Tuesday 27th November 2012- The Guardian: Why finding new uses for old drugs is a growing business

This article depicts how ”Repurposing’ drugs for different ailments is cheaper than testing new ones’, which pharmaceutical companies have realised following famous previous accidental breakthroughs by US pharmaceutical group Pfizer.

For example:’It was probably a bad day at the lab when scientists at the US drug group Pfizer’s now defunct Sandwich research centre realised an angina treatment they were developing – a compound called sildenafil – simply didn’t work.

It might have been the end of the road for compound UK-92,480 but the drug did have an interesting side-effect: three days after swallowing the pill the male volunteers testing the medicine got a prolonged erection.

The treatment was refined and the time delay reduced. It was branded as Viagra and has become a blockbuster, prescribed for erectile dysfunction.’

‘It isn’t the only drug originally tested for one purpose that has become a treatment for another. Rogaine, also by Pfizer, was originally developed to treat high blood pressure but is now a successful treatment for hair loss.’

Related Articles:

• Why finding new uses for old drugs is a growing business

Monday 10th December 2012- The Independent: Cells from patients’ own blood spur cancer remissions

‘Nine leukemia patients are cancer-free after being treated with genetically-altered versions of their own immune cells, giving strength to a promising new approach for treating the blood cancer’, as opposed to the present treatment of chemotherapy and bone-marrow transplants.

‘The trial of 12 patients, two of them children, bolsters findings from 2011. Then, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia reported that two of the first three patients treated showed no traces of the malignancy after getting the therapy. Today’s results were presented at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting in Atlanta.’

‘The approach developed by University of Pennsylvania scientists has since been acquired by Novartis.

The scientists, led by Carl June, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a study author, used genetic engineering to manipulate white blood cells extracted from the patients. The researchers reprogrammed the cells to specifically target the leukemia cells and reinjected them into the patients.’

 

Related Article:

• Cells from patients’ own blod spur cancer remissions

Wednesday 28th November 2012- The Guardian: Ambassadors for health

This article is about Ethiopian healthcare, including the increasing prioritisation of vaccinations to protect residents from common illnesses like ‘diphtheria, whooping cough and polio’. ‘With only 0.7 health workers per thousand people, scaling up primary healthcare is a matter of urgency’. The so-called ‘ambassadors of health’ refers to Health Extension Workers operating under the ‘Ethiopian government’s health extension programme (HEP), which began in 2003’.

See:

• Ambassadors for health

Wednesday 17th October 2012- Scienceline: Musicians hear best over the din

‘Scientists demonstrate that musicians are better at understanding speakers in noisy environments’ in a study co-authored by  Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

‘In the study, published in the September issue of Neuroscience, 25 musicians and 25 non-musicians between the ages of 18 and 32 were asked to don headphones and listen to sentences embedded in babble produced by four different speakers. The participants were then required to recall the sentences, and were scored according to their accuracy.

The scientists found that musicians performed consistently better than non-musicians, correctly recalling the sentences much more frequently despite the ruckus audible in the background of the recording.

Moreover, by attaching electrodes to the participant’s scalps, Kraus’ team demonstrated that an adult musician’s brain is much better at keeping neural responses distinct. This allows musicians to discriminate between similar sounds and to understand a speaker even against a noisy backdrop.’

See:

• Musicians hear best over the din

Thursday 23rd August 2012- The Times: Right to Die Campaigner Finds a Victory in Death

This case was long in the press and was a great moral dilemma among the Courts. In the end, Tony Nicklinson, who suffered locked-in syndrome, lost his fight for his legal suicide. But 6 days later he got his wished and died after his condition worsened post-trial.

See: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article3515356.ece

Issue Continued: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article3647531.ece

Friday 17th February 2012- The Independent: Dawn of the age of wireless medicine

The first drug-delivering microchip has been developed to help battle the fact that 30% of the 9 million prescriptions filled every year are never administered by scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver. This chip, implanted under the skin, is said to help to combat problems patients face when taking medication, such as a fear of pain from needles, and taking the correct dosage at the correct time.

So far it has been suggested that it could be used to benefit cancer, heart disease and multiple sclerosis patients after already being tested on 7 female osteoporosis patients in place of injections of Teriparatide.

There those appear to be many benefits in the long term, such as increasing the likelihood that patients will complete a cycle of drugs for their ailment without interruption following symptomatic change, and particularly elderly patients and the mentally ill could have a decreased risk of self harm by possibly administering the wrong dosage too many or too few times a day.

However, the implantation of the chip has not been extensively described in the article, such as the likelihood of infection from the test cases already observed, how often the chip needs to be changed. Also, the possible anxiety a patient may experience at the idea of such a procedure in the short term must be considered; perhaps stopping them for following this course of drug treatment at all, rendering the benefits mute.

See:

• Dawn of the age of wireless medicine