Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) – U.S. drug regulators approved Astellas Pharma Inc’s pill for overactive bladder on Thursday, boosting the Japanese drugmaker’s foothold in the market for the condition.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the once-daily pill, to be sold as Myrbetriq, for adults who cannot control their bladder muscles, following a positive recommendation from FDA advisers.

The FDA said about 33 million Americans have an overactive bladder, whose symptoms include frequent urination and urgency to urinate. The condition is especially common among those 75 years of age and older.

Myrbetriq, the first drug in its class, works by activating a protein receptor in bladder muscles that relaxes them and helps the bladder fill and store urine. The pill is already approved in Japan.

“Overactive bladder … is uncomfortable, disrupting and potentially serious,” said Dr. Victoria Kusiak, deputy director in an FDA office for drug evaluation.

In April, a panel of outside advisers to the FDA voted 7-4 that the benefits of the pill, known chemically as mirabegron, outweighed its possible risks to the heart and liver.

In clinical trials, a 50-milligram dose of the drug meant four fewer trips to the bathroom over seven days compared with placebo, and three fewer episodes of urine leakage, or incontinence.

Some FDA advisers had said that may not greatly help people who often go to the bathroom at least eight times a day. However, the FDA had said clinical trials only had to prove the drug was better than a placebo, prompting a majority of panelists to vote in favor of the drug.

Common side effects were elevated blood pressure, urinary tract infection, elevated heart rate and abdominal pain. The FDA said people with very high uncontrolled blood pressure or serious kidney or liver disease should not take the pill.

Astellas, Japan’s second-largest drugmaker, already makes the overactive bladder drug Vesicare. It is one of the company’s biggest products, and had global sales of 86.7 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in 2010.

Shares of Astellas closed up 1.5 percent in Tokyo at 3,405 yen.

Read More…
More on Video

Somebody was seriously planning on cashing in this 4th of July.

More than 8,000 pounds of illegal fireworks — worth a total street value of $20,000 — were confiscated by the LA County Sheriff’s Department Tuesday.

The illegal stockpile was found in a Norwalk store facility after detectives received a tip, ABC reports in the video above. The bust included 91 cases of illegal fireworks containing mortars, bottle rockets, roman candles and a variety of other commercial-grade fireworks.

Read More…
More on Video

This week Google has released the first public build of Google Earth‘s 3D flyover features, and at the Google I/O 2012 developer event, we got the chance to take a peek at a relatively massive set of four HDTV units combined to bring on one giant vision of the future. This 3D mapping feature is currently out for Google Earth on Android and will be coming soon to iOS as well, as our Google hosts note in the video below.

This hands-on – or eyes-on rather is just a glimpse of what you’ll be working with in the near future once you grab the update to the app you’ve already more than likely got running on your devices right this minute. This 3D mapping adventure comes at essentially the same time as Apple has announced their own 3D mapping project to be tied in with Apple Maps on the future versions of iOS for the iPhone and iPad. That said, this Google Earth action will also, once again, be available for iOS more than likely sooner than the Apple equivalent.

The folks you see above are both Googlers, speaking during the Lives Stream of the Google I/O events you may have caught from a different perspective earlier today!

Have a peek at the hands-on video above and peek at the couple photos above and below as well, and grab the update for your Google Earth app from the Google Play app store now! Also be sure to continue following us all week for all the most fabulous Google I/O 2012 action!

Google Earth 3D hands-on at Google I/O is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

RIM hasn’t had much good news to offer along with its glum fiscal first quarter, but it has given a reason to mark early 2013 on the calendar if you’re a BlackBerry fan. CEO Thorsten Heins revealed during the results call that the first QWERTY BlackBerry 10 phone will arrive in “close proximity” to its touchscreen-only counterpart. What that entails is still very much under wraps, although there were clues. Heins stressed that the early batch would focus on the “premium” space, while BlackBerry 7 would hold down the entry and mid-range markets until their BlackBerry 10 replacements were ready. The tidbits won’t provide much comfort to someone who has to decide on a phone by the holidays, but they hint that the truly patient could be rewarded for their calm under pressure.

RIM: QWERTY BlackBerry 10 phone launches in ‘close proximity’ to its all-touch cousin originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

There are a lot of people managing Facebook Pages out there, so this is for you: Facebook has (finally) added a couple of features that will make your life easier. First of all, the admin roles get a little bit more granular so that managing a Facebook page can be a real team effort with less risk of a major snafu. To do this, Facebook is adding several layer of access to the page, from “read-only” to “full admin” of as described by the table below: (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: The Facebook App Center, Publicly Available, Facebook Introduces Facebook Camera for iOS,