Pharma News

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.

EMA’s human medicines committee (CHMP) has developed a paper to strengthen consistency when defining therapeutic indications in the product information of medicines. The document is intended to guide assessors in the national competent authorities who are responsible for evaluating marketing authorisation and extension of indication applications received by EMA. It outlines key elements that assessors should consider when evaluating the therapeutic indications proposed by the applicant, for example, whether a medicine is considered as first- or second-line treatment and whether it should be used in combination with another product. In this context, the paper takes into account some of the needs of healthcare decision-makers such as healthcare professionals and health technology assessment (HTA) bodies.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission posted a joint warning letter to Rooted Apothecary LLC, of Naples, Florida, for illegally selling unapproved products containing cannabidiol (CBD) online with unsubstantiated claims that the products treat teething pain and ear aches in infants, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, among other conditions or diseases.

Machine learning’s powerful ability to detect patterns in complex data is revolutionizing how we drive, how we diagnose disease and now, how we discover new drugs. Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have developed a machine-learning algorithm that gleans information from microscope images - allowing for high-throughput epigenetic drug screens that could unlock new treatments for cancer, heart disease, mental illness and more.