Breaking WORLD PHARMA NEWS

Unsuspected discovery of abnormal antibodies could explain pediatric cancer

A team of scientists in Norway has found evidence for a new, previously unknown mechanism for the development of cancer in children: they seem to produce an unusual amount of aberrant antibodies against the building blocks that make up the DNA repair machinery, a diverse set of hundreds of proteins which identify and correct damage or errors in the genome. This important discovery could open the door to the early screening of small children, in the hope of ultimately preventing them from developing such pediatric cancers years in their teenage years.

Read more …

How cancer cells lose dangerous DNA

Aggressive tumors often contain large amounts of exchromosomal DNA. Removing this DNA from the nuclei of cancer cells could improve patient outcomes, an international team led by Anton Henssen of the Experimental and Clinical Research Center reports in Nature Genetics.

Cells from rapidly growing, highly metastatic tumors often contain numerous rings of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA).

Read more …

Abbott launches 'Mind Your Behind' campaign to encourage Americans 45+ to screen for colorectal cancer

Abbott, the global healthcare leader, launched “Mind Your Behind,” a new Cologuard Plus® awareness campaign featuring baseball legend and three-time MVP Albert “The Machine” Pujols and catcher for the Seattle Mariners Cal “The Big Dumper” Raleigh to encourage adults to prioritize colorectal cancer screening.

Read more …

Nearly one billion people could live with osteoarthritis by 2050

Almost one billion people are projected to be living with osteoarthritis by 2050, up from about 600 million in 2023, and there remains no cure and no drug that can stop or slow the disease, according to a new roadmap published in The Lancet.

A Curtin University-led group of international researchers is calling for stronger health policy action to arrest the growing global disability burden.

Read more …

Pharmaceutical company marketing negatively influences prescribing

Doctors’ prescribing habits are heavily influenced by payments, gifts, and free meals from pharmaceutical companies, leading to more expensive, less appropriate and more drugs being prescribed, a new Cochrane review finds. This can seriously harm both individual patients and health systems.

Pharmaceutical companies use a variety of strategies to market and promote their drugs.

Read more …

NIH grant awarded to treat breast cancer with bacteria

A scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine is working with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on new, complementary research efforts engineering therapeutic Salmonella to target critical gaps in treatment for drug-resistant triple-negative breast cancers. The team has received a five-year, $13.1 million grant, the first of its kind for bacteria cancer therapies awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health,

Read more …

Model reveals strategies to modify the tumor microenvironment and improve cancer therapy

Researchers from Mass General Brigham and the University of Cyprus have developed a sophisticated mathematical model to better understand how the tumor microenvironment affects the delivery and effectiveness of a new type of cancer therapy called an immunomodulatory antibody-drug conjugate (IM-ADC).

Read more …

Blocking immune cells' path into brain limits neurodegeneration

There is no treatment available today to stop the death of brain cells in neurodegenerative diseases known as tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease, in which twisted clumps of a protein called tau accumulate in the brain. Cells near those clumps begin to die after tau accumulates, but growing evidence suggests that much of the damage doesn’t come from the protein directly.

Read more …

Frequent cannabis use tied to more severe epilepsy

Adults with hard-to-treat epilepsy who used cannabis most days had more than twice as many convulsive seizures per year and more rapidly became resistant to antiseizure medications compared with nonusers, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The study appears in the journal Epilepsia.

Read more …

A new technique could accelerate the development of RNA therapies

RNA vaccines and other nucleic acid therapeutics are typically packaged within fatty molecules known as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). MIT researchers have now come up with a way to produce these particles much more quickly, and with more precise control over their size and shape.

Read more …