Pharmacology

Two recent articles showed showed changes in the focus and funding of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease therapies. And they suggested the change might be evidenced by today, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seemed ready to approve aducanumab (Biogen) as the first new drug therapy to Alzheimer's patients in nearly 20 years. Namely the emergence of taxpayer-funded government and nonprofit organizations as the primary drivers of research.  Alzheimer's is difficult and when a company is looking at a billion dollar expense to navigate the red tape of modern FDA approval…

Smallpox has been eradicated from the face of the Earth following a highly effective, worldwide vaccination campaign. Paralytic poliomyelitis is no longer a problem in the U.S. because of development and use of effective vaccines against the poliovirus. In current times, millions of lives have been saved because of rapid deployment of effective vaccines against COVID-19. And yet, it has been 37 years since HIV was discovered as the cause of AIDS, and there is no vaccine. Here I will describe the difficulties facing development of an effective vaccine against HIV/AIDS. I am a professor of…

Antibiotics won't help with COVID-19 because the disease is not caused by bacteria but instead a virus. However, a new study finds that some antibiotics can prevent the entry of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into cells. The Drug Design and Molecular Topology Unit group of the University of Valencia found that certain macrolide antibiotics like clarithromycin and azithromycin (used in respiratory tract infections) does just that. The group had said the same back in March of 2020 but also made the speculative claim it might mean antibiotics could treat COVID-19. No one took it seriously because these…

Beta-blockers are a class of medications that reduce the heart rate, the heart's workload and the heart's output of blood, which, together, lower blood pressure. Blood pressure is only a risk factor for heart disease, it is not a disease in itself, yet when people hear about a medical issue with a vital organ it can have profound psychological impacts. Some people report feeling depressed or having fitful sleep after taking beta blockers. Plus anxiety, drowsiness, hallucinations and nightmares. When one medicine has so many diverse correlations without any biological plausibility, it is…

The NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel recently changed ivermectin from firmly “against” to the neutral “neither for nor against” when it comes to mild COVID-19 treatment. Ivermectin, developed in 1975, led to the eradication of numerous parasitic diseases and earned the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for its discoverers, Dr. William Campbell and Dr. Ōmura Satoshi. It is considered safe and cheap but like another famous drug, the malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine, its claims about COVID-19 are more anecdote than science. In vitro studies are fine exploratory efforts but were only…

A new paper claims that people vaping instead of smoking are putting their hearts at risk but their study does not show that. Instead, they mixed chemicals in Petri dishes with heart cells and used mice. Both of those are fine exploratory experiments but they are scientifically invalid to make the conclusions the authors make in their press release. At a time when distrust of journalism and science has increased due to increased efforts at politicization of, well, everything, it is important that the public be shown the difference between clinically relevant work and papers that claim…

Cannabidiol (CBD( products are being illegally marketed for pets, including a product for use in the eye, and for various conditions in humans also, despite any evidence they can prevent, diagnose, mitigate, treat or cure various diseases. Shady hucksters have sought to avoid that by preying on the margins of what are known as “supplements” and exempt from science and logic thanks to President Clinton's Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which declared open season on medicine by legitimizing alternatives with no evidence. But they can only make vague claims, and only using…

Results from the STatin Residual Risk Reduction With EpaNova in HiGh CV Risk PatienTs With Hypertriglyceridemia (STRENGTH) double-blind, randomized, multicenter trial from 2014 to 2020 found that in patients with high cardiovascular risk, supplements of Omega-3 Fatty Acids were no better for outcomes than plain old vegetable oil. This was not a small trial by a supplement company hoping to correlate something to something, this was 13, 078 patients at 675 academic and community hospitals in 22 countries. Half of those randomized got 4 g/d of omega-3 and half got corn oil, in addition to usual…

Recently, Pfizer and BioNTech released promising preliminary results of their clinical Phase III trials with 40,000 participants for their RNA vaccine candidate. This report suggests 90% efficacy for protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes the CoVID-19 disease. However, there is no peer-reviewed publication on this yet. Since many parameters of this study are unknown, I will focus on the previously published Phase I data1 from the same group and provide some background.      SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. RNA vaccines mimic the viral infection of cells, where…

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent both political parties rushing to wrap themselves in the flag of science - even those voters who were historically more inclined to oppose vaccines and medicine and purchase organic food. They should have been on Team Science all along, and a new analysis shows why; in a recent 16 year period, over 1.2 million people were saved thanks to 106 new treatments approved across 15 common tumors from 2000 to 2016 - including colorectal cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, melanoma, gastric cancer, and renal cancer. The study used a…