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Pediatrician Group Recommends Decriminalizing Marijuana For Youngsters

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[0][value]":"Marijuana","field_title[und][0][format]":"markdown"},"view_mode":"default"}]]Today, the American Academy of Pediatrics is publishing a report on recreational marijuana use among kids under the age of 18. Like a good pediatrician, the report summarizes the latest research to answer kids' and parents' most pressing questions. Is pot bad for young brains? Will the newest wave of changes in American law about marijuana make things better or worse? The report ends with a recommendation for lawmakers and voters: Laws need to change so that young people aren't punished severely for…

The Science Of Decriminalizing Drugs

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The legal landscape for marijuana has never looked this relaxed.

Biology Ideas That Billionaire Peter Thiel Thinks Are Worth Funding

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Investor Peter Thiel may be best known for founding PayPal and investing early in Facebook, but it seems he has a soft spot for biology too. Since 2011, the Thiel Foundation has funded biotechnology startups through an organization called Breakout Labs. The organization tends to interpret "biology and technology" loosely—its first protege worked on algorithms designed to understand natural human speech—but the latest round of Breakout Labs funding goes to folks with serious life-sciences ambitions.Breakout Labs' latest investments, announced yesterday, include one company dedicated to finding…

Ask Us Anything: Are Aphrodisiacs For Real? [Video]

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If you’re in the market for a natural aphrodisiac--and steering clear of herbal supplements the FDA has learned are laced with Viagra--you’ve got options. A research review from 2011 listed 34 plant species that have produced amorous effects in lab animals. “But the vast majority of products marketed as natural aphrodisiacs have not been scientifically proven according to Western standards,” says Rany Shamloul, a doctor at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute who has treated male sexual dysfunction.Researchers have done preliminary (but inconclusive) studies on the aphrodisiacal properties…

Stem Cell Test Screens For Dangerous Drug Side Effects

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A new test could help researchers understand how patients might respond to an unpredictable type of drug called a biologic. The test uses stem cells to give a more accurate prediction for how the drugs will affect a person's entire body, not just specific cells, and could make drug trials much safer in the near future.A biologic drug is made of a compound isolated from human, plant or animal. “In contrast to most drugs that are chemically synthesized and their structure is known, most biologics are complex mixtures that are not easily identified or characterized,” says the Food and Drug

A Breathalyzer Test For All Sorts Of Drugs

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Employers mandate workplace drug tests, with the caveat that the results aren’t foolproof. The Internet abounds with workarounds or questionable methods that might alter the results of a urine test; other times the tests themselves are faulty, producing false positives or negatives. A new technique uses a sample of exhaled breath instead.In the traditional mass spectrometry urine test, molecules in a sample are given a charge then separated out by their weight so that they can be identified by their unique spectral signature. A researcher doing mass spectrometry can check a urine sample for…

Colombia Plans To Fight Cocaine With Hungry Caterpillars

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On Saturday, Colombia’s president announced that the country would stop airdropping carcinogenic herbicides to kill coca plants, the raw material for cocaine. Luckily, the…

Could Genetic Engineering Make Non-Addictive Heroin?

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Synthetic versions of opiates like morphine and heroin have been prohibitively expensive to make, so the drugs are still made the old-fashioned way, from opium poppies. Now…

Will Smoking Pot Get Rid Of Your Intestinal Worms?

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The 400 members of the Aka tribe, indigenous to the Congo River basin in Africa, are some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers in the world. Collectively, they’re also…

5 Things You Need To Know About So-Called "Female Viagra"

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Viagra first hit the market 17 years ago as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. In all that time, the FDA hasn't approved a comparable drug for women's sexual…

Scientists Separate Marijuana's Highs From Its Medical Lows

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Medical marijuana

Dreamstime

Marijuana is getting a lot of love lately, from newly legal recreational users in a few American states, and doctors alike. Researchers are uncovering lots of ways in which THC, the chemical responsible for most of the herb’s psychological effects, can help treat medical conditions, reducing chronic pain or shrinking tumors. But from a medical perspective THC isn’t all good, man! Frequent exposure can lead to memory loss, anxiety, or dependence. Now a team of European researchers using mice as test subjects found a way to separate THC’s good effects from those seen as less medically desirable, according to a study published today in PLOS Biology.

THC affects the brain through a series of cell membrane receptors called cannabinoid receptors. These receptors can influence everything from a person’s appetite to mood to how sensitive she or he is to pain. But because marijuana research has been impeded by government restriction in the past, researchers didn’t have a good understanding of which parts receptors affect which behaviors.

In the study, the researchers tested THC on mice that were lacking a particular receptor that responds to serotonin. They found that while these mice experienced THC’s pain-killing effects, they didn’t experience amnesia as the researchers expected in normal mice. When they looked at this receptor and THC is a petri dish, they also found that they are also integral in forming memories. The researchers don't address whether or not the mice with the damaged receptor felt less "high," though if the mice aren't getting as much serotonin (a brain chemical often associated with happiness) from the THC, chances are that they don't feel as good as they would with normal receptors.

If the same holds true in humans, the researchers hope that this information could someday help them create synthetic marijuana that only targets the desired pathways. This would help make medical marijuana safer—and maybe even more acceptable to those who still disapprove of its use.

Space Waves, Birth Control, and Other Amazing Images of the Week

Chemical In Marijuana Could Build Strong Bones

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Marijuana

Dank Depot/ Flickr CC By 2.0 (with modification)

Step aside milk. Weed could be could be the next big thing in bone health.

Marijuana affects our bodies in a lot of different ways, for example by giving us the munchies, decreasing motivation, or even by helping to fight off bacterial infections and parasites. Now researchers have found that a chemical in cannabis might just help build strong bones, too. A recent study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research found that cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychotropic component of cannabis, helped heal bone fractures in rats.

The team at Tel Aviv University injected CBD in one group of rats with mid-femoral fractures. They also injected another group of rats with the same type of fractures with a combination of both CBD and THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis. After eight weeks, the researchers found that the rats who received CBD had healed better than rats who received a control injection of a saline mixture. But, before you roll a celebratory joint, CBD alone enhanced fracture healing, whereas the mixture with THC offered no advantage.

Not only could CBD enhance bone regeneration, it may increase the strength of the bones as well.

"We found that CBD alone makes bones stronger during healing, enhancing the maturation of the collagenous matrix, which provides the basis for new mineralization of bone tissue," said co-author of the study Yankel Gabet in a press release.

While some researchers hope to create synthetic marijuana that only targets certain serotonin receptors to separate marijuana's negative affects from its positive health benefits, the researchers at Tel Aviv University want to pursue the use of CBD in human trials, since it has no psychotropic properties and is primarily an anti-inflammatory, they say.

"Other studies have also shown CBD to be a safe agent, which leads us to believe we should continue this line of study in clinical trials to assess its usefulness in improving human fracture healing,” said Gabet.

Suspected Meth Lab Explodes In U.S. Government Building

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The Advanced Measurement Laboratory on the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Yesterday, Congress requested more information about a July 18 explosion in one of the buildings operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology outside Washington, D.C. There’s reason for Congress to raise an eyebrow; based on evidence collected at the scene, investigators suspect that the room was being used to develop illegal methamphetamines.

The explosion occurred in NIST Building 236, far from the majority of the labs, so it didn’t damage any research endeavors. It happened in a room that had been emptied of equipment, as one experiment had recently ended and another was slated to begin. The blast occurred on a Saturday, so luckily few employees were around, but it did injure a security guard who was on duty. (He quit his job the day after the incident.)

So the question on everyone’s mind is: how was there a meth lab in a government building, and who was operating it? Paul Starks, a spokesman for the local Montgomery County police, would not comment on whether any chemicals or equipment used to make the drugs were found on the property. But NBC Washington reports that the security guard was found with burns on his arms and hands, igniting suspicion that he might have been involved in making the meth.

But Congress is worried. “The fact that this explosion took place at a taxpayer-funded NIST facility, potentially endangering NIST employees, is of great concern,” says Lamar S. Smith, a congressmen from Texas and chairman of the Science, Space & Technology Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives told Chemical and Engineering News. “I am troubled by the allegations that such dangerous and illicit activity went undetected at a federal research facility.”

The local Montgomery County Police Department is investigating the incident, along with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. So far there have been no arrests and the investigation is ongoing.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Drugs Better and Faster

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When researchers used to try to diagnose and treat diseases, they would often search for one mutation on a single gene that was causing the problem. Or maybe they would look for average effects of a mutation that led to a disease across the entire population. But these approaches ignored the complexities and specifics that truly give rise to disease — demographic information, proteins, multi-gene interactions, environmental effects, and a whole host of other facets.

Until recently, computers weren’t powerful enough to be able to analyze all of this health information, nor were there large enough datasets to test. But the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can tease out interactions from big health data that is emerging from the ability to quickly sequence entire genomes and gather more molecular information than ever before. AI could make precision medicine a reality, since it will hopefully one day be able to identify the unique characteristics an individual has that could lead to certain diseases, and how to treat them.

“That’s what precision medicine is all about. Each of us is different and each of us is genetically unique, so each of us should have a treatment that’s tailored to our individual genetic makeup and our individual environmental history,” said Jason H. Moore, Chief of the Division of Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. “So I think that’s where artificial intelligence has a very important role to play, is being able to put together multiple genetic and environmental factors to identify the important subgroups.”

Two researchers, including Moore, presented their approaches using health AI during the Leveraging Big Data and Predictive Knowledge to Fight Disease conference at the New York Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. Health AI is essentially getting computers to think about genomics, diseases, and treatments like humans do but in a much faster, more powerful way, and on a larger scale.

One of the most exciting applications for AI is identifying new targets for drugs that previous methods have missed. Since developing a single drug takes on average up to 14 years and $2.6 billion, pharmaceutical companies would like to do anything they can to decrease that time and cost.

Dr. Niven Narain, Co-Founder, President and Chief Technology Officer for biopharma company Berg, discussed his company’s Interrogative Biology AI platform that has identified several drug targets that are in development and at least 25 more that are in the pipeline. Berg’s platform pulls together as much data on individual patients as possible — from demographic information and environmental conditions to genetic mutations — in order to tease out opportunities for new treatments. He said Berg’s method has cut the time and money required to develop drugs by more than half.

“It’s not only that we’re reducing the time to produce the drug; the drug that’s produced is going to have more of an impact,” Narain said. “That’s also a metric that needs to be intangibly appreciated, because you could get things done faster [using current drug development methods], but it’s only going to help 10,000 people. But if you get it done faster [with AI] and you’re helping 10 million people, that’s a big difference.”

Using their AI system, EMERGENT, Moore’s lab discovered five new biomarkers that could be potential drug targets for the eye disorder glaucoma. To do this, he said, they input patient data for 2,300 healthy and unhealthy individuals, information on over 600,000 specific DNA sequences, and knowledge of specific gene interactions into EMERGENT. One of the DNA sequences the AI system identified was one known to affect glaucoma, and the other five are new opportunities for drug development.

Next, Moore said his group is working on developing better ways to visualize the data that AI computers spit out — the results can’t be helpful unless biologists can interpret what they mean and how they can be used. His group is actually using the video game platform Unity Technologies to develop apps that could eventually allow researchers to fully immerse themselves in their data and AI algorithms inside a gaming system.

“Imagine all your big data lives in a video game, and you’re flying through it and you see something interesting. What you want to be able to do from within the visualization is say, ‘Aha, that looks interesting,’ and push a button, and have an analysis run on that piece of the data that you’ve seen and have the result come back in real time. And then you can fly through, see something else, push a button and get an analytical result. So you want the analysis to be intertwined with the visualization. I think that will revolutionize how we analyze big data.”

But Moore thinks it will likely take at least two decades before AI becomes accessible and interpretable enough to fully reach its potential. Narain said the first applications of AI in medicine could come in the next three to four years, particularly because the U.S. Federal Drug Administration and insurance companies are starting to encourage the use of big data in making health care decisions.

“I think AI is what is going to drive this voluminous amount of information into going from data to knowledge, and from knowledge to products,” Narain said. “AI’s going to help speed that process up, and help to remove the noise from what the real, true signal is. And that signal’s going to really drive processes.”


Weed Delivery Service Will Fly Drugs To Customers Via Drone

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Trees Delivery Drone

Trees Delivery Drone

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Trees is a Bay-area startup that combines the novelty of selling box kits with the functionality of California’s medical marijuana industry and the enduring gimmick of drone delivery. Watch their brief promo video, set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” below:

Prices for the boxes range from $59 to $149, and each contains at least a few grams of product. The boxes are themed around flavor and convenience, with the mini boxes highlighted as “for those that need a small amount of cannabis on the go, perfect for concerts or going on a hike.” Trees notes that drone delivery is a future service, and might not be available in all the areas they currently deliver.

While most drone delivery efforts are either one-off stunts or take their time getting FAA approval, Federal bans on the trade, sale, and possession of marijuana, even for medical purposes, make it unlikely that Trees drone delivery operation will go that route. Instead, they’ll exist in that hazy gray area common to much of the unlicensed drone industry and the medicinal marijuana industry: illegal on some level, but operating as though it’s a normal and permitted part of the economy already.

Kim Kardashian’s Instagram Is Only The Latest Victim Of FDA Campaign

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Kim Kardashian

Eva Rinaldi/ Flickr CC By SA-20

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian was recently forced by the FDA to take down a misleading Instagram post about a drug, but the FDA has been cracking down on social media posts long before Kardashian.

Kardashian is pregnant with her second child with rapper Kanye West, which I hope she either names Key, SxS, or Wild Wild. Meanwhile, she has also become a paid spokesperson for a prescription morning sickness drug called Diclegis, and began endorsing it on her various social media accounts. The FDA found one of her Instagram posts to be against its guidelines for promoting drugs through social media platforms and sent a warning letter to the pharmaceutical company Duchesnay, Inc.

The Instagram post in question, which was sent out to Kardashian’s 43 million followers and included a photo of her gently holding a white bottle of Diclegis, read:

OMG. Have you heard about this? As you guys know my #morningsickness has been pretty bad. I tried changing things about my lifestyle, like my diet, but nothing helped, so I talked to my doctor. He prescribed me #Diclegis, and I felt a lot better and most importantly, it’s been studied and there was no increased risk to the baby. I’m so excited and happy with my results that I’m partnering with Duchesnay USA to raise awareness about treating morning sickness. If you have morning sickness, be safe and sure to ask your doctor about the pill with the pregnant woman on it and find out more www.diclegis.com; www.DiclegisImportantSafetyInfo.com.

The FDA states that this promotion is misleading due to the fact that the post contains no mention of the drug’s side effects such as drowsiness, or that it has not been studied in woman with hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare complication of pregnancy that causes prolonged vomiting and severe weight loss.

There are four draft guidelines that the FDA released to address promotion of drugs and medical products on social media, the most recent and comprehensive draft being released in June 2014. The main requirement for social media posts written by the company or one of their spokespeople is that the main risks be included along with a hyperlink to more in-depth information about the product. The Kardashian Instagram post may have included a link to the drug’s website, but that didn’t quite cut it. The FDA's warning letter says:

The social media post, however, entirely omits all risk information. We note the statement, "[F]ind out morewww.diclegis.com; www.DiclegisImportantSafetyInfo.com[,]" appears at the end of the social media post; however, this does not mitigate the misleading omission of risk information.

Diclegis Pill

Duchesnay USA

This is far from the first instance of the FDA issuing a warning to a company for posting misleading information about its products on social media. Between October 2014 and March 2015 the FDA sent out at least six warning letters to companies posting unapproved claims on Facebook. One of the warning letters was sent to Vitalab Co., Inc. for Facebook posts that claimed some of its “Vit-Ra-Tox” products could be used for “bacterial food poisoning,” or “repair broken bones.” None of those claims has been approved by the FDA.

Even as far back as December 2012, the FDA sent a warning letter to AMARC Enterprises, a supplement marketer, for “liking” an unapproved claim about one of their products that someone wasn’t paid to write. That's the only instance of the FDA considering a “like” to be an endorsement and issuing a warning letter.

“We can’t speculate on any future actions, But what I can tell you, is that the FDA understands that today, various social media platforms increasingly enable drug and device manufacturers to more actively engage with consumers and healthcare professionals about the products they manufacture and market,” the FDA said in an email. “When manufacturers promote their medical products to consumers and health care providers using social media platforms, FDA’s statute and regulations require that such communication be truthful, non-misleading and balanced.”

You can find all of the FDA’s warning letters here, although they don’t all deal with social media. You can also browse through some of our favorite drugs, supplements, and foods that the FDA has recalled from the market.

Home-Brewed Synthetic Opioids Are Finally A Reality

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Yeast growing in a petri dish

Stephanie Galanie

Pain-relieving opioids, like morphine or codeine, are important for medical purposes. The drugs have been around for millennia however even today they are still made from poppy flowers, making the production of the drugs dependent on poppy farming. Now, for the first time, researchers from Stanford University have been able to synthesize opioids from yeast cultures grown in the lab, according to a study published today in Science.

This isn’t the first attempt to synthesize opioids. Researchers have been trying to do it for years in order to produce opioids more quickly, or even alter them to be less addictive. But the poppy plant’s chemical processes proved to be surprisingly difficult to replicate in the lab—in the most recent attempt, earlier this year, the researchers only made it two-thirds of the way to a full opioid.

But this study was different. The researchers engineered yeast to first synthesize thebaine, a basic ingredient and precursor to producing opioids, over a 72 hour period and using sugar as a food source. By further engineering the yeast they created hydrocodone, a common semi-synthetic opioid. The final pathway that yielded the hydrocodone, their final product, expressed 23 different enzymes usually found in plants, mammals, bacteria, and yeast.

The researchers note that this study was merely a proof of concept—the amount of opioid that the yeast can synthesize is way too small to make it commercially viable. That’ll also prevent those inclined to abuse them from making opioids at home. They write: “…a single dose of hydrocodone, as used in Vicodin, would require thousands of liters of fermentation broth, which no home brewer would reasonably pursue.” But that being said, in the next few years they do hope to engineer yeast that can produce much higher yields of opioids so that it can be commercially viable. No word on whether that will also bring brewed opiates into people's homes, too.

Bacteria With Synthetic DNA Create Protein Never Found In Nature

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Court Turner, the president of Synthorx, left, looks at the results from an experiment.

Synthorx

Your DNA, like that of everything else on the planet, is made of four nucleotides: A, C, G, and T. These are like a blueprint that your body reads to produce 20 different amino acids, which combine to make up the proteins that enable everything your body does, like repairing damaged cells or breaking down food.

Last year, biotech startup Synthorx announced that it had pushed the limits of biology by adding new building blocks to a bacteria’s genetic code. Now they’ve gone a step farther: those engineered bacteria have created a well-studied protein that has an added function, according to a press release the company issued yesterday. This could be the first step towards the discovery of new, more effective drugs and vaccines.

Synthorx added two more nucleotides, X and Y, to a bacteria’s DNA. These combine with the other four to make up to 172 different amino acids—over eight times the 20 commonly found in nature. These can combine to make an enormous number of proteins never before seen on Earth.

How Synthorx's modified bacteria produce new amino acids.

Scientists have already invented thousands of amino acids in the past to do things like fortify foods with more nutrients or make synthetic drugs. But those amino acids have proven very hard to string together in proteins. Having bacteria that can pump out proteins with an extra amino acid in a specific place could be a game changer for the synthetic drug industry. It could also be used to make new vaccines that contain a modified form of a virus that will train patients’ immune systems without the risk of making them sick.

Synthorx’s experiments aren’t quite there. They added the X and Y nucleotides at specific locations in the DNA of the bacteria E. coli to generate a “well-studied protein” (they didn’t say exactly which one) that contained one or more new amino acids. When they checked the resulting protein in a mass spectrometer, they found that the new amino acid was where they had wanted it to be.

The company plans to start ramping up the complexity of DNA modifications to produce more novel proteins. “By advancing our technology to this stage, we are now poised to produce proteins containing multiple novel amino acids, to fill our drug discovery pipeline as well as enable our partners in many aspects of drug development and manufacturing,” said Court Turner, Synthorx’s president and co-founder, in the press release.

3D Printed Fish Can Detect And Remove Toxins From Liquid

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Microfish

Microfish

W. Zhu and J. Li, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

3D printed Microfish glow red in the presence of a toxin.

We all know that eating fish is good for your health, but what about fish shaped robots?

In a study published this month in Advanced Materials, researchers from UC San Diego announced that they'd figured out a way to 3D print tiny microrobots in the shape of fish.

The fish are just 120 microns long and 30 microns thick, much smaller than a human hair. Researchers can 3D print hundreds of the fish in seconds. The fish are printed with tiny particles of platinum in the tail which react with hydrogen peroxide. When the microfish are placed in peroxide, the tails move, propelling the fish along. The scientists can also add other particles to the materials used to print the fish, including chemicals that can detect and absorb toxins like bee venom.

In the study, they showed that the microfish could detoxify a liquid contaminated with a toxin. As the fish work, they glow red, and the swimming motion helps make sure they don't miss a drop of the contaminant.

These fish are just a proof of concept. They won't be used outside of a lab for a long time yet, but their creators have very high hopes for the fish.

“This method has made it easier for us to test different designs for these microrobots and to test different nanoparticles to insert new functional elements into these tiny structures. It’s my personal hope to further this research to eventually develop surgical microrobots that operate safer and with more precision,” one of the microfish inventors Jinxing Li said in a press release. Other possible applications include delivering drugs to targeted areas of the body, or removing toxins.

And those future drug deliveries or detoxifying treatments don't have to be done with simple fish-shaped bots. The researchers can also make printed manta rays or sharks, and could eventually even print bird shaped microbots.

Clearly, this means that one day your doctor could ask you to swallow these sharks and call her in the morning...and it wouldn't be fishy at all.

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