Pharmacology
Mistletoe wasn't always for annoying co-workers at office parties, and it wasn't always just desperate men who think it has magical powers. In previous times, it was held in high regard because it was rootless, green and thriving when the tree it was on looked dead. Celtic druids latched onto it as some sort of supernatural fertility symbol - everything was a fertility symbol to druids - and it crept into popular culture from there.
Today we know it is simply a parasite, which isn't extending its use at office Christmas parties too far.
But a new study finds it may have value beyond…
A multi-center, non-randomized phase-Ib clinical trial designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and antitumor activity of bi-weekly infusions of pembrolizumab (MK-3475, marketed as Keytruda®) found that infusion of pembrolizumab produced durable responses in almost one out of five patients.
Patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer--a disease with no approved targeted therapies.
In a presentation at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium., the researchers discussed the study of 27 patients, aged 29 to 72 years, who had metastatic triple-negative breast cancer…
A Parkinson's disease vaccine
developed by the Austrian biotech company AFFiRiS AG
is going into a Phase I trial clinical trial.
The vaccine, called AFFITOPE® PD03A , targets a protein called alpha-Synuclein. The protein plays a key role in the onset and progression of Parkinson's as well as multiple system atrophy (MSA), an orphan disease. This vaccine has the potential to modify disease progression, rather than only symptomatic improvements available with current treatment strategies.
Current scientific understanding is that Parkinson's – as well as MSA – is caused by deposits of…
How do drug prices get picked? Some of it is simple economics. If you develop 20 drugs and 19 of them fail at various stages and one succeeds after a billion dollars in costs and bureaucracy, you are going to price it to make back all that lost money before generic companies are allowed to come along and sell your product without doing any work at all.
Some are not happy with that system, they believe companies should be able to both do creative work developing new drugs and then give it away. People who have never actually created a product think it's that easy and more transparency or…
A new technique involves wrapping chemotherapy drugs in a liposome - a fatty cover - and it reduces heart damage that would otherwise occur, according to a presentation by Professor Jutta Bergler-Klein and Professor Mariann Gyöngyösi from the Medical University of Vienna, at
EuroEcho-Imaging 2014.
The study included 24 pigs that were randomised to receive the human dose-equivalent of either Myocet, conventional doxorubicin, or epirubicin in 3 cycles. Cardiac function was assessed by echocardiography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at baseline and follow up (after about 3 months).…
Some new mothers who are breast-feeding (and some who should have stopped by now) have turned to medications to help increase their milk supply - and that meant off-label use of domperidone, a nausea medication, to stimulate breast milk production.
Some studies have suggested it may be related to negative side effects, including irregular heartbeat and sudden cardiac death, but a new article in Journal of Human Lactation,
finds that there is no risk to the babies who drink the milk, though the risks to women may be a concern.
In order to assess the efficiency and safety of…
Some paper have suggested a link between the diabetes medication pioglitazone and bladder cancer but a new analysis, including more than 1,000,000 people in six populations worldwide, has found no link between either pioglitazone or rosiglitazone (also known as Avandia) and bladder cancer.
Bladder cancer is the ninth most common cancer in the world, with 430,000 new cases diagnosed in 2012. Europe and North America have the highest incidence of bladder cancer, with an even higher incidence in people with diabetes.
Bladder tumors over-express a natural part of the cell machinery, a…
Just for yucks, let’s go back a few years and see how well people did in forecasting drug prices in the future.
Within the past decade, we began to hear the term “patent cliff”—the consequence of most blockbuster drugs losing patent protection during a short period of time. Perennial critics of the pharmaceutical industry were experiencing paroxysms of joy as the holy grail of health care savings—generic drug companies—became able to sell cheap copies of formerly multi-billion dollar products. The greedy drug companies would finally get their comeuppance, which would result in…
In epidemiology, matching curves are often enough to imply causation and so it is often done, even if there is no evidence to warrant the link.
There has been an increased use of antibiotics and there are an increased number of diagnoses so some epidemiologists looked at those two curves in the same direction and suggested one may be causing the other. A new analysis of about 500,000 children published in BMJ dismisses those claims and finds that exposure to antibiotics during pregnancy or early in life does not appear to increase the risk of asthma.
Several previous studies…
Evidence for role of cannabis in medicine does not strengthen argument for legalization. Thomas Hawk, CC BY-NC
By Victoria Forster, Newcastle University
Cannabis has long been touted as containing chemicals that might work against cancer. A recent study suggested that two chemicals found in cannabis, the cannabinoids CBD and THC, could act on an aggressive brain tumor called glioma, where only 10% of people live for five years after diagnosis. The research found that THC and CBD, combined with radiotherapy were able to shrink, but not completely eradicate, gliomas that were artificially…