Anxiety predictor, more eye-drop recalls, a cure for being drunk, and more

09 Mar 2023

Posted by Andrew Kantor

Who needs coffee … or a cold shower?

Nobody likes to deal with drunk mice. They annoy the cat and spend too much time trying to take over the world. But now there’s a potential solution: a dose of the hormone FGF21.

Researchers led by the University of Texas were looking at how to treat drunk mice, when they realized that FGF21, produced by the liver, is one of the ways the body deals with being drunk. (And when we say “drunk,” we mean really drunk: “defined as the loss of the ‘righting reflex,’ or the mouse’s ability to get upright after being placed on their back.”)

So what if they used artificial FGF21 on those blotto mice?

[W]hen the researchers gave the conked-out mice extra FGF21, they sobered up an average hour-and-a-half faster than the control drunk mice.

By augmenting the FGF21 naturally produced by the liver, the injection “activates a specific part of the brain that controls alertness, known as the noradrenergic nervous system.” (It also makes you want to drink more water.)

Not surprisingly, “More research will need to be done, but the team believes that FGF21 could someday be used to treat acute episodes of alcohol poisoning.”

More eye drop recalls

Two more companies are recalling some of their eye drops due to, obviously, health dangers.

Pharmedica is recalling its over-the-counter Purely Soothing 15% MSM Drops “due to problems ‘that could result in blindness’.”

= AND =

Apotex is recalling six lots of its prescription brimonidine tartrate ophthalmic solution 0.15% because it found cracks in some of the bottle caps.

These drops were made in the US and Canada, respectively, and aren’t related to last month’s eye-drop recall of drops made in India.

The Board of Public Health is meeting

Mark thy calendars: The Georgia Board of Public Health is holding its next public meeting on Tuesday, March 14 from 1:00 – 3:00 pm via Zoom.

Topics include Georgia’s dementia/Alzheimer’s program, environmental health updates, vaccinations for those over 50, and more.

Testing anxiety

There soon could be a simple blood test for anxiety. Not the spur of the moment, “Was that mole there yesterday?” kind, but the longer-term psychological condition.

The test, developed at Indiana University, is based on research that identified certain biomarkers for anxiety.

By examining the RNA biomarkers in their blood, researchers could identify a participant’s current state of anxiety and match them with medications and nutraceuticals, showing how effective different options could be for them based on their biology.

It can also predict someone’s risk of developing anxiety in the future, which, ironically, could end up causing that very anxiety….

AI finds a Parkinson’s drug

One of the contributors to Parkinson’s is that the body has trouble clearing out defective mitochondria*. So one treatment would be, say, a drug that helps with that process, called mitophagy.

But how to find that drug? If you’re a Canadian researcher (and it’s 2023), you turn to IBM’s Watson AI.

First you show it the kinds of words and phrases and clauses that are related to mitophagy (it called semantic similarity). Then you sic it on existing studies of more than 3,000 drugs.

In this case, Watson was able to narrow the drug possibilities down to 79, which was a small enough number to test in the lab. Then the humans took over.

Lo and behold, one of them — probucol — turned out to be “the compound with the best combination of effectiveness and likely safety.” It “was also found to improve motor function, survival, and neuron loss in two different animal models of Parkinson’s disease,” so clearly this was a win.

This is still in vitro, but it’s a better AI story than yet another “Will you lose your job to a robot?” piece.

^* Tradition requires us to include the phrase “the powerhouse of the cell.”

Makena is off the market

Under pressure from the FDA, Covis Pharma has pulled Makena, its hormonal injection to prevent pre-term labor, from the market.

Makena was granted an accelerated approval for Makena under the stipulation that it conduct more tests. But the company — now owned by a private equity firm — didn’t bother to run those tests for almost a decade. Why bother, when the drug was turning a profit?

When it was finally pressured into running those trials, it turned out Makena doesn’t work. And the side effects include miscarriages and stillbirths. With the FDA breathing down its neck (the FDA’s CDER said two and a half years ago it should be pulled from the market), Covis formally withdrew Makena.

Still, as one specialist put it, “We’ve basically been injecting pregnant women for 20 years with a synthetic hormone that doesn’t work, and carries risks to the moms and babies.”

Short Takes

The bright future of testing

What’s better than an at-home Covid test? An at-home Covid test that glows in the dark. It’s not just a gimmick, either. The same technology that causes the glow also makes the test more sensitive.

Biden’s plan to save Medicare

President Biden is joining Republicans in looking for ways to preserve the Medicare trust fund and keep the program funded. His proposal: Increase the number of drugs for which Medicare can negotiate the price. Paying what a drug is worth, rather than whatever drugmakers dream up, could save the program (i.e., taxpayers) billions.