In this issue

For more than 20 years, drugmakers in the UK have been forced to source blood plasma from overseas, thanks to an outbreak of the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the 1990s that saw a ban on the use of UK donated plasma in drug therapies. Consequently, the supply of immunoglobulin therapies has been limited, and the NHS has faced repeated plasma shortages.

As April saw people in the UK once again permitted to donated blood plasma for use in medical treatments. This decision will likely be welcomed by patient groups, but how will the move impact UK pharma? We find out.

While the subject of vaccines has been at the forefront of pharma development over the past year, the sector has been largely dominated by the fight to curb the spread of Covid-19. But outside of this bubble, work has been going on behind the scenes to develop a new drug that targets a different health threat: malaria. To learn more about this development, we explore the history of malaria treatments.

Plus, we examine alternatives to using shark squalene in vaccines, learn about a pharmaceutical solution to reduce the appearance of surgical scarring, and much more.

All this and more in this latest issue of Pharma Technology Focus.

Eloise Mclennan, editor