Drugs to help kick the drug habit

Drugs to help kick the drug habit
Vaccines are normally conceived to fight infectious disease, but a new shot will bring cheer to those who have resolved to kick certain habits in the new year. Although it’s still years from approval, a vaccine that would teach the immune system to destroy cocaine before the drug reached the brain is poised to enter its first large-scale clinical trial.
Developed by Baylor College of Medicine psychiatrist Thomas Kosten, the pre-emptive treatment joins a raft of new vaccines that target addictive substances like nicotine, heroin and methamphetamine. Normally drugs like those are small enough to evade the body’s immune system: they slip undetected from the respiratory and circulatory tracts that absorb them into the nervous system. But when they’re sent into the body attached to larger molecules—like inactive proteins—they can’t hide, and antibodies can find the tiny drugs and prevent them from reaching the brain.
Preventive measures like these could change the way we treat addiction by blocking the drugs’ neural targets, unlike the treatments—like methadone—used today that simply serve as “a replacement drug,” explains Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And, one day, it could even make kids “impervious to the effects of alcohol and hard drugs.”

Scientists battle cancer in Tasmanian devils
Scientists on Long Island are fighting the clock against the extinction of the Tasmanian devil—a small, sharp-toothed mammal with a bone-chilling shriek—now dying by the tens of thousands due to a mystifying facial cancer. Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory say the disease, passed animal to animal through bites in which malignant cells are transmitted, raises new questions about cancer itself. Caused neither by viruses nor bacteria, the researchers are trying to decipher the molecular underpinnings of the rare affliction, called DFTD — devil facial tumour disease. “Tasmanian devils are the world’s largest remaining marsupial carnivores, and they are only found on the island of Tasmania,” said molecular geneticist Elizabeth Murchison. Citing figures from Tasmanian government officials, Murchison estimated that more than 50 percent of devils are affected. On some parts of the island, populations have dwindled by as much as 90 percent. “It’s a very obvious tumor on the face and mouth of the devils,” said veterinarian Hannah Bender. “They advance to very large, smelly masses. “The animals can’t eat and tend to die of starvation. It’s quite an aggressive cancer that infiltrates many, many organs and spreads like wildfire.”

It’s crunch time for carrots and calcium
A carrot a day may keep osteoporosis away—if that carrot has been genetically modified. “Fruits and vegetables are generally a pretty low source of calcium,” says Jay Morris, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine’s Children’s Nutrition Research Center in Houston and lead author of a study published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “But if we can increase calcium in a wide variety of foods, we can have a modest effect in the amount of calcium available to people in their diets.” In the study, 15 men and 15 women ages 21 to 29 ate regular carrots, and carrots that had been genetically modified to allow them to store more calcium. Through urine tests, researchers found that subjects absorbed about 41 percent more calcium per serving than from the regular carrots. In 100 grams, or about 4 ounces, that translates into 27 to 29 milligrams of calcium, Morris says. Of course, that’s far less than the 1,000 milligrams recommended for daily intake. “In the future, this would be to simply offer consumers that choice,” Morris says.

Drug-coated stents for off-label use safe
Doctors can safely use drug-coated stents to open up complicated blockages in coronary arteries for which they were not originally designed, according to new research. In fact, they appear to work better than older, bare-metal stents in those situations.
About half of stents currently placed in heart patients in the United States are used “off-label”—for purposes not officially approved by the Food and Drug Administration. “In off-label use … there is no mortality increase, and they are more effective than bare-metal stents in sicker, higher-risk patients,” said Oscar Marroquin of the University of Pittsburgh, who headed the study in New England Journal Of Medicine. In the new study, researchers looked at the experience of 6,551 people who’d gotten either bare-metal or drug-secreting stents at more than a dozen hospitals in the United States. Both types were used “off-label” about half the time. The study found that even though re-narrowing occurred more often in off-label uses than in approved ones (13 percent vs. 8 percent), the drug-secreting stents reduced the rate by about one-third compared to bare-metal devices in the year after the device was put in. Furthermore, patients getting a drug-coated stent in an off-label location had roughly the same chance of dying or suffering a heart attack as those who got a bare-metal stent in the same place.