The Quintiles Transnational Corp. is teaming with DynPort Vaccine Co. LLC to establish and operate a phase 1 clinical trials unit to test infectious disease therapeutics in a seven-year federal contract worth an estimated $32.3 million.
Quintiles’ portion of the work will be conducted at its new 150-bed phase 1 trials unit in Overland Park, Kansas. That $48 million, 236,000-square-foot facility was dedicated in May 2007 and brought together 750 Quintiles employees previously employed at a phase 1 unit in Lenexa, Kansas, and operations related to later-phase trials at the former Marion Laboratories campus in south Kansas City.
The new facilityis one of Quintiles’ three phase 1 — or first-in-human — clinical trials units and its only one in North America. Quintiles is based in Durham. Read more
(HealthDay News) — A stomach bacterium called Helicobacter pylori may reduce a child’s risk of developing asthma by as much as 50 percent, a new study suggests.
H. pylori has been present in the human stomach probably since humans were humans. However, the germ began disappearing over the course of the 20th century with the introduction of antibiotics and cleaner water and homes, perhaps making children more susceptible to asthma, the study authors suggested.
“In our study we asked the question, is there any relationship between having H. pylori in the stomach and having asthma and other allergic disorders,” said lead researcher Dr. Martin J. Blaser, the Frederick H. King Professor of Internal Medicine and chairman of the department of medicine at the New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City.
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PARIS (Thomson Financial) – Sanofi-Aventis and Johns Hopkins University’s school of medicine have signed a three-year collaboration agreement for research into respiratory and immuno-allergic diseases.
Sanofi and the school of medicine’s Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology will work jointly to discover and develop new ways of treating respiratory disease, focusing in particular on severe asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the French pharmaceutical company said in a statement.
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A drug that was once used as an antihistamine by people with allergies in Russia offers new hope for Alzheimer’s patients, a study published today suggests.
The drug, dimebon, has so far been trialled on only 183 patients, but it led to significant improvement in the understanding and behaviour of patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease, according to the research published in the Lancet medical journal.
Treatments for Alzheimer’s are badly needed. Those that exist are controversial; arguments rage over whether or not Aricept and similar drugs work well enough to be worth their high cost.
The dimebon trial took place in Russia, where the drug has dropped out of use in allergy treatment as newer drugs have been discovered. The 183 patients from 11 different sites were randomly divided into two groups and given either dimebon three times a day or a placebo.
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U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week canceled plans for a large clinical trial of an experimental vaccine to combat the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that  more research was needed on the government-developed vaccine known as PAVE (Partnership for AIDS Vaccine Evaluation) before it could be tested in 8,500 people infected with HIV, the virus that causes full-blown AIDS. The announcement comes 10 months after drug giant Merck & Co. canceled a trial of a similar vaccine after it was found ineffective at reducing the HIV load in volunteers’ blood.
Fauci said the trial of the newer vaccine was canceled because there was no indication that it would be any more promising than the earlier version; both used a relatively innocuous cold virus to deliver the drug.
