Making a cheaper autoinjector

Someday insulin will be inexpensive again, the way it was 100 years ago. But cheap meds still need expensive delivery systems for patients. But now Canadian engineers have potentially solved that little problem with an open source autoinjector that costs 1/10th the cost to make as commercial devices.

Open source? It means they’ve designed plans that can be used with a 3-D printer, and they’re giving those plans away, including to companies that want to commercialize it.

It’s not much to look at, but it’s a big deal.

That’s great news for developing countries where, even if insulin is cheap, the pens can be too expensive for people or governments. But cutting the price from about $70 each to about $7, it becomes a lot more reasonable. And there’s no reason the tech couldn’t be used here — if it’s about $7 on a home printer, think how cheap it could be produced at scale.

Mental health: How to help

Would you recognize the signs of mental illness or substance abuse if they weren’t incredibly obvious? Face it: probably not. But catching those signs early is critical to getting patients on the right path.

That’s why the Georgia Pharmacy Foundation is offering an important CE course: Mental Health First Aid. It’ll teach you to identify and respond to signs of mental illnesses and substance abuse sooner rather than later.

The course: 5½ hours live training, plus 2 hours self study — a total of 7.5 hours of CPE credit for pharmacists and technicians. (You’re expected to complete the home study portion first.)

The next date: Saturday, August 5, from 9:00 am – 3:30 pm at UGA’s campus in Tifton.

GPhF is making this training available to pharmacists, pharmacy techs, and student pharmacists for just $49.00. (It’s normally $170.00.)

Click here for details!

Smoothing the biosimilars path

In the US, even when a biosimilar is FDA approved it needs a second approval to be “in­ter­change­able,” i.e., switchable by a pharmacist. In the EU, though, approval is approval, and now a bipartisan group of US senators wants to make that the case here.

Said one senator:

“The Eu­ro­pean Med­i­cines Agency (EMA) has been ap­prov­ing biosim­i­lars since 2006. In 2022, af­ter an­a­lyz­ing more than fif­teen years of da­ta, the EMA stat­ed that there is no ev­i­dence that switch­ing be­tween a biosim­i­lar and its ref­er­ence prod­uct in­creas­es the risk of im­muno­genic­i­ty.”

Learning from ticks

If you were going to use one of your three wishes to eliminate mosquitoes and ticks from the Earth, hold off a second. Ticks may offer something useful. They have the ability to attach to their hosts and hang out there for a while without being detected — and that hints at a potential drug.

Ticks are able to hide like that, Canadian researchers found, because they “have naturally evolved the ability to block chemokine-driven inflammation.” That ability comes from proteins in their saliva called A3 evasins, and the Canucks think they might be repurposed into a new kind of anti-inflammatory drug because they’ve got a distinct method of action.

Then you can wish them off the face of the planet.

They’re smarter than you think.

Covid quickies

Free vax

The Biden administration said Covid vaccines will be free to the uninsured through the end of 2024. “The temporary program aims to fill the gaps after the federal government shifts Covid shots and treatments to the commercial market.”

Don’t you dare

Based on hospital admissions and wastewater surveillance, it seems Covid is on the rise. Epidemiologists say this isn’t unexpected as new waves typically begin in the summer. At this point it’s more “That’s worth keeping an eye on” than “Oh, %$@& this again.”

Emergency department visits for Covid at the national level were up 10.7% compared to the previous week, with Alaska, Florida, and Hawaii reporting percentages that were higher than other states. Also, test positivity at the national level was up slightly, by 0.7%, rising to 5.5% compared to the previous week.

Misdiagnosis is bigger than you think

Yesterday we told you how a lot of people who think they have penicillin allergies were probably misdiagnosed. Turns out misdiagnosis overall is a bigger problem. Much bigger. A study out of Johns Hopkins found that “549,000 misdiagnoses lead to patients dying or becoming permanently disabled” every year — and that’s a conservative estimate. The big culprit is false negatives, and that makes sense; if you’re told you don’t have cancer you’re probably not likely to seek a second opinion.

If that 549,000 figure doesn’t give you pause, how about this: “The overall average diagnosis error rate was estimated at 11.1%.” Yeah, more than 1 in 10 diagnoses is wrong.

Doctors missing signs of stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism, and lung cancer make up almost 40% of those mistakes. The good news, the authors say, is that…

“Just 15 diseases account for about half of all serious harms, so the problem may be more tractable than previously imagined.”