Doctors treating cancer patients nationwide are facing a shortage of essential generic chemotherapy drugs, a situation that many fear could lead to widespread rationing. The shortages stem from manufacturing problems, shipping delays and decisions by some companies to stop producing the medications, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The decades-old medicines are challenging to…
Josua Lottering stepped out the airport doors in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, and doubled over in coughing spasms. Cystic fibrosis has sharply reduced his lung capacity, and the humid, smoggy air hit him hard. Yet even as coughs shook his body, he was delighted. Josua, 18, had made the long journey from the Western Cape…
In a hastily assembled Ebola treatment center in Rwampara, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Papys Lame and his colleagues rehydrate patients who arrive in paroxysms of diarrhea and vomiting, transfuse those who bleed uncontrollably from their noses and mouths, and provide oxygen for those in respiratory distress. They monitor patients’ hearts and blood pressure, and…
As the Ebola outbreak spreads in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, health workers are rushing to provide supportive care, hoping that some patients will recover on their own, while isolating the sick and tracing contacts of the infected. Missing from the fight? Vaccines and drugs that might stop the virus. Dismayed by the…
For decades, an annual gathering of oncologists has featured drug trials that were run mainly at American and European hospitals. But at this year’s meeting, which is being held in Chicago this weekend, the signs are everywhere of China’s ascendance as a powerhouse in drug development — and of the threat that many believe it…
In a sterile Bristol Myers Squibb lab about an hour north of Boston, scientists in scrubs and hairnets transfer living cells to a 2,000-liter stainless steel bioreactor that grows them for weeks. The goal is to produce proteins that are genetically engineered to attack cells that cause disease. Tiny variations in heat, light or pH…
A 27-year-old woman began an experiment on herself early one morning in December 2024. Her laboratory was her childhood bedroom, tucked into a second-floor corner of a pale yellow house in the Boston suburbs. On a bookshelf behind her sat a small stuffed sloth and some favorite books, including “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. Her parents…
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday announced several initiatives intended to rein in the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, which he has described as exceptionally difficult to quit. Mr. Kennedy has long signaled that reducing the use of psychiatric drugs would be an aim of…
Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA. Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican…
A manufacturer of the abortion pill mifepristone asked the Supreme Court on Saturday to immediately restore full access to the medication, putting the contentious issue of abortion back before the justices in an election year. The request came after a lower court on Friday temporarily restricted abortion providers nationwide from prescribing the pills by telemedicine…
