Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions To Present Study On Real-World Patient Data Benefits

New studies show that important role of real world data can play in developing value-based reimbursement strategies.

Cardinal Health’s (NYSE:CAH) Health Specialty Division, a division responsible for the research and development in the medicine field specialization, has announced that it will present a series of  research paper studies later this week on the economic health outcome that aims to reiterate the importance of  reviewing real world treatment patterns while developing value-based reimbursement strategies.

Dr. Bruce Feinberg, who serves as the vice president and CMO of Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions, has stated that for professional doctors, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies alike had been aware that statistical results conducted through clinical trials do not entirely reflect on how cancer treatments are conducted in real time alone, for which insurance payers are watching the disparity closely and are now adjusting reimbursement strategies in response to it.

According to Mr. Feinberg, the new research, which will be released ahead of the 2015 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago by next month, will confirm that ‘Health Economic Outcomes’ data can play a better role in helping insurance payers to get a better understanding of treatments in practical scenarios, in turn, helping to have a  better sense on developing strategies for the value-based reimbursement

Since the last year upto now, Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions has released a voluminous amount of studies featuring real world treatment patterns for diseases, such as leukemia care, and what economic impact that has on patient care.

Meanwhile, FTC has announced its less than $27 million settlement with Cardinal Health Inc., after it charged the healthcare services company of illegally monopolizing around 25 local markets in the country for the sale/distribution of low energy radiopharmaceuticals, that has forced hospitals to pay inflated prices for the purchase of those drugs. The $27 million is considered as the largest disgorgement in the FTC history and will be distributed amongst injured customers based on the validity of their claims.

The final order provides an injunction to the purchase and sale of the radiopharmaceutical drugs, and the ruling requires Cardinal Health to constitute an antitrust compliance program for its Nuclear Pharmacy division. Lawyers say this settlement serves as a reminder that antitrust disgorgement penalties on healthcare services are gaining traction and the conduct of any matter short of the explicit agreement runs foul to antitrust laws.

Cardinal Health stock price ended the day trading at $88.16, a gain of more than 0.60% the previous day, despite the confirmation of the ruling that has taken a hit on the company’s earnings last month.

Leonard Green Has Built Up a Secret Stake in Bed Bath and Beyond

Beauty products retailer expands contract with Memphis Logistics Company and opens up a 25,000 square foot store at Highland Commons.

Bed Bath and Beyond Inc. (NYSE:BBBY) was secretly scooped up at a value of $75 million last year by Leonard Green and Partners, a buyout firm which puts its money on beaten down retailers.

The stocks were purchased initially in the first quarter of 2014 by the Los Angeles based private equity firm, which was accumulated at 990,000 shares until the end of the last year. Leonard Green was granted permission by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to not disclose the holdings till the end of this month. In addition, the firm also received clearance to not disclose its stake of PetSmart Inc., a large US pet store chain, in March.

The decision for Leonard Green to purchase and boost its stake at Bed Bath and Beyond came at a time when the company had reported below analysts’ expectations during the fourth quarter last year in January 2014. After floating at a now low of less than $55 last summer, the stock price has now rebounded to less than $80.

It is usual for money managers to be confidential about their investments, though this is the case for those who have invested over a $100 million in equities, but for that, they have to fill out ‘Form 13F’ with the SEC, after the end of each quarter, and should have a very valid business reason to do so.

Meanwhile, Bed Bath and Beyond has expanded its contract with the Memphis-based distribution and logistics company by securing an extension in a lease of more than 334,000 square feet of industrial space. Wesley Kraker has leased distribution spaces for Orlando, Atlanta, Houston, and Memphis for Bed Bath and Beyond. On the other hand, Pathmark Transportation Co., headquartered in Memphis, has been assigned the responsibility to distribute various Bed Bath and Beyond merchandise across various stores in the country.

In news, Bed Bath and Beyond has announced that it will open up the doors to the 25,000 square foot at the Highland Commons Shopping Centre located near the Hudson-Berlin line. It is located at the intersection of Interstate 495 and Route 62 (Exit 26), where the company will sell domestic merchandise and home furnishings, with prices ranging from as low as $1 to a maximum $5. Retail store, Five Below, opened its store more than a couple of weeks ago, serving as a competitive threat to Bed Bath & Beyond.

Bed Bath & Beyond stock prices ended the day at $71.76, flat from yesterday’s trading.

Cannabis Science Reaches Collaborative Drug Development Deal with IGXBio

Medical research companies intend to develop a joint protocol to demonstrate potential synergistic effects of their respective drug candidates in HIV.

Cannabis Science Inc. (OTC:CBIS) has announced that the company has signed a Collaborative Drug Deal with IGXBio and its GenePro, which is a DNA-based immunotherapeutic that has received the green signal from the FDA IND to start with the human trials. The two medical research companies are expected to develop a joint protocol to demonstrate the synergistic effects of their own respective drugs that can have an impact on HIV.

In a statement issued by James Laufenberg, CEO of IGXBio, he expressed his excitement about the collaboration with Cannabis Science, which he acclaims to be based on the same values as that of their own in serving to meet the unmet needs of HIV positives patients.

The GenePro ® technology has been on at least 150 covers of many scientific journals and it intends to produce the technology on a wide scale. Mr. Laufenberg did point out though that it will be a big undertaking, since they had to conduct pre-clinical trials through $21 million of funds being granted. This ends the company’s cooperation with Cannabis Science to serve to create new medicinal products for the purpose of clinical development and commercialization using the technology in the first and second phase of the trial.

Roscoe M. Moore,  DVM, MPH, Ph.D., DSc., Former Asst. US Surgeon General, Cannabis Science Special Senior Advisor, and Member of the Company's Scientific Advisory Board, explained that risks of inflammation can possibly be lowered along with HIV viral replication, which can greatly help in health and extend the lives of HIV patients. That can happen with the GenePro technology, partnered by CS-TATI-1.

In addition, Mr. Raymond C. Dabney, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Cannabis Science, for his part says that collaboration between the two medical research companies will help to provide new discoveries into the role of inflammation vaccination of HIV, which serves as a very first critical step in optimizing effective treatments in various settings. The studies will also serve to provide scientific evaluations to the GenePro Technology to demonstrate the enhanced potential of therapeutic vaccination.

While the development is welcomed, it is still early days to ascertain if its drive will prove to be a success, despite the many bullish assessments from the two partners involved in this deal, not least because diseases are developing resistance at a relatively faster rate than the pace of development of new drugs, especially for HIV Aids.

Cannabis Science stock price ended the day at $0.0305, a massive rise of 1.67% from the previous day.

Citigroup Joins Foreign Brokerages In Cutting Year-End Target for Indian Stocks

Investment bank faces its own cut in stock price over forex rigging settlement.

Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) has joined the league of other local and foreign brokerage houses by cutting the year-end performance of Indian stocks, owing to concerns over poor corporate performance of Indian companies, as well as a growing yet sluggish economy, hampered by forecast that calls for lackluster monsoon rainfalls, which will affect the output of crop production. UBS and HSBC have also lowered their outlooks.

According to Citi, it has reduced the Sensex Index from 33,000 points to 32,000 points, whereas HSBC has reduced it from 30,100 to around less than 27000 points – much lower than that of Citi’s forecast.

In a statement, Citi said that the investor should still keep faith to the South Asian nation’s stock market, while conceding that despite the uptick in growth, mostly as a result of rebasing the economy, challenges remain, such as slowdown in earnings growth, the prospect of foreign funds outflow as a result of a potential rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, and an underperformance against other markets (its neighbor Pakistan is performing even better than them).

However, breakdown suggests that the investment banking group is bullish on the banking, auto, cement, pharm, and telecom sectors, which is the reason why Citi expects the Sensex to rise up to 35000 points by next summer in June 2016. The announcement of the budget, which seems to have contained some “big bang” reforms, has also led to bullish assessment, but the key to focus will be on the implementation. This along with declining of interest rates and steady flow of domestic funds should help to keep investors interested.

Meanwhile, the global investment bank has announced that it has to pay less than $400 million as a settlement for manipulating foreign exchange rates. It came on the same day that the bank said that it has pleaded guilty to charges levied by federal authorities. However, in addition to the settlement to the Federal Reserve, the bank has to pay $925 million to the Justice Department; the total fines to be paid are around $1.65 billion.

In response to the settlement, Citigroup CEO told federal authorities that the company has overhauled its monitoring and control systems, and in that process, it has terminated nine employees, including those who were involved in the rigging scandal. More terminations are on the line here, he said.

Citi Stock price ended the day at $54.72, down 0.22% the previous day because of the scandal.

Twitter Inc. introduces New Search Results Interface to Strengthen user Engagement

Twitter started a new search results interface that precisely classifies searches using a number of tabs, streamlining the process of search.

Twitter Inc. is introducing a latest feature to update its search engine.  The previous search interface witnessed chaotic appearance. Now it seems more organized, involving tabs for search result division into different categories. For the time being, the new feature is only available for web version and includes further options than just showing “Top Tweets” or “All Tweets”.

The new search interface has now been developed for all logged in users on Twitter website. It is the conclusion of efforts which started in April. The feature was in beta testing mode and was available to limited users. From today it is open to all the customers.

Twitter has lately launched several new features to attract users to the site. These features include partnership with Domino’s Pizza, which help the users to place order directly via Twitter by using hash tags or emojis.

The service seems very simple to use, it just requires user to type almost 140 characters or less than that. However, it has been a worrying for some old and new users. Anthony Noto, an executive at Twitter unintentionally Tweeted acquisition plans of the company, which he had specified to send to a contact ass direct message.

Fresh users are frequently confused by the site and by the procedure by which they entice fresh followers and make tweets visible.

Searching now disclose applicable tweets the individual is seeking for intends, instead of something favorited or retweeted. This accommodates users to search relevant news rather than something went viral. When there are updates regarding search, they are posted on top of the page at status bar. They can be viewed by clicking on the status bar. Additional features involves a latest Live tab to substitute the All tweets tab. And parameters of search can be saved for later use.

Spokesperson of Twitter confirmed the news that the feature is now available for all users and said, “We’re rolling out a new search experience to users on web,” said a Twitter. Like other features, we will continue to iterate and improve on this, to make it even easier for users to find what they are looking for when they search on Twitter.”

In recent times, the social media giant has added features like recap by the name of “While You Were Away”.

Cisco Systems Stock Is The One To Watch Out For Right Now

Better than expected results, high gross margins, and a complete focus on customer solutions to help propel the stock forward.

Last week, Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) has reported its third quarter results, which were better than expectations. Revenue rose from $12.07 billion to over $12.15 billion, which is much lower than Cisco’s guidance of between $12.50-12.75 billion, even higher than analysts’ estimates.

The earnings from Cisco comes at a particularly critical time, as the company is about to see the handover of the position of chairman on board. John Chambers will hand over the ‘baton’ to Chuck Robbins In July. It is hoped that Mr. Robbins will continue the momentum of fiscal consolidation and the company’s future projects, consisting of home automation solutions and the Internet of Things (IoT). Tech analysts have welcomed the ‘changeover’, saying that Mr. Chambers was becoming a bit too headstrong and was at the helm for a long time.

Even though Cisco has a strong presence in the market in terms of its data networks, assuming that it is an aggressive innovator, the company needs to continue to keep it evolving because the tech industry is evolving at an even faster rate. Hence, it can be difficult to catch up with it.

This leads to the question: Is Cisco’s stock worth buying? No doubt that the company has a strong market share in switches, routing, data center network, but not so much at IP telephony and Wireless LAN. The challenges exist for the company in the market, as some rivals are competitive enough to steal the limelight.

Juniper Networks Inc., while not a threat without trouble, has managed to steal away Cisco’s dominance. Cisco’s market share for switches declined from over 65% to around 57%, whereas Jupiter’s switches market share rose from less than 2% to 3%. Even more significant is that Cisco’s market share for data center hardware has fallen from less than 59% to over 47%, whereas Juniper’s grew from 2.1 to 3%.

Cisco Systems also has to deal with Huawei in the Asian market, whose market share has grown from 7% to less than 13%. Here is the positive aspect though. Juniper and Huawei represent a sort of a fly that only needs some swatting from stealing market share here and there, though Huawei will be a bit of a tough proposition, though the Asian company looks solely to focus on the Asian markets for now, with little plans to expand in the US market.

The only near term challenge is that the company has to decide as to whether it wants to make a big shift to the software territory and face the risk of their hardware market becoming cannibalized. The SDN market is expected to grow to over $35 billion by 2018, so Cisco has to thread a fine line here from now then, so a decision must be made within this year.

Cisco stock price ended the day at $29.76, a gain of 0.71% the previous day.

Petroleo Brasileiro Petrobras SA Reported Rise in 1QFY15 Adjusted Earnings

Petrobrass reported first quarter fiscal year 2015 earnings on Friday May 15 . the company was able to post increase innon-GAAP earnings while net profit profit decline slightly.

Petroleo Brasileiro Petrobras SA reported fiscal year 2015 first quarter earnings result on Friday after market close.  The Brazilian oil giant posted a 1.2% decline in net profit during the period but was able to post 50% increase in non-GAAP earnings, as new management of the company tried to reduce costs and move on after corruption outrage which surrounded the company and cost it around $17 billion in asset write-down.

Petrobras reported $1.78 billion ( 5.33 billion reais) in net income slightly less than 5.39 billion reais in the similar quarter in 2014. The revenue of the company accounted for 74.3 million reais during the quarter drop by 9% from the similar quarter previous year. EBITDA surged by 50% on year over year basis and reach 21.52 million reais.

CFO, Ivan Monteiro said,“We’re very satisfied with the results we’ve presented but we know there are a lot of challenges ahead,”

As Petrobras works to take itself out of the write-off and negative effects of the corruption, it is cutting its budget and seeking for ideas to ct its huge debt. during the 1Q, the company reduces its expenditure by 13% to almost 17.8 billion reais, and emphasizing on slashing costs in downstream segment, in which capital expenditure fell by 64%.

The downstream segment, which approximately lost 60 million reais because of fuel subsidies provided by government between 2011 to 2014, posted a profit of 6.18 billion reais in the January to March 15 period as the company kept diesel and gasoline domestic price stable in spite of tumbling crude oil prices in global market.

Petrobras is the largest indebted energy firm of the world. earlier in March, the company said that it is looking to sell $13.7 billion of fixed assets in the year 2015-16. the company has $133 million of debt burden.

Federal prosecutor of Brazil says that Petrobras suppliers together with cartel of construction firms conspired to inflate the project prices and using the amount to bribe former company's officials and local politicians.

Four former Petrobras executives have been charged with crimes including corruption and money laundering. One former executive, Paulo Roberto Costa, was sentenced last month to six months under house arrest after he made a deal with prosecutors in exchange for telling what he knew of the alleged scheme.

Company's four former officials have been alleged with crimes like money laundering and corruption. Paulo Roberto -a former executive of Petrobras was sentenced to 6 months house arrest last month in exchange of details regarding corruption which he provided to federal prosecutors.

Petrobras stock was up 2.01% to $10.13 at market close on Friday May 15.

United Technologies Pratt & Whitney to provide Aircraft Health Management System To Bombardier Inc

Bombardier Inc. plans to boost its C series aircraft efficiency with a latest on-board management and monitoring system.

Bombardier Inc. announced during the Regional Airline Association convention, which was held in Cleveland, Ohio that it is going to team up with United Technologies Corporation Pratt and Whitney, on order to develop a latest Aircraft Data Management System for its aircraft – Cseries. This management system is part of Aircraft Health Management System, which transfers real-time data from aircraft to enable remote troubleshooting.  It also supports in forwarding aircraft maintenance diagnostic and will deliver technical information to the aircraft crew.

The Aircraft Health Management System is CSeries aircraft part, which provides on-board and on-ground support and will be accessible as soon as aircraft enters.  It deals with the faulty messages from the aircraft and modifies it. The system has the capacity to record date, avionics, flight controls, engine and electrical, braking and landing systems together with environmental control and many other systems.

Vice President of Bombardier, Todd Young said that technicians were required to download important aircraft metrics by using a laptop which took a lot of time. The AHMS system help recover that information immediately through cellular network of Wi-Fi.

As per the contract, the systems infrastructure called as the eFast system, is going to be delivered by Pratt & Whitney. According to Graham Webb, Pratt & Whitney Vice President, this latest system will revolutionize the operations of aircraft and will facilitate performing monitoring better in real-time.

Mr. Webb said, "We're thrilled that this technology has evolved to the next level. CSeries operators will be able to immediately review the performance of their aircraft, allowing them to make smarter business decisions related to their PurePower engine fleet. This is truly revolutionary and will enable operators to maximize their fleet performance, while optimizing their maintenance and reliability expenditures."

The CSeries is going to be fortified with PurePower engines of Pratt & Whitney, which provides as much as 15%efficiency in regards to fuel, maintenance cost and noise pollution against majority of other aircraft engines. Almost 1000 of total test hours have been registered by CSeries-300 since its initial flight earlier in February.

On the other hand, aircraft makers like AIRBUS Group and Boeing Co have been emphasizing on establishing smaller aircraft with twin engine. Boeing launched the 737Max and 777X narrow body airplanes, which are more fuel friendly as compared to 777 and 787 Dreamliner.

Likewise, the AIRBUS is doubtful about the decision of continuing A380 aircraft production beyond 2020, as its other aircraft A330 is more popular compared to A380. One of the major reasons for this alteration is to be prepared if prices of fuel increase in the medium term.

Visa Europe Opens Innovation Hub While Announcing Healthy Earnings

Payment technology solution decided to assist European startups to develop latest technology to facilitate payment system.

Almost a week ago, Visa Europe (NYSE:V), made to headlines that it has been in talks with Visa to formally reacquire it with a deal worth $15-20 billion. Visa Europe had also made to other headlines by announcing that it is also opening its innovation hub, which it announced simultaneously during the earnings results release, but did not receive much attention among many news channels.

The innovation hub is promised by financial payment company to help startups build new and updated payment related technologies with the best model to be rolled out to member banks, retailers, and consumers.

The hub, named Visa Europe Collab, aims to take 20 ideas in its first year of operation through a 100-day "innovation funnel”, which involves from initial scooping to qualification, all the way to market testing and proof of design. Only one of the best concepts will win, and will be handed to the main body of Visa Incisor that it could be commercially rolled out into operations.

The innovation hub will be based initially in London, but will be expanded over time to include other hotspots, including Paris, Berlin, even Tel Aviv. Partners include schools, such as CASS Business School, and accelerators, such as Digital Catapult.

Steve Perry, founder and co-creator of Visa Europe Collab, who was the genius behind the idea, said that it is not about simply acquiring startups or purchasing stakes, rather than try to start from the ground up. It is also about giving opportunities to many innovation companies in Europe, which lack services, such as mentoring, financing, and spending on R&D for the many likeminded individuals.

In fact, Visa Europe is doing itself, as well as the EU governments, a favor by providing the ‘glue’ that brings together innovators, banks, mobile cellular operators, e commerce companies, and most importantly, governments, to grow entrepreneurial ecosystem, and in turn, develop jobs. This also helps improve and deliver the latest payment systems, which will not only benefit the European countries, but around the world.

In a separate news, Visa Inc., under the guidance of Min Wang, a former senior scientist and researcher at Google, HP Labs China, and the IBM Watson Research Center, will help the company’s tech research capabilities, to focus on areas, such as applied research, and bring together many academics and ‘think thanks’ along with the government into one fold to create new technologies related to the improvement of the online payments system. This will complement the innovation hub, except that it will focus on the commercial aspect, whereas the separate one run by Mr. Wang will focus on the security and government policy aspect.