Used coffee grounds can help treat neurodegenerative diseases

That’s not exactly true, but it makes for a good headline.

What University of Texas chemists found was that chemicals called “caffeic-acid based carbon quantum dots” (CACQDs) can protect brain cells from damage by Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases. That’s because caffeic acid has an important property: It can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Once there, it goes to work.

The CACQDs, the team observed, were able to remove free radicals or prevent them from causing damage and inhibited the aggregation of amyloid protein fragments without causing any significant side effects.

And then there’s the headline. The CACQDs can be easily cooked from used coffee grounds, which are obviously pretty common. So the process is simple, cheap, and green.

The downside: This was only done in the lab, so a lot of further testing is needed.

Meanwhile, in caffeine news…

People who consume caffeine regularly might be giving up brain plasticity in the bargain. Specifically, researchers found, because caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist, it can interfere with neurons’ long-term potentiation. That’s kind of important, because long-term potentiation means ‘forming long-lasting connections’ — something you need for learning and memory.

(Note: This is yet another story that confuses coffee and caffeine. The story is about caffeine, although the article’s headline speaks of coffee.)

The bad amino acid

You’re used to hearing about how amino acids can do a body good, but there’s at least one case where cutting down on one helps mice live longer and happier.

The acid is isoleucine, and University of Wisconsin researchers found that cutting it out of mice’s diets helped them live longer and better, even when they ate more.

Mice on the low-isoleucine diet lived longer — on average 33% longer for males and 7% longer for females. And, based on 26 measures of health, including assessments ranging from muscle strength and endurance to tail use and even hair loss, the low-isoleucine mice were in much better shape during their extended lives.

Good luck cutting isoleucine from your diet, though. First of all, you need some of it to live. Secondly, it’s in a lot of foods — you can’t switch to a diet of isoleucine-free mouse chow. But learning the effect of this one amino acid “gets us closer to understanding the biological processes and maybe potential interventions for humans, like an isoleucine-blocking drug.”

Cancer hates lidocaine

Lidocaine, besides numbing skin, activates a person’s bitter-taste receptors. So what? I hear you ask. It turns out that the receptor, called T2R14, is pretty popular with cancer cells, especially oral and throat cancers.

The fun part: When lidocaine hits those cancer cells, it kills them. That’s what UPenn researchers found, and it surprised them: “Lidocaine targets the one receptor that happened to be most highly expressed across cancers.”

“While we’re not suggesting the lidocaine could cure cancer, we’re galvanized by the possibility that it could get an edge on head and neck cancer treatment and move the dial forward.

Simpler, cheaper chemo ingredients

Making cancer drugs is expensive — we’re talking more than the price of gold for just one component. (That’s partly because the manufacturing process requires platinum and gold.)

But now UCLA chemists have made a breakthrough that uses oxygen and copper instead of that platinum or gold to create amines, a building block of a lot of pharmaceuticals. Their process, called aminodealkenylation^*, not only uses cheaper materials, it takes fewer steps — three instead of more than a dozen.

And the final bit of good news is that the technique works for more than just cancer drugs:

“We have used this unconventional transformation for late-stage modification of hormones, pharmaceutical reagents, peptides, and nucleosides.”

That means once it’s out of the lab it could knock down a lot of drug prices.

^* Coincidentally, that’s also the name of one of UCLA’s backup linebackers.

The Long(ish) Read: Stopping Ozempic edition

Can people stop taking GLP-1 inhibitors? Well, they do stop — many people give up after a year or two for various reasons (side effects, insurance coverage). The question is whether people can stop taking them and keep off the weight, and how to help them do that.

Still nothing to see here

While there is absolutely nothing to worry about with the new respiratory illness spreading in China, the Chinese ministry of health has “urged local authorities to increase the number of fever clinics.”

“Efforts should be made to increase the number of relevant clinics and treatment areas, appropriately extend service hours and strengthen guarantees of drug supplies.”

(For its part, the WHO says that this spike in illnesses ‘isn’t as high as it was before the pandemic.’ This makes no sense at all — at some point there were only a handful of Covid cases, just like with the current outbreak.)