National Institute for Health and Care Excellence

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced the HPE Diversity Startup Program to provide equitable access to the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform for women-owned and minority-owned startups.
• The HPE Diversity Startup Program provides complimentary cloud service vouchers through service provider partners to startups owned by women and minorities.
• “Alpha3 Cloud can now optimize and transform their customers’ businesses and investments through HPE GreenLake, while also transforming their own business,” said Alexia Clements, vice president worldwide GTM, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services.
• “The HPE Diversity Startup program enables cloud service providers to ramp and scale cloud platforms quickly to better meet customer needs.”
  With data centers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern Virginia, Alpha3 Cloud offers cloud services built on HPE GreenLake to startups with month-to-month subscription models and no vendor lock-in.

• Obesity is associated with many health conditions including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, stroke and cancer.
• Under the new pilot scheme, however, it’s hoped these drugs can also be prescribed by GPs and specialist pharmacies.
• This would remove the long wait for a clinical appointment, making the drug available to thousands more patients in England.

How does Wegovy work?

• Wegovy is the brand name of semaglutide – a drug that mimics a naturally-occurring hormone in the body which is released in the intestines after we eat.
• Semaglutide mimics it, reducing a person’s hunger levels and making it easier for them to lose weight.

Are there any downsides?

• Another pitfall of using semaglutide to manage obesity is whether and when to stop it.
• Another problem with taking semaglutide to manage obesity is that some weight regain, after stopping the drug, is nearly inevitable.
• The cost to the NHS (for lower doses to treat diabetes) is approximately £75 for a pack of four pens.
• But calculating this is complicated, since obesity affects so many areas of physical and mental health.

Will the pilot scheme be helpful?

• Tier 1 includes public health lifestyle messages - for example, health promotion from primary care such as your GP or local pharmacy.
• Tiers 3 and 4 are mostly hospital-based and include the provision of weight-loss drugs or bariatric surgery.
• The new pilot scheme would streamline access to weight-loss medications, making care more equal in all parts of the country.
• Without effective implementation of a range of lifestyle-related policies alongside roll-out of the pilot scheme, it’s likely that expanding access to Wegovy may not have as great an effect as hoped.

• Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
• “We believe FLT201 has life-changing potential for people with Gaucher disease type 1, the most common type of the disease,” said Pamela Foulds, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Freeline.
• Existing therapies come with a heavy life-long treatment burden, and even with treatment, many patients continue to experience serious symptoms.
• We believe that FLT201 may improve outcomes for patients with a one-time gene therapy.

• The decision follows authorisation from the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in April 2022.
• "The recommendation of Kapruvia® by NICE is a key step on our journey to bring this breakthrough treatment to in-centre haemodialysis patients living with moderate-to-severe CKD-associated pruritus in the UK," said Fabio Dorigotti, Head Global Medical Affairs of CSL Vifor.
• "We look forward to continue working with the National Health Service to ensure access to this important medicine for patients as quickly as possible."
• "Together with VFMCRP, we are committed to bringing our first-of-its kind therapy to providers and patients around the world to help change the way pruritus is managed."