Drug Shortage

In the past year, prescribers have had difficulties treating people with type 2 diabetes and obesity due to a global shortage of semaglutide and tirzepatide, but that seems to be resolving, according to manufacturers.

The combination of gemcitabine and docetaxel conferred superior high-grade recurrence-free survival compared with standard therapy among adults with high-risk nonmuscle-invasive bladder cancer, results of a retrospective study showed.

Scientists from Denmark and the United States have engineered a yeast commonly used in foods to produce the precursor molecules for the anticancer agent vinblastine, a drug that has been in shortage several times in recent years.

When Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, kidney care was among the wreckage.

Novo Nordisk announced it cannot meet demand in the U.S. for its recently approved weight-loss drug semaglutide for at least the first half of 2022.

The FDA has included tocilizumab among its list of drugs currently in shortage.

Demand for tocilizumab IV has outpaced the global supply, exacerbated by increased demand following the drug’s emergency use authorization for COVID-19 and the surge in delta variant cases, the American College of Rheumatology reported.

In this guest editorial, Pinar Keskinocak, PhD, director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Evren Ozkaya, PhD, founder and CEO of the management consulting and digital solutions firm Supply Chain Wizard, discuss how pandemics create chaos in global medical supply chains and ways to alleviate this burden.

More than 50 rheumatology societies, including the American College of Rheumatology, have urged U.S. governors to ensure judicious use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for investigational COVID-19 purposes, given that these drugs are essential for many rheumatology patients.