Category Archives: Drugs

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Some experimental diabetes treatments in late testing offer patients hope of better controlling their blood sugar and weight and preventing dangerously low blood sugar, all big challenges for millions of diabetics. Results from studies of several new diabetes medicines and insulin products, just announced at the premiere U.S. conference for diabetes specialists, likewise hold the promise of billions in annual revenue for drugmakers that have dominated the diabetes market and for others breaking into it. They have been presenting their data at the American Diabetes Association conference, held in Philadelphia from last Friday through Monday. Until the last decade, relatively few companies made treatments for diabetes, a chronic condition in which the body either does not make enough insulin to break down the sugar in foods or uses insulin inefficiently. Now many more drugmakers have jumped in, as the number of American diabetes patients is about 26 million and growing fast, and there are tens of millions more in Western Europe, China and India. That's because the global obesity epidemic has caused a similar explosion of diabetes cases. About 95 percent are Type 2 diabetes, usually related to being overweight and sedentary. Type 2, once called … Continue reading →

Home > News Synthetic drugs reach Lynn area By Taylor Provost / The Daily Item LYNN Public Health Director MaryAnn OConnor said a 13-year-old Lynn girl told her grandmother she bought and used fake pot and ended up passing out on a sidewalk. She reported experiencing a major, major headache and heart palpitations after she was taken to the emergency room, OConnor said. We have a little girl who is scared for her life, who gave it to her grandmother who reported it, she said of the so-called synthetic drugs that are showing up in Lynn. She said she found it at a gas station. OConnor said synthetic drugs and the trendy designer drug bath salts, pose a danger to kids and teens who might not realize just how serious the drugs are. While the substances sold as fake pot may resemble marijuana and are marketed as a legal alternative, OConnor said there is nothing natural about them. Kids think theyre getting legal pot and what theyre really getting is a banned substance thats chemical, she said. The effects are much more dangerous, and you dont know what it will do it depends on the person. The problem has been … Continue reading →

Scientists at a biomedical research laboratory in Cambridge have developed a computer model to test drugs for adverse side effects before they would be given to people in clinical trials. If proven successful, such an approach could be a significant step toward solving a major problem facing the pharmaceutical industry. Adverse drug reactions are a costly liability, causing about 20 percent of drugs in clinical development to fail, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The ability to detect them early in the development process could spare patients harmful reactions and save the time and expense of launching clinical trials on drugs that carry problematic side effects. Already, companies test drug candidates in animals and in the lab to minimize the possibility that drugs with toxic effects are tested in people. But those offer only a limited way to mimic how a drug will act in humans, so crafting tests that could flag molecules likely to have side effects has become been a priority. I think this is an extremely powerful tool, said Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, who was not involved in the study. One of the … Continue reading →

Ingram Publishing / Getty Images For years, researchers have longingly eyed the human immune system as a potentially powerful weapon against cancer. Yet while the prospect of getting the bodys antibodies and immune cells to seek and destroy cancer the same way they do bacteria and viruses seems like a home run in theory, it hasnt proven to be very reliable. The reason has to do with the very nature of cancer itself: cancer cells arent invaders, but healthy cells gone rogue. So, targeting tumors often means having to target innocent, healthy tissue as well. Thats why cancer vaccines and immune-based treatments have had such mixed success. (MORE: Americas Health Checkup: A Shot at Cancer) But last weekend, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), researchers reported on a promising advance: Dr. Kimberly Blackwell, director of the breast cancer program at the Duke Cancer Institute, said that she and her colleagues had successfully treated 991 women with advanced and metastatic breast cancer with an innovative smart bomb of a therapy, an antibody designed to bind only to tumor cells and then deliver its killer payload, an uberpowerful toxin, to destroy them. The idea is eloquently … Continue reading →

Downside to Biologics Is Lower Immunity, Increased Risk of Shingles, Others Find June 8, 2012 -- Rheumatoid arthritis patients who take medications known as anti-TNFs may be treating more than their disease. According to new research presented at a European meeting, these patients may be less likely to have a heart attack and are more likely to live longer than those with RA who are not taking the drugs. In one study, the longer the patients take the anti-TNF drugs, the more protected they are from heart attacks. "The unique feature of this study is, we have tied the time on the drugs with the reduction of heart attacks and other problems," says researcher Michael Nurmohamed, MD, PhD, of the VU University Medical Centre and Jan van Breemen Research Institute in Reade, Netherlands. "After one year on anti-TNFs, we saw a 24% reduction, after two years, 42%, and after three years, 56%, compared to those not on the drugs," he tells WebMD. He presented the findings this week at EULAR 2012, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism. The study was funded by Abbott, which makes the anti-TNF drug Humira. At the same meeting, other researchers also reported … Continue reading →

Human skin fibroblast cells under professional fluorescent microscope. Recent drugs that have been created can help treat some of the toughest diseases out therefrom Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to all types of cancers. The only problem: They kill some people. But new breakthroughs in cell engineering might usher in a new era of personalized medicine where drugs can be tested for side effects without having to test the drug in humans. Scientists at San Francisco's Gladstone Institutes announced Thursday that they've successfully reprogrammed human skin cells into brain cells, and recently, a team turned skin cells into working heart cells. [Single Bomb Blast Causes Soldiers NFL-like Brain Trauma] The idea, according to Yadong Huang, head of the Gladstone study, is to scrape cells from an Alzheimer's patient's skin, turn it into a brain cell, and try out different therapies on the newly-created cells. If there's an adverse reaction, doctors will know not to give that drug to the patient. "There are some drugs that can't be put on the market because some patients respond badly to a drug. If the drug kills 5 percent of the patients, the FDA won't approve it," Huang says. Instead of risking side effects, which range … Continue reading →

by Michael R. Cohen, R.Ph. You may be surprised to learn that in 2011, the Food and Drug Administration received 179,855 reports of serious or fatal adverse drug reactions. This was an increase of 15,386 reports (9.4 percent) from the 2010 total. Reports reached the FDA through two mechanisms. Voluntary reports from health professionals and consumers and reports from manufacturers. There were 21, 002 voluntary reports and 158,853 from manufacturers. Manufacturers must report serious events within 15 days of becoming aware. The 10 drugs with the largest numbers of reports sent directly to the FDA by healthcare practitioners and consumers in 2011 in order of frequency are Pradaxa, Coumadin, Levaquin, Carboplatin, Zestril, Cisplatin, Zocor, Cymbalta, Cipro and Bactrim. Keep in mind that this is not a scientific study of the frequency of adverse drug events in clinical practice. These are the medications that health professionals and consumers told the FDA were causing serious and fatal side effects during 2011. It is interesting to note that just two of these drugs were first introduced in the last decade (Pradaxa and Cymbalta), and only one in the previous year (Pradaxa), suggesting that major drug safety issues are not confined to recently approved … Continue reading →

JAKARTA, Indonesia, June 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Branded NSCLC drugs in Indonesia cost almost three times as much as generic drugs. Their high prices are expected to compensate manufacturers for the decline in sales volumes, as generics is the first line and often, the only form of drug treatment for NSCLC in Indonesia. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.pharma.frost.com), The Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Drug Market in Indonesia, finds that the market earned revenues of $16.0 million in 2010 and estimates this to reach $26.0 million in 2015. Branded drugs are sold at price-per-cycle and their volumes drop when the price-per-cycle crosses $850. As the price-per-cycle of generic drugs has not reached the $850 mark yet, their volume is expected to continue rising. The prices of both generic and branded NSCLC drugs could see a spurt along with the increase in transportation and oil costs, since active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are generally imported. However, the market will be sustained by the increasing incidence of NSCLC caused by the high rates of smokers. "The percentage of adult male smokers has increased from 53 percent in 1995 to 66 percent in 2010; and while only 4.2 percent of adult Indonesian women … Continue reading →

Lung, Skin, Kidney Tumors Shrink in Early-Stage Trials June 4, 2012 (Chicago) -- Two experimental drugs that recharge the body's immune system to seek out and attack tumors are showing promise for the treatment of certain advanced lung, skin, and kidney cancers. The drugs disable a molecular shield that tumors put up to block attacks from the immune system. In early-stage studies, the drugs shrank tumors in some people with certain types of lung, skin, and kidney cancers who had not been helped by other treatments. Researcher Julie Brahmer, MD, associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, tells WebMD that she is optimistic because "in some patients, tumors did not grow back even after treatment was stopped." "These patients had been through several types of therapy and were very ill," she says. It's too soon to say whether the drugs will extend lives and whether they are safe in the long run. A larger, longer study is planned to test that. But the early studies suggest the drugs work at least as well as chemotherapy drugs currently in use, and possibly with fewer side effects, Brahmer says. The research was presented here at the annual meeting of … Continue reading →

by Bob Ortega - Jun. 3, 2012 11:10 PM The Republic | azcentral.com Orion Wilkins was a drug addict, hooked on painkillers he'd begun taking to fight the pain of an old high-school football injury. In 2008, he used a wrapped block of Velveeta cheese, claiming it was a bomb, to rob several Valley pharmacies of pain pills to feed his addiction. He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 101/2 years in prison. Three years later, on Dec. 7, 2011, Wilkins, 35, died of a drug overdose inside the Arizona state prison in Florence. The presence of illegal drugs inside what are supposed to be the most secure buildings in the state has led to the deaths of at least seven inmates from overdoses, all involving heroin, over the past two years. The state Department of Corrections classified the deaths as accidental. The Arizona Republic investigated these deaths as part of a broader look at the high rates of suicide, homicide and accidental deaths in Arizona's state prisons. The ability of inmates to get drugs and hypodermic needles while behind bars suggests that the Department of Corrections has its own drug problem: a porous security system that allows … Continue reading →