Tag: drug

A nanoparticle-coated skin patch could treat obesity and diabetes

A new study out today in ACS Nano presents an interesting and effective way to reduce fat stores in the body. Researchers at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina showed that a patch loaded with nanoparticles could reduce fat, increase energy expenditure and ameliorate type-2 diabetes in obese mice. The patch consists of an array of microscopic needles that help deliver drugs enclosed in nanoparticles directly into fat lying beneath the skin. Those drugs help turn white fat, which stores energy, into brown fat, which burns energy. Humans have both types, but as we age, we lose more and more of our brown fat, leaving mostly white fat behind. Therefore, it’s harder to get rid of the fat we have once we store it. Turning white fat into brown — a process called browning — has been a concept explored by researchers looking to treat obesity and diabetes , but earlier efforts have been largely done with pills or injections, which can cause a number of side effects since they deliver the drugs to the entire body. This patch, however, can concentrate the drug to just the area with the fat. And when they tested it on obese rats, putting a patch with drug on one side and a patch without drug on the other, researchers found that the drug side showed around 30 percent reductions of a particular type of white fat. Additionally, genes associated with brown fat were upregulated in the treated side, meaning the changes appeared to be due to a browning of the white fat stores. The patches even had an effect in healthy mice, leading to increased metabolic activity and upregulated brown fat genes. The research team is now working on figuring out which drugs work best and at which concentrations. The treatment isn’t ready for human testing, but these first results seem promising. “Many people will no doubt be excited to learn that we may be able to offer a noninvasive alternative to liposuction for reducing love handles, ” Li Qiang, one of the lead researchers of the study, said in a statement . “What’s much more important is that our patch may provide a safe and effective means of treating obesity and related metabolic disorders such as diabetes.” Via: Phys.org Source: ACS Nano , Columbia University

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A nanoparticle-coated skin patch could treat obesity and diabetes

Surgical robot makes highly precise eye injection possible

For the first time ever, a team of eye surgeons were able to inject a thrombolytic drug directly into a patient’s retinal vein to dissolve a blood clot. It was a success despite the fact that the vein is as thin as human hair thanks to a surgical robot developed by researchers from KU Leuven , a university in Belgium. The condition they treated is called retinal vein occlusion, and it leads to reduced eyesight and blindness. At the moment, doctors can only suppress its effects with monthly eye injections, because the retinal vein itself is only around 0.1 millimeter wide. It’s just much too thin for manual injections when the drug has to be administered for 10 minutes straight. Professor Peter Stalmans, an eye surgeon at University Hospitals Leuven, said: “The current treatment for retinal vein occlusion costs society €32.000 per eye. This is a high price tag, considering that you’re only treating the side effects and that there is little more you can do than avoid reducing eyesight. The robotic device finally enables us to treat the cause of the thrombosis in the retina. I look forward to what is next: if we succeed, we will literally be able to make blind people see again.” To address the issue, the researchers created a robot that can help a surgeon insert the needle precisely and then hold it perfectly still. They also designed the 0.03 millimeter needle, which is three times thinner than human hair, needed to inject the drug into the tiny vein. According to the university, the method successfully dissolved the blood clot and the patient is now doing well. However, it’ll take some time before everyone else who has the condition can go through the same treatment: the surgery was merely part of the first phase of the method’s clinical trial. The surgeons have to replicate the procedure’s success on other patients and then study its effects in the trial’s second phase. Source: KU Leuven

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Surgical robot makes highly precise eye injection possible

High school students open-source Shkreli’s pricey HIV drug

Australian high school students have done “a little Breaking Bad ” by synthesizing and effectively open-sourcing the drug famously hiked 5, 000 percent in price by “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli . The drug they recreated, Daraprim, is used to treat infection caused by malaria and HIV and without it, many patients would die. “Working on a real-world problem definitely made us more enthusiastic, ” said 17-year-old Sydney Grammar student Austin Zhang. “The background to this [drug] made it seem more important.” Daraprim is a relatively simple compound and typically costs $12.99 AUD ($10) for fifty tablets in Australia. However, Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, has the exclusive rights to distribute the specific Daraprim formulation (it’s known as Pyrimethamine elsewhere), even though the drug was developed in 1953, and is long out of patent. To get a new version approved, a company would have to compare it Turing’s FDA-approved product with their permission, which isn’t likely — the company limits sales to doctors and pharmacies, making it difficult to reverse-engineer. Pharma companies would therefore need to go through an onerous approval process that probably wouldn’t be worth it, considering that less than 10, 000 Daraprim prescriptions are written in the US per year. (The US uses a ” closed distribution ” system which differs from most other countries.) @nedavanovac lol how is that showing anyone up? almost any drug can be made at small scale for a low price. glad it makes u feel good tho. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) December 1, 2016 Though the open source Daraprim literally debunks Shkreli’s premise that the drug is ” underpriced ” (supply and demand aside), it probably won’t directly help anyone. Shkreli himself dismissed the work with a tweet, saying, “how is that showing anyone up? Almost any drug can be made at small scale for a low price. Glad it makes u feel good tho [sic].” However, that doesn’t mean that the exercise was useless. In fact, the students didn’t just follow a recipe, they actually reverse-engineered the drug, checking their progress using spectral analysis on each new compound. They also posted the work on Github , letting experts from the Open Source Malaria Consortium (OSM) (endorsed by Bill Gates ) provide some help. For instance, the process used to manufacture Daraprim would be dangerous for students to replicate in a small high school lab. “They had to change things as some reagents were nasty and dangerous so some invention was needed on their part, ” said Todd. After achieving a “beautiful” spectrograph, they finished with 3.7 grams of pure pyrimethamine, worth about $110, 000 on the US market, and presented the results at a prestigious symposium. The OSM also posted a guide for making the drug that could help anyone else who wanted to try. That’s quite an accomplishment for 16- and 17-year-old students, even if they can’t actually sell it. And they sort of proved that as tempting as it is to hate Shkreli, he’s merely profiting from a US system that’s much friendlier to pharmaceutical companies than other countries. Via: The Guardian Source: Open Source Malaria

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High school students open-source Shkreli’s pricey HIV drug