Justices reject Johnson & Johnson appeal of $2B talc verdict
Source: AP
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is leaving in place a $2 billion verdict in favor of women who claim they developed ovarian cancer from using Johnson & Johnson talc products.
The justices did not comment Tuesday in rejecting Johnson & Johnson’s appeal. The company argued that it was not treated fairly in facing one trial involving 22 cancer sufferers who came from 12 states and different backgrounds.
A Missouri jury initially awarded the women $4.7 billion, but a state appeals court dropped two women from the suit and reduced the award to $2 billion. The jury found that the company’s talc products contain asbestos and asbestos-laced talc can cause ovarian cancer. The company disputes both points.
Johnson & Johnson, which is based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has stopped selling its iconic talc-based Johnson’s Baby Powder in the U.S. and Canada, though it remains on the market elsewhere.
Scientists Measured The Mass of The Human Chromosome For The First Time
MICHELLE STARR
2 JUNE 2021
For the first time, scientists have been able to accurately measure the mass of the human chromosome.
Using a powerful X-ray source at the UK's national synchrotron science facility, the Diamond Light Source, physicists were able to determine the individual masses of all 46 chromosomes in human cells.
A browsable 3D map of just one millionth of the cerebral cortex has been created using 225 million images and a whopping 1.4 petabytes of data.
The human brain is the most ridiculously complex computer that’s ever existed, and mapping this dense tangle of neurons, synapses and other cells is nigh on impossible. But engineers at Google and Harvard have given it the best shot yet, producing a browsable, searchable 3D map of a small section of human cerebral cortex.
With about 86 billion neurons connecting via 100 trillion synapses, it’s a Herculean task to figure out exactly what each of them does and how those connections form the basis of thought, emotion, memory, behavior and consciousness. Daunting as it may be, though, teams of scientists around the world are rolling up their sleeves and trying to build a wiring diagram for the human brain – a so-called “connectome.”
Last year, researchers at Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute paved the way with a fruit fly brain connectome that encompassed about half of the insect’s full brain. Now, Google and the Lichtman Lab at Harvard have released a similar model of a tiny section of human brain.
Tested on human blood in the lab, the selective nanocapsules could reduce the side effects of a major blood clot dissolving drug, which include bleeding on the brain. If confirmed with animal tests, the nanocapsules could also make the drug more effective at lower doses.
Blood clots, also known as thrombi, are a key cause of strokes and heart attacks which are leading causes of death and ill-health worldwide. They can be treated with a clot dissolving drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) which disrupts clots to clear the blocked blood vessel and re-establish blood flow.
However, tPA can cause life-threatening off-target bleeding, and lasts only a few minutes in circulation, so often requires repeated doses, which further increases the risk of bleeding. Consequently, it is only used for a minority of potentially eligible patients.
Now, researchers at Imperial College London have found that by encasing tPA in newly designed tiny capsules, it can be targeted more specifically to harmful blood clots with an increased circulation time. They designed the nanocapsules to attach to activated platelets present in thrombi, release the tPA payload and dissolve clots.
Nearly a quarter of the world's population is estimated to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), the pathogen that causes tuberculosis, but less than 15 percent of infected individuals develop the disease.
A study published May 24 in Nature Immunology by investigators from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard offers insights into the immune system that may help explain why some people have latent infections and others get sick.
In collaboration with Socios En Salud, (a part of Partners In Health based in Peru), researchers looked at a type of immune cell called memory T cells from 259 Peruvian individuals who were participating in a long-term program to monitor the progression of TB in people who were found to have latent infections.
FDA approves obesity drug that helped people cut weight 15%
June 04, 2021
Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy, a higher-dose version of Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug semaglutide.
In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing. In a comparison group getting dummy shots, the average weight loss was about 2.5%, or just under 6 pounds.
“With existing drugs, you’re going to get maybe 5% to 10% weight reduction, sometimes not even that,” said Dr. Harold Bays, medical director of the Louisville Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center. Bays, who is also the Obesity Medicine Association’s chief science officer, helped run studies of Wegovy and other obesity and diabetes drugs.
In the U.S., more than 100 million adults — about one in three — are obese.
ADHD medications may lower suicide risk in children with hyperactivity, oppositional defiance and other behavioral disorders, according to new research from the Lifespan Brain Institute (LiBI) of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania. The findings, published today in JAMA Network Open, address a significant knowledge gap in childhood suicide risk and could inform suicide prevention strategies at a time when suicide among children is on the rise.
"This study is an important step in the much-needed effort of childhood suicide prevention, as it leverages data collected from approximately 12,000 U.S. children to identify an actionable target to reduce childhood suicides," said senior author Ran Barzilay, MD, Ph.D., an assistant professor at LiBI. "Early diagnosis and treatment of behavioral symptoms with ADHD medication, particularly among children with severe externalizing symptoms, may serve not only to improve learning and behavior problems, but also to decrease suicidality risk."
Non-caloric sweetener reduces signs of fatty liver disease in preclinical research study (Rebaudioside A from Stevia)
MedicalXPress/Children's Hospital Los Angeles ^ | May 05, 2020
There is clear evidence that high sugar consumption leads to obesity and fatty liver disease. Synthetic and natural alternatives to sugar are available, but little is known about the effects of these non-caloric sweeteners on the liver. A new study led by Rohit Kohli, MBBS, MS, shows that stevia extract can reduce markers of fatty liver disease.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that obesity affects nearly 19% of children. An associated condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease affects one out of every 10 children. Fatty liver disease can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Consumption of too much sugar can lead to both obesity and fatty liver disease.
"Sugary foods and drinks can cause scarring in the liver," says Dr. Kohli, "but we don't know how non-caloric sweeteners may affect liver disease." In a first-of-its-kind study, Dr. Kohli addressed and answered the question: Can non-caloric sweeteners improve signs of fatty liver disease?
Using a preclinical model, he tested two non-caloric sweeteners, sucralose and stevia extract. Both are widely available and appear in many sweetened foods and drinks. "We were interested in those two compounds because they are the newest and least studied in the context of liver disease and obesity," says Dr. Kohli.
The results were striking. "We compared these sweeteners head to head with sugar," he says. "Stevia extract lowers glucose levels and improves markers of fatty liver disease." These markers include fibrosis and fat levels in the liver. The study also uncovered some potential mechanisms that could be responsible for reversing these markers of fatty liver disease. "We saw a decrease in signs of cellular stress and some changes in the gut microbiome," says Dr. Kohli
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first new medication for Alzheimer’s disease in nearly two decades, a contentious decision, made despite opposition from the agency’s independent advisory committee and some Alzheimer’s experts who said there was not enough evidence that the drug can help patients.
The drug, aducanumab, which go by the brand name Aduhelm, is a monthly intravenous infusion intended to slow cognitive decline in people in the early stages of the disease, with mild memory and thinking problems. It is the first approved treatment to attack the disease process of Alzheimer’s instead of just addressing dementia symptoms.
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease in which a misdirected immune system gradually destroys healthy pancreatic islet β cells, resulting in a lack of insulin. The exact cause of T1D remains unknown. However, β cell-reactive autoantibodies can be detected in circulating blood months to years before diagnosis, raising the possibility of intervening to stop or delay T1D before children develop the disease.
Monitoring the number, type, and concentration of autoantibodies appearing in the blood can help predict the long-term risk of progression from autoimmunity to symptomatic T1D.
Now new findings suggest that measuring how patterns of gene expression in white blood cells change in children starting in infancy—before autoantibodies appear indicating an autoimmune reaction against the β cells—can predict earlier and more robustly which genetically-susceptible individuals will progress to T1D. The comprehensive international study included co-investigators from the University of South Florida Health Informatics Institute (HII).
Children on trendy vegan diets are 1.2 inches SHORTER on average, with smaller and weaker bones, study warns
• The study involved 187 healthy five to ten-year-olds, including 52 vegans
•Vegan children averaged 1.2in shorter and had 4-6% lower bone mineral content
•They were also 3 times more likely to be deficient in vitamin B-12 than omnivores
ARE VEGAN DIETS SAFE FOR BABIES?
Around 3.5million people living in the UK are vegan – the equivalent of around seven per cent of the population, according to estimates.
And, as the diet has surged in popularity, more mothers are choosing to make their baby a vegan.
The NHS says babies and young children on a vegetarian or vegan diet can get the energy and most of the nutrients they need to grow and develop.
However, the plant-based diet is known to be low in key nutrients for babies, such as vitamin B12 - found milk and eggs, iron, calcium and zinc.
A vitamin B12 deficiency is a rare and treatable cause of failure to thrive and delayed development in infants, researchers wrote in the journal Pediatrics.
It can also lead to malnutrition and ‘irreversible damage’ to their nervous systems, experts at University College London once concluded.
The threat of antibiotic resistance rises as bacteria continue to evolve to foil even the most powerful modern drug treatments. By 2050, antibiotic resistant-bacteria threaten to claim more than 10 million lives as existing therapies prove ineffective.
Bacteriophage, or "phage," have become a new source of hope against growing antibiotic resistance. Ignored for decades by western science, phages have become the subject of increasing research attention due to their capability to infect and kill bacterial threats.
A new project led by University of California San Diego Biological Sciences graduate student Joshua Borin, a member of Associate Professor Justin Meyer's laboratory, has provided evidence that phages that undergo special evolutionary training increase their capacity to subdue bacteria. Like a boxer in training ahead of a title bout, pre-trained phages demonstrated they could delay the onset of bacterial resistance.
The study, which included contributions from researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel and the University of Texas at Austin, is published June 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
New drug-formulation method may lead to smaller pills
June 7, 2021
About 60 percent of drugs on the market have hydrophobic molecules as their active ingredients. These drugs, which are not soluble in water, can be difficult to formulate into tablets because they need to be broken down into very small crystals in order to be absorbed by the human body.
A team of MIT chemical engineers has now devised a simpler process for incorporating hydrophobic drugs into tablets or other drug formulations such as capsules and thin films. Their technique, which involves creating an emulsion of the drug and then crystallizing it, allows for a more powerful dose to be loaded per tablet.
"This is very important because if we can achieve high drug loading, it means that we can make smaller dosages that still achieve the same therapeutic effect. This can greatly improve patient compliance because they just need to take a very small drug and it's still very effective," says Liang-Hsun Chen, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the new study.
Patrick Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Advanced Materials.
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is the leading modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and premature death worldwide. And key to treating patients with conditions ranging from chest pain to stroke is understanding the intricacies of how the cells around arteries and other blood vessels work to control blood pressure. While the importance of metals like potassium and calcium in this process are known, a new discovery about a critical and underappreciated role of another metal—zinc—offers a potential new pathway for therapies to treat hypertension.
The study results were published recently in Nature Communications.
All the body's functions depend on arteries channeling oxygen-rich blood—energy—to where it's needed, and smooth muscle cells within these vessels direct how fast or slow the blood gets to each destination. As smooth muscles contract, they narrow the artery and increase the blood pressure, and as the muscle relaxes, the artery expands and blood pressure falls. If the blood pressure is too low the blood flow will not be enough to sustain a person's body with oxygen and nutrients. If the blood pressure is too high, the blood vessels risk being damaged or even ruptured.
The ability of stem cells to fix impaired functions of host tissues after transplantation has been a lifesaving breakthrough in treating previously incurable conditions. Much like a coin toss, however, the fate of the transplanted stem cells is unpredictable. They may choose self-renewal, grow into a different kind of tissue, or die.
Spermatogonial stem cells follow the same stochastic fate of unpredictability in outcomes. But a group of fertility scientists led by Hiroshima University's Yoshiaki Nakamura discovered a new method that has favorably flipped the odds and successfully reversed male infertility in mice—showing great promise for future applications in regenerating human sperm after cancer treatment and repopulating threatened and endangered species. Results of their study are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Women who will develop potentially life-threatening disorders during pregnancy can be identified early when hormone levels in the placenta are tested, a new study has shown.
Pregnancy disorders affect around one in ten pregnant women. Nearly all of the organ systems of the mother's body need to alter their function during pregnancy so that the baby can grow. If the mother's body cannot properly adapt to the growing baby this leads to major and common issues including fetal growth restriction, fetal over-growth, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia—a life-threatening high blood pressure in the mother.
Many of these complications lead to difficult labors for women with more medical intervention and lifelong issues for the baby including diabetes, heart issues and obesity.
Pregnancy disorders are usually diagnosed during the second or third trimester of gestation when they have often already had a serious impact on the health of the mother and baby. The current methods to diagnose pregnancy disorders are not sensitive or reliable enough to identify all at risk pregnancies.
Since 2008, we have known that the 16p11.2 chromosomal region is linked with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Now, researchers from Boston Children's have developed a new way to study the effects of 16p11.2 deletion in human neurons. In the process, they also found a potential treatment, possibly expanding the therapeutic options for this specific cause of ASD.
A common risk factor for ASD
Accounting for up to 1 percent of autism cases, deletions in 16p11.2—which includes 29 genes—occur in people who are missing a small amount of DNA on one copy of chromosome 16.
To better understand what happens in the brain cells of people with either deletions or additions of part of the 16p11.2 gene region, the researchers focused on a specific type called dopaminergic neurons. Defects in the dopaminergic system have been implicated in people with autism. Two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat irritability associated with autism act on the dopaminergic system.
A cell-penetrating peptide developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center can prevent, in an animal model, the often-fatal septic shock that can result from bacterial and viral infections.
Their findings, published this week in Scientific Reports, could lead to a way to protect patients at highest risk for severe complications and death from out-of-control inflammatory responses to microbial infections, including COVID-19.
"Life-threatening microbial inflammation hits harder (in) patients with metabolic syndrome, a condition afflicting millions of people in the United States and worldwide," said the paper's corresponding author, Jacek Hawiger, MD, Ph.D., the Louise B. McGavock Chair in Medicine and Distinguished Professor of Medicine at VUMC.
A new study at the University of Chicago Medicine and Washington University found that a single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects. The study, published June 9 in Science Translational Medicine, also found that the effects lasted much longer than previously suspected, with some participants experiencing improvements for upwards of two weeks.
These results bolster the evidence that non-traditional treatments may be a viable option for patients whose depression is not responsive to typical antidepressant medications. It may also provide a rapidly effective treatment option for patients in crisis.
Often called "laughing gas," nitrous oxide is frequently used as an anesthetic that provides short-term pain relief in dentistry and surgery.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
