Down and out in the land of the free

A new Gallup poll found that more than a quarter of American adults are or have been depressed — that’s a 10% jump from 2015. And that’s not “people who feel depressed” — these are patients who have been diagnosed with clinical depression.

(Sure, some of those are probably over-enthusiastic prescribers. But then again, there were over-enthusiastic prescribers in 2015, too, when the number was lower.)

For some reason we just can’t fathom, the rate jump starting in the spring of 2020, almost as if there was some event triggering it. But while it dipped a bit by 2022, it’s been rising since then.

Blame what you like — social media, isolation and loneliness, fear of the future, social media — it’s clearly a problem.

Shortages are still an issue

Drug shortages continue to be a problem and now they’re becoming a concern and could even be a crisis. But unlike other issues, this one is harder for government — i.e., society as a whole — to solve, because it’s mostly in the hands of private industry and the laws of supply and demand.

Officials have been debating possible measures like tax incentives for generic drugmakers and greater transparency around generic drug quality. The current incentives favor drugmakers with the lowest prices, which includes those that might cut corners — leading to disruptive plant shutdowns if the F.D.A. demands a fix.

(One plan that has bipartisan support is making it easier for generics to come to market “by addressing tactics or loopholes [used by drugmakers] that cause delays.” We shall see.)

If you give a mouse a mushroom….

Good news if you have mice you’re worried about getting poisoned by death cap mushrooms: Chinese scientists have uncovered the process by which the toxin kills, and then a possible antidote: indocyanine green, which is used in medical imaging and FDA approved for human use (in small doses).

Half the mice survived the poisoning when given indocyanine green, compared to a 90% death rate without it.

The biggest problem, though, is human testing. See, subjects would need to be poisoned first….

What’s old is new

Cancer drug makes a good partner

Once upon a time, angiogenesis inhibitors were a hopeful candidate for cancer treatments, but they didn’t do well in clinical trials; today they have only limited benefits. But it seems they might have a new life: When combined with checkpoint inhibitors, angiogenesis inhibitors delayed recurrence of the nasty liver cancer hepatocellular carcinoma. That’s a first.

And it’s just one of the ways the angiogenesis/checkpoint inhibitor combo is being tested on various cancer types:

So far, dozens of clinical trials have evaluated checkpoint inhibitor-angiogenesis inhibitor combos. Some proved toxic, and others failed. However, the studies also led FDA to approve new therapies for types of liver, kidney, lung, and endometrial cancers. The drug combinations are not curative, but they restrain tumor growth. And some extend patients’ lives by many months over angiogenesis inhibitors alone.

Improving an old antibiotic

A “new” weapon in the fight against antibiotic resistance might be 80 years old. It’s nourseothricin (b. 1942) which is kind of a complex form of streptothricin. Sure, back in the ’40s it did kidney damage, but this ain’t the ’40s.

“What scientists were isolating in 1942 was not as pure as what we are working with today. In fact, what was then called streptothricin is actually a mixture of several streptothricin variants.”

And one of those variants, streptothricin-F, “was significantly less toxic while also working against present day pathogens that are resistant to multiple drugs.”

Smart sutures could be comin’

Take a suture. Make it of catgut, which naturally dissolves in a few months. Great — it’ll close a wound. But what if the wound becomes infected? And what if it’s a particularly dangerous gut wound?

If you’re an MIT researcher, you coat that suture with a hydrogel that “can be embedded with sensors, drugs, or even cells that release therapeutic molecules.” Yep — the suture itself could detect inflammation or infection, then release drugs to counter it.

(How can it detect inflammation? By containing a peptide that reacts in the presence of inflammation-associated enzymes.)

The researchers envision that these sutures could help patients with Crohn’s disease heal after surgery to remove part of the intestine. The sutures could also be adapted for use to heal wounds or surgical incisions elsewhere in the body.

Short Takes

Goodbye, J&J vax

The Johnson & Johnson one-shot Covid vaccination has left the building.

AstraZeneca quits PhRMA

It’s the latest pharmaceutical manufacturer to leave the trade group.

Monkeypox won’t quit

Health officials: The monk— the mpox emergency is over. As you were.

Mpox: You couldn’t kill Rasputin, what makes you think you can stop me?

Health officials: That is a terrible analogy.