Settlement derailed

Two years. Dozens of states, cities, towns, and tribe. Finally, one big $4.5 billion opioid settlement.

Until the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma (and implicated as the people who “took a keen interest in drastically downplaying the addictive qualities of OxyContin in marketing efforts”) made a demand:

They want to be shielded, forever, against any future lawsuits — and not just about opioids, but over any drugs the company makes.

And the definition of “Sackler family” is rather broad:

[David Sackler said] the family anticipated that the liability shield would cover him, other members of his extensive family, and about 1,000 other individuals, including contractors and consultants, and protect them from lawsuits that had nothing to do with opioids.

Brain delivery

We’ve got good treatments for HIV infections, but not a cure. That’s in part because the virus is able to hide in reservoirs in the central nervous system, where antiretrovirals fear to tread.

Molecular biologists at the University of Miami did the obvious thing: They turned to nanoparticles — “biodegradable brain-targeted polymeric nanoparticles,” to be specific. Using those nanoparticles, they were able to deliver antiretrovirals, antioxidants, and anti-inflammatories through that pesky blood-brain barrier.

It’s only in animal models at the moment, but it’s a pretty cool proof of concept. “The approach could theoretically be used to hustle other therapeutic molecules across the blood-brain barrier.”

Joe’s story

Many of you know GPhA member Joe Ed Holt — today he serves as chair of GPhA’s PharmWell, but he was also one of the folks whose lives were changed by the PharmAssist program.

Take a minute to read what Joe Ed has to say about PharmAssist, and how you can help your fellow pharmacists who are dealing with burnout, chemical dependency, and addiction.

SSRI interference

When you think about feeling good, you might think about serotonin — it’s what most antidepressants work on, after all. But British researchers (and their friends in South Carolina) think there’s another “molecule of interest” — histamine.

Specifically, they found that (in mice) histamine actually binds to the neurons that normally would produce serotonin. To quote the philosopher Scooby-Doo, “Ruh-ro.”

And to make matters worse, SSRIs also cause the release of histamine “cancelling out [the SSRI’s] serotonin boosting action.”

But then…

The researchers then administered histamine reducing drugs alongside the SSRIs to counter histamine’s inhibitory effects, and saw serotonin levels rise back to control levels.

(Important note: Those weren’t simply anti-histamines they used. They were drugs that “cause a whole-body reduction in histamine.” So just taking Zyrtec won’t help.)

Next up: Does this translate to humans?

Big step for HIV vaccine

Moderna is expected to begin phase 1 trials of two mRNA HIV vaccines, starting today. Phase 1 is just to determine safety, so there’s a ways to go before the serious effectiveness trials begin. But still.

With tumors, timing is everything

If you want to see what drugs will work on a particular patient’s cancer, it makes sense to take a sample of the tumor and test those drugs. But that hasn’t worked well with many solid epithelial tumors, like some lung cancers.

Now Finnish researchers have figured out why, and a way around it. And it’s pretty straightforward.

The “trick” is speed. Normally you would culture the cells to have more to work with, but solid tumor cells change very quickly after removal from the body. The Finns developed a test that lets them skip that culturing stage and go straight to testing these “fresh uncultured tumor cells” instead.

Their results demonstrated that robust drug response data was generated in 19 of 20 patient cases. Genetic cancer mutation analyses and the drug sensitivity data were well aligned.

A scary breakthrough number

Data change — that’s science. So the latest information won’t be the final information. That said, numbers from six of the seven states that collect the most Covid data show that “breakthrough infections accounted for 18 percent to 28 percent of recorded cases in recent weeks.”

But the scary part isn’t cases. It’s hospitalizations: “Breakthrough infections accounted for 12 percent to 24 percent of Covid-related hospitalizations in the states.”

(Good news: Deaths among the vaccinated remain small — less than 1 percent of breakthroughs.)

One is never enough

“People lose control over it. They consume it even though they know they should stop. They’re having compulsive behaviors. They go through withdrawal when it gets removed.” University of Michigan psychology and addiction researcher Ashley Gearhardt is talking about Diet Coke.

Between the caffeine (32 percent more than regular Coke) and the aspartame (only gives half the reward as sugar)…

“If Diet Coke—or any diet soda—was a new pharmaceutical product and we were testing it for whether people are getting addicted to it, we would be very concerned.”

The lonely flies

If you’ve been reading the news and dreading the idea of another lockdown, the fruit flies of the world understand.

Publishing in Nature, Rockefeller University geneticists found that isolated fruit flies are more human than you might expect.

After seven days, flies housed together in groups of varying sizes produced no anomalous behaviors. Even two flies cut off from the crowd were content with one another. But when a single fly was entirely isolated, the lonely insect began eating more and sleeping less.

As the lead researcher put it, “loneliness has pathological consequences.”