Fleming!

“Hamilton” is yesterday’s news. The hot new musical is “The Mold the Changed the World” — the story of Alexander Fleming and the history of antibiotics.

Even better: It’s coming to Atlanta November 2–6! Book your tickets today!

Testing a universal Covid treatment

mRNA is proving to be a Pretty Big Deal with vaccines, but it might also be useful as part of a treatment for Covid-19.

Certain enzymes can neutralized the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but they don’t last very long. So Oregon State pharma researchers are using mRNA to create on-site enzyme factories that last for days, not hours.

First they program mRNA to make that enzyme that binds to the infamous spike protein. Then they coat those little mRNA factories in lipid nanoparticles. The particles are delivered to the site of the infection, releasing the factories, and the enzyme they produce renders the virus impotent. Repeat until the infection is gone.

“Rather than messenger RNA as a vaccine, this shows that mRNA can be used as a universal therapy against different coronaviruses.”

Murder most foul

Sure, you’re in pharmacy to help people. But not everyone thinks like you do. Have you ever considered drugs … and murder?

Agatha Christie sure did! And now you can learn how the world’s most famous mystery writer used drugs to cause (fictional!) murder and mayhem while scoring an hour of CE.

GPhA’s Pharmacy Tales from the Crypt, Part III: Agatha Christie: Her use of drugs for murders is a one-hour CE course on Wednesday, October 26 from 7:30–8:30 pm via Zoom.

Join us and learn how about her descent into the dark side of pharmaceuticals….

No, there is no ‘CDC mandate’

Just a reminder that states, not the feds (and certainly not the CDC), decide which childhood vaccines are required for kids to go to school, as a quick glance at the CDC’s website shows. (Georgia’s list is here.) If you’ve heard otherwise, you need a better news source.

FDA likely to pull Makena

An FDA advisory panel recommended that AMAG Pharmaceuticals’ Makena — hydroxyprogesterone caproate, designed to prevent pre-term births — be removed from the market until more trials can be done. Right now, they said, there’s evidence “that the drug doesn’t have clinical benefit.”

Your plastic brain

For some depression treatment to work, the brain needs to be more plastic — able to change quickly and create new connections. The problem is that adult brains are thought to be pretty rigid. (Try changing someone’s mind.)

But now German neuroscientists have found that adult brains aren’t as fixed as expected. Using treatments including drugs, talk therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy, they found adults’ brains could be changed in about six weeks (PDF), and depressive symptoms dropped.

“We found that treatment for depression changed the infrastructure of the brain, which goes against previous expectations. Treated patients showed a greater number of connections than they had shown before treatment.

Knowing the brain is more flexible means they can start looking for targeted treatments for specific networks. As always, of course, more research is needed.

Long Covid treatment tested

The latest potential treatment for long Covid is, oddly, naltrexone — the addiction treatment. Anecdotal evidence implied that it worked to help reduce fatigue and brain fog, and “there are now at least four clinical trials planned to test naltrexone in hundreds of patients with long Covid.”

Even if it works, though, it won’t work for everyone, as long Covid’s symptom list is as long as a CVS receipt. And as one researcher put it, “It’s not a panacea. These people weren’t cured, but they were helped.”

The five-hour mark

If you’re 50 or over and get fewer than five hours of sleep a night, you’re doomed. Doomed. British researchers found that not getting enough sleep makes you…

• 20% more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic disease
• 40% more likely to be diagnosed with two or more chronic diseases over 25 years

And that, obviously, increases your risk of death within 25 years. Worse, it’s bad for the rest of us — “a major challenge for public health, as multimorbidity is associated with high healthcare service use, hospitalisations, and disability.”

ICYMI: hair-straightening risk

The headlines: “Hair-straightening products linked with uterine cancer risk”.

The reality: Yes, it’s true. They can triple the risk. But before you worry, keep in mind that it means the risk goes from 1.6% to 4.1% — notable, but not necessarily worth a panic.

The Long Read: Why BMI? edition

About 200 years ago, a Belgian mathematician invented the idea of the “ideal” weight for an average man. Today we know it as Body Mass Index, and it’s way, way past its usefulness. Read more: “BMI: The Mismeasure of Weight and the Mistreatment of Obesity.”