Eat some sugar for IBD
I can't really imagine doctors and other medical researchers envisioning methods of drug delivery like this back when Mary Poppins first came out.
Professor Simon Carding of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences has adapted a bacteria in our own bodies to make it produce a treatment for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Bacteria and viruses have been used before to deliver drugs in this way, but Professor Carding has solved the major problem with this kind of treatment: he uses a sugar to 'switch' the bacteria on and off. By eating the sugar, a patient will set the medicine to work and then can end the treatment simply by stopping consumption of the sugar.
While the press release doesn't specify which bacteria has been modified, it appears to be Bacteroides ovatus. The genetic modifications on the bacterium cause it to produce murine interleukin-2 (MuIL2) in response to elevated levels of xylan. This was accomplished by inserting the MuIL2 gene into the xylanase operon of the organism.
[tags]Medicine, IDB, microbiology[/tags]
Pancreatic cancer vaccine shows some promise
A vaccine for pancreatic cancer in Phase II trials is showing some promise in extending patient's lives according to Reuter's.
Most of the patients who got the vaccine survived at least two years, Dr. Daniel Laheru of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues told a meeting of gastrointestinal cancer specialists.
In the phase II study of 60 patients, 88 percent were alive a year later and 76 percent lived two years.
In comparison, 63 percent of patients treated with surgery alone survive a year and 42 percent live two years.
Interesting, but as nearly as I can tell, this research is actually from November 2005. It looks like it's making news because it was just presented at the 2007 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. Regardless, this is good news. How long until we have a regular bevy of cancer vaccines in our arsenal?
[tags]Medicine, cancer, pancreatic cancer, vaccines[/tags]
BestTreatments to charge for access — other methods of monetization?
This is unfortunate:
The BMJ Group says the Department of Health has withdrawn funding from its award-winning website BestTreatments and it says it will now probably be forced to charge patients to access the service.
The Internet economy-savvy reader might think that it'd be fairly trivial to monetize such a website using Google's AdSense service — which I use here at OnThePharm — and they'd be right. Unfortunately, however, doing so could undermine the integrity of the site, because some of the treatments and remedies advertised with AdSense have absolutely zero scientific evidence to back them up.
This can confuse readers, particularly if the AdSense code is nicely integrated into the BestTreatments site: optimizing a website to maximize revenue (within reason) means ads that flow nicely with the overall look-and-feel of a website. This means less clear delineation between what content belongs to BestTreatments, and what belongs to the advertiser. With less web-savvy types accessing this information, BestTreatments would almost have to employ someone to filter out the bad advertisements from the good ones if they'd want to continue being neutral.
I wonder if they could go towards a non-profit model, and solicit donations to keep running instead? I don't know much about the UK and its tax laws, but it would seem like it'd be an option worth exploring. Less drastic than, say, charging users for access, which would be a business catastrophe, I think.
The BMJ says patients view nearly a million pages of BestTreatments information each month and that the site was independently judged the most readable and accessible of 15 UK health sites.
A million pages a month doesn't cost all that much to serve, even on a fairly dynamic website like BT. A sufficiently robust server setup and an efficient backend could handle this quite easily. I'm sure the most expensive part of running BestTreatments is instead vetting the information on the site, checking for accuracy, and then copy-editing the content. If some other way were found to monetize BT, maybe they'd even let people from outside the UK access it…
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Hat tip to Kevin, MD.
[tags]Medicine, economics, Internet, advertising, health[/tags]
Polio vaccine saved $180 billion — what about HPV?
Research done at the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that the US saved some $180 billion by developing and making the vaccine available (mandatory?) in the United States — without factoring in the less quantifiable benefits like removing the stress of fear and suffering that the disease (or the possibility of disease) brings.
The researchers, Professor Thompson and Dr. Radboud Duintjer Tebbens, a research associate at HSPH, estimated the costs and the effectiveness of historical polio vaccination strategies. They found that the U.S. invested over $35 billion between 1955 and 2005 and will continue to invest billions into the future to pay for polio vaccination. They estimated that these historical and future investments translate into over 1.7 billion vaccinations that prevent approximately 1.1 million cases of paralytic polio and over 160,000 deaths, thus saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars in treatment costs.
I post this not because $180 billion is a huge number — it is — but rather because I can envision the HPV vaccine(s) having a similar economic impact should its mandatory use become widespread.
With 3,700 deaths per year from HPV-mediated cervical cancer, you're looking at 185,000 preventable deaths over the same period of time when you place HPV next to polio. It's not a perfect comparison, but it does get one to wondering if the economic impacts would be similar. I'm thinking they will be, and that they'll eventually become a standard cocktail for children… just like polio.
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, economics, HPV, polio[/tags]
Using propranolol to block malaria
A (relatively) new study in PLoS Medicine indicates that using propranolol can prevent malaria from gaining access to erythrocytes by dampening Gs peptide activity.
Dampening the signaling mechanism also inhibited parasitic growth at the blood-stage. While the study deals with propranolol specifically, other beta-blockers have similar activity. Given how inexpensive this particular class of drug is on the whole, this could open up huge new avenues of treatment in cash-strapped third-world nations.
When used in combination with existing antimalarials in cell culture, propranolol reduced the 50% and 90% inhibitory concentrations for existing drugs against P. falciparum by 5- to 10-fold and was also effective in reducing drug dose in animal models of infection.
The conclusion states:
Together these data establish that, in addition to invasion, erythrocyte G protein signaling is needed for intracellular parasite proliferation and thus may present a novel antimalarial target. The results provide proof of the concept that erythrocyte Gs antagonism offers a novel strategy to fight infection and that it has potential to be used to develop combination therapies with existing antimalarials.
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, propranolol, malaria, biochemistry[/tags]
Mandatory HPV vaccination in Maryland
Nearly half of Maryland's state senate has signed onto a bill requiring that all middle school girls receive Gardasil.
"Having the ability to eliminate a disease is something that cannot and should not be overlooked and should be made available to young girls," said Sen. Gwendolyn T. Britt (D-Prince George's), one of 21 senators who have signed onto the bill, sponsored by state Sen. Dolores G. Kelley (D-Baltimore County.)
[...]
Several Maryland lawmakers said the vaccine would affect their families directly. "I have two teenage daughters," said Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), a co-sponsor. "I don't want them to get cancer."
Not to get too political or anything, but it always strikes me as faintly amusing that disease states don't discriminate between the social classes. Do we need to start sending the children of US Senators to war before that particular idiocy is stopped?
Anyways, on a related note, I got a script for Gardasil at the pharmacy yesterday (first time) that wasn't covered by her insurance. Naturally, we don't stock it normally, but the cost to her would have been $180 per round or $540 in total. Naturally she didn't take it, but it does get me wondering where I could have told her to go to get it for less. She was more interested in her own knee-jerk "No way you're crazy!" reaction than taking a more productive approach, however. But for the future, does anyone have any ideas?
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, Gardasil, HPV[/tags]
Trichomonas vaginalis's genome sequenced
Researchers seem to think that having sequenced its genome will lead to novel treatments for the bug, which is becoming more resistant to the nitroimidazoles. They were also surprised by the genome's size, which looks like it may be larger than Homo sapiens thanks to large numbers of repeated genes.
[Image from the BBC.]
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, genomics, biochemistry, gynecology[/tags]