Clinical pharmacology

An effective pill for obesity treatment looks to be within reach. This week, Novo Nordisk announced the results of a Phase III clinical trial testing out an oral version of its in-demand drug semaglutide. The once-daily pill not only substantially outperformed a placebo but did as well as the injectable form of the drug—an already-approved medicine called Wegovy—with participants losing 15% of their body weight on average.Mental Health Apps Are a Privacy NightmareSemaglutide belongs to a class of drugs called GLP-1…

After years of openly flirting with entering the health care industry, Amazon went all out on Tuesday in its debut of RxPass, a new subscription service that provides Amazon Prime members with unlimited prescription medications for an additional $5 monthly fee. According to Amazon, RxPass is designed for people who are uninsured or whose insurance doesn’t cover certain medications, and customers don’t need health insurance to sign up for RxPass. While it doesn’t stock every medication out there, RxPass offers 60 generic…

Google has proposed a remedy for the doctor’s note. The tech giant is working on an AI technology tool to decipher hard-to-read handwritten medical prescriptions, as announced at its yearly Google for India conference on Monday and described in a company blogpost. The feature will be part of Google Lens’ library of applications. Lens can already assess, copy, and paste handwriting from real life into your phone or computer and automatically offer supporting context and information based on that text through its Search…