Research Library

The authors assess U.S. health care system and offer a plan for achieving universal health care. The Lancet: http://bit.ly/2lSaqX6

By Morgan N. Fredell, Hagop M. Kantarjian, Ya-Chen Shih, Vivian Ho and Binata Mukherjee Current U.S. health care spending includes many areas of wasted expenditures. In this study, published in Cancer, the authors explore plans to optimize U.S. health care to provide greater benefits to patients: https://bit.ly/2TmeoDg

The authors conducted mobile phone surveys on energy supply, demand and quality in 12 sub-Saharan African countries, finding that current grid and off-grid electricity supply is inadequate to meet consumers' demands.

The authors examine ways in which disruptive technologies could potentially help improve power sector development in African countries. 

The winner’s curse — overestimating the value of an asset and therefore overpaying — is often associated with acquisitions of publicly-traded firms but not with private acquisitions. Using an event study methodology for over 22,000 private acquisitions of U.S. firms between 1985 and 2015, the authors examine a possible winner’s curse for such acquisitions, testing variables to determine what characteristics make a private company more likely to overestimate the asset's value.

Regenerative medicine and stem cell research are exciting new fields. But as the fields progress toward clinical therapies, controversies emerge. Hype surrounding stem cell research has caused an increase in their use in interventions that are not clinically proven. Furthermore, the regulatory agencies have a lot of difficulty dealing with cell therapies, which are distinctly different from drugs and medical devices they more commonly approve. To move the field forward, advocates, regulators and scientists need to come together to find new options for stem cell research oversight that protects both the patients and the research field.

States with large African-American populations are more likely to have harsher incarceration practices, worse conditions of confinement and tougher policies toward juveniles compared with other states, according to a study led by Katharine Neill, the Alfred C. Glassell III Postdoctoral Fellow in Drug Policy.

Every patient with cancer or another life-threatening disease wants the most effective treatment, but drug prices have become staggering. What determines the escalating prices of cancer drugs?

For both generic and patented cancer drugs, the free-market economy has not worked well. Solutions are needed to maintain reasonable drug prices that allow for corporate profits and are affordable to patients and to the U.S. health care system.

In a genuine effort to protect patients from adverse events, regulatory burdens and research rigidity in clinical trials have increased to a point at which such protection is outweighing the benefits, and actually harming patients who are unable to be involved in clinical trials.