drugs

How lasers can switch off cocaine addiction

Researchers who shined a laser light in a certain region of the brain -- stimulating the area associated with decision-making and impulse control -- were able to zap what they call "cocaine seeking" behaviors in addicts.

And while their work was on rats, their hope is that a similar technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS, currently used to improve symptoms of depression) will work on humans as well.… Read more

Recon 2: The Google map of the human body

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

Search results beat FDA in finding drug combo side effects

When it comes to scientific research, size matters -- and yes, bigger is better.

So it may come as no surprise that scientists at Stanford, Columbia, and Microsoft have used Internet search data to uncover prescription drug side effects faster than the FDA's current gold standard, the Adverse Event Reporting System. After all, the data miners had the activity of some 6 million Internet users at their disposal, whereas the FDA relies on physicians to notice and report problems.

Reporting today in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the researchers write that by analyzing Google, Microsoft, and … Read more

IBM says it has tool to kill deadly drug-resistant superbugs

Hospital-acquired infections have become a major killer in the United States, mainly because the drug-resistant "superbugs" that cause them have proven nearly impossible to stop.

But now IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology say they have come up with what they're calling an antimicrobial hydrogel that can successfully fight the superbugs that are behind killers like MRSA.

In an announcement today, IBM Research and its partner on the project said that their antimicrobial hydrogel was designed to cut through diseased biofilms and almost instantly kill off drug-resistant bacteria. The collaborators on the project said that … Read more

Etsy cracks down on skulls, drugs, lighter fluid for sale

Just when it seemed like Etsy was the perfect place to pick up some human bones, poison, or drug paraphernalia, the online artisan e-commerce site announced it was banning these products and more.

It actually seems a bit laughable that Etsy had to earnestly state that it was forbidding these items, which include all smokeable products, human remains or body parts, hazardous materials, motor vehicles, and drugs -- but it did.

Here's what Etsy policy manager Lauren Engelhardt wrote in a blog post last week:

The Policy Team at Etsy is continually working to ensure that our rules balance … Read more

Google think tank tackles traffickers and terrorists

Google doesn't just want to just "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," as its mission statement says. It also wants to figure out how to use technology to improve the world under the auspices of its think tank, Google Ideas.

Google Ideas, which launched 18 months ago, is working with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tribeca Film Festival to sponsor a conference, "Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition" in Los Angeles this week. The aim is to bring together government officials, tech leaders, researchers and victims to explore … Read more

Court: Cops can read suspect's texts, spring text trap

Police did not violate the privacy rights of a Washington state man who responded to a text message from the iPhone of his suspected drug dealer only to get arrested on drug charges after arranging to meet up, a Washington appeals court says.

Police had arrested Daniel Lee on drug charges and one officer searched through the text messages on Lee's iPhone, found some suspicious messages from a "Z-Jon" and texted from Lee's phone to ask if Z-Jon "needed more." Then, according to court papers, Z-Jon followed up with a message using drug slang … Read more

3D computer model helps screen millions of chemo drugs

Researchers have long used still images of proteins known to be related to recurring cancers in an attempt to understand exactly why these proteins make some chemotherapies fail.

Now, biochemists at Southern Methodist University are using a 3D computer model of the human protein P-glycoprotein -- believed to play a pivotal role in the failure of chemotherapy in many recurring cancers -- to screen more than 8 million potential drug compounds in the hunt for one that will help stop this failure.

"This has been a good proof-of-principle," biochemist John G. Wise said in a school news release. &… Read more

Pharma firms could soon use 3D printers to create drugs

Sorry, Walter White. There's about to be a new gig in town, and it doesn't involve mixing volatile compounds in sketchy trailer park drug labs.

So say researchers at the University of Glasgow, who are reporting in the journal Nature Chemistry that their novel tech, which they call "reactionware," could turn a commercially-available $2,000 3D printer into a drug lab.

The team says its reactionware uses a robotically-controlled syringe to build objects out of a polymer-based gel that sets at room temperature. So instead of putting chemicals and catalysts in glassware to get a desired … Read more