could lead to improved drug testing Fingerprints carry a marker of cocaine use, scientists have claimed,
in a discovery that they hope will create a new and much easier form of drug testing.
Chemical indicators that come out of the breakdown of the drug are carried on fingerprints, researchers at the University of Sussex say.
there is no proven drug therapy for treating losses in episodic memory, which has led scientists to find ways of training the brain through computer-based games. e need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory,
but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment, Professor Sahakian said. o this proof-of-concept study is important
because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have failed so far. Because the game is interesting
while a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for life-threatening infectious diseases experienced a 5, 000 percent overnight increase.
Rodelis Therapeutics acquired the rights to TB drug cycloserine in August, and subsequently raised the price from $500 for 30 capsules to $10,
The day after the price hike, Rodelis agreed to return the drug patent to its former owner, the nonprofit Chao Center for Industrial Pharmacy and Contract Manufacturing,
as the drug has cost the Chao Center roughly $10 million since it acquired its rights in 2007.
Turing CEO Martin Shkreli announced the company had agreed to lower the price of the drug to a point that is ore affordable,
Turing price hike on an old drug is indicative of a growing business trend in pharma where new companies buy old,
generic drugs that are mainstays of rare treatments and turn them into high-priced specialty drugs.
In Turing case, the company switched from selling the drug in drugstores to tightly controlled distribution,
making it harder for generic competitors to get access to the drug. Another strategy companies can employllegallys market manipulation.
and manufacturing a drug. Multiple studies in the past few years have concluded that only one-third of prescription drugs make a profit for the developing company.
And those drugs are often ones for popular non-life threatening issues (think Viagra) rather than common illnesses like high blood pressure and asthma.
The effect on generic drugs Generic drugs are intended to serve as the national policy solution to high prescription drug prices.
Traditionally, when a generic enters the field, drug prices decrease by 80 to 90 percent for oral prescriptions.
For specialty infused/injected drugs, prices usually decrease about 60 to 80 percent. In the last five years
making them among the drugs that saw the highest increase last year. And given that six of every seven prescriptions filled in the U s. is for generic medications
the asthma drug Albuterol sulfate went up more than 3, 400 percent and the antibiotic Coxycycline jumped 6, 300 percent.
and one out of five skipped scheduled doses. For generic drugs, experts place the price blame on aging production facilities, shortages of ingredients and, most importantly, competition.
Drugs in the generic specialty (infused/injected) market can require more specialized equipment and knowledge to satisfy regulatory processes.
Professor of Hematology/Oncology at the University of Chicago, there are just not enough players in the generic specialty drug market that have the capability to manufacture these drugs.
On top of that, due to an abundance of mergers and acquisitions in the past 15 years, the generic specialty drug market is essentially a monopoly
or oligarchy. e need more generic manufacturers to be willing to make older infused/injected drugs
because the more entry we have into the generic specialty drug market, the more we can expect price cuts,
or three manufacturers willing to manufacture these drugs in sizable quantities would naturally break the monopoly
While there may be multiple labels for one drug, there is actually only one manufacturer contract manufacturer that is making the drug for everyone to slap their own label on. e know this is an issue because of drug shortages,
said Conti. hortages appear to be linked to drugs that have very tight ties to contract manufacturing.
Drug shortages not only affect customers and prices but also R&d. If the drug in question is the backbone of a specific therapy,
laboratories need increased access to confirm efficacy and carry out additional analysis. Often, these drugs act as the comparative drugs in clinical trials.
Another drug for the specific ailment cannot be produced without first evaluating its effectiveness in a clinical trial,
which can prove difficult without access to the current gold standard. Conti and her team studied the launch price of new oncology drugs from 1996 to 2012.
They concluded that approximately one-fourth to one-third of price increases were related to the quality of drugs becoming better.
As for the rest of the price inflation it a tale as old as time. here is this natural ecology of price where the market appears to be signaling they are willing to pay higher prices,
companies know they can price their drug higher than previous years just because the ambient mood for process has changed,
Drugs receive a 20-year patent life from the date of filing on the first molecule.
While it varies by drug, in some cases manufacturers only have eight to nine years of patent protection left by time the drug finally enters the market.
Given the expense of R&d, that may not be enough time for manufacturers to recoup their costs.
not making it shorter. atent protection is one of the ways government facilitates innovation in drugs,
and market the drug and the original manufacturer would never recoup the costs. A situation like that can only lead to one thingnvestors dropping out of pharma
if they are proven once theye gone head to head with other drugs out there,
and increase interest in developing biologic drugs, Holroyd told Laboratory Equipment. hat is an area where there is limited competition even
when the drug if off patent because biosimilar pathways are still at an early stage.
Now, however, it has fallen under scrutiny as drug prices continue to rise across the nation. The big deal with Medicare Part D is this:
Most other countries give the government direct saynd most other countries have significantly lower drug prices than the U s. So,
The drug program which covers 37 million seniors, has come in $350 billion under budget with a 90 percent satisfaction rating.
pharmaceutical companies could be left off drug formularies, denying seniors access to many medicines, said Thrope. nd,
there were 18 Alzheimer drugs in development. Now, there are 82. Additionally, the number of diabetes drugs in development jumped from 34 to 142,
and 29 arthritis drugs in the pipeline became 92. Thorpe insists that prescription drugs are not just about price. he most useful way to look at
The difference between the U s. and other OCED nations is sizehe U s. is responsible for approximately 50 percent of total drug spend in the world.
said Conti. efore drugs get produced, the payers say es we want themand we will pay the high costs for R&d.
and say ow we want the lowest price possible for this drug and as your majority purchaser,
but for a different reason than other experts. f we can pay for drugs without putting the burden on our children
particularly for patients who take anticoagulant drugs to thin their blood.""It's interesting that you can take something so deadly
It has also been used as a diagnostic tool to determine blood-clotting time in the presence of heparin, an anticoagulant drug."
They say the mini-kidneys offer a ways to develop and test drugs for kidney disease.
and Women Hospital in Boston and is now an assistant professor of medicine in the nephrology division at the University of Washington. nswering this question was important for understanding the potential of mini-kidneys for clinical kidney regeneration and drug discovery.
better ways to perform linical trials in a dishto test drugs and therapies that might work in humans.
#Model Could Predict Drug's Side effects Researchers at the University of California, San diego have developed a model that could be used to predict a drug's side effects on different patients.
The proof of concept study is aimed at determining how different individuals will respond to a drug treatment
and could help assess whether a drug is suitable for a particular patient based on measurements taken from the patient's blood."
"We're not just interested in predicting the efficacy of a drug, but its side effects as well,"said Bernhard Palsson, the Galetti Professor of Bioengineering at the Jacobs School of engineering at UC San diego."
"Side effects are personalized very. Two different people can take the same drug, but one person might experience side effects
while the other doesn't."Palsson and his team published their new study in the journal Cell Systems."
"There needs to be a good way to obtain data about a drug's side effects before exposing a lot of people to the drug.
Researchers said that this predictive model would be extremely useful for pharmaceutical companies during the drug development stage.
For example, pharmaceutical companies could conduct predictive screenings for drugs before clinical trials and determine which groups of patients would experience side effects and
which ones wouldn't. The model predicts how variations in different people's genes impact how they metabolize a drug.
Researchers used data from different people's genotypes and metabolism to build personalized models that simulate how a drug will affect a particular set of cells in the body."
In this study, researchers focused on modeling drug side effects on red blood cells. Palsson and his team were interested in red blood cells
Also, the red blood cell provides a simple platform for researchers to find health markers that are related to a drug's side effects.
a drug used to treat hepatitis C, while other individuals did not. A side effect of ribavirin is that it causes anemia--a condition characterized by a decrease in red blood cell levels--in approximately 8 to 10 percent of patients."
and predict what will potentially happen to any particular patient on this drug over time,
because the liver is where the majority of drugs are metabolized and where many drug side effects are manifested d
#Paging'CSI':'Microbiome analysis may be the new fingerprint In forensic science, fingerprints and DNA are beginning to look old-school.
with some caveats The Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules Tuesday that would allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood in the U s. for the first time in decades.
the way poppy crops are--allowing millions of people around the world who do not have sufficient access to painkilling drugs to get the medications they need.
which is a drug and a major component in Vicodin. Smolke said the purpose of producing hydrocodone was to show that yeast can be engineered to create a compound that a plant doesn't have the cellular machinery to produce.
because any given drug or drug combination does not work the same for all patients.
The device can be used to inject multiple drugs into tumors that are close to the surface of a person's skin.
First, the needles are loaded with drugs, pressed into the tumor and then withdrawn, with each needle leaving behind a columnlike trail of a drug that spans the full depth of the tumor.
and examine the cells to see the effect of each drug whether it killed the tumor cells,
whether a certain drug or set of drugs will be more effective.""Ordinarily, when I write a prescription,
if the cancer is resistant"to the drug that's being prescribed, said Dr. James Olson,
The device could also be a boon to drug development, as it allows for controlled experiments that don't require flooding a patient's system with experimental chemotherapy drugs,
Each tube can contain a different drug, and the device can carry up to 30 drugs, according to the researchers'report,
also published today in Science Translational Medicine. Unlike CIVO the cylinder is designed to be implanted into the tumor,
and then diffusion allows the drugs to move from the tubes into the surrounding cancerous tissue.
to see which drugs worked better or which ones didn't work at all.""It's a way to predict
whether the patient will respond to the drug or not,"said Robert Langer, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering at MIT who is one of the senior authors on the report.
Olson said the ability to test out drugs using such devices could make chemotherapy more comfortable for patients
whether certain drugs will work for a given patient. That would make it less likely that patients would have to endure ineffective chemo treatments with all of their associated side effects
Even knowing that no drug will help a patient could be a good thing, he said,
"Some drugs make patients sick, "he said.""It would be great if we could do nothing more than prevent that."
they often needed drugs to keep them sedated and prevent them from moving. They all had placed breathing tubes in their necks,
causing some people to speculate that a drug based on the hormone could be used as a treatment for obesity.
in order to understand which genes make a drug less or more effective in killing the cancer.
Petri merely substituted E. histolytica for a drug. The scientists found, to their surprise, that silencing the genes that normally let potassium flow out of the cell could keep the cells alive.
Drugs that do the same thing might be used to slow the damage caused by E. histolytica
"The challenge with developing drugs that target ion channels"such as potassium channels is that these channels are found all over the body,
"In 2012, other scientists discovered that the rheumatoid arthritis drug auranofin was as effective as metronidazole in killing E. histolytica in laboratory samples.
in order to understand which genes make a drug less or more effective in killing the cancer.
The 10 Most Diabolical and Disgusting Parasites Petri merely substituted E. histolytica for a drug.
Drugs that do the same thing might be used to slow the damage caused by E. histolytica
"The challenge with developing drugs that target ion channels"such as potassium channels is that these channels are found all over the body,
"In 2012, other scientists discovered that the rheumatoid arthritis drug auranofin was as effective as metronidazole in killing E. histolytica in laboratory samples.
the new insights could provide a more detailed look at the workings of drugs such as chemotherapeutic agents,
"This is because the action of drug molecules relies on them recognizing a specific molecular shape much like a key fits a particular lock,
or target the release of medicine locked in acoustically activated drug capsules, said study co-author Bruce Drinkwater,
#First 3d printed Drug Approved by FDA Youl rarely see medication news on the pages of Medgadget,
but a newly FDA approved drug has raised our eyebrows because of how it produced. Aprecia Pharmaceuticals has developed a way of producing individually dosed tablets that dissolve on contact with liquid.
The drug in powder form is placed on a surface and a drop of luethat makes it stick together is placed on top.
More drug dust is sprayed on top of the result and the process is repeated until the correct amount of drug is embedded within the tablet.
Each tablet is extremely porous and breaks down once in contact with a liquid, so even kids
#Use of Ultrasound to Promote Faster Healing of Wounds Sometimes discoveries in science are not about the development of new medical devices or drugs,
the treatment doesn carry the risk of side effects that are associated often with drug treatmentssays the lead author of the study, Dr. Mark Bass.
an associate professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery, has developed essentially smarter immune cells.
which might make it a viable drug candidate. The initial study did not show that any toxic by-products were created in the blood.
Ideally, a drug made from the little Pac-Man enzyme would be paired with other tools
and get the drugs to the damaged vessels, explained Christian Kastrup, a biomedical engineer at the University of British columbia. t similar to when a grenade goes off
#Patch Releases Drugs When Stretched A team of investigators from North carolina State university and the University of North carolina at Chapel hill have designed a novel drug release technology that relies on a stretchable elastomer
and drug loaded nanoparticles to unload medication when the skin flexes and contracts. The idea is that this kind of approach can deliver drugs transdermally only when needed.
For example, people with arthritis may be able to get pain relieving drugs during walks in doses that are proportional to how many steps are taken.
The patches consist of an elastomer that has tiny capsules throughout its surface each filled with drug loaded nanoparticles.
The nanoparticles are designed to slowly release a medication into the capsules where they reside. The capsules themselves are not impermeable,
but will let compounds through when enough pressure is applied to them. This pressure comes from stretching of the elastomer film,
and compresses them to release the drugs. Microneedles placed below each capsule allow the drugs to pass into the skin.
The combination of the mechanisms lets the nanoparticles load the capsules with a small amount of a medication and release it into the skin immediately on demand d
This life saving treatment could be administered by paramedics in emergency situations without the need for specialised equipment as is currently the case. ee created a nanocapsule that contains a clot-busting drug.
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,
Professor Frank Caruso from the Melbourne School of engineering said the targeted drug with its novel delivery method can potentially offer a safer alternative with fewer side effects for people suffering a heart attack
or suffer a stroke every year. bout half of the people who need a clot-busting drug can use the current treatments
researchers have tried already out hundreds of drugs, each requiring preclinical and clinical testing with live subjects.
One of the easiest ways to speed up the drug development process is to simply perform it outside of the living body (e g.,
This approach will eventually provide more effective preclinical selection of drug candidates for the subsequent long-term and expensive clinical trial.
Researchers from the Laboratory of Nanooptics and Plasmonics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology-MIPT (Russia) have devised a novel type of graphene oxide (GO) based biosensor that could potentially significantly speed up the process of drug development.
which in future may enable the development of new drugs and vaccines against many dangerous diseases including HIV,
All this can be used efficiently for new drug discovery and validation. Widespread introduction of this method into preclinical trials will completely change the pharmaceutical industry.
With SPR sensors we just need to estimate the interaction between the drug and targets on the sensing surface,
and can be used for analysis of chemical reactions with small drug molecules. An important advantage of the new GO based sensor chips is their simplicity
and low-cost fabrication compared to sensor chips that are already commercially available. ur invention will help in drug development against viral and cancer diseases.
The achievement was made possible by a new generation of drug-containing coating applied to the inner surface of the vessel.
The lifetime of such grafts is determined often by the amount of drug stored within the graft,
The system, developed by the researchers, is based on the entrapment of the drug inside a porous protective shell,
You just need to take the right kind of drug. For example, after the implantation of an artificial ureter, urease crystals often start to grow inside
It is possible to apply a similar drug-containing coating that dissolves urease. The same approach may be used for kidney or liver surgery,
It's a major step forward in creating a quantum computer to solve problems such as designing new drugs
#Targeted drug delivery with these nanoparticles can make medicines more effective: Nanoparticles wrapped inside human platelet membranes serve as new vehicles for targeted drug delivery The research,
led by nanoengineers at the UC San diego Jacobs School of engineering, was published online Sept. 16 in Nature.""This work addresses a major challenge in the field of nanomedicine:
targeted drug delivery with nanoparticles, "said Liangfang Zhang, a nanoengineering professor at UC San diego and the senior author of the study."
platelet-mimicking nanoparticles can directly provide a much higher dose of medication specifically to diseased areas without saturating the entire body with drugs."
and release their drug payloads specifically to these sites in the body. Enclosed within the platelet membranes are made nanoparticle cores of a biodegradable polymer that can be metabolized safely by the body.
The nanoparticles can be packed with many small drug molecules that diffuse out of the polymer core and through the platelet membrane onto their targets.
makes platelet membranes extremely useful for targeted drug delivery, researchers said. Platelet copycats at work In one part of this study, researchers packed platelet-mimicking nanoparticles with docetaxel,
a drug used to prevent scar tissue formation in the lining of damaged blood vessels, and administered them to rats afflicted with injured arteries.
because they can focus treatment on the bacteria locally without spreading drugs to healthy tissues
or water and therapeutic drug monitoring at home, a feature which could drastically improve the efficient of various class of drugs and treatments a
#Efforts to Improve Properties of Body Implants Using Nanocoatings Yield Positive Results Despite the high performance of metallic implants, including titanium and its alloys, in human body,
and help design new drug therapies against pathogens by targeting enzymes that interact with DNA."
and that has a ton of implications--from understanding how life works to drug design,
or find protein properties that would be ideal targets for drug therapies.""For example, viral genes code for their own proteins that process their DNA,
#Milestone single-biomolecule imaging technique may advance drug design Knowing the detailed shape of biomolecules such as proteins is essential for biological studies and drug discovery.
"Longchamp noted the technique would also open the door for"rational drug design,"an inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target.
Better knowledge about the individual structures of those target proteins can help scientists develop more effective drugs.
"We knew nano diamonds were of interest for delivering drugs during chemotherapy because they are largely nontoxic and non-reactive,
Iranian researchers from Materials and Energy Research center (MERC) succeeded in the production of a type of biocompatible nanocomposite with the ability to carry drugs,
The vast majority of drugs are considered small molecules, as are many important biological research tools.
Making those molecules is a major barrier to drug discovery, Burke says. oing real atomistic modifications to transform nature's starting points into actual medicines is really,
#Spherical nucleic acids set stage for new paradigm in nanomedicine drug development A research team led by Northwestern University nanomedicine expert Chad A. Mirkin
and Sergei Gryaznov of Aurasense Therapeutics is the first to show spherical nucleic acids (SNAS) can be used as potent drugs to effectively train the immune system to fight disease,
"The ability to selectively trigger the immune response with spherical nucleic acids presents a whole new way of thinking about drug development,
"Once developed fully, SNAS will lay the foundation for developing an entire new pipeline of drugs to treat a range of diseases, from psoriasis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis to lymphoma, bladder cancer and prostate cancer."
"The beauty of the approach is that a very small amount of drug does a tremendous amount of work,
"The SNAS trigger the immune response and, without more drug, additional cells are trained to behave the same way as the initial cells.
while also creating new opportunities for graduate students to use the technique for research in materials science and drug delivery at UNC and NCSU.
and are working on novel applications in drug delivery and other areas.""In addition to using new materials,
Selective drug transport verified in human tissue for the first time The Munich scientists have developed nanocarriers that only release the carried drugs in lung tumour areas.
were able to show nanoparticles'selective drug release to human lung tumour tissue for the first time. Tumour specific proteins were used to release drugs from the nanocarriers Tumour tissue in the lung contains high concentrations of certain proteases,
which are enzymes that break down and cut specific proteins. The scientists took advantage of this by modifying the nanocarriers with a protective layer that only these proteases can break down,
a process that then releases the drug. Protease concentrations in the healthy lung tissue are too low to cleave this protective layer
"Using these nanocarriers we can very selectively release a drug such as a chemotherapeutic agent specifically at the lung tumour,"reports research group leader Meiners."
"We observed that the drug's effectiveness in the tumour tissue was 10 to 25 times greater compared to
when the drugs were used on their own. At the same time, this approach also makes it possible to decrease the total dose of medicines
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011