Pharma News

In almost all cases of colon cancer, a specific gene is mutated – this offers opportunities to develop broadly effective therapeutic approaches. Research teams in Würzburg have taken this a step further.

If the eIF2B5 gene is inhibited, the colon cancer cells with an APC mutation do not do well: they die. On the left a schematic representation, in the middle cell cultures, on the right organoids. (Image: Armin Wiegering / Universität Würzburg).

24th Annual National Convention of Association of Pharmaceutical Teachers of India – 2019 (APTICON - 2019) was hosted by DIT University, Dehradun in association with Uttarakhand State APTI Branch from 11-13th October, 2019 at DIT University Campus. It is hosted for the first time in Uttarakhand state by wider participation by teachers of pharmaceutical sciences all across India.

Like an adjustable wrench that becomes the “go-to” tool because it is effective and can be used for a variety of purposes, an existing drug that can be adapted to halt the replication of different viruses would greatly expedite the treatment of different infectious diseases. Such a strategy would prevent thousands of deaths each year from diseases like dengue and Ebola, but whether it can be done has been unclear. Now, in new work, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) show that repurposing an existing drug to treat viral diseases is in fact possible – potentially bypassing the decades needed to develop such a broad-spectrum drug from scratch.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a new partnership with the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, the latest effort in the Winning on Reducing Food Waste Initiative launched by the three federal agencies in 2018.

A new compound that binds to, and enables MRI imaging of, liver cells in the early stage of disease, has been developed by scientists supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the NIH.

Exposure to acetaminophen in the womb may increase a child’s risk for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder, suggests a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. The study was conducted by Xiaobing Wang, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and colleagues. It appears in JAMA Psychiatry.

Synthetic biology company, Camena Bioscience succeeded with significant breakthrough in DNA synthesis accuracy with the development of an innovative technology called gSynth™. With this pioneering enzymatic de novo synthesis and gene assembly method, gSynth is able to produce 300 nucleotide DNA molecules with an accuracy as high as 90%.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that, for the first time, it has authorized the marketing of products through the modified risk tobacco product (MRTP) pathway. The authorizations are for eight Swedish Match USA, Inc. snus smokeless tobacco products sold under the “General” brand name.