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Teva Pharmaceutical Industries launched a generic version of Letairis (ambrisentan) in the United States for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension. Generic ambrisentan will be available as 5 and 10 mg tablets. Letairis is marketed by Gilead in the U.S., while in Europe it is sold…

Cumbersome security procedures, rising airfares, and shrinking legroom have made commercial air travel difficult enough these days — even for healthy passengers. Imagine how much harder it is for patients with rare diseases who must get to doctors’ appointments or clinical trials that are hundreds of miles away from home.

Oral beraprost, in combination with standard therapy, may help decrease pulmonary arterial pressure, and improve heart function and exercise capacity in patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH), a study says. The findings of the study, “Effect of beraprost on pulmonary hypertension due to left ventricular systolic dysfunction,” were published in…

Low-dose radiation given to two mouse models of pulmonary hypertension depleted disease-causing cells, preventing and reversing the development of the condition, researchers report. Their study, “Low dose 100 cGy irradiation as a potential therapy for pulmonary hypertension,” was published in the Journal of Cellular Physiology. Pulmonary hypertension (PH) develops due to…

Upon treatment with inhaled nitric oxide, oxygenation improved faster in preterm, near-term, and term newborns with hypoxic respiratory failure and pulmonary hypertension (PH), a Japanese study shows. The registry-based study, “An Analysis of Time to Improvement in Oxygenation in Japanese Preterm and Late Preterm or Term Neonates with…

With an estimated 1.37 billion inhabitants, India will likely surpass China in five years as the world’s most populous country. That also means it will have more rare-disease patients than any nation. It already has more than twice as many as the 28-member European Union. Harsha K. Rajasimha, a genomics…