October 3, 2024 The Southern Hemisphere’s flu season is winding down, and new data shows this year’s flu shot was 34.5% effective in keeping folks there who got influenza from needing hospital care. Most (68.3%) of those sent to hospital had the A(H3N2) strain of flu, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for...
Category: <span>Pharmaceutical Updates</span>
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Direct Brain A-Dopamine Infusion Promising for Parkinson’s Disease
Patrice Wendling October 02, 2024 PHILADELPHIA — Continuous intracerebroventricular administration of an anaerobic dopamine formulation (A-dopamine) appears safe in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and may avoid complications associated with levodopa, results from a first in-human trial suggest. A-dopamine induced a dose-dependent improvement in motor symptoms in refractory patients with severe levodopa complications and had...
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Promising ‘first’ in Alzheimer’s drug development
News Release 3-Oct-2024 New drug successfully blocks both Tau aggregation ‘hotspots’ for the first time Peer-Reviewed PublicationUniversity of Southampton The brain of a 7-day-old fruit fly with Tau expressed in a neuronal circuit used by the fly in olfactory memory. The green outlines the neurons, which are starting to swell and degenerate due to the...
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Plant compound used in traditional medicine may help fight tuberculosis
October 2, 2024 by Katie Bohn, Pennsylvania State University A compound found in African wormwood—a plant used medicinally for thousands of years to treat many types of illness—could be effective against tuberculosis, according to a new study published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. The team, co-led by Penn State researchers, found that the chemical compound,...
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Novel drug molecule that helps recycle mitochondria may help treat Parkinson’s
Scientists are testing new drug molecules to develop treatments for Parkinson’s disease. blue sky in my pocket/Getty ImagesResearchers have found that a novel drug molecule may fight the development of early-onset Parkinson’s disease in younger people.The new compound, BIO-2007817, is from the family of tetrahydropyrazolo-pyrazine (THPP) compounds.It offered promising results in activating parkin, a key...
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Clinical trial shows synthetic cannabis reduces agitation in Alzheimer’s disease
News Release 2-Oct-2024 Synthetic THC (dronabinol) was well tolerated by patients without adverse effects often seen from current Alzheimer’s agitation medications Reports and ProceedingsJohns Hopkins Medicine In a study led by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Tufts University School of Medicine, researchers show that a pill form of the drug dronabinol, an...
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Study: For long COVID, lithium aspartate at low doses is ineffective, but higher doses may be promising
News Release 2-Oct-2024 UB researcher characterizes the findings published in JAMA Network Open as “a negative study with a positive twist” Peer-Reviewed PublicationUniversity at Buffalo BUFFALO, N.Y. — A small University at Buffalo clinical trial has found that at low doses, lithium aspartate is ineffective in treating the fatigue and brain fog that is often...
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Planning a drug’s route in the body with synthetic chemistry
News Release 2-Oct-2024 Peer-Reviewed PublicationRIKEN Researchers at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) have developed technology that can alter, within the body, the recognized identity of proteins. The innovation, published in Nature Communications on October 2, allowed researchers to target mouse tumors with a protein and then transport that protein out of the body....
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New drug combination shows promise for small cell lung cancer
September 30, 2024 by The Mount Sinai Hospital Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have made a promising breakthrough in the treatment of small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Their study, published in Science Advances and titled “ATR Inhibition Activates Cancer Cell cGAS/STING-Interferon Signaling and Promotes Anti-Tumor Immunity in Small Cell Lung...
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Hydrogel with ultrasound activation enables sustained drug release
September 28, 2024 by University of Michigan Researchers at Michigan Medicine have developed a composite hydrogel capable of achieving sustained, steady drug release using ultrasound as a trigger. The team behind the breakthrough believes it could revolutionize drug delivery for various medical applications, in which constant drug levels are crucial for optimal therapeutic outcomes. The...