Feature Channels: Pharmaceuticals

• share
• favorite_border

Chlorine, a disinfectant used in most wastewater treatment plants, may be failing to eliminate pharmaceuticals from wastes. As a result, trace levels get discharged from the treatment plants into waterways. Now, scientists are reporting that chlorine treatment may encourage the formation of new, unknown antibiotics that could enter the environment, potentially contributing to the problem of antibiotic resistance. They will present the research at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

• share
• favorite_border

Since HIV emerged in the ‘80s, drug “cocktails” transformed the deadly disease into a manageable one. But the virus is adept at developing resistance to drugs, and treatment regimens require tweaking that can be costly. Now scientists at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society are announcing new progress toward affordable drugs that could potentially thwart the virus’s ability to resist them.

• share
• favorite_border

Saccharin, the artificial sweetener that is the main ingredient in Sweet ‘N Low®, Sweet Twin® and Necta®, could do far more than just keep our waistlines trim. According to new research, this popular sugar substitute could potentially lead to the development of drugs capable of combating aggressive, difficult-to-treat cancers with fewer side effects.

• share
• favorite_border

Laura Kiessling, Ph.D., will present new findings that could exploit differences between human and microbial carbohydrates to fight infections during today’s “The Fred Kavli Innovations in Chemistry Lecture” at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists will report in a presentation today that they have turned to the opossum to develop a promising new and inexpensive antidote for poisonous snake bites. They predict it could save thousands of lives worldwide without the side effects of current treatments. The presentation will take place here at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

• share
• favorite_border

Lots of potentially useful medical information is getting lost. McGill researchers discovered this when they looked into the lack of reporting of information from “stalled drug” trials in cancer, cardiovascular and neurological diseases.

• share
• favorite_border

In patients with advanced thyroid cancer, sunitinib, a drug approved for treatment of several other cancers, showed significant cancer-fighting activity t, a new phase 2 clinical trial has found. Results of the single-center study will be presented Sunday at the Endocrine Society’s 97th annual meeting in San Diego.

• share
• favorite_border

A new testosterone nasal gel raises men’s low testosterone levels to normal, with few side effects, according to the results of a phase 3 clinical trial to be presented Saturday at the Endocrine Society’s 97th annual meeting in San Diego.

• share
• favorite_border

An experimental drug causes loss of weight and fat in mice, a new study has found. The study results will be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society’s 97th annual meeting in San Diego.

• share
• favorite_border

Among prescriptions filled for menopausal hormone therapy (HT) in the U.S., almost half now are custom-compounded “bioidentical” hormones, according to analysis of a recent survey of nearly 500 pharmacists. The study results will be presented Friday March 6th at the Endocrine Society’s 97th annual meeting in San Diego.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study by researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute has found that screening for and treating depression could help to reduce the risk of heart disease in patients with moderate to severe depression.

• share
• favorite_border

New research suggests that widely used statin therapy provides the most benefit to patients with the highest genetic risk of heart attack. Using a relatively straightforward genetic analysis, the researchers assessed heart attack risk independently of traditional risk factors such as age, sex, so-called good and bad cholesterol levels, smoking history, family history and whether the patient has diabetes.

• share
• favorite_border

Drug-induced acute liver failure is uncommon, and over-the-counter medications and dietary and herbal supplements -- not prescription drugs -- are its most common causes, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings are published in the current issue of Gastroenterology.

• share
• favorite_border

It's time to clear up the confusion and debunk the false reports surrounding the potentially serious health risks of Hormone Therapy.

• share
• favorite_border

An aggressive campaign to reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics has helped cut the rate of infection with a dangerous drug-resistant bacteria at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, by nearly 40 percent.

• share
• favorite_border

MIT chemical engineers have designed a new type of self-healing hydrogel that could be injected through a syringe. Such gels, which can carry one or two drugs at a time, could be useful for treating cancer, macular degeneration, or heart disease, among other diseases, the researchers say.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have long sought alternatives to morphine – a powerful and widely used painkiller – that curb its side effects, including dependency, nausea and dizziness. Now, an experiment at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has supplied the most complete atomic-scale map of such a compound docked with a cellular receptor that regulates the body’s pain response and tolerance.

• share
• favorite_border

The science behind many anti-depressant medications appears to be backwards, say the authors of a paper that challenges the prevailing ideas about the nature of depression and some of the world’s most commonly prescribed medications.

• share
• favorite_border

While methods for identifying immunogenic hotspots, or epitopes, are evolving rapidly, technologies to redesign the hotspots while maintaining biotherapeutic activity and stability are far less developed.

• share
• favorite_border

Study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists indicates that the pool of patients who can benefit from the drug olaparib is potentially much wider – and offers a ready means of identifying them.

• share
• favorite_border

Good drugs are hard to design: they must not only effectively treat a medical condition, but they must also do so without having side effects that outweigh their benefits. Sometimes, toxic side effects aren’t discovered until late in development, when substantial time and money have already been invested. Now, researchers have devised a new drug screen that capitalizes on the tendency of toxic compounds to alter the properties of the lipid bilayer that encases cells.

• share
• favorite_border

A report from a summit organized last year by the American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Society of Anesthesiologists,® the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, and The Pew Charitable Trusts summarizes manufacturing, regulatory, and economic issues related to drug shortages, as well as potential solutions.

• share
• favorite_border

FDA has approved IBRANCE (palbociclib), representing a new treatment method to arrest tumor growth in certain advanced breast cancer patients. IBRANCE targets a key family of proteins responsible for cell growth. Results of a phase 2 study found the combination of IBRANCE and letrozole improved progression-free survival by 10 months as compared to letrozole alone. Over 80 percent of metastatic ER+ breast cancer patients received some benefit from this treatment.

• share
• favorite_border

Global pharmaceutical supply chains are fragmented and lack coordination, facing at least 10 key challenges, according to the researchers. Their study sheds light on areas of weakness and what specifically is needed to strengthen the global health pharmaceutical supply chains.

• share
• favorite_border

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved lisdexamfetamine dimesylate, under the brand name Vyvanse, to treat moderate to severe binge eating disorder (BED) in adults, a first of its kind prescription drug specifically indicated for BED. TOS says that understanding the differences between obesity and BED is important for clinicians, as BED is an eating disorder that affects only a portion of those with the medical disease obesity.

• share
• favorite_border

Valium, one of the best known antianxiety drugs, produces its calming effects by binding with a particular protein in the brain. But the drug has an almost equally strong affinity for a completely different protein. New studies revealing atomic level details of this secondary interaction might offer clues about Valium's side effects and point the way to more effective drugs.

• share
• favorite_border

People’s perceptions of the cost of a drug may affect how much they benefit from the drug, even when they are receiving only a placebo, according to a new study of people with Parkinson’s disease published in the January 28, 2015 online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

• share
• favorite_border

Fears of a link between testosterone replacement therapy and cardiovascular risk are misplaced, according to a review published in this month’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The therapy has come under widespread scrutiny in recent months, including by a federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel convened last fall.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at University of California, San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Bridge Institute at the University of Southern California report the first crystal structure of the cellular receptor CXCR4 bound to an immune signaling protein called a chemokine. The structure answers longstanding questions about a molecular interaction that plays an important role in human development, immune responses, cancer metastasis and HIV infections.

• share
• favorite_border

Classic psychedelic drugs include LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. This new School of Public Health research is published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine previously reported that a drug used for almost a century to treat trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, reversed environmental autism-like symptoms in mice. Now, a new study published in this week’s online issue of Molecular Autism, suggests that a genetic form of autism-like symptoms in mice are also corrected with the drug, even when treatment was started in young adult mice.

• share
• favorite_border

In a new study researchers at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered how melanoma becomes resistant to a promising new drug combo therapy utilizing BRAF+MEK inhibitors in patients after an initial period of tumor shrinkage.

• share
• favorite_border

A new “trick” steroids use to suppress inflammation, which could be used to make new anti-inflammatory drugs without the harmful side effects of steroids, has been discovered by researchers at Georgia State University.

• share
• favorite_border

While considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, snails have found a more intriguing use to scientists and the medical profession offering a plethora of research possibilities.

• share
• favorite_border

Antibiotics aren’t supposed to be effective against viruses. But new evidence in mice suggests antibiotics may help fight norovirus, a highly contagious gastrointestinal virus, report scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

• share
• favorite_border

Innovative scoring system uses “Ann Arbor GVHD score” to better predict how patients will respond, minimize side effects

• share
• favorite_border

Research from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University demonstrates that a drug used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) helps radiation be more effective when it was administered to laboratory models with melanoma that had metastasized to the brain.

• share
• favorite_border

Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists were awarded a grant from the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund, part of the Center for Innovative Technology, to engineer a viral therapy for a difficult-to-treat brain cancer.

• share
• favorite_border

A multi-institutional research team led by Chris Dealwis from Case Western Reserve University has used the new IMAGINE instrument at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor to map an enzyme that could play an important role in anti-cancer drug development.

• share
• favorite_border

An international team of researchers has developed a drug delivery technique that utilizes graphene strips as “flying carpets” to deliver two anticancer drugs sequentially to cancer cells, with each drug targeting the distinct part of the cell where it will be most effective.

• share
• favorite_border

UCLA researchers have for the first time developed a method that defines many stages of reprogramming skin or blood cells into pluripotent stem cells. Study analyzed the reprogramming process at the single-cell level on a daily basis. Results determined that stages of cell change were the same across different reprogramming systems and cell types analyzed.

• share
• favorite_border

Salk scientists made a more effective diet pill

• share
• favorite_border

Cell biologists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have targeted telomeres with a small molecule called 6-thiodG that takes advantage of the cell’s ‘biological clock’ to kill cancer cells and shrink tumor growth.

• share
• favorite_border

Early use of available heart failure drugs slows the progressive decline in heart function before symptoms are apparent in boys and young men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), according to a new study published online by The Lancet Neurology.

• share
• favorite_border

/PRNewswire/ -- Tigercat Pharma, Inc. today announced positive results of a Phase 2 study evaluating the investigational oral NK-1 receptor antagonist VPD-737 (serlopitant), for the treatment of patients with severe, chronic itch who are unresponsive or inadequately responsive to the current standard of care, including topical steroids and antihistamines.

• share
• favorite_border

The organismal performance assay detects subtle toxic effects by subjecting mice to a relentless, Darwinian competition for food, shelter and mates. If there is a defect in any physiological system, it is more likely to stand out if test animals have to compete for resources.

• share
• favorite_border

Clinical recommendations discouraging the use of CYP2D6 gene testing to guide tamoxifen therapy in breast cancer patients are based on studies with flawed methodology and should be reconsidered, according to the results of a Mayo Clinic study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

• share
• favorite_border

If approved, Iomab-B should increase the number of patients eligible for curative bone marrow transplant (BMT, also known as HSCT) and improve clinical outcomes.

• share
• favorite_border

Assistant Dean Mike Millard, a member of the Oregon Governor's Task Force on Prescription Drug Abuse, can speak about current law and policy.

• share
• favorite_border

The receptor CCR5, targeted by HIV drugs, is also key in driving prostate cancer metastases, suggesting that blocking this molecule could slow prostate cancer spread