| Edmund's Newsletter | August 7, 2007 Issue 32 Volume 7 |
IN THIS ISSUE
- Investigating Antibiotic Use In Acute Care Patients
- Phase II Study of Therapeutic Vaccine Shows Efficacy in Patients with Metastatic Colorectal Cancer
- MIT Model Could Predict Cells Response To Drugs
- Progesterone Treatment Does Not Prevent Preterm Birth in Twin Pregnancy
- Cigarette Additives May Make It Tougher to Quit
- The Hard Cell
- Success or Failure of Antidepressant Citalopram Predicted by Gene Variation
- Believe It Or Not
- News From MedWatch
- Research Update
- Recently Approved Drugs/Indications
- FDA Recalls and Safety Alerts in the Past 60 Days
- Drug Shortages
- Recommend Edmund's Newsletter
My newsletter up and till now was written using CSS. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.
You might be asking what the hell does all this mean, well, it just means is that CSS makes it easier for me to publish my newsletter, which is a good thing. (for me anyway)
Using CSS is without question the best method of publishing just about anything on the web BUT unfortunately many email programs have not caught up with the real world and many email programs have a hard time decoding CSS.
Where I work, we use Lotus Notes (absolutely the world's worst email application out there) and Lotus Notes doesn't read CSS at all. The result of this inability to read CSS is that my newsletter gets completely reformatted by Lotus Notes and it looks like hell.
So knowing this and knowing that many other email programs have a hard time with CSS, I rewrote everything in plain old HTML and while I lost some neat ways to format things at least it should look consistent, no matter what email program you are using.
While this is a step backwards in time, at least we can all see what I write.
Edmund
ps....If you CLICK HERE this is what my newsletter should look like. If it doesn't, let me know, and I will tweak my code a bit more
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Investigating Antibiotic Use In Acute Care Patients
Pigs could be the key to understanding how antibiotic resistant bacteria persist in Intensive Care Units in hospitals.
NSW Department of Primary Industries (NSW DPI) Immunology & Molecular Diagnostic Research Unit Team Leader, Dr James Chin, says it is commonly believed that each time an antibiotic is used only pathogens or disease-causing bacteria will be killed. "Antibiotic use in hospitals is often perceived to be solely directed against only bad bacteria. "In reality, antibiotics also act against entire microbial communities, including the good bacteria which can protect patients from pathogenic bacteria. "Antibiotics do not just eliminate bad bacteria", Dr Chin said. "They also maintain a pool of antibiotic resistance genes within the microbial community of patients treated with antibiotics." Using pigs as a model, Dr Chin and Dr Toni Chapman at NSW DPI’s Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute have examined how E.coli bacteria – a common cause of diarrhoea in pigs and humans - respond to treatment by antibiotics. For more information CLICK HERE Phase II Study of Therapeutic Vaccine Shows Efficacy in Patients with Metastatic Colorectal Cancer A therapeutic cancer vaccine has shown effectiveness when given alongside chemotherapy to patients with metastatic colorectal cancer in a phase II trial, according to researchers at Oxford BioMedica (UK) Ltd. The study found that six of the 17 metastatic colorectal cancer patients in the study showed tumor shrinkage, classified as complete or partial responses following independent expert review. The study, reported in the August 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, was designed to demonstrate the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine, called modified vaccinia Ankara-encoding 5T4 (TroVax®), when used alongside standard chemotherapy. The research was funded by Oxford BioMedica which is developing the vaccine in partnership with Sanofi-Aventis. Unlike preventative vaccines, such as the human papillomavirus vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, TroVax is a therapeutic vaccine, designed to stimulate the immune systems of patients who already have cancer. The vaccine consists of an attenuated (non-disease causing) version of the vaccinia virus modified to deliver the gene for 5T4, a protein found in many tumors. "The idea is that the modified virus enters cells, produces the tumor protein and stimulates the immune system," said lead study author Richard Harrop, Ph.D., vice president of clinical immunology at Oxford BioMedica. "To give a vaccine alongside chemotherapy might seem counterintuitive, since chemotherapy can weaken the immune system, but our study shows that TroVax could be complementary to standard chemotherapy, enhancing the immune response to tumors." For more information CLICK HERE MIT Model Could Predict Cells Response To Drugs MIT researchers have developed a model that could predict how cells will respond to targeted drug therapies. Models based on this approach could help doctors make better treatment choices for individual patients, who often respond differently to the same drug, and could help drug developers identify the ideal compounds on which to focus their research. In addition, the model could help test the effectiveness of drugs for a wide range of diseases, including various kinds of cancer, arthritis and immune system disorders, according to Douglas Lauffenburger, MIT professor of biological engineering and head of the department. Lauffenburger is senior author of a paper on the new model that will appear in the Aug. 2 issue of Nature. The model is based on similarities in the signaling pathways cells use to process information. Those pathways translate cells' environmental stimuli, such as hormones, drugs or other molecules, into action. "Cells undertake behavioral functions--proliferation, differentiation, death--in response to stimuli in their environment," said Lauffenburger. "The signaling pathways are the biomolecular circuits that process that information from the environment and regulate the mechanisms that execute the behavorial functions." For more information CLICK HERE Progesterone Treatment Does Not Prevent Preterm Birth in Twin Pregnancy Progesterone therapy does not reduce the chances of preterm birth in women pregnant with twins, reported researchers in a network sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. An earlier study showed progesterone therapy reduced the risk for preterm birth in another category of high risk pregnant women — those carrying a single baby who had delivered a single baby prematurely in the past. “This study shows that progesterone therapy is not beneficial for all women at risk for giving birth prematurely,” said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the NICHD, the NIH institute that supported the research network. “So far, the evidence supports progesterone therapy as a means to reduce preterm birth only in women pregnant with a single baby who are at risk for premature delivery because of a prior preterm birth.” After the initial study showed progesterone therapy could reduce the likelihood of preterm birth in women carrying a single baby and who had previously given birth prematurely, many physicians began prescribing the therapy for women pregnant with twins and for other categories of women at risk for preterm birth as well. In addition to women carrying two or more babies, and those who have delivered prematurely before, also at risk for preterm delivery are pregnant women having a shortened cervix (the lower part of the uterus) and certain infections of the reproductive tract. The study appears in the August 2, 2007 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. For more information CLICK HERE Cigarette Additives May Make It Tougher to Quit More than 100 of 599 additives that might be in cigarettes are potentially harmful, with some making cigarettes even more addictive and others making it difficult for people to detect tobacco smoke in their midst, a new study contends. Trade secrecy about the ingredients in cigarettes makes it impossible to know how many of the additives that appear on a 1994 list are actually in tobacco products today. Still, there's plenty of reason to be alarmed, said study lead author Dr. Michael Rabinoff, an assistant research psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They're making people less aware of tobacco [smoke] and making the cigarette more addictive," he said. "There is so much going on with these additives that it's an uncontrolled experiment on billions of people around the planet." Contrary to what smokers might assume, cigarettes aren't simply tobacco rolled up in pieces of paper. "They're highly engineered by the industry to smoke in certain ways and taste in certain ways," said James Pankow, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University who studies cigarette smoke and tobacco additives. Some additives may seem harmless, such as sugar. But even that can become harmful when combusted to form other compounds, he said. The study was released online this week and will appear in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health. It is being released as Congress considers whether to allow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products. On Wednesday, a Senate committee approved a bill granting such oversight. For more information CLICK HERE The Hard Cell Stewart Loken, a 64-year-old physicist from Berkeley, took a scientific approach to fighting his cancer — he immediately jumped into an experiment. “Science is about having a theory and making measurements to see if that theory is correct,” he says. Three and a half years ago, Loken received a new treatment being tested at Stanford, a new method of blood stem cell transplantation for treating cancers of the blood cells and bone marrow. Loken had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the most common form of leukemia in adults. The method that Stanford researchers tested on Loken aims to retain the desired result of the cell transplant — the killing of the cancerous leukemia cells — without inducing a potentially deadly side effect that often accompanies the procedure. The side effect is graft-versus-host disease, in which the incoming donor cells attack the patient’s body as foreign. The ability to tease apart the favorable results of a blood cell transfer from the bad seems too good to be true, but 30-odd years of methodical studies in mice back it. “What appealed to me was that there was an underlying theory to this treatment,” says Loken. “To me, much of medical science always appeared to be an oxymoron; it’s more of an art. Here we could really follow scientifically the progress of the treatment, which made me feel confident that this was something we could watch and had scientific validation.” For more information CLICK HERE Success or Failure of Antidepressant Citalopram Predicted by Gene Variation A variation in a gene called GRIK4 appears to make people with depression more likely to respond to the medication citalopram (Celexa) than are people without the variation, a study by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, has found. The increased likelihood was small, but when people had both this variation and one in a different gene shown to have a similarly small effect in an earlier study, they were 23 percent more likely to respond to citalopram than were people with neither variation. The finding addresses a key issue in mental health research: the differences in people’s responses to antidepressant medications, thought to be based partly on differences in their genes. Some patients respond to the first antidepressant they attempt, but many don’t. Each medication takes weeks to exert its full effects, and patients’ depression may worsen while they search for a medication that helps. Genetic studies, such as the one described here, may lead to a better understanding of which treatments are likely to work for each patient. Results of the study are in the August issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, reported by lead researcher Francis J. McMahon, MD, Silvia Paddock, Ph.D., of NIMH, and colleagues. Scientists from the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center also contributed to the research. “We’re moving steadily closer to being able to personalize treatments based on patients’ genetic variations. This is a crucial need for the millions of Americans who suffer from depression,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, MD. “New techniques have led to advances that would have been inconceivable a few years ago and are making individualized treatment an achievable goal.” For more information CLICK HERE Believe It Or Not NYPD: Drugs sold out of ice cream truck An ice cream truck parked in front of a junior high school was offering up cocaine and marijuana along with the soft serve, police said. A police search of the vehicle uncovered a loaded pistol along with the drugs, police said Friday after arresting 26-year-old Jermaine Jordan on charges including criminal possession of a weapon near a school and criminal sale of a controlled substance near a school. There was no listed number at Jordan's address, and it was not immediately clear whether he had a lawyer. The school, J.H.S. 008, is in Queens. |
News From MedWatch Keep up-to-date on all of the recent MedWatch reports that gives you timely safety information on the drugs and other medical products regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by CLICK HERE
Recently Approved Drugs/Indications Keep up-to-date on all of the recently approved drugs and/or approved new indications on already FDA approved drugs CLICK HERE
FDA Recalls and Safety Alerts in the Past 60 Days: To see a list of all FDA Recalls and product safety alerts for the last 60 days CLICK HERE
Drug Shortages: As many of you are aware, many drugs in the US are either unavailable or in short supply. To view a list of these drugs CLICK HERE
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Departments of Pharmacy and Medicine
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