Can vitamin C cure sepsis?

As a matter of fact … maybe. But not the over-the-counter pills — it requires sodium ascorbate, according to the Aussie researchers who tested it in a small trial. They added that into the bloodstreams of 30 sepsis patients “resulting in promising improvements to multiple organs.”

(To answer the obvious question: The placebo group got standard treatment for sepsis. They didn’t not treat them.)

The study found that patients with sepsis who received the sodium ascorbate treatment:

• produced more urine, a sign of improved kidney function
• required less of the clinically used drug, noradrenaline, to restore blood pressure
• showed signs of improved function in multiple organs.

Next up: a 300-patient trial.

The sound of better chemo

One way to make chemo treatments more targeted is to create a version of cisplatin that carries a second drug with it. The cisplatin sticks to the tumor, and the second drug is a light-activated med called a PDT. Once the PDT is brought to the tumor, doctors use a laser to activate it.

That’s a great idea, but it only works on the surface of the tumor. So scientists in Hong Kong came up with a similar idea, but one that uses ultrasound. Unlike light, the sound waves can penetrate so the drug can be activated throughout the tumor.

Working with cancer cell cultures in their lab, the researchers created a small-molecule platinum-based prodrug called cyaninplatin, which gathered at the tumor sites. […] They then beamed the cyaninplatin with highly-targeted ultrasound waves, which converted it to carboplatin, a common chemotherapy drug. This induced tumor death by damaging the mitochondria inside the cancer cells.

Bonus: The drug combo also fluoresces, so it can help map the details of the tumor. Nifty!

Mothers don’t let your children grow up without the HPV vaccine

Apparently a whopping 40% of college-aged women tested positive for HPV infections within 2 years of starting a heterosexual relationship. That’s the result of a two-year study by Canadian researchers. HPV often clears up on its own, but persistent infections can lead to cervical cancer.

Acne three-fer

Why use just one acne med when three will do a better job? Specifically a “combination gel containing clindamycin phosphate 1.2%, adapalene 0.15%, and benzoyl peroxide 3.1%” that Henry Ford Hospital researchers call IDP-126^*.

Patients with serious acne saw a 50% success rate with IDP-126 compared to 20–25% of the placebo group, and “significantly greater absolute mean reductions in both inflammatory and noninflammatory lesions.” (Side note: Eew.)

And since all three meds are already approved, it’s just a matter of combining them. Compounders, take note.

^* Also the name of a droid in an upcoming Star Wars movie

Shaken, not stirred: AI’s new recipe to forecast virus variants

So, remember that game of Whack-a-Mole we all played with Covid-19 and its seemingly endless line of variants? The ones that took the “new year, new me” mantra a bit too seriously? Harvard Medical School and University of Oxford teams might just have developed a way to see which mole (or, erm, variant) is gonna pop up next.

Meet EVEscape, the new artificial intelligence kid on the block. She’s not predicting your next terrible relationship choice, but she IS forecasting the future moves of viruses. If EVEscape was around at the start of the pandemic, she’d have been like “Called it!” on all the major Covid-19 variants. And she’s not a one-trick pony — she’s got insights on other viruses like HIV and influenza too.

How does this work? Well, think of it as two key ingredients in a virus prediction cocktail: 1) A model predicting the virus’s next evolutionary move (think of this as the bartender) and 2) Lots of intel about the virus itself (the cocktail recipe). Mix ’em together, and voilà: you’ve got a pretty good guess at the virus’s next step.

In a recent experiment, the researchers played a bit of “What if?” They sent EVEscape back to January 2020 to see how she’d fare against the actual pandemic. Not to brag, but she did pretty darn well, often better than real-world experiments.

Now, with all these insights, the big goal is to design “future-proof” vaccines. Instead of always playing catch up with a mutating virus, why not be a step ahead? It’s like having a cheat sheet for a test, but instead of acing History 101, you’re saving lives.

So, while we can’t predict your next life choice (or whether you should cut bangs during a lockdown), with EVEscape, we’re getting closer to anticipating a virus’s next move. Cheers to that!

Big twist: That entire summary, including the headline, was written by an AI and pasted in verbatim. Yes, I am well aware that I’ll soon be out of a job.

News shocker

“Pharmacist shortages and heavy workloads challenge drugstores heading into their busy season”

We replaced your tumor’s food source with Folger’s Crystals

Pancreatic tumors are very good at finding new food sources when one gets cut off. If they rely on the amino acid glutaminase for making food, drugs that block glutaminase just trigger the tumor to find a different source. Regardless of the source, the tumor’s goal is to find glutamine, so a team out of NYU came up with a idea.

Instead of trying to block the glutamine-seeking process, they made a drug “designed to starve cancer cells by mimicking glutamine, so that unlike glutaminase blockers it broadly inhibits all metabolic pathways that use glutamine.”

They replaced the tumor’s normal food source with a fake one.

But pancreatic cancer has one other trick: It can turn to sources other than glutamine, but there’s a drug for that — trametinib. Adding trametinib to the new drug “further improved survival in pancreatic cancer mouse models.”

More testing is in order, of course.

Cannabis legalization vs commercialization

Cannabis use can result in more hospitalizations. A-ha! some of you might think, we knew legalization was a bad idea! But there’s a twist.

It seems that marijuana legalization actually causes a drop in hospitalizations. It’s marijuana commercialization that’s the problem.

Making pot legal — i.e., removing the criminal aspect — was good from a public health standpoint, according to Canadian researchers. But when pot began being sold commercially, hospitalizations for issues like cannabis-induced psychosis went up.

The period of legalization with restrictions was associated with a gradual monthly decrease of −0.06 in hospitalizations due to cannabis per 100,000 individuals.

During the commercialization period, which coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an immediate increase of 0.83 hospitalizations due to cannabis per 100,000 individuals.

This information will certainly ensure that lawmakers consider the nuances of marijuana legalization rather than have knee-jerk reactions one way or the other.