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Tag: treatment

07.11.2014

child actually not HIV free

HIV medications

A child thought to be cured of HIV is actually still infected. The child received aggressive treatment immediately after birth, which made the virus undetectable. Now the child is showing signs of viral infection again, after two years without therapy. From the Bloomberg:

The child, born to an HIV-infected mother, is now nearly four years old. It was found to have detectable HIV levels in its blood during a routine clinical care visit earlier this month, according to a statement by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Doctors had unintentionally stopped giving anti-retroviral treatments to the child at 18 months. When care resumed five months later, medical staff couldn’t detect the virus and the speculation was that the child was free of the illness.

“Obviously, as an individual patient it’s disappointing,” said Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, in a telephone interview. “But we’re learning very important things. Our capability of detection isn’t good enough. This reservoir is extraordinary, and we need to get better tools to measure it accurately.”

03.26.2013

lithium and bipolar

Lithium has been used for over 60 years as a treatment for manic depressive or  bipolar disorder. The treatment is one of the most effective for the disorder as well as one of the most inexpensive. Bethany Halford surveys the current research on the drugs mechanism of action in this week’s C&EN:

Lithium has a reputation for being moderately effective at treating or preventing bipolar depression. Scientists know that lithium displaces magnesium ions and inhibits at least 10 cellular targets. They have been able to narrow that range on the basis of what lithium inhibits at therapeutically relevant concentrations, roughly 0.6 to 1 mM.

One putative lithium target researchers have been pursuing for decades is inositol monophosphatase, or IMPase. The enzyme is part of the phosphatidylinositol signaling pathway. It strips the phosphate off of inositol phosphate to produce inositol, a key substance in the biosynthesis of compounds that trigger cellular responses.

There is some evidence that in bipolar patients the phosphatidylinositol signaling pathway becomes hyperactive. Inhibiting IMPase halts the pathway and depletes inositol. Adding credence to this theory, researchers have fingered inositol depletion in the mechanisms of two other bipolar medications—carbamazepine (Tegretol) and divalproex (Depakote), also called valproic acid.

Click the link for much much more.

03.05.2013

mice are not good models for human inflammation

lab mouse

Lab mice might not be good models for humans in pharmacological studies

Mice are often used in biology to study pharmacological phenomena before studying a drug’s effects in humans. A paper recently published in PNAS suggests that mice might not be good models for human systems – at least when it comes to inflammation pathways.

In the paper, The Inflammation and Host Response to Injury, Large Scale Collaborative Research Program analyzed data sets from several studies. In these studies, researchers looked at gene expression after events that lead to inflammation like blunt trauma or burns. They compared the genes expressed in humans after such events to the gene expression of their analogues in mice. They found that there was very little correlation in the genes that a mouse expressed during inflammation and when compared to a human.

Also, when they compared the expression rates, they saw that both mice and humans saw the change in expression responded within the first 6 hours. But the time it took for expression to returned to normal lasted up to a year in humans, but only up to a week in mice.

The authors point out that many of the clinical trials based on mice studies fail. And none of the 150 treatments in clinical trials for inflammatory ailments has been successful.

For more information check out the original research by Junhee Seok et al. at PNAS.

//eecmauks.net/4/4535925