Pharmacology
terrasig | May 19, 2009
Although I saw this obituary over the weekend, I didn't get to posting it until today. I was reminded by a local friend, an outstanding young scientist in her own right, of the impact that Dr Schanberg had made on so, so many lives in science, medicine, and our larger community.
I only had the honor of meeting Dr Schanberg once, shortly after his cancer diagnosis, while we were at a Duke Cancer Patient Support Center fundraising dinner. His wife of over 50 years, Rachel, is founder and former director of the organization which they started following the loss of their own daughter.
Among…
terrasig | March 21, 2009After writing this post, I came across Alex's obituary and guestbook on Legacy.com. By all accounts, Alex was a great kid - loved and admired by many - an accomplished hockey player and musician with a love for the mountains. This could have been you or I, or worse, one of our own children.
Breaking my heart this morning is news from Boulder that last month's death of 20-year-old CU student, Alexander McGuiggan, was from consumption of "opium tea."
Police department spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said investigators believe McGuiggan and others had acquired poppy plants -- which are available…
terrasig | March 9, 2009
I'm very proud today to see one of my formative professors, Dr Fulton Crews, quoted extensively in a USAToday article on a new, web-based alcohol awareness initiative, "Rethinking Drinking," from NIH's National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Division of Treatment and Recovery Research.
While many associate heavy drinking with liver problems, it can also increase the risk for heart disease, sleep disorders, depression, stroke and stomach bleeding. Consumed during pregnancy, it can cause fetal brain damage, says Fulton Crews, director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol…
terrasig | February 23, 2009Welcome 4 March readers of The Daily Grail - please be sure to also click on the original post about the DMT article by my colleague, Laura Mariani.
Thanks to Dave Munger & Co's ResearchBlogging.org, I just found a fabulous neuroscience grad student blogger from Emory University: Laura E Mariani at Neurotypical?
Doctor-to-be Mariani blogged last Monday about a paper in Science where the endogenous ligand of the orphan sigma-1 receptor was identified as the hallucinogen, N,N'-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The work originated with the group of Arnold Ruoho and colleagues at the University…
terrasig | January 13, 2009I just started receiving a bunch of Google referral hits from readers searching for a story about the US Federal Trade Commission apparently taking regulatory action against a church that is selling supplements claimed to exhibit anti-cancer activities.
The article in question, "Tyrannical FTC Threatens Christian Church with Imprisonment for Selling Dietary Supplements," was written by a gentleman named Mike Adams, an editor at NaturalNews.com. I'm not exactly certain at this point what the specific FTC actions are today since the article is rife with rantings and rhetoric:
The FTC has…
terrasig | December 30, 2008I see you - I've been there.
You're sitting in the lab the day before New Year's Eve looking at what you've done over the last year - or last six years - and thinking about how you're ever going to turn this postdoc or extended grad school period into some gainful career. The economy is for hell no matter where you live and you're wondering if this is all worth it.
Well, as I've said before, don't limit your options until you explore them. The US drug, medical device, food, cosmetic regulatory and safety agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), can provide a really satisfying…
terrasig | August 28, 2008A couple of colleagues turned me on the other morning to a press release by researchers at the University of Warwick who recently published in PNAS that their data apparently overturns the Meyer-Overton Rule regarding solubility of a compound in olive oil and its propensity for crossing biological membranes. I'm having trouble understanding exactly why their conclusions are earth-shattering.
At the turn of the last century, Meyer (1899) and Overton (1901) independently conducted experiments to demonstrate that the longer the carbon chain of a molecule, the better it partitioned into olive…
neurophilosophy | August 22, 2008
This advertisement for Ritalin comes from a 1966 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Ritalin, or methylphenidate, is widely - and controversially - prescribed to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The drug is an amphetamine-like stimulant which blocks reuptake of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenaline (norepinephrine) in the prefrontal cortex. This seems paradoxical given that it improves concentration and reduces impulsivity in hyperactive children, and exactly why it is an effective treatment for ADHD is still unclear.
In the…
terrasig | August 13, 2008Most people know of methadone as a long-term substitution therapy for people addicted to heroin, morphine, or other similar drugs called opiates or opioids. A good, free full-text description of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) can be found in the 15 June 2001 issue of American Family Physician.
Now, in the 1 August 2008 issue of Cancer Research, Claudia Friesen and colleagues at the University of Ulm report that methadone can kill leukemia cells in culture and reverse acquired resistance to other drugs like doxorubicin (Adriamycin). Press reports to this effect appeared at the beginning…
neurophilosophy | July 17, 2008In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.
The programme was apparently inspired by a 1959 book called The Sacred Mushroom, by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who is known for taking the spoon-bending fraudster Uri Geller to the United States for investigation.
In the first part of the programme (embedded below), Newland, Puharich and others travel to Mexico to collect mushroom samples…
terrasig | June 4, 2008This whole "cosmeceutical" thing probably shouldn't be in "Medicine & Health" but we did call your attention to today's news item back on 27 July 2007: Drug maker Allergan announced at a stock analyst's meeting this afternoon that it is filing a New Drug Application (NDA) for a cosmetic form of its anti-glaucoma drug bimatoprost (Lumigan®) as a result of it side effect in increasing the number and thickness of eyelashes.
Allergan (nyse: AGN) has completed its clinical trial program demonstrating that its patented formulation of bimatoprost, when applied directly to the base of the…
terrasig | May 31, 2008Our quick post yesterday cited Jonathan Alter's Newsweek essay this week on the sad state of cancer research funding in the context of Hamilton Jordan's recent death and Ted Kennedy's recent glioblastoma diagnosis. Like many areas of US federal research funding, cancer research support has been flat under the Bush administration and, in fact, declined in real dollars since 2004.
But when one hears a federally-funded researcher like me whining about this situation, one might think I am solely acting in a self-serving fashion, caring only about the preservation of my career and that of my…
neurophilosophy | May 30, 2008
SciCurious has written an interesting post about Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine.
Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was also a pioneer of psychopharmacology; as well as being one of the first to scientifically investigate the properties and effects of cocaine, he also played a key role in the growth of the pharmaceuticals industry.
In 1884, Freud read a paper which described the effects of cocaine on Bavarian soldiers. The author, a German physician named Theodor Aschenbrandt, reported that the drug suppressed the appetite and increased mental powers and endurance.
Intrigued,…
When medical experimental therapeutics gets co-opted as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)
terrasig | May 8, 2008Sorry to get to this so late but I wanted to weigh on an excellent post from my cancer blogging colleague, Orac, the other day on the investigation of CAM therapies in cancer. The post covers a lot of ground, as expected from any of Orac's exhaustive missives, but I wanted to focus on the comparison and contracts between NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine within the National Cancer Institute (NCI-OCCAM).
I am on record as a strong critic of NCCAM but a supporter of NCI's OCCAM in that the…
terrasig | April 28, 2008Well, not only am I weaseling out of posting original content today but I'm going to direct you to an excellent repost by Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock.
I am often asked why plants expend the bioenergetic capital to synthesize secondary metabolites. In his post, Bora notes that the synthesis of capsaicin by hot peppers results in selective avoidance by mammals but an interesting co-evolutionary relationship with thrashers.
And in other news, mosey on over to the newest member of the ScienceBlogs community, the superb ERV blog written by Abbie Smith, a graduate student in Middle…
terrasig | April 12, 2008". . .you got marijuana in my lead."
Two great tastes that do not go great together (with apologies).
[Welcome Fark.com readers on 12 Oct 2008 - I comment on the recent story here and you can read our other posts on drugs of abuse here. Thanks for stopping by - APB]
A concise but fascinating medical detective story appears in the letters of this week's (10 Apr 2008) issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (free full text at the time of this posting.).
An astute group of physicians at Leipzig Hospital in Germany noted a local surge of young people presenting with classic symptoms of…
terrasig | April 4, 2008Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer.
An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…
terrasig | March 30, 2008In attempting to re-engage my academic brain stem, I've been doing a little continuing education the last couple of weeks at various forums hosted by the University-That-Tobacco-Built. Last week I had the pleasure of attending a forum of the Duke student organization, Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE), that featured four academic leaders (who were women) and Bora Zivkovic discussing non-bench science careers.
One of the panelists was an old colleague, Dr Rochelle (Shelly) Schwartz-Bloom, an award-winning neuropharmacologist and educator in the Duke Department of Pharmacology &…
terrasig | March 29, 2008A paper in last month's issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery reported that US drug approvals during 2007 were the lowest number since 1983. (17 new molecular entities and 2 biologicals; see this figure for 1996-2007 data.) The review cites increased regulatory action as a factor in this reduction, especially following high-profile post-marketing safety issues with blockbuster drugs like Vioxx or Avandia. But other commentators have noted other problems such as the science of drug discovery in pharma being overridden by managers or the reluctance to develop agents for diseases that afflict…
terrasig | March 20, 2008The safety and effectiveness of medicines and other health products is dependent upon their proper use, particularly the proper route of administration. There are reasons why products are labeled as "for topical use only" or "do not swallow" - two recent warnings from the US FDA illustrate these issues.
Allergic Reactions with Use/Misuse of Denture Cleansers
The FDA recently announced reports of one death and 72 other adverse reactions in individuals who ingested denture cleansers meant to be used in a container with one's dentures removed. A crucial oxidizing agent, salts of persulfate,…