Doc Ock meets “Fantastic Voyage”

If engineers are tasked with creating a drug-delivery system for the lungs — but then stay up late drinking and watching the wrong kind of anime — this is what they come up with: a “magnetic tentacle robot” that can be guided deep into the lungs.

It’s designed to replace the bronchoscope, a large tube inserted through the nose or mouth. Its size makes it unwieldly, though, and hard to ‘steer’ to the right place. The magnetic tentacle robot, though, is small enough to go deep, controlled by external magnets.

As the magnets outside of the patient move, they develop forces on the magnetic particles in the segments of the catheter, causing them to change shape or direction — enabling the robot to be manoeuvred through the lungs and to a site of a suspicious lesion.

Once at the target location, the robot is used to take a tissue sample or deliver treatment.

So far it’s been tested in an artificial lung; the team will next try it on a cadaver before moving on to grad students.

Who’s that calling?

That voice you’re hearing — assuming it’s not the neighbor’s German shepherd — is probably Amelia Island calling!

Will you answer? The Georgia Pharmacy Convention is coming up, and you ought to be there. Amazing courses, great events, that incredible beach, lots for the family to do … it’s always an amazing event. (Yeah, we said “amazing” twice. Can’t be helped.)

Check it all out at GPhAConvention.com, then register, grab your room, and we’ll see you at the beach!

June 9-12, 2022. Room block closes May 18. Be there or be square.

Don’t worry, honey, I’m on the pill

A non-hormonal birth control pill for men is expected to start human trials this year.

Other male Pill candidates target testosterone, but researchers at the University of Minnesota tried a different tack: Their pill interferes with vitamin A, which is necessary for mammal fertility.

The result (they hope) will be “long-lasting but reversible sterility.” And because it doesn’t target testosterone, the so-called GPHR-529 pill shouldn’t cause unwanted side effects like higher cholesterol or lower sex drive.

Captain Obvious will never trust an influencer again

“TikTok videos about high blood pressure often lack scientific basis”

The dark was rising

What kind of person was most likely to have “maladaptive responses” to the pandemic — e.g., refusing to take steps to reduce risk?

In Brazil, which had one of the worst responses (with the government essentially doing nothing) the answer, according to an international group researchers, is “people with ‘dark personality traits’.” These are folks who “prioritize themselves more than the health of others,” exhibit lower levels of empathy, higher levels of deceitfulness, and higher levels of the so-called “Dark Triad.”

The Dark Triad: Machiavellianism/cynicism, psychopathy, and narcissism. To get the full Dark Pentad you can add sadism and spitefulness.

The Dark Pentad was overall negatively correlated with worry about the pandemic. In other words, those with higher Dark Pentad scores were generally less concerned with the pandemic. Higher Dark Pentad scores were also generally associated with less adaptive responses and more maladaptive responses to the pandemic.

HuffPo champions pharmacists

High-five to the Huffington Post (and reader S.S. who pointed it out) for a piece we’d like to see more of: “8 Health Issues You Didn’t Know Your Pharmacist Can Help With.”

Fighting mouse epilepsy

If you have mice — particularly female mice — with epilepsy, there’s good news afoot. A compound called TC-2153 reduces seizures in the hippocampuses* of mice — and that’s where 60 percent or more of them start.

University of Illinois physiology researchers were actually expecting to cause seizures when they tested TC-2153, and were surprised to find the opposite. Back to the lab: “Further studies will explore how TC-2153 works and will test its effects in human neurons.”

Interesting, while it worked on both male- and female-identifying mice, it was more effective on the girls. When they removed those mice’s ovaries, the efficacy dropped — offering a possible avenue for future research.

* It’s from the Greek, so it’s not “hippocampi.” I checked.

Breaking up the stones

Breaking up kidney stones from outside the body isn’t new. Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy is popular, using X-rays and shock waves to break up stones.

The downside is that ESWL needs to be done in hospital, can’t be used on pregnant people, and requires patients to be at least sedated, if not anesthetized. Not to mention the whole X-ray thing.

Now University of Washington and Indiana University have a better way: burst wave lithotripsy, which uses a small, handheld device and doesn’t require sedation. Instead of X-rays, it uses focused ultrasound pulses. The only side effect is a bit of “mild and manageable peripheral tissue injury.”

The first study of BWL in human subjects resulted in a median of 90% comminution of the total stone volume into fragments ≤2 mm within 10 minutes of BWL exposure with only mild tissue injury.

More research is coming. In the meantime, there’s always the roller coaster.

About those dietary guidelines

In 2020, HHS and the USDA released the latest version of “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” — recommendations for healthy eating. The question, as always, was how much those recommendations were based on science, and how much they were based on “input” from industry.

So a group of Irish, US, and UK researchers decided to find out. And yep, there was plenty of conflict of interest to be had:

Our analysis found that 95% of the committee members had COI with the food, and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon, and the International Life Sciences had connections with multiple members.

So take all these recommendations with a grain of salt. (But not too much.)

While you’re enjoying that grain of salt…

Eating cranberries every day can improve your cardiovascular function … according to a study funded by the Cranberry Institute.