Pharmacology news from FierceBioResearcher

The heart drug propranolol can be used to interfere with the way the brain stores memories, offering a new approach to treating people with post traumatic stress disorder, according to a team of U.S. and Canadian scientists. The researchers at McGill and Harvard worked with a group of volunteers with traumatic memories of a crash or rape. They treated the victims with the drugs over a period of 10 days, during which the group related their memories. A week later the volunteers treated …

A scientist at the University of Central Florida has helped develop a nanoparticle that apparently helps deliver high concentrations of medicine for treating glaucoma. The tiny size of the particle allows it to penetrate the blood-brain barrier that typically obstructs therapies. Sudipta Seal, an engineering professor with appointments in UCF's Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center and the Nanoscience Technology Center, says that only 1 percent to 3 percent of existing …

Pouring through public records on file in Minnesota, The New York Times found more than 100 cases of physicians who were paid by drug companies to test therapies after they had been sanctioned by the state medical board for a variety of offenses, including the reckless disregard of their patients' welfare. Experts around the country say the only thing that makes Minnesota unusual is that it makes these documents public. Drug companies, they say, routinely engage physicians for …

Some of the country's top biomedical researchers have been beating a path to Congress in an attempt to fend off deep cuts in research funds. Nobel Prize winner Roger D. Kornberg, for example, has been making the point that it was doubtful he could have done his groundbreaking work on the way DNA is copied in the current budgetary environment. "In the present climate especially, the funding decisions are ultraconservative," he told The Washington Post. "If the work that you …

BusinessWeek has discovered something that's been evident in the biotech community for some time: The University of Florida has made some amazing progress in turning its research projects into start-up companies. In the 2004 to 2005 time frame, Florida spun off 13 start-ups. That put it behind the big three of MIT, the University of California and the California Institute of Technology, but ahead of powerhouse centers like Johns Hopkins. Florida's licensing income has grown as …

While drug developers over the past six years have stepped up the number of post-marketing studies they conduct on newly approved medicines, sponsors feel that those studies have contributed little to their understanding of safety, efficacy, or quality, a recently completed assessment by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development shows. According to a Tufts CSDD survey, 68 percent of clinical study sponsors and 79 percent of non-clinical study sponsors said results contributed …

An Australian biotech company says it has developed a "nano-cell" that can be used to directly deliver drugs to cancer cells. Reporting in Cancer Cell journal, EnGeneIC reports the approach worked in primates and promises to help greatly reduce the amount of cancer therapies needed for treatment, while avoiding many of the harsh side effects that are common to chemotherapy. The nano-cell relies on antibodies to dock on the cancer cell for targeted delivery. Researchers hope to begin human …

In a new study, U.S. researchers say that they have developed a plant that makes a protein that can be used to manufacture a safe and effective smallpox vaccine. And Dr. Hilary Koprowski, head of the Centre for Neurovirology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and developer of the live polio vaccine, says that in 10 years time all smallpox vaccine will be made in plants. Smallpox has been eliminated as a routine health threat, but governments around the globe have been …

A set of tough new government regulations governing drug trials in the U.K. has begun to drive some clinical trials out of the country. New data suggests the some trials have been delayed or moved abroad while other developers expressed concern over the future of drug research. Analysts say that the government's regulatory response to an earlier clinical trial disaster will seriously damage the U.K.'s efforts to encourage more research.

The Financial Times reports that in …

A group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say that string-like nanoparticles survive longer than spherically shaped nanoparticles, which leads them to believe that the right shape is a key concern in designing new delivery vehicles for drugs. Dennis Discher and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania say that string-like nanoparticles circulated for up to a week in rodents, significantly longer than the carbon nanotubes that have been studied in depth. Their work …