Amazon getting physical?

The rumor is that Amazon is planning to take its nascent retail prescription drug business into the real world, possibly inside Whole Food stores.

Cue the panic, with CVS and Walgreens stock dropping on the news. But first, it’s only a rumor. Second, though, Axios gives a pretty solid reality check on what it means, at least for the short- to medium-term:

Amazon still isn’t disrupting the prescription drug industry. Amazon is maybe, possibly considering a way to capture a marginally bigger piece of the extremely small slice it has.

The right bacteria protects the good bacteria

Having the right bacteria in the guy can reduce chemotherapy side effects. According to environmental biologists at Northwestern University, certain types of gut bacteria — for example, Raoultella planticola — can break down chemotherapy drugs and protect the rest of the good bacteria in the gut. And having the good gut bacteria survive can make a tremendous difference in typical chemo side effects.

This is still in the lab, but “There are several eventual applications that would be great to help cancer patients — particularly pediatric patients.”

Future Watch

A new way to deliver vaccines could be with a wafer under the tongue. That type of delivery isn’t new (think nitroglycerin), but vaccine molecules are too large to work that way. Until now. Maybe.

Biomedical engineers at the University of Minnesota have developed a polymer ‘wafer’ that can deliver the large proteins of a vaccine while protecting and preserving them. They’ve tested it with HIV proteins and it worked, so it’s a successful proof of concept. As always, more research is needed.

“This is just a small step in this long journey. If we continue this line of work, it can bring us to a point where we will have vaccines—they could be based on DNA, RNA, proteins—that can be stored without refrigeration and easily delivered under the tongue at the sublingual site.”

Two ways to live forever*

Start by knocking three years off your biological age in just eight weeks with DNA methylation! Change your diet and lifestyle (including adding “supplemental probiotics and phytonutrients”) It must be real, because the study’s author has her own website where she sells some of those very supplements.

Then … add a tapeworm to your life. Yep, a German study found that “Life expectancy of tapeworm-infected worker ants is significantly higher than that of their uninfected nest-mates.” How? The infected worms get better care from the other ants. So maybe don’t go the tapeworm route.

(Bonus: The article contains this bit of wisdom: “The high life expectancy of [ant] queens is due to their low mortality rate.”)

* Don’t do either

After the infection: MIS-C news

Although kids are rarely affected by being infected with Covid-19, some of them have developed a set of serious symptoms after it clears — high fever, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, extreme fatigue, and potential organ damage. It’s been named multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), and it’s been a mystery.

Two big pieces of news have come out, though — good news for parents. And, of course, the kids.

First, a small study out of the U.K. found that “Severe Symptoms of MIS-C Typically Clear Within Six Months,” which is cause of at least cautious optimism, if not full-blown celebration.

Second, pediatric pulmonologists (and others) in Boston have figured out how MIS-C happens: The virus, stinker that it is, hides in the gut, and can hang out there before jumping into the bloodstream.

And that gives them an idea for treatment: larazotide acetate, which is used to treat celiac disease, can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from jumping from the gut into the bloodstream. They got FDA approval for a compassionate-use case, and successfully treated a 17-month-old.

Testosterone and Covid

What they don’t know: Why.

What they do know: Men with higher testosterone levels do better when hospitalized with Covid-19.

What makes even less sense: Men with Covid-19 fare worse, on average, than women.

If a man had low testosterone when he first came to the hospital, his risk of having severe COVID-19 — meaning his risk of requiring intensive care or dying — was much higher compared with men who had more circulating testosterone. And if testosterone levels dropped further during hospitalization, the risk increased.”

Coked-up fruit flies

One way to make a fruit fly’s very short life more interesting (and meaningful) is to give it some cocaine.

Clemson University behavioral geneticists exposed fruit flies to coke to see what it did to their brains. A lot, it turns out. “[C]ocaine use elicits rapid, widespread changes in gene expression throughout the fruit fly brain,” they found, but more importantly, they also noticed that there were specific cell clusters that were most affected.

By noting which cells — and which genes — had the biggest reaction, they hope to lay the groundwork for potential addiction therapy.

“We built an atlas of sexually dimorphic cocaine-modulated gene expression in a model brain, which can serve as a resource for the research community.”