yeast that can literally brew narcotic drugs. Achieving that, she knew, could open the door to the quick development of better medications of all sorts."
including oxycontin, codeine and morphine. Making the yeast took a herculean effort. The team took more than 20 genes from rats
and coaxed the cells to synthesize the drugs. Right now the yeast can brew only tiny, tiny amounts of the drugs.
You would have to drink thousands of liters of the"brew"to get one dose of hydrocodone,
Still, the genetically modified yeast strains have triggered a heated debate about how to regulate these organisms and the possibility of"home-brewing morphine.""
which is made easily from morphine or thebaine. Home-brewing, Oye says, could put more drugs on the street."
"Unfortunately, one of the implications, in my judgment, is that addicts would have easier access to something that threatens health in very serious ways,
home-brewed morphine is likely years away. It's not possible with the strains of yeast that Smolke has.
But Oye thinks U s. drug officials need to start planning now, before the lid of Pandora's box opens wide.
He recommends that the Drug Enforcement Administration start to track these microbes by"barcoding"them,
But the agency is worried also about large drug cartels.""It's concern that the technology will fall into the wrong hands,
And drug cartels already have large and steady supply of opioids from poppy production in Mexico and Afghanistan."
"We can't see the drug cartel making a 180-degree turn to start to exploit this particular market,
#Your Pill Is Printing: FDA Approves First 3-D-Printed Drug In a first, the Food and Drug Administration has given approval to a drug that is produced on a 3-D printer.
The pill, produced by Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, treats seizures. It's expected to hit the market in the first quarter of 2016.
NPR's Rob Stein reports for our Newscast unit:""The drug is called Spritam and is designed to treat seizures in people suffering from epilepsy.
It's a new version of a seizure medication that's been on the market for years."
"The new tablets are manufactured using 3-D printing, which creates objects by very precisely spewing out one layer of a substance on top of another. 3-D printing is being used to make all sorts of things these days."
The company that makes Spritam says the 3-D-printed version of the drug allows it to dissolve more quickly,
the drug's maker, is that it allows a high drug load up to 1, 000 mg to be delivered in a single dose.
The 3-D printing process creates a pill that has"a porous formulation that rapidly disintegrates with a sip of liquid,
yeast that can literally brew narcotic drugs. Achieving that, she knew, could open the door to the quick development of better medications of all sorts."
including oxycontin, codeine and morphine. Making the yeast took a herculean effort. The team took more than 20 genes from rats
and coaxed the cells to synthesize the drugs. Right now the yeast can brew only tiny, tiny amounts of the drugs.
You would have to drink thousands of liters of the"brew"to get one dose of hydrocodone,
The yeast could also make morphine more available in poor countries, where there's a terrible shortage of pain medicine,
Still, the genetically modified yeast strains have triggered a heated debate about how to regulate these organisms and the possibility of"home-brewing morphine.""
which is made easily from morphine or thebaine. Home-brewing, Oye says, could put more drugs on the street."
"Unfortunately, one of the implications, in my judgment, is that addicts would have easier access to something that threatens health in very serious ways,
home-brewed morphine is likely years away. It's not possible with the strains of yeast that Smolke has.
But Oye thinks U s. drug officials need to start planning now, before the lid of Pandora's box opens wide.
He recommends that the Drug Enforcement Administration start to track these microbes by"barcoding"them,
But the agency is worried also about large drug cartels.""It's concern that the technology will fall into the wrong hands,
And drug cartels already have large and steady supply of opioids from poppy production in Mexico and Afghanistan."
"We can't see the drug cartel making a 180-degree turn to start to exploit this particular market,
The Fraunhofer FIT will make the first public demonstration of the system alongside its ZETA imaging software that is used in drug research at the forthcoming BIOTECHNICA expo in Hanover, Germany, between October 6 8, 2015.
and thus can support researchers in a wide range of applications in drug research. The Single Molecule Detection Machine (SMDM) employs a highly sensitive confocal microscope
#3d Printed Pills Could Bring Bespoke Drugs to a Hospital Near You It a development that could spell the end of horse pills,
Yesterday, the FDA approved the first drug to be manufactured using 3d printing. In a buzzword-heavy press release that would make a venture capitalist swoon, Aprecia,
the company that makes Spritam, the newly approved drug, claims the technology allows high-dose pills to be made more porously,
allowing them to dissolve more quickly. The active ingredient in Spritam is levetiracetam, an existing anticonvulsant used to treat epilepsy that has been available as a generic in the U s. since 2008.
By creating a new smaller, more dissolvable pill packaging, Aprecia is clearly hoping to distinguish its product from the generics.
In the long term, though, 3d printing could offer much more than just tinier pills. Here BBC News:
Being able to 3d print a tablet offers the potential to create bespoke drugs based on the specific needs of patients,
rather than having a one product fits all approach, according to experts. or the last 50 years we have manufactured tablets in factories
Today, most bespoke drugs are formulated at specialized compounding pharmacies that are frequently miles away from the hospitals and clinics in
Researchers say the lab-on-chip device is a step toward creating quantum computers that could help design new drugs,
Integrated into an injection molding system, the device is capable of generating more than 1. 7 million bar code configurations on anything from cellphones to pills.
#Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Are No Match For Medieval Potion Bloodletting, mercury cures, holes drilled in the headany ancient medical remedies seem ill-advised based on our modern understanding of medicine.
But researchers recently found that a thousand-year-old Anglo-saxon treatment for eye infections works as an antibiotic against one of today most notorious bacteria, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA.
Some researchers have been looking into this type of communication interruption as a possible new way to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. e were astonished genuinely at the results of our experiments in the lab,
we could potentially have a pill to do just that. e
#New Japanese Glasses Block Facial recognition Computers are really, really good at recognizing faces. Refined through work on millions of uploaded and tagged faces at sites like Facebook and elsewhere,
like morphine or codeine, are important for medical purposes. The drugs have been around for millennia
however even today they are made still from poppy flowers, making the production of the drugs dependent on poppy farming.
Now, for the first time, researchers from Stanford university have been able to synthesize opioids from yeast cultures grown in the lab,
#Embedded 3d Barcodes To Ensure Pills Are Real A new kind of barcode could be built structurally into a pill or other product,
The FDA has designed also a device that uses UV light to scan pills and their packaging.
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had approved the drug Imlygic to treat late-stage melanoma on the skin and lymph nodes.
The drug, which relies upon a genetically engineered herpes virus to attack and kill the cancerous cells,
When the drug was injected into the cancerous sites over the course of six months, more than 16 percent of patients saw their lesions shrink.
according to Nature News. But a number of drugs using different viruses and to treat several types of cancer are already in clinical trials.
#Have your drug nano-delivered via microbubble"Colloidal delivery system "and"nanoparticle"are probably not terms you find yourself using in day-to-day interactions,
but for the Univ. of Cincinnati (UC)' s Yoonjee Park, assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Applied science biomedical engineering professor, these words are central to every conversation relating to her cutting edge research on drug delivery vehicles.
and how the drugs used to kill cancer cells also killed other parts of the body.
"If you inject the drug intravenously it can go anywhere and everywhere, which is why we get side effects like hair loss."
"She hoped to find a way of sending drugs only to the specific area of the body that needed the treatment rather than inadvertently treating
"Usually I use nanoparticles for drug delivery vehicles, and we can attach image and contrast agents to the nanoparticle to track the particle.
which makes a complex of the image and contrast agent with the drug itself.""In the course of time Park began to focus her efforts on those parts of the body that posed a significant challenge
and we can see the drug bio-distribution. So we can minimize the side effects before something happens."
"The drug delivery systems Park and Lin have designed can be filled with the prescribed drug and inserted a single time into the spinal disc.
the vehicles can be popped"to systematically release the drug as needed. This technique allows for minimized invasive treatment,
Lin says that his favorite part of his collaboration with Park has been that studying this drug delivery system has much wider applications
Preliminary testing of the drug delivery procedure is being performed at the Laboratory Animal Medical Services (LAMS) facility on UC's East Campus. Currently Park is in the preclinical phase,
Because this is a new application for an old drug the two expect less challenges from the FDA than
if they were trying to introduce an entirely new drug to the market. Thankfully UC provides all of the necessary facilities, equipment,
"says Park of her attempt to create an effective drug delivery vehicle, and she herself is no stranger to this work,
Her Phd at Purdue University and her research at Boston's Massachusetts institute of technology were dedicated both to studying particle stabilization to avoid clogging arteries with the nanoparticles and drug delivery vehicles;
and learning how drugs could be released time at the proper time. With the support of the Univ. of Cincinnati behind her efforts, Park hopes to be able to overcome the barriers that have slowed others,
The researchers note that other compounds could also be added to release drug molecules, make a robot glow
#Experimental treatment regimen effective against HIV PROTEASE inhibitors are a class of antiviral drugs that are used commonly to treat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Scientists at the Univ. of Nebraska Medical center designed a new delivery system for these drugs that,
when coupled with a drug developed at the Univ. of Rochester School of medicine and Dentistry, rid immune cells of HIV and kept the virus in check for long periods.
While current HIV treatments involve pills that are taken daily, the new regimens'long-lasting effects suggest that HIV treatment could be administered perhaps once or twice per year.
Nebraska researcher Howard E. Gendelman designed the investigational drug delivery system so-called"nanoformulated"protease inhibitor.
The nanoformulation process takes a drug and makes it into a crystal, like an ice cube does to water.
Next, the crystal drug is placed into a fat and protein coat, similar to what is done in making a coated ice-cream bar.
The coating protects the drug from being degraded by the liver and removed by the kidney.
a new drug discovered in the laboratory of UR scientist Harris A.("Handy")Gelbard M d.,Ph d,
URMC-099 boosted the concentration of the nanoformulated drug in immune cells and slowed the rate at
"The chemical marriage between URMC-099 and antiretroviral drug nanoformulations could increase drug longevity, improve patient compliance,
whether the drugs could be administered safely together. Much to Gelbard and Gendelman's surprise, URMC-099 increased the effectiveness of the nanoformulated drug."
"Our ultimate hope is that we're able to create a therapy that could be given much less frequently than the daily therapy that is required today,
"If a drug could be given once every six months or longer that would greatly increase compliance,
particularly for patients who take anticoagulant drugs to thin their blood. t interesting that you can take something so deadly
an anticoagulant drug. rom a clinical perspective, that far and away the most important issue here, Hartgerink said. here a lot of different things that can trigger blood coagulation,
Originally discovered as an antiviral system in bacteria, CRISPR/Cas9 is one of the hottest topics in genetic research today.
and change how different people respond to drugs. But only if the CRISPR technique is specific enough.
and how they vary between cell types, during development or in response to drug treatment."
"Current methods for controlling gene switches, including drugs used in clinical trials, change the activity of many switches across the genome simultaneously,
but slow progress is being made toward developing a drug treatment, "said Barbara Sahakian from the department of psychiatry at Cambridge university."
demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have failed so far. And) because the game is interesting,
and Drug Administration has approved, for the first time a drug that uses 3d printing technology, paving the way for potential customization of drugs to suit patients'needs.
The drug, made by privately held Aprecia Pharmaceuticals Co, was approved for oral use as a prescription adjunctive therapy in the treatment of epilepsy,
the company said on Monday. Spritam uses Aprecia's"Zipdose"technology, a delivery system that creates premeasured doses
which disintegrate in the mouth with a sip of liquid. 3d printing could help companies make products"to the specifications of an individual patient rather than (take a) one-size-fits-all kind of approach,"
with a drug targeting its toxins rather than its life. C. difficile is responsible for more than 250,000 hospitalizations
By not aiming to kill the pathogen with antibiotics, scientists were able to avoid wiping out sizeable numbers of beneficial gut microbes.
the drug used has already been tested in clinical trials to treat other, unrelated conditions. So the researchers believe it could be moved rapidly into human trials for the treatment of C. difficile, as well.
The findings constitute the first-ever demonstration of a small molecule's ability to disarm C. difficile without incurring the collateral damage caused by antibiotics."
"Unlike antibiotics--which are both the front-line treatment for C. difficile infection and, paradoxically, possibly its chief cause--the drug didn't kill the bacteria,
"Bogyo said. Instead, it disabled a toxin C. difficile produces, preventing intestinal damage and inflammation and allowing the gut to be repopulated by healthy bacteria that had been decimated by earlier rounds of antibiotic treatment,
as well as by C. difficile-induced intestinal changes. Infection often recurs About one in 20 people,
chemotherapy or antibiotics that wipe out their"lawn"of beneficial intestinal microbes, C. difficile can get a foothold
the infection recurs despite antibiotic treatment. When it does succeed, antibiotics in eliminating it only 25 percent of the time.
About 7 percent of infected people die within 30 days of diagnosis. Treatments for C. difficile infection include fecal transplants,
beneficial bacteria the way antibiotics do said Bogyo. That would lay the groundwork for the"good guys"to make a comeback.
Realizing they might have a potentially effective drug on their hands, Bogyo and his colleagues brought in Sonnenburg,
After rounds of multiple antibiotics, the researchers introduced a virulent, multi-drug-resistant C. difficile strain and then began oral dosing with ebselen.
They observed a nearly complete block of inflammation and damage to colon tissue as the result of ebselen treatment.
They realized that the sugar molecule--oncofetal chondroitin sulfate--could be a target for anticancer drugs,
and attached an anticancer drug to it, it would bind with the oncofetal protein in the cancer,
delivering the drug to the tumor.""Scientists have spent decades trying to find biochemical similarities between placenta tissue and cancer,
"They administer drugs which are also very fast-acting, but because it's free in the blood stream everywhere it causes side effects like bleeding
"The drug-loaded nanocapsule is coated with an antibody that specifically targets activated platelets, the cells that form blood clots,
releasing the clot-busting drug. We are effectively hijacking the blood clotting system to initiate the removal of the blockage in the blood vessel."
and it can spot recent drug use and whether or not the person has recently been in contact with guns and explosives.
or pilots could be tested for recent drug use. Further down the line, Arrogen is hoping to be able to use its finely tuned procedures to create full prints out of partial ones,
They discovered that a certain type of enzyme can turn glucose sugars into morphine and were able to successfully express it in a simple form of genetically engineered yeast.
And synthetic versions of THC are currently available in pill form to treat several side effects of having HIV or chemotherapy,
drugs that target the so-called IL-1/IL1RAP pathway already exist for the treatment of various inflammatory conditions,
In addition to Tu's malaria drug, Artemisinin, China has pioneered also development of solar and wind technology, and is working on trains that will reach 500 km h.
The next step is to apply the findings to research that is already investigating how new drugs could inhibit PRC2 enzyme activity According to Liu,
researchers are looking at the potential of such drugs as a treatment for several types of lymphoma."
and we believe our work will shed light on these and other studies in drug development by offering insights into how PRC2 works at the atomic level,
#Future antibiotic-making kit for amateurs? Kit could one day Be led by widely available Professor Jeffrey Bode of the Institute of Transformative Biomolecules at Nagoya University in Japan,
and safely to discover novel antibiotics. Microorganisms can synthesise mixtures of complex organic molecules, such as antibiotics, from simple organic building blocks by fermentation.
Inspired by this approach, Professor Bode and his colleagues found that they could make large mixtures of biologically active compounds from a few chemical ingredients in just a few hours,
and identify new antibacterial or antifungal molecules to treat plant diseases.""By combining a handful of molecules in a variety of ways,
the researchers tested for the first time to pre-treat undifferentiated mouse embryonic stem cells with mitomycin C a drug already prescribed to treat cancer.
"This simple strategy of shortly exposing pluripotent stem cells to an anticancer drug turned the transplant safer,
Originally discovered as a natural antiviral system in bacteria, researchers have hijacked the system over the past few years
and how it relates to disease or response to drug therapies.""Gersbach added, "Not only can you start to answer those questions,
#Alternating antibiotics could make resistant bacteria beatable Researchers from the University of Exeter has shown that the use of'sequential treatments'--using alternating doses of antibiotics--might offer effective treatment against bacterial infection.
Crucially, the research also demonstrates this technique for administering treatment also reduces the risk of the bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics,
and so maintaining the long-term effectiveness of the drugs. The collaborative international research, led by Professor Robert Beardmore from the University of Exeter
The research indicates that drug treatments with two antibiotics can be designed to kill bacteria at dosages that would ordinarily cause rapid development of drug resistance and sustained bacterial growth,
sequential treatments could deal with the bacteria, even when much higher doses of single drugs or mixtures of two drugs failed to do so."
bacterial population densities and drug resistance,"said lead author, Professor Beardmore.""As we demonstrate, it is possible to reduce bacterial load to zero at dosages that are said usually to be sub lethal and,
therefore, are assumed to select for increased drug resistance.""The researchers also discovered that, although sequential treatments didn't suppress the rise of all drug resistance mutations in the bacteria,
one drug would'sensitize'the bacteria to the second drug, and therefore reduce the risk of resistance occurring.
Study co-author Dr Ayari Fuentes-Hernandez said:""Research has concentrated for decades on synergistic drug cocktails.
We believe'sequential synergies'might be just as potent if we look for them, this research will
therefore be of interest to the pharma and dwindling antibiotic discovery communities.""While bacteria are masters at adapting to antibiotic challenge,
this research suggests that there is a way to use this adaptation against them. The fluctuating environments created by well-designed sequential treatments can sensitize bacteria
and render them susceptible to concentrations of antibiotics that would normally induce drug resistance and continued existence.
when using drug doses below their maximal potency. She said:""One outcome of this highly surprising result will be to set in motion a series of studies to determine ways of using antibiotics not only in combination,
but sequentially and with the potential for lower dosages than is thought currently possible
#Biologists identify brain tumor weakness The study, led by researchers from the Whitehead Institute and MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, found that a subset of glioblastoma tumor cells is dependent on a particular enzyme that breaks down the amino acid glycine.
who are now seeking potential drug compounds that could do just that t
#Study on new treatment for prostate cancer Published in The british Journal of Cancer (BJC), the study is the first time low temperature plasmas (LTPS) have been applied on cells grown directly from patient tissue samples.
"The new information learned from these types of studies could assist in identifying pathogen targets for drug development,
can also be tested for drug discovery using our strategy.""The research team evaluated about 6,
000 compounds from both the KU Chemical Methodologies and Library Development Center and the Food and Drug Administration in a process known as"High Throughput Screening,"hunting for compounds that obstruct Hur's interface with healthy
and could help scientists design more effective drugs to counteract cancer's hallmark trait, uncontrolled cellular growth."
Learning the specific genetic cause of symptoms is a key step in finding new therapeutic drugs that could treat the patient's disease.
The development of a drug based on this discovery is a possibility, although not a certainty,
and the road to such a drug is long and far from simple
#Researchers test smartphones for earthquake warning The study, led by scientists at the U s. Geological Survey
and could provide a potential new drug target for prostate cancer, "Franceschi said.""It could also be a potential biomarker to discriminate between fast and slow growing tumors."
or for transporting lethal drugs into the cancer cells. Since the protein is not found in all of the cells of our body,
The findings from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts institute of technology could bolster efforts to develop the next generation of antiviral treatments.
This feature also helps them become resistant to antiviral drugs. But scientists have developed therapeutic antiviral agents for HIV
Hepatitis C, and influenza using a strategy called lethal mutagenesis. This strategy seeks to extinguish viruses by forcing their already high mutation rates above an intolerable threshold.
But together their research teams were able to fruitfully undertake one of the first 2d infrared spectroscopic studies of the therapeutic mechanism of an antiviral drug."
including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels. Scientists with the U s. Department of energy (DOE)' s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria
The yields of target chemical molecules produced from the acetate were also encouraging--as high as 26-percent for butanol, a fuel comparable to gasoline, 25-percent for amorphadiene, a precursor to the antimaleria drug artemisinin,
#Electronic micropump to deliver treatments deep within the brain Drugs constitute the most widely used approach for treating brain disorders.
However, many promising drugs failed during clinical testing for several reasons: Epilepsy is a typical example of a condition for
which many drugs could not be commercialised because of their harmful effects, when they might have been effective for treating patients resistant to conventional treatments.
whether these are ions or drugs. When an electrical current is applied to it, the flow of electrons generated projects the molecules of interest toward the target area.
in order to activate the pump to inject the drug at just the right moment. It may therefore be possible to control brain activity where
In addition to epilepsy, this state-of-the-art technology, combined with existing drugs, offers new opportunities for many brain diseases that remain difficult to treat at this time e
They also added two other drugs that temporarily inhibited key biochemical pathways associated with the pluripotent state of the stem cells.
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