The National Cancer Institute selected Akaza Research as a licensed provider of support in two areas of its caBIG technology infrastructure effort: deployment and documentation and training materials. Said Cal Collins, Akaza’s CEO: “We will be able to leverage our experience and infrastructure we have developed for supporting our OpenClinica open source electronic data capture (EDC) platform to offer similar services to caBIG adopters.” The company’s news release says that it “helped develop several of the caBIG open source clinical trial management system (CTMS) software components.” We wrote about Akaza a while back, in this story. Here’s the release.

Wal-Mart is offering a patient health record to employees, along with the ability to designate which health care professionals see which types of data. Wal-Mart chose a solution from WebMD and Dossia, which is supported by Sanofi-Aventis. Many Wal-Mart employees are steered toward state Medicaid programs for the poor, and it’s not clear whether such workers will also be able to use the new system. Here’s an article.

Emory University’s medical school removed Charles Nemeroff as the chief of psychiatry. Nemeroff is the author of more than 850 scientific articles and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. But he’s been the focus of a controversy that unearthed hundreds of thousands of dollars in industry payments that he failed to disclose on conflict of interest forms required by his university and the NIH, for which he appears to be running two active trials. In one case, Nemeroff appears to have been accepting significant quantities of money from a sponsor and doing NIH research on the same company’s drug. A combination of private investigators and tips from Nemeroff’s academic foes was presumably used to document the payments, suggesting the industry’s critics are taking their efforts to a new level.  The blogosphere is mocking Nemeroff for hiding from the press—and giving credit for his firing to Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa. Here’s an article by Ed Silverman and another in the New York Times.

Maine officials are investing $670,000 in what they term drug safety. It’s not clear whether the funds will be used on improving existing procedures in rural hospitals, or invested in new tools. Here’s a story.

News media seldom mention the scientific names of drugs. The authors of a new article in JAMA are worried about that. They reviewed stories in the 100 most circulated newspapers in the U.S. Sample quote: “News articles reporting on medication studies often fail to report pharmaceutical company funding and frequently refer to medications by their brand names despite newspaper editors’ contention that this is not the case.” Here’s an abstract.

Image Solutions submitted its 1,000th electronic common technical document (eCTD). “This significant milestone is a reflection of ISI’s commitment to helping life science organizations streamline the process of submitting to regulatory agencies around the world,” said Jeanie Kwon, senior director of ISI’s regulatory operations practice. “While harmonization of regulatory standards promises to synchronize the submissions process, the reality is that most countries are in vastly different stages of adoption and the disparities have the potential to add significant cost and time to the submission process. ISI helps companies navigate through this complexity.” Here’s the release.

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