Pharmacology

A new small molecule may help people with benzodiazepine-resistant epilepsy. Epilepsy affects an estimated 3.4 million people in the U.S. and millions more worldwide and drugs work for most, but for the rest, Uncontrolled epilepsy and resulting frequent and prolonged seizures lasting five minutes or more that can cause brain cell damage and even death. Epilepsy occurs when the intricate, delicate balance of signaling by neurons in the brain malfunctions, causing neurons to fire too much and trigger seizures. Benzodiazepines slow down the messages traveling between neurons. Yet up to 30…

The booster dose of either the BNT162b2 mRNA (Fosun-BioNTech, equivalent to Pfizer-BioNTech outside China) or CoronaVac (Sinovac) COVID-19 vaccine was correlated to a 90 percent reduction in death in people with multiple co-morbidities compared to 2 doses, according to a new study. As the Omicron (BA.2) variant epidemic hit Hong Kong in late 2021, the city reported the highest COVID-19 mortality rate worldwide relative to its population of 7.5 million people. Since November 11, 2021, older people, health care professionals and other priority groups were able to receive a booster…

IN 1994, President Bill Clinton and Senator Tom Harkin set off a supplement boom - by decreeing that supplements could be exempt from real FDA oversight as long as they didn't claim to cure cancer or kill anyone (which companies in that market continued to do anyway) and placed in small print that their supernatural claims were not validated by FDA. That, plus wasting taxpayer money at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(1) that could have gone to real research created a boom, to where woo and mysticism that claims it is sticking it to Big Pharma is a $40 billion…

Antibiotics are popular in America among everyone but pharmaceutical companies. Part of the reason is cultural; everyone wants antibiotics to be cheap, but want to be able to sue companies if anything new causes a side effect. Meanwhile, the government has doubled the cost and red tape to put anything on the market this century (COVID-19 vaccines and a few other products exempted) and research for new molecules is costly. That adds up to little interest. One antibiotic candidate is called albicidin. It is produced by the bacterial plant pathogen Xanthomonas albilineans, which causes the…

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding basic research on non-genetic drugs that can temporarily enhance the human body’s ability to endure extreme cold exposure. The human body’s response to cold involves two biological processes known as thermogenesis. Shivering is something everyone has experienced, it raises your body temperature in a direct fashion, with movement. The second uses brown adipose tissue, brown fat, which regulates body temperature by breaking down blood sugar and other fat molecules  The first is physical and the second chemical, but the…

Over 200 years ago, the age of modern agriculture began with fertilizer that wouldn't give you food poisoning if traces of it remained, like manure will. A new paper found what you would expect, and a key reason why legacy pesticides used in the organic process require nearly 600 percent more chemicals per calorie;  pests evolve as the science does. In their observational study, the authors compared 187 waterhemp samples from farms and nearby wetlands with over 100 herbarium samples, dating as far back as 1828, stored in museums across North America. They found hundreds of genes across…

Heart inflammation after a COVID-19 vaccine is very rare but epidemiology exists to vreate exploratory between products and outcomes and a recent analysis showed incidence of myocarditis, pericarditis or myopericarditis is two- to threefold higher after a second dose of the Moderna Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine compared to the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. That's not a reason to avoid a vaccine, any more than you should stop eating salad if it has a regular pesticide rather than an organic one, but it may mean that it's beneficial to choose specific vaccines for certain populations.…

Antivirals, such as Merck’s molnupiravir and Pfizer’s nirmatrelvir, are given to people infected with COVID-19 when prescribed by a doctor or as part of a clinical trial. Yet entire websites exist that sell it without prescription anyway. COVID-19 caused numerous parts of culture to flip. In the United States, the left abandoned their historical anti-vaccine camp while the right took up the old 'needs more testing' position of their opposition. The poor began to feel like the rich were given early access to treatments and even that some treatments were being casually dismissed by…

In the 16th century, it was shown by Paracelsus that 'the dose makes the poison' - too much medicine or anything else could kill while too little did nothing. In the 21st century activists have sought to dispel that. They claim homeopathic effects from chemicals at safe doses, endocrine distuption and u-shaped curves, but science knows better. Even venom can be therapeutic if you are in the middle ground between no effect and poison. Researchers are identifying venom proteins that could help treat a variety of medical conditions. Some choose to remain in the realm of mysticism even if they…

You probably know someone who takes an aspirin to reduce chances of a heart attack, just like you may know someone who says wine, containing alcohol, a true class 1 carcinogen, is 'good for you.' They were never settled science, they were instead epidemiology, statistical correlation, which then got transformed into clinical claims, much like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVD-19. How did that happen? Plaque buildup in the arteries that circulate blood back to the heart is a risk factor for heart attacks, the more you have the more risk there is, so reducing that is wise, especially…