Tag: medicine

Etanercept

It is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention. It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiologic mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer’s research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed in the field of Alzheimer’s. Even though this report predominantly discusses a single patient, it is of significant scientific interest because of the potential insight it may give into the processes involved in the brain dysfunction of Alzheimer’s.”

wow. talk about how flexible the brain is.

Microdosing

By examining these samples for the presence of radiocarbon, the developer of a particular drug can see whether the active ingredients are absorbed into the body and, if they are, how long they persist there. If they do get absorbed and then persist, the drug is probably worth developing further. If not, then it can be abandoned before any more expensive tests are conducted. And by using people rather than experimental animals for the tests, the researchers can be confident that the results are applicable to humans.

using spectrometers to track tiny doses of new compounds to find out if they can cross the blood / brain barrier, for instance. should speed up pharma r&d quite a bit.

Death By Exercise

The highest death rate is among those who exercise long and hard, and is much higher than that of those who exercise short and hard. Worse, those who do hardly any vigorous exercise had a lower death rate than those who do the most.

can’t be too long now when even jock rags wake up to the marathon silliness.

Nutrition is Aging

I wanted to compare my body mass, strength, lipid and hormone profile to the 28 year old experienced weight trainers studied in the NJM article I discussed earlier this week. I want to show that the conventional wisdom that aging causes a decline in muscle mass, increased obesity, a fall in testosterone, and an unfavorable alteration of blood lipids is not true. Aging research is flawed; it is not the aging process but the poor eating and lack of exercise that is responsible for the general decline we often see with aging.

this is the most convincing yet for evolutionary fitness / diet: at 70, he kicks the ass of 28 year olds.

Skeleton Black Market

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has been working for the last half a year or so on a story about grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the US and Europe. “To research the story I combed the state of West Bengal and saw huge piles of police-confiscated bones. I even spoke to some of the people who deflesh human bodies for a living.”

makes sense, since we already outsource many of our medical studies to india as well. medicine will be increasingly catering to indian people i suppose 🙂

23AndMe

My SNP for $1000, my 2008 resolution:

groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own.

2008-05-28: fill out surveys to strengthen the links between your genetic makeup and open research questions. Sounds a lot more fun than “walking for the cure”.
2015-03-15: 23andme enters drugs. This should be very interesting. To date, they have SNPs from 800k people, and that could grow rapidly. I’d expect them to release new higher resolution kits and make them available at cost to their customers.

23andMe, the Google -backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself.

2015-06-18: 23andme has 1M customers now. I’m pleased to be among the first 0.2% 🙂
2019-07-16: 23andMe Chip Updates

100s of 23andMe customers tested on those earlier chips have pleaded with the company for some way to get access to its latest features, like the health reports and improved ancestry estimates. Many worried about whether their old data was accurate.

2023-06-01: Now they’re doing cancer drugs, but it’s not obvious why their SNPs matter all that much? It feels they need to rebase their approach on much more powerful technology like full genome sequencing. That said, I’ve yet to receive a benefit from my Nebula 30x DNA sequencing.

23ME’610 is designed to do something similar, by binding to a receptor called CD200R1, which was identified as a promising anti-cancer target by 23andMe scientists studying the 23andMe database. CD200R1 is a cell surface receptor protein that is mostly expressed on human immune cells, specifically cancer-fighting T cells and myeloid cells. Tumor cells can express CD200, the only known binding partner for CD200R1, and use this regulatory protein to turn off the activity of T cells. A drug that blocks the ability of CD200 to bind to CD200R1 may activate T cells and enhance their ability to kill cancer cells.