Apple, Japan Post team up to boost elderly care

NEW YORK, May 2, (Agencies): Apple, IBM and Japanese insurance and bank holding company Japan Post have formed a partnership to improve the lives of elderly people in the country.

The companies say they hope other countries will follow suit as the world’s population ages. About a quarter of Japan’s population, or more than 33 million people, is over 65, the companies said citing data from Japan’s health ministry.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Japan Post CEO Taizo Nishimuro announced the deal in New York on Thursday. The program will provide iPads with apps designed to help seniors manage day-to-day lives and keep in touch with family members. IBM will provide cloud services and help create apps to improve seniors’ quality of life, whether that means finding a plumber, keeping in touch with distant family members or remembering to take medications.

Cook said Apple strives to make its products accessible and easy to use, and noted that a many of the company’s recent products have focused on health. Its HealthKit system, for example, lets users share health information such as heart rate or weight with various phone apps to get a more complete picture of the user’s health and fitness level.

Apple Inc. and IBM formed a partnership last year to create mobile apps for a broad range of industries. This has led to the creation of 22 apps so far. Pain: The US Food and Drug Administration approved the Medicines Co’s drug device Ionsys for postoperative pain for hospital use, the company said on Thursday.

Ionsys, a needleless, patient-controlled, opioid-based treatment, offers patients recovering from surgery in the hospital control over their analgesic dosing.

Ionsys was originally developed by Johnson & Johnson and won approval in the United States and Europe in 2006. But after its launch in Europe in 2008, it was recalled due to device stability issues. The therapy never made it to the market in the United States.

The Medicines Co gained access to the product through its 2012 acquisition of Incline Therapeutics Inc, which had acquired the treatment from J&J in 2010.

The approval also cements Ionsys’ lead over AcelRx Pharmaceuticals Inc’s rival drug Zalviso, which is in development.

Zalviso was dealt another blow in March after the FDA said it required an additional study to evaluate risks associated with the device.

RBC Capital’s Adnan Butt said he expects Ionsys, which is also awaiting a regulatory decision in Europe, to generate worldwide peak sales of about a half a billion in 2022.

The New Jersey-based company said it expects Ionsys to be available in the US in the third quarter.

Butt said any drug approval for the company “would be considered positive at this time” because of the uncertainty surrounding Medicine Co’s Angiomax, an anti-coagulant injection. Blood-clotting agent: The US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved The Medicines Co’s dry powder blood-clotting agent for use in hospital settings, a month after the treatment received approval in Europe.

The treatment, Raplixa, is a combination of two human plasma-derived blood-clotting proteins — fibrinogen and thrombin.

Raplixa is used to control bleeding during surgery when conventional aids are found ineffective. The treatment is approved for use in combination with an absorbable gelatin sponge.

Failure to close surgical wounds completely can result in serious or possibly life-threatening complications, including blood loss, tissue damage, infection and excessive scarring.

The approval comes at a time Medicines Co is facing a drop in sales of its lead product, Angiomax anticoagulant injection, which accounted for over 80 percent of its 2014 revenue.

RBC Capital analyst Adnan Butt said any drug approval for the company “would be considered positive at this time” given the uncertainty regarding Angiomax.

He expects the treatment to generate peak sales of about $100 million in the United States.

Raplixa was added to the New Jersey-based company’s armory, after it acquired in 2013 private Dutch biotech firm ProFibrix B.V, its original developer.

The Medicines Co expects Raplixa to be complementary to its other hemostatic product Recothrom Thrombin, which notched US sales of $64.4 million last year.

The US regulator pushed up by three months its scheduled decision date, after the company amended its marketing application in relation to its manufacturing specifications.

The Medicines Co estimates there are 110 million surgical procedures per year worldwide which result in bleeding that requires a hemostatic product.