Here’s drug in your eye

Do your contact lenses just sit there bending light? How boring. Johnson & Johnson now has one that includes a drug — ketotifen — the antihistamine to prevent itchy eyeballs. And it just got FDA approval. “Ocular allergic itch in contact lens wearers,” the company said, “may soon be an issue of the past.”

Tiny drug, big cancer breakthrough

Did Rice University bioengineers just cure ovarian and colorectal cancer? In mice, it seems so. In humans — maybe. Phase 1 trials could begin this year.

How? Old drug, new delivery: They created what they call “drug factories” less than a millimeter across (about 1⁄₁₆” in Freedom Units) that are implanted next to tumors where they deliver interleukin-2. By bringing the drug right to the target, it can be a lot more concentrated than via an IV.

“We just administer once, but the drug factories keep making the dose every day, where it’s needed until the cancer is eliminated. Once we determined the correct dose — how many factories we needed — we were able to eradicate tumors in 100% of animals with ovarian cancer and in seven of eight animals with colorectal cancer.”

Sackers settle

Finally (maybe?) there’s a settlement between the Sackler family and the states, local governments, tribes, and individuals suing them for their role in the opioid crisis.

The Sacker family, who helped fuel that crisis with its pushing of OxyContin, will pay an extra $1.5 billion than they offered last time, in exchange for immunity from civil liability.

In other words, instead of the $4.55 billion settlement rejected by states in December (because of that no-liability provision), the Sacklers will pay $6 billion, admit to and apologize for their role, and allow their name to be removed from any ‘medical centers, art, or educational institutions’ still bearing it.

Oh, and they’re still open to criminal prosecution.

ACE is the place … to fight overdose?

ACE inhibitors apparently make opioids work better. And that means that combining them with prescription painkillers could mean lower doses of opiates — and less risk of addiction or overdose.

Or, as the University of Minnesota researchers put it, “Our results raise the enticing prospect that central ACE inhibition can boost endogenous opioid signaling for clinical benefit, while mitigating risk of addiction.”

Women and Alzheimer’s

Why do more women than men get Alzheimer’s? The answer could lie in FSH, a hormone produced by the pituitary gland. During menopause, the concentration of FSH increases — that’s what researchers at Emory, Mount Sinai, and in China found — and in turn increases deposits of beta-amyloid (Greek: β-amyloid) and tau in the brain.

So they did an experiment — they blocked that FSH in mice. Result: “blocking FSH not only dampens Alzheimer’s disease pathology, but reduces bone loss and body fat in mouse models.”

If you’re thinking, “Whoa, they need to look at FSH-blocking a bit more,” you’re on the same wavelength.

“These results could provide the framework for development of a single FSH blocking agent to be used in humans for treating Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, and osteoporosis — conditions that affect millions of people worldwide.”

Cuckoo for cocoa

There are those who believe that, if exercise nauseates you, the solution is cocoa. Lots of cocoa.

The idea is that the flavonoids in the cocoa have “antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity and have been shown to have prebiotic effects on beneficial gut microbes” — happy gut, no gastrointestinal distress.

Sadly, say Spanish researchers who actually did a real study on it, that may be true in some animal models, but not in humans. They found …

…cocoa had no significant effects on serum and fecal metabolites and that its consumption had little impact on the metabolome after a bout of physical exercise.

E-cigs: Gateway to diabetes

We already knew that regular cigarettes can increase someone’s risk of diabetes, but what about e-cigarettes? Turns out that there’s at least a connection to pre-diabetes.

Looking at date from more than 600,000 respondents of a two-year survey, medical researchers from Johns Hopkins and China’s Peking University found that, simply put, yes, “E-cigarette use was associated with greater odds of prediabetes.”

And that’s true whether or not they had smoked traditional cigarettes.

Cinderella is doomed

Here’s an excuse to keep those floors dirty: Mopping with the wrong cleanser can make your air as polluted as a city street.

British researchers found that using pine- or citrus-scented cleaning products produced a host of molecules you probably don’t want to breathe in. Limonene is one — it “reacts readily with ozone, an outdoor pollutant that is the main ingredient in smog.”

In their tests…

… an average person would breathe in about 1 billion to 10 billion nanoparticles each minute. That’s equivalent to vehicle traffic on a busy street in a typical U.S. or European city.

The Long Read: Do What We Say and You Won’t Get Hurt edition

New technology is here — and coming down the pike — to help patients adhere to their meds. Drug Topics has a nice overview of what’s out there: “Medication Safety 2.0: Advances in Adherence Technology.”