First generic GLP-1

Out of the blue comes the first generic GLP-1 drug. It’s liraglutide, a generic form of Teva’s Victoza, and as it’s actually made by Teva it is Victoza but in a different box.

Teva is reportedly planning to charge $470 for a two-pack of pens or $700 for a three-pack (a $5 discount!), which is 13.6% lower than the brand-name price.

Victoza is officially approved only for diabetes, but we all know how much of a difference that’ll make. Side note: It’s a daily injection rather than a weekly one, which patients won’t be thrilled about.

Speaking of GLP-1 drugs….

A new study out of Case Western Reserve University found that people taking GLP-1 agonists “have a lower chance of developing 10 types of obesity-related cancers than those taking insulin and other diabetes drugs.”

Interestingly, they weren’t funded by the drug makers.

Bringing back memories

If you’re sleep deprived, you can start to forget things; sleep deprivation affects the hippocampus. There might be hope, though.

Dutch researchers have found that the drug roflumilast (Daxas or Daliresp to its friends) can help restore mice’s social memories — “Have I met him before?” — that were lost thanks to lack of sleep.

And lost spatial memory — “Was that chair always there?” — can be restored with vardenafil, aka Levitra.

Why does this work? They don’t know. As usual, more research is needed.

Covid-asthma connection

It’s not surprising when you think about it: In areas where more people were vaccinated against Covid-19, kids had fewer asthma symptoms during the pandemic.

Asthma rates during the pandemic dropped all over because of school closures and social distancing, but researchers at Nemours Children’s Health found that high-vax states saw an asthma reduction three times higher than lower-vax states.

They found that for each 10-percentage-point increase in Covid vaccination coverage, there was an average 0.36 percentage point decrease in childhood asthma symptoms.

Mice, menopause, and saunas

If you have mice who have gained weight after menopause, there might be a way to help them: a sauna. UMass-Amherst researchers found that “daily time in a warm environment such as a sauna might help older adults, especially women, combat age-related obesity and insulin resistance.”

(To simulate menopause, they removed the mice’s ovaries. To simulate being American, “the mice received a Western diet that contained 45% calories from fat.”)

Compared to the mice not receiving the treatment, those that underwent heat therapy showed significant improvements in insulin sensitivity and insulin signaling as well as reduced fat accumulation in key areas such as the liver and in brown fat.

Of course that’s not nearly science-y enough, so they looked into what was going on at the molecular level. Heat, it seems, activates a protein called TRPV1, which…

…kicks off a process known as futile calcium cycling where the body uses up energy (in the form of ATP) to pump calcium ions across cell membranes. This process helps increase the amount of energy the body burns.

Questions: Will that translate to humans? And if so, can it be made into a pill?

Potential Narcan booster

When someone is overdosing on opioids, naloxone works wonders — but sometimes it takes several injections (or sprays) to be effective. When fentanyl is involved it can be even more.

Now, though, a group of American researchers say they’ve got a way (a proof of concept, anyway) to boost naloxone’s effectiveness. It’s a compound called, memorably, 368, and it works by sorta-kinda plugging opioid receptors while they have naloxone in them, making that naloxone last longer.

Tests found 368 made naloxone 7.6 times more effective at inhibiting the activation of the opioid receptor, in part due to naloxone remaining in the binding pocket at least 10 times as long as when it was given on its own.

Bad news: It could take 10-15 years to turn the finding into an actual drug.