of improving whole body metabolism, leading to improved weight control, according to a new study in mice from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. In a group […]
Creating more resilient supply chains through nature-inspired design: Diverse supply chains that mimic ecological systems can more readily adapt to unforeseeable disruptions
A new paper in Nature lays out the way natural ecosystems parallel U.S. supply chains and how American cities can use these tools to strengthen their supply chains. The paper, “Supply chain diversity buffers cities against food shocks,” is co-authored by Benjamin Ruddell, director of the FEWSION Project and the School of Informatics, Computing, and […]