The Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway healthcare venture has a CEO: Dr. Atul Gawande. Gawande is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and the founding executive director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center. He will start on July 9. (CNBC)
Facebook will redirect users trying to buy opioids to a federal crisis hotline. The company announced the initiative just before the FDA opioids summit, which is expected to call on tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to take additional measures to curb illicit opioid sales. (STAT)
Purdue Pharma laid off another 350 sales employees this week. The company had already slashed 50% of its sales staff in February when it stopped marketing its painkiller OxyContin. It has about 550 sales representatives left. (Stamford Advocate)
Rival drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Gilead Sciences are taking competing treatment approaches to the world’s leading AIDS conference. GSK is planning to show off results from its two-drug approach, rather than the standard three, at the International AIDS Conference next month, which will take place in Amsterdam a day before the company releases its quarterly results. (Reuters)
Pharma companies are using social media to take the heat off antibiotics in food. Companies such as Elanco, an animal drugs maker, are running social media campaigns to downplay concerns about antibiotic use in livestock. (Guardian)
