and a few drugs aiming to delay or altogether arrest its progression are advanced in an testing phase.
Early diagnosis and disease markers to test drugs quickly and efficiently are critical success factors.
#This Handheld Scanner Identifies Pills Determines Calories and More What if you could scan a piece of cheese to discover its caloric content
or a stray pill to figure out if it a vitamin or your pain medication? It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie,
This Handheld Scanner Identifies Pills Determines Calories and More SCIO is currently available for pre-order on the company website with as estimated ship date of July 2015.
Pfizer, Honyewell and Walmart have provided also training materials for the organization, which has trained EHS managers and suppliers from hundreds of companies.
#Tiny needles could target drugs to front of eye Georgia Institute of technology rightoriginal Studyposted by John Toon-Georgia Tech on November 14 2014microneedles almost too small to be seen with the naked eye may offer the best way
and could provide a new way to deliver drugs to specific areas within the eye relevant to these diseases.
By targeting the drugs only to specific parts of the eye instead of the entire eye researchers hope to increase effectiveness limit side effects
and reduce the amount of drug needed. Glaucoma affects about 2. 2 million people in the United states
To treat it researchers developed solid microneedles for delivering a dry drug compound that stops vessel growth.##
##The power of microneedles for treating eye conditions is the ability to target delivery of the drug within the eye##says Mark Prausnitz professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of technology.##
##We are developing different microneedle-based systems that can put the drug precisely into the part of the eye where it s needed.
##and could become the first treatment technique to use microneedles for delivering drugs to treat diseases in the front of the eye.
The first study shows that the microneedle therapy would inject drugs into space between two layers of the eye near the ciliary body
The drug is retained near the injection side because it is formulated for increased viscosity. In the animal model researchers were able to reduce intraocular pressure through the injections showing that their drug got to the proper location in the eye.
Because the injection narrowly targets delivery of the drug researchers were able to bring about a pressure reduction by using just one percent of the amount of drug required to produce a similar decline with eye drops.
The researchers hope to produce a time-release version of the drug that could be injected to provide therapy that lasts for months.##
##The ultimate goal for us would be for glaucoma patients visiting the doctor to get an injection that would last for the next six months until the next time the patient needed to see the doctor##Prausnitz says.##
and then inserted the coated needles near the point of an injury keeping them in place for approximately one minute until the drug dissolved into the cornea.
In an animal model placement of the drug halted the growth of unwanted blood vessels for about two weeks after a single application.
While the research reported in the journal did not include time-release versions of the drugs a parallel project is evaluating potential formulations that would provide that feature.
##Increasingly eye drops are not able to deliver drugs where they need to go so injections into the eye are becoming more common##says Henry F. Edelhauser emeritus professor of ophthalmology.##
and are not optimal for targeting drugs within the eye.####In contrast to the larger hypodermic needles the microneedles are tailored to penetrate the eye only as far as needed to deliver the drugs to internal spaces within the layers of the eye.
For the glaucoma drug for instance the needle is only about half a millimeter long which is long enough to penetrate through the sclera the outer layer of the eye to the supraciliary space.
Both potential treatments would require additional animal testing before human trials could begin. The National Eye Institute of the National institutes of health supported the research.
#Scientists grow norovirus stomach bug in a dish University of Florida rightoriginal Studyposted by Morgan Sherburne-Florida on November 13 2014researchers have grown for the first time a human norovirus in a cell culture dish taking a step toward developing medications to treat the stomach
Although a vaccine for these viruses is in clinical trials there is still no medication to combat them.
They are resistant to many common disinfectants and very little of the virus is needed to infect a host so a surface may still contain enough virus to infect a person even after it is cleaned.
and antiviral drug development.####Source: University of Floridayou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license l
Next the researchers plan to use the device to try out various cancer-fighting drugs within this device to get a better look at how the medications perform
and scan for infection for exampleâ##synthetic gene circuits are especially useful for detecting things like contaminants pesticides heavy metals and counterfeit drugs.##
##Freeze-drying is a pretty common thing to do in pharmaceuticals. If you freeze-dry a protein like insulin you can often re-constitute it
bandages that signal when a wound is infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria; or smart clothing that tells a runner she s getting dehydrated.##
#New antibiotic found in horse poop mushroom A fungus that grows on horse dung contains a protein that can kill bacteria.
The substance known as copsin has the same effect as traditional antibiotics but belongs to a different class of biochemical substances.
whereas traditional antibiotics are often non-protein organic compounds. The researchers led by Markus Aebi a mycology professor at ETH Zurich discovered the substance in the common inky cap mushroom Coprinopsis cinerea.
Further research demonstrated that the copsin produced by the mushroom is responsible for this antibiotic effect.
Whether copsin will one day be used as an antibiotic in medicine remains to be seen. This is by no means certain
and other naturally antibiotic substances for millions of years to protect themselves against bacteria. Why does this work for fungi
while humans have been using antibiotics in medicine for just 70 years with many of them already becoming useless due to resistance?
In addition to being used as an antibiotic in medicine it may also be possible to use copsin in the food industry as well.
One doctor sees another doctor prescribing a drug or ordering a test and she will catch
It s a surprisingly long road from Food and Drug Administration approval of a new drug or technique to doctors actually using the new drug in their practices notes Weiss whose research focuses on how to get doctors to adopt best practices.
While the use of such drugs in humans could be several years away the new discovery gives them a specific target to pursue.
but a drug-based approach would be simpler and could be administered as long as it takes to restore hearing.
#Staph bacteria gang up to outsmart antibiotics Vanderbilt University rightoriginal Studyposted by Leigh Macmillan-Vanderbilt on October 20 2014 Relatively harmless bacteria can turn deadly
One way that Staphylococcus aureus and other pathogens can become resistant to antibiotics is to change the way they generate energy
Current studies support the notion that antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria including methicillin-resistant (MRSA) strains can exchange nutrients with each other
if an infection becomes resistant to antibiotics then the resistant organisms appeared clonally meaning they're all genetically the same.
Next they tested the idea in a mouse model of the bone infection osteomyelitis. Antibiotic-resistant small colony variant S. aureus is the cause of chronic and difficult to treat osteomyelitis and also of lung infections in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF.
Our findings show that these antibiotic-resistant infections are not what we thought they were they're not a single strain of bacteria with a single lesion leading to the small colony variant phenotype.
When the drugs go away they start sharing resources again and get even tougher. We're now a little bit smarter about how these organisms are behaving in an infection which
Preventing the nutrient exchange for example may offer a new therapeutic strategy against these antibiotic-resistant organisms The National institutes of health supported the research.
We found a drug that could push this process forward making even more endothelial cells that help form blood vessels.##
The researchers picked one such experimental drug called RITA and used it to treat mice for a few days after cardiac injury.
The drug had dramatic results doubling the number of fibroblasts that turned into endothelial cells.
The researchers want to look for a drug that would activate the promoter for one of PTEN s close relative genes.
Once a patient is diagnosed with cancer caused by a PTEN mutation the patient could take the drug over-express the PTEN bench player gene
Somewhere there may be a backup system what we call redundancy that might be the basis for better identifying tumors
and possibly creating cancer-fighting drugs. You have another gene which might be able to step in for the broken gene to keep things normal and that s
#Topical antibiotics may raise pneumonia risk University of Melbourne rightoriginal Studyposted by David Scott-Melbourne on October 13 2014patients in hospital intensive care units have a higher risk of developing pneumonia
when they are treated with topical antibiotics. The findings contradict previously published research that topical antibioticsâ##medication applied to the patient s airwayâ##would decrease pneumonia rates.
Ventilator-associated pneumonia develops in approximately 20 percent of patients in intensive care units (ICUS) who are receiving prolonged medical ventilation.
However in the control groups of these published clinical trials of topical antibiotics in this patient group the pneumonia rates were as high as 40 percent.
Use of topical antibiotics increases the pneumonia risk in ICU patients by disrupting the balance of bacteria
not only in patients that received these antibiotics but also in control group patients also staying in the ICU.##
###Therefore it appears topical antibiotics used in an effort to prevent pneumonia in the ICU are a hazard
#Drug for parasitic worms fights diabetes in mice Rutgers rightoriginal Studyposted by Rob Forman-Rutgers on October 7 2014a modified form of a drug commonly used to eliminate intestinal parasites may hold the key to battling type
Researchers say it s important to find a suitable medication to correct the cause of the disease as quickly as possible
##The surgery can only be performed on highly obese people##says Victor Shengkan Jin associate professor of pharmacology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical school
It is also significant that the drug he used is modified a form of a medication that the FDA already approved for human use.
and found an approved drug that does in parasitic worms what we wanted to do in liver cells.##
##The modified form of the medication although itself is not a drug used in humans has an excellent safety profile in other mammalsâ##so very likely it would have a good safety profile in humans too.##
This kind of medication if shown to be effective could safely treat patients of all weights.
##We didn t know that the drug affects preosteoclasts nor did we understand how important preosteoclasts are in maintaining healthy bones##says study leader Xu Cao professor of orthopedic surgery at the Johns hopkins university School of medicine.##
Previous data including that from early clinical trials in humans indicated that the drug odanacatib decreases bone resorption by hobbling CTSK one of the enzymes used to resorb bone.
What came as a pleasant surprise was that the same drug also increased bone rebuilding.
The drug appears to slow down the maturation of preosteoclasts Cao says lengthening the time they secrete PDGF-BB before becoming osteoclasts
Odanacatib is produced by Merck & co. Inc. and has gone already through phase III clinical trials with good results Cao says.##
##It is unusual to see a single drug that decreases bone resorption and increases bone rebuilding at the same time##Cao says.##
#Why a deadly drug didn t hurt lab rat livers Scientists believe they ve solved the mystery of why a diabetes drug introduced in 1997 caused fatal liver failure in 63 patients.
Their discovery makes it likely that similar drug-related deaths can be prevented in the future. In 1997 troglitazone was approved for use in the United states as one of the first drugs designed to treat type 2 diabetes.
It was withdrawn from the market in 2000 after 63 people died from liver failure after taking it.
During human trials adverse effects from the drug were characterized as rare and relatively mild. There were some hints at the potential for liver damage
but they weren t enough to prevent approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Rats didn t have a problem handling the drug
and the human trials weren t large enough for the true risk of liver injury to become apparent says Paul Watkins coauthor of the study and professor of medicine and pharmacy at University of North carolina.
He is the director of the Hamner-UNC Institute for Drug Safety Sciences. Once the drug was given to a larger population that contained patients unable to properly process the drug people started to turn yellow
and die of liver failure. The research team at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy used DILISYM a computer program designed to predict how drugs will affect the liver.
The team combined information about troglitazone with data specific to the human liver generated in the lab of senior author Kim Brouwer a professor at the pharmacy school.
In a simulated population the model successfully predicted that rare patients would develop life-threatening liver injury
while also suggesting what factors make these patients susceptible. The team s findings are published online in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
The simulation we used was able to predict the effects that were seen in patients who actually took troglitazone
The model also predicted that rats respond differently to the drug than humans a critical insight as animal testing precedes human trials.
It turns out that animals do a poor job predicting human drug-induced liver injury.
Drug-induced liver injury is the most common reason drug-development programs are terminated. It is also the leading cause of regulatory actions that lead to failed
or stalled drug approvals market withdrawals usage restrictions and warnings to physicians Watkins says. Rare liver toxicity is now the major safety concern with new drugs
and can often be detected only after many thousands of patients have received treatment Watkins says. We believe that the application of DILISYM will greatly improve drug safety
while minimizing animal testing and reducing the costs of new medicines. The DILISYM software is the result of the DILI-sim Initiative a partnership between the Hamner-UNC Institute for Drug Safety Sciences
and fourteen major drug companies that shared data to develop a tool that can predict a drug s risk of injuring the liver.
Kyunghee Yang is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Hamner Institutes. Paul Watkins is chairman of the DILI-sim Scientific Advisory board.
Kim Brouwer is chair of the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provide a promising new target for antiviral therapies.
Most antiviral drugs work by deactivating viral proteins but viruses often evolve and become drug resistant.
avoid being destroyed by the body s antiviral response. The findings which appear in PLOS Pathogens provide knowledge that could help researchers treat the disease more effectively.
and infects cells it induces the production and release of interferonsâ proteins that raise the body s antiviral defense mechanisms.
This attaches to proteins in the cell that help in the production of antiviral proteins in response to interferons.
The results could also guide the refinement of blood-thinning drugs which are prescribed to millions to reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke.
The device could be on pharmacy shelves in 2016. The FDA-funded Atlantic Pediatric Device Consortium the Georgia Research Alliance Children's Healthcare of Atlanta the Georgia Center of Innovation for Manufacturing and the Global Center for Medical Innovation
and receive clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration. About one micron in diameter the particles were developed originally to be used on the battlefield by wounded soldiers who might self-administer them using a device about the size of a smartphone.
or more such drugs in just the 12 months preceding the survey The results are based on a nationally representative sample of some 1100 students enrolled full time in a 2-or 4-year college in spring 2013.
or near-daily basis in 2013 including one in every 11 males and one in every 34 females.
and narcotic drugs other than heroin with each of these three having about 5 percent of college students reporting any use in the prior 12 months.
The use of narcotic drugs other than heroin like Vicodin and Oxycontin peaked in 2006 with 8. 8 percent of college students indicating any past-year use without medical supervision.
Past-year use of these dangerous drugs by college students has declined since to 5. 4 percent in 2012 where it remained in 2013.
The use of some other illicit drugs by college students also has declined in the past decade including crack cocaine powder cocaine tranquilizers and hallucinogens other than LSD
These drugs include inhalants crack cocaine heroin methamphetamine bath salts GHB and ketamine. In general female college students (who are now in the majority) are less likely to use these drugs than are their male counterparts.
For example 40 percent of college males used marijuana in the past year compared to 33 percent of college females.
They also have quite similar rates of several specific drugs including past-year use of marijuana ecstasy hallucinogens other than LSD and extreme binge drinking.
and they have annual prevalence rates of use for several particularly dangerous drugs that are roughly two to three times as high as rates found among college students.
if detectedâ##both by medication and through a procedure that essentially resets the heart s electrical activityâ##many individuals with the condition will experience a reoccurrence.
#Insertable gel for women could deliver HIV drug Researchers have developed a vaginal suppository that loaded with the antiviral drug Tenofovir could help prevent the transmission of HIV and AIDS.
Due to socioeconomic and gender inequities women in some countries and cultures are not always in a position to negotiate regular condom use so a drug-dispersing suppository can protect against transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections during heterosexual intercourse
Women participating in the study at the Sensory Evaluation Center in Penn State s Department of Food science were presented with suppositoriesâ without the drug in a variety of sizes shapes and textures.
Understanding women s perception of the suppository and reasons behind their choices is a critical step in the development of the suppository as a vaginal drug-delivery system.
Zaveri also studied the release of Tenofovir from the suppositories in a simulated vaginal environment to ensure that the drug will be released once inserted in the body even in the presence of semen.
and use different methods to create drug-delivery products but not many focus on the end-user aspect of this she says.
The biomedical use of a food additive a material widely used in the food industry for its gelling thickening and stabilizing properties as a medium for a drug-delivery system is a novel idea
which appears in PLOS ONE Antiviral Research and most recently the July and September issues of Pharmaceutics c
#Drug combo heals wounds fast with less scarring Johns hopkins university rightoriginal Studyposted by Vanessa Mcmains-Johns Hopkins on August 28 2014doctors have stumbled onto a potential new use for two approved medications.
In mice and rats injecting the two drugs in combination speeds the healing of surgical woundsâ#by about one-quarter
##The wound healing potential of the two drugs was discovered incidentally while the researchers were working to prevent rejection of liver transplants.
One of the drugs AMD3100 is used generally to move stem cells from bone marrow to the bloodstream to be harvested
in addition to successfully preventing liver graft rejection in their study the drugs when used together seemed to improve wound healing in animals.
while those that received both drugs healed in nine days a reduction of 25 percent.
Those that received only one drug or the other recorded just a modest one-day improvement in healing time.
The researchers had similar findings in rats though the drug combination worked slightly better reducing healing time by 28 percent compared to saline.
Additionally they found that the wounds in animals that received the drug combination healed with less scar tissue and regrew skinâ##s hair follicles.
Further tests showed that the drugs work synergistically with AMD3100 pushing stem cells from bone marrow into the bloodstream
Though the study tested the drug combination only on surgical excisions the researchers say the beneficial effects also apply to burn injuries
On the basis of the reason selected they were alerted subsequently to reassess the need for the catheter
and out of the cell nucleus. The map reveals that the viral protein takes away the host protein s ability to carry an important immune signal into the nucleus. This signal helps activate the immune system s antiviral defenses
and activates the genes for hundreds of proteins involved in antiviral responses##Leung says.####But when VP24 is attached to some of these transporters STAT1 can t get into the nucleus.##The study shows that VP24 s action specifically prevents STAT1 transport.
and other researchers look for drugs to block VP24 and another Ebola protein VP35. The group includes researchers at the Icahn School of medicine at Mount sinai Washington University the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center Howard University and Microbiotix Inc. a Massachussetts biopharmaceutical company Source:
or take bottles receive medication and even as they are passed from one adoring relative to another.
or cesarean whether they had been given antibiotics their ages when stools were sampled and their dietsâ##influenced the pace but not the order of the progression.
by the time they turn four years old, even with therapeutic drugs. Researchers are now beginning to study why SAS is less severe in some dogs while causing severe symptoms in others.
They also are examining the genetic basis of SAS in the golden retriever, Rottweiler, and other dog breeds.
Pfizer Animal health training grant, and the Newfoundland Club of America supported the research, which appears online in the journal Human genetics r
if drugs are counterfeit Counterfeit drugs make up to one-third of the pharmaceutical drug market in some countries.
Fake drugs, which at best contain wrong doses and at worst are toxic, are thought to kill more than 700,000 people each year.
While less than 1 percent of the US pharmaceuticals market is believed to be counterfeit, it is a huge problem in the developing world. ne challenge in fighting counterfeiting is need the to stay ahead of the counterfeiters,
#Fabric dissolves to deliver HIV drug faster Bioengineers have developed a new way to protect women from HIV medicated,
The new method spins the drug into silklike fibers that quickly dissolve when in contact with moisture, releasing higher doses of the drug than possible with other topical materials such as gels or creams
discreet way to protect themselves from HIV infection by inserting the drug-loaded materials into the vagina before sex,
previously found that electrically spun cloth could be dissolved to release drugs. These new results build upon that research,
Oral pills are used in the US for people who are considered at risk for HIV infection,
and topical medications in the form of gels and films are just starting to be developed.
allowing the drug to dissolve and diffuse into the surrounding tissue. Called microbicides the drugs must be given as a large dose to be effective minutes before sex.
But these topical drugs haven done well in clinical trials, partly because they aren always easy for women to use.
Drugs in film form take at least 15 minutes to fully dissolve in the body, and the volume of gels must be large enough to deliver a full dose
but small enough to prevent leakage. These factors can make microbicides difficult for a woman to use before sex,
researchers says. he effectiveness of an anti-HIV topical drug depends partially on high-enough dosages and quick release,
Ball says. e have achieved higher drug loading in our material such that you wouldn need to insert a large amount of these fibers to deliver enough of the drug to be helpful.
and combined it with a drug, maraviroc, and other agents often used in pharmaceuticals that help a material become more water-soluble
and dissolve quicker. Maraviroc currently is used to treat symptoms of HIV for people who already have the virus. The syrupy substance is charged then with a high-voltage generator
so the researchers looked at different ingredients for the fiber that would allow for the highest concentration of drug with the fastest-possible release in the body.
which nearly 30 percent of the mass was composed of the drug itself. In topical gels
the drug makes up only about three percent of the total mass. By adjusting the ingredients in the fibers,
researchers were able to dissolve the drug in about six minutes, no matter how much drug mass was in the fiber.
which appears in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy l
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