med-hints

  Modified from a web article by  Eurofins CDMO Alphora   “Pfizer started their paxlovid study on March 13, 2020, when they sent medicinal chemist Dafydd Owen home from his job at Pfizer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His bosses asked him to spend the weekend thinking about what resources he would need to lead a program to develop an oral drug to fight the emerging pandemic. Owen had started working at the company’s Sandwich, England, site in 1999 and moved to the US in 2011. For the prior decade, he says, his role has been to help pick targets for medicinal chemistry programs.     In this case, he didn’t have to pick the target. Pfizer scientists knew they wanted to make an antiviral that would go after the main protease (also known as the 3CL protease) of SARS-CoV-2—the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. I Inhibiting a viral protease has been a successful strategy for developing drugs that fight HIV and hepatitis C.   In 2003, researchers at the compa...

T lymphocytes are c apable of destroying cancerous cells, but they have trouble recognizing them. B lymphocytes are experts in identifying and marking targets, but they have no killer mechanism. During the last few decades a researcher in Israel learned how to plant a gene into the cytoplasm of a T cell, and the gene gave the cell the ability both to recognize and destroy worrisome proteins.  At the NIH a researcher named Steve Rosenberg removed T cells from a person with lymphoma.  His team a dded a gene to the T cells and the gene allowed the cells to recognize CD 19. That’s an antigen that is only found on the surface of the healthy and malignant B cells. After the gene was added, the researchers allowed the changed T cells to multiply. Then they poured them back into the person’s bloodstream and the patient became and remained cancer free. Researchers at Providence hospital in Oregon used a similar approach when they successfully treated a person with pancreatic cancer. T...

I’m 85 and if I make it to 90 I’ll have a 50/50 chance of developing Alzheimer’s.   For those who don’t know (or remember), Alzheimer’s is a condition where neurons die, the brain shrinks, and people can’t form new memories, or think and function normally.   Labeled a “degenerative disease”, it starts in the hippocampus of the brain up to 15 years before a person has memory changes, and it spreads like an infection.   At a microscopic level pathologist see amyloid “plaques” outside of nerve cells and Tau tangles inside them.     Smart scientists have theories as to what’s happening and why, but we still don’t know how to cure or slow the problem.   And that brings me to ibuprofen and a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001.   Back then a group of researchers studied the pharmacy records of “ 6989 people who were living in a suburb of Rotterdam, Netherlands.   All were 55 years of age or older and they were free ...