HONG KONG – Japan cuts medical device prices every two years to manage increasing health care costs. This year, the biennial medical device price cut will take effect beginning on April 1, 2020.

HONG KONG – Aiming to increase the financial stability of the national health care insurance system, Japan has announced a list of 17 drugs for which prices will be reduced. The country’s Central Social Insurance Medical Council, an advisory group from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), approved the drug repricing system on Jan. 22.

Researchers at the Riken Center for Advanced Intelligence Project in Japan developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology that found previously unknown features related to prostate cancer occurrence in unannotated pathology images.

With many on Wall Street transfixed by the three injectable calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) therapies cleared in the prophylactic migraine market, Satsuma Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s prospects with STS-101 may have gone overlooked, at least until lately.

MALAYSIA – Asian countries, like India, have been struggling to find a middle ground to the effective pricing of drugs and medical devices over the past year and several are looking at health technology assessment (HTA) programs as a solution for this issue in the coming year. Boston-headquartered consulting firm Analysis Group Inc. recently looked at how HTA programs in Japan, South Korea and China varied and what could be gleaned from their experiences.

Establishment Labs SA, from the Virgin Islands and with main manufacturing and marketing operations in Alajuela, Costa Rica, where it was founded, is entering the Japanese market with what it says is a revolutionary breast implant solution, starting this month.