Bacteria vs acne

The usual way to treat acne (pharmacologically, at least) is with antibiotics — kill the Cutibacterium acnes and get a prom date.

But with antibiotic resistance a problem, Belgian biomedical engineers came up with another solution: bacteria to fight bacteria. Specifically, using lactobacillus to fight both C. acnes and Staphylococcus aureus.

Fun fact: Not only does it work, it keeps working after treatment stops.

Fentanyl rising

When it comes to opioids, fentanyl is just about in a league of its own, it’s so powerful. And it’s cheap to make. Thus it’s ending up in other street drugs as sort of a deadly filler. In Georgia, state health officials said, there’s been a surge of overdoses — an average of more than one a day in the state attributed just to fentanyl added to other drugs.

“In the crime lab alone, the lab has seen an 80% increase of fentanyl results in the last year. We’ve also seen a disturbing trend of samples called ‘purple heroin/purp’ that contains heroin and fentanyl.”

And it’s not just here. An NYU study found that “Seizures of pills containing fentanyl increased 834% between 2018-2021.”

Drug factory in your gut

What if instead of simply tweaking gut bacteria to do no harm, we could introduce bacteria that would produce a drug? For example, L-DOPA for Parkinson’s?

That, in fact, is exactly what pharmacologists from UGA (and Iowa State) did by engineering a version of E. Coli to eat tyrosine and, um, expel L-DOPA.

It’s still just in the lab and just in mice, but a couple of interesting notes. First, the bacteria can just keep on keepin’ on, so there’s less risk of dyskinesias (a side effect probably caused by the L-DOPA slacking off). And second, they say they can control the amount of L-DOPA released by regulating either the E. Coli or its food.

Next up: “[O]ptimizing the engineered bacteria as the research looks to human trials.”

Drug to watch #1: Vupanorsen

Vupanorsen is still investigational, but the latest investigation found that yep, it lowers non-HDL cholesterol quite well.

It was designed to target ANGPTL3 proteins, and that it does — lowering levels by 95 percent. It also lowered triglycerides by up to 57 percent. In fact, the only bad stuff it didn’t affect was LDL cholesterol.

One caveat: These studies were done on patients who were also taking statins.

Listen to your medicine

Non-chemical drugs aren’t new — there’s transcranial magnetic stimulation (done in hospital) and transcranial direct current stimulation (which can be done with a homemade device). But those require either a medical professional or an ability to building an electronic devices based on a schematic you find online.

What’s catching on is a different kind of ‘digital drug’ — binaural beats, which are based on sound. The idea is that playing tones of different frequencies in each ear causes the brain to perceive it as a thir frequency, “thought to produce a range of effects, including relaxation and attentiveness.”

What’s crazy is that studies have shown it actually works … at least for reducing pain and stress. (Not so much for attention issues.)

Just consider the side effects

Older women should consider eating six to 12 prunes a day to prevent osteoporosis — all those prunes “may reduce pro-inflammatory mediators that may contribute to bone loss in postmenopausal women” according to a study out of Penn State.

“Prunes might be a promising nutritional intervention to prevent the rise in inflammatory mediators often observed as part of the aging process.”

Drug to watch #2: Patiromer

If you’ve got patients taking an RAASi for heart failure, adding patiromer might be an option. A study out of the University of Mississippi found that patiromer worked well to lower patients’ potassium levels — heading off hyperkalemia, a common side effect of RAASi.

“Here, what we show is that we can simultaneously get all three things — you can maintain normal kalemia, you can reduce the risk of hyperkalemic events, and you can improve RAAS inhibitor therapy, in patients in the longer term.”

Can you overdo boosters?

With Omicron BA.2 threatening to start another pandemic wave, more booster shots have been authorized for some folks. But how long can we keep this up? Not forever, say the experts — we’re gonna need a better vaccine.

Such a long-lasting pan-coronavirus vaccine “is a realistic hope” […] Several efforts are underway to create a universal vaccine—which would target parts of the virus crucial to its function and don’t change across variants—including an initiative by the U.S. Army.

In the meantime, there’s a 61-year-old gentleman in Germany — a place known to occasionally take things to excess — who got himself vaccinated against Covid-19 at least 87 times.

No, he wasn’t paranoid; he was selling the vaccination cards he received to anti-vaxxers.

Captain Obvious nods vigorously in approval

If you give middle-aged rats a lot of caffeine — the human equivalent of about six mugs of coffee (880mg) at once— they may develop arrhythmias. That’s the groundbreaking research out of the New York Institute of Technology.