Japanese biopharmaceutical firm Takeda Pharmaceutical announced that the company’s drug candidate for leukemia failed to meet the primary endpoint in a late-stage study.

Innovations in diabetes care go beyond new therapeutic classes. Pharmaceutical companies are continuing to invest in new technology to help improve diabetes treatment and patient adherence with progress ranging from artificial pancreases to smart insulin pens and pumps.

The statistics are staggering and well-known. Despite an increasing pipeline of drugs targeting rare diseases, 95 percent of the 7,000 disorders classified as rare still have no indicated treatment option. Eighty percent of rare diseases are genetically based, and more than half of the 30 million Americans affected by rare disorders are children. Rare diseases can take five to seven years to be accurately diagnosed, partly because they are inherently difficult to identify and because there are relatively few physicians equipped to recognize and design an appropriate treatment plan for a disorder that will, at most, affect 200,000 people (but often far fewer).