Hello and welcome to the end of another week with The Kable. Our exclusive to Friday section, The Week That Was, has all the developments that made the past five days feel so incredibly long. And then a bunch more for you today.

Best things first, Sanofi is following in the footsteps of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, slashing its insulin prices by 78% starting January 2024.

In a continuing layoff season, AstraZeneca India let go of 103 sales employees as a result of its “evolving strategic priorities”. While 52 of these individuals accepted an offer of a voluntary retirement scheme, the remaining 51 aren’t taking it lying down.

Over in the UK, Novo Nordisk has been suspended as a member of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry for two years. All over a sponsored LinkedIn course that was actually just a promotional campaign in disguise.

And in some long-overdue good tidings for the UK with regard to public worker strikes, nurses and paramedics have agreed to resolve months of disruption by strikes as they vote on an offer of a lump sum payment for this year and a 5% raise next year. Doctors, however, are still not on board.

Meanwhile, the neighbouring European Union has struggled to limit methane emissions from livestock over the past decade, but do they even want to? EU countries have agreed to reduce the number of cattle, pig and poultry farms covered by proposed rules sidestepping their own emission limits.

And finally, in our worst nightmare come to life, Russian hacker group Phoenix has targeted the Indian health ministry’s health-management information system, compromising the personnel directory and data about chief physicians of every Indian hospital. License documents and personally identifiable information are probably floating around the dark web as you read this.

The week that was 

The week began with news of the South Korean government's proposed increase of the legal cap on weekly work hours from 52 to 69 hours, all while countries elsewhere are moving to four-day work weeks.

In China's Xi'an city, local authorities mulled lockdowns to counter a flu outbreak.

Experts reckoned South Africa urgently needs to reform its patent laws, but this process has been underway for over a decade with no real changes yet.

Bangladesh’s Beximco Pharmaceuticals is set to begin manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In what was easily the biggest news of the week, Pfizer is buying the Seattle-based Seagen in a $43 billion deal giving the company access to Seagen’s novel lymphoma drug Adcetris and several other cancer treatments.

The Indian government is reportedly considering a crackdown on e-pharmacies as a consequence of concerns over patient safety, including data privacy, malpractices, and the irrational sale of drugs.

In the US, Novo Nordisk joined Eli Lilly in cutting prices for insulin drugs, and it didn't even require a fake tweet.

In the UK, cough medicines containing the opioid Pholcodine were withdrawn due to reports that it causes sudden, life-threatening allergic reactions in people who go on to have a general anaesthetic before surgery up to a year later.

The European Union released a 58-page report mapping existing API manufacturing operations in Europe and incentives that promote local production. The report also assessed the possible benefits and challenges of the EU producing its APIs locally.

According to the WHO’s updated health workforce support and safeguards list in 2023, 55 countries around the world face severe health worker shortages as professionals move to wealthier countries for better-compensated work.

Countries in Europe were unhappy about having to pay for all the Covid vaccines they asked for but didn’t really need. Pfizer and the European Commission arrived at a new supply agreement, but Pfizer wants to be paid for doses it won’t even produce.

Per a new report by Swiss firm IQAir, India is home to 12 of the 15 most polluted cities in Central and South Asia.

New research came out suggesting high doses of zero-calorie sweetener sucralose reduce immune responses in mice by impairing T cells’ ability to replicate; good news if you have an autoimmune disease.

Newsworthy

A hard day’s night. You should be sleeping like a log, but ResMed’s 2023 Global Sleep Survey results are out, and they indicate the opposite. 81% of the 20,000 respondents from 12 countries reported experiencing one or more symptoms indicating poor sleep quality; the most common of these were feeling depressed or irritable, waking up with a sore throat or dry mouth, finding it difficult to concentrate, and feeling excessively sleepy during the day.

Individuals in India, Mexico and China reported the highest satisfaction levels with their quantity of sleep, but those in Australia, Japan and the UK weren’t so lucky. In terms of quality, though, Mexico, France and South Korea fared the worst. And for all the grief given to Millennials and Gen Z, at least they were more satisfied with their sleep quality, with 37% and 31% of them, respectively, reporting dissatisfaction with their sleep quality, as compared to 43% of Gen X and Boomers and 49% of the Silent Generation.

Poor sleep can increase your risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. It could also be a sign of other health issues or sleep disorders like sleep apnea. So no matter where you live and how old you are, we recommend you snooze to keep away the blues.
(ResMed)

Nor any drop to drink. A particular market has seen an amazing growth of 73% from 2010 to 2020, and that’s terrible news. Because it’s the bottled water market. According to a UN think tank, this spike in bottled water consumption around the world is a sign of governments’ failure to improve public water supplies. This also means that we’re far from achieving the UN SDG concerning safe drinking water by 2030.

Estimates reveal that about 2.2 billion people around the world don’t have access to potable water, and that number isn’t decreasing fast enough. Consumption of bottled water is set to grow from 350 billion litres in 2021 to 460 billion litres in 2030. In the grip of water scarcity, Egypt was the fastest-growing market for bottled water from 2018 to 2021.

Solving the problem of inadequate safe drinking water is creating some problems, too. Government failure to provide their citizens with safe water means that corporations are taking over, depleting groundwater resources to pack them into plastic bottles. This brings us to the issue of plastic pollution – over 600 billion plastic bottles worth of it – which we have to contend with.
(Reuters)

R&D

Mapping lung tumours. A growing tumour has high energy demands, so much so that it organises its cellular architecture to nurture its development. Research has found that mitochondria in tumour cells organise themselves with organelles like lipid droplets, giving rise to distinct subcellular structures which support mitochondrial activity and cell metabolism. Understanding this mechanism opens up potential new targets to treat lung cancer.
(Nature)

Bacteria against viruses. Viruses are threats not just to humans and other animals and plants but also to other microorganisms like bacteria. Researchers from Harvard Medical School have now engineered E. coli bacteria to make them immune to viral infections. Such bacteria can be super useful to produce insulin, biofuels and other useful substances, which, if contaminated by viruses, can result in increased costs, lost productivity and, worst of all, unsafe drugs.
(Nature)

Neutering mosquitoes. Warmer temperatures mean that mosquito season is growing longer. Good thing that scientists around the world have been finding ways to control mosquito populations for a while now, with the latest method involving shutting down the proteins which power mosquito sperm in their swim towards the eggs in the female reproductive tract.
(PLoS ONE)

The Kibble

Sniff sniff. Scientists at the University of California San Francisco have found a way to see smells; they’ve created the first-ever molecular image of the process of olfaction: basically, how an odour molecule activates human odorant receptors, of which we have 400 unique ones. The most important ingredient in this experiment? Stinky Swiss cheese.
(Nature)

Cough cough. Next-generation gene sequencing technology is revealing the invisible impact of tourism on the Everest. If you cough, sneeze, or blow your nose on the world’s tallest mountain, the microbes you throw into the air are freezing and sticking around in the soil in a dormant state, even in extremely harsh conditions. And while this human contamination doesn’t have significant environmental impacts, it has important implications for our study of life outside our planet.
(Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research)

Bottom line

Replacing one evil with another. What good is all that fresh chemical-free produce you bought if the labels on them are loaded with toxic hormone-disrupting chemicals? Even though toxic Bisphenol A (BPA), found in paper receipts, water bottles and other plastics, has been banned in some countries, replacements like BPS are no better. And researchers have found that these chemicals leach into our food from packaging materials with thermal labels.
(Environmental Science & Technology)

Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn't want you to see this.