Branded

SILVER SPRING, Md. — The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first pill to contain a digital ingestion tracking system. The Abilify MyCite (aripiprazole with sensor) tablets — a collaboration between Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Proteus Digital Health — send a message from the pill’s sensor to a wearable patch that links to a mobile app.

DANBURY, Conn., and RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — Analytics company QuintilesIMS has a new name. Effective Nov. 6, the company will do business as IQVIA, with its name ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange set to switch to IQV on Nov. 15. The name change comes almost a year and a half after Quintiles merged with IMS Health in a $9 billion deal.

SILVER SPRING, Md. — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new lymphoma treatment from AstraZeneca. The company announced this week that its Calquence (acalabrutinib) had been approved to treat patients with mantle cell lymphoma in patients who have received at least one prior therapy.

FARMVILLE, N.C. — Following its August approval, CMP Pharma on Monday launched its CaroSpir, a spironolactone oral suspension. Company leadership said CaroSpir is the first approved oral liquid dosage form of the diuretic.

The formulation is aimed at meeting the needs of patients with difficulty swallowing. Up to this point, CMP Pharma said these patients have relied on compounded formulations with limited shelf life and potential unreimbursed costs.

SILVER SPRING, Md. — The Food and Drug Administration has approved an auto-injector and new formulation of a once-weekly treatment for Type 2 diabetes from AstraZeneca. Bydureon BCise offers a single-dose auto-injector for adults with Type 2 diabetes whose blood sugar is uncontrolled on one or more oral medicines.

LONDON — GlaxoSmithKline on Friday announced that the Food and Drug Administration has approved Shingrix (zoster vaccine recombinant, adjuvanted) for the prevention of shingles (herpes zoster) in adults aged 50 years and older. Shingrix is a non-live, recombinant subunit vaccine given intramuscularly in two doses.

FOSTER CITY, Calif. — The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first chimeric antigen receptor T cell, or CAR T, therapy for patients with certain types of lymphoma. Yescarta, from Gilead’s recently acquired company Kite, was approved to treat relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma following two or more lines of systemic therapy.

Even after the boom that the specialty pharmacy sector saw in 2014 with the introduction of new treatments for hepatitis C, the drug class continues to see its share of per-capita spending grow as manufacturers continue to develop more targeted therapies. The changes that the specialty space is seeing have been documented by the Quintiles IMS Institute, both in its report on the use of medicines in 2016 and its issue briefs on the drivers of drug expenditure and the oncology space.