If you’re reading this, your GPhA membership is about to expire*
* unless you’re one of the 239 that have already renewed!

That’s because everyone’s membership expires August 31!

Don’t let that happen to you. Not only will the cool kids laugh at you behind your back, you’ll no longer be supporting GPhA’s advocacy — you’ll be abandoning the fight to protect your practice and your patients in the state legislature, like a puppy left outside a firehouse.

Please don’t abandon us

And don’t forget all that sweet, sweet CE GPhA offers — hot topics and awesome instructors.

Heck, the discounts you get on CE, networking, and events means membership pays for itself! It must be true because we underlined it.

You’ll also stop getting GPhA Buzz — and a Buzz-free diet has been associated with smaller brain volume and grouchier disposition.

The point is, we need you, and you need GPhA. You complete us. So please, look for your renewal invoice in your (paper) mailbox and send it in ASAP. Or you can skip the wait and head to GPhA.org/renew and do it all online.

Clarkston refugees are a vaccine win

Here’s a cool Georgia story in the national news: In and around Clarkston, refugees from places like the “Democratic” “Republic” of Congo, Myanmar, and Syria have been vaccinated against Covid-19 at higher rate than not only the state, but the country.

According to data compiled by the Prevention Research Center at Georgia State University, 70% of Clarkston residents were fully vaccinated as of July. In DeKalb County, where Clarkston is located, that number was 62%. The Georgia share, 57%, is among the nation’s lowest. [About 67.9% of Americans are vaccinated overall.]

Lysine saves kidneys (maybe)

Let’s say you have a rat with hypertension. Based on some initial, basic research, those shifty Danes have shown that you might protect it from kidney disease with everyone’s favorite amino acid, lysine that’s often caused by high blood pressure.

The researchers (from Aarhus University) are careful to point out that this is only preliminary — “We don’t know the side effects or the underlying mechanisms yet, and human metabolism is much more complex than a rat’s metabolism” — but it’s also a big step toward understanding kidney metabolism and potential treatments for kidney disease.

Huge shocker

WHO says monkeypox vaccine isn’t 100% effective.

Skip the liver, treat the cancer

Treating cancer with PI3K inhibitors is a risky business — they’re dangerous enough for the liver that the FDA requires an ‘increased risk of death’ warning.

But what if you could slip the drugs past the liver to its target, like the Wehrmacht slipping around the Maginot Line*?

That’s just what radiology researchers from the University of Michigan have done. They created a kinase inhibitor — a dual PI3K and MAPK inhibitor— that’s absorbed by the lymph nodes, bypassing the liver altogether. The lead researcher calls it “the world’s first kinase inhibitor that’s lymphatically absorbed.”

They’ve tested it on mice (it did well), and now they’re working on understanding its mechanism in detail … while launching a company to eventually make money from it, of course.

* Too soon?

ICYMI

Fauci is stepping down in December, as expected. [insert 45-minute retrospective of the pandemic here]

Twindemic: This time for sure

How’s our flu season gonna be? Ask the Aussies — they get it first, thanks to that whole southern hemisphere thing. It’s winter there now and their flu season is pretty darned bad.

This is great news for the news, which can run headlines like, “Australia’s Bad Flu Season Raises ‘Twindemic’ Concerns For U.S. Winter 2022.”

To be fair, the last time we expected a (gosh I hate this word) “twindemic,” it fizzled — we were all masked up and keeping our distance. But this year, well….

Vaccine news

Novavax for teens

The FDA has expanded its authorization of the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine to 12–17 year olds. That is all.

Pfizer says it’s booster is ready

It wants FDA approval for the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 booster version of its vaccine (although it hasn’t actually started clinical trials yet).

The Long Read: Eroom’s Law edition

Computer chips keep getting cheaper and faster — that’s Moore’s Law* at work. Drugs, though, do the opposite — they get more expensive to create and market over time. In fact, despite ginormous technological advances, the cost of bringing a new drug to market “has increased exponentially in the last several decades.“

Meet Moore’s Law’s evil cousin: Eroom’s Law. Based on actual data, “Eroom’s law states that the inflation-adjusted cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.”

What’s the solution? Computers, of course.

* ‘The number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years.’