Georgia is waking up

The state’s vaccine rate is rising as people realize, “This Delta thing is actually pretty scary.” The CDC says Georgians’ vaccinations jumped 26 percent week to week, compared to just 8 percent for the country as a whole.

We’re still near the bottom for vaccinations, but jumps like that show we’re moving in the right direction.

Latest Covid tester

This one’s from MIT and Harvard, uses saliva, and takes about an hour — bonus: It can detect variants as well. Bonus bonus: It costs about $15 to make.

What’s your NarxCare score?

It’s a private company with a secret algorithm. It has access to everyone’s medical records, and it’s used by doctors, pharmacists, and hospitals across the country. The company is Appriss, and the product is NarxCare. Quietly, secretly, and usually without patients knowing, it produces an “Overdose Risk Score” that’s supposed to indicate how likely the person is to be abusing opioids.

That score can cause prescribers to refuse to treat patients, and pharmacies to refuse to dispense drugs. In some states using NarxCare is even required by law, or part of the state’s prescription monitoring program. But the calculations it uses are secret and have never been checked or validated.

That “Overdose Risk Score”?

Only Appriss knows exactly how this score is derived, but according to the company’s promotional material, its predictive model not only draws from state drug registry data, but “may include medical claims data, electronic health records, EMS data, and criminal justice data.”

Hopefully you don’t have a sick pet (its meds are under your name, after all), or a serious condition that requires seeing multiple specialists. Either could get you flagged as a ‘doc-shopper’ and affect your NarxCare score. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

They still trust you

The latest ‘Who do you trust poll’ — this one from the University of Chicago and the Associated Press — once again shows that people trust their pharmacists.

A solid 75 percent of people said they trusted pharmacists “to do what is right for you or your family.” Nurses scored a little higher, as usual, but physicians were only at 70 percent. The lowest-scoring of healthcare professions? Hospital execs.

Gene therapy for asthma

Not every asthmatic responds to corticosteroids, and a lot more people are getting asthma these days. So UConn chemists did what any self-respecting scientist does these days: They turned to nanoparticles.

In this case, they’re using gene-silencing nanocapsules: tiny drug-delivery devices that deliver an enzyme to white blood cells. By turning off one gene, it stops the cells’ overactive immune response — the GATA-3 response to be specific. While that means this only works on allergic asthma, but heck, that’s what half of adults and 90 percent of kids have.

Among other next steps, they admit, is figuring out “Where do these nanocapsules go?”

If you can’t beat ’em…

Hospital systems, startups, non-profits — they’re all getting into the business of making their own drugs to save money, as drug makers keep raising the prices of generic meds. But that’s the cool thing about generics: Anyone can make ’em.

Some of these companies are selling directly to hospitals, others are going through independent pharmacies, and all of them are undercutting the big guys … and adding a little fresh competition to the market.

The alternative drugmakers are hiring U.S. contract manufacturers whenever possible and getting drug ingredients here or in Europe, to diversify supply chains heavily reliant on China and India, which limited exports of drugs and ingredients early in the pandemic.

Two drugs vs one cancer

Treating myelofibrosis — the blood cancer — usually involves ruxolitinib, but that’s got two downsides. First, it just treats the symptoms and doesn’t treat the disease. Second, it can scar patients’ bone marrow, reducing blood production and leading to anemia.

But now University of Virginia biochemists think they’ve got a better idea: adding palbociclib. Palbociclib is a CDK4/6 inhibitor (normally used to treat breast cancers). When it’s combined with ruxolitinib, though, it not only inhibits myelofibrosis, it cuts down on the bone marrow scarring.

Caveat: They’ve only tested this in mice so far.

J&J is looking for the perfect package

Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS is dangling a prize of up to $100,000 in grant funding for someone to create the perfect single-dose drug package. So what’s a perfect package?

For starters, it has to be user-friendly and child-resistant. Easy. Then add “great user experience” (e.g., “frustration-free opening, portability, attractiveness”). Oh, and it helps to be sustainable, tamper-evident, without sharp edges, and of course cost-effective.

The contest is the latest of the company’s QuickFire Challenges — and the deadline is about two months from now, October 15.