Chemistry – Page 40 – David Bradley

Cholesterol drug withdrawal

According to the FierceBiotech pharma newsletter, Pfizer has been forced to halt development of its cholesterol drug Torcetrapib. The report says that the Data Safety Monitoring Board recommended the withdrawal of the drug from trials because of an “imbalance of mortality and cardiovascular events”.

I presume that’s management speak for “too many patients were having heart attacks and dying”.

The drug was set to become a Pfizer blockbuster, although I’d have hoped the marketing people would have come up with a snappier name before it went to market. “Based on all the evidence we have seen regarding Torcetrapib and in light of prior study results, we were very surprised by the information received from the DSMB,” the company stated. The DSMB has privileged access to the blind trials information so that it can make such decisions in the public and patient interest, but Pfizer claims the announcement was “totally unexpected and disappointing”.

The drug was set to replace Lipitor, a $12b a year blockbuster the patent on which is soon to expire. The FB newsletter says, that Pfizer “continue to invest in a wide range of pipeline opportunities across a diverse range of therapeutic areas.” Which, I presume, is management speak for “back to the drawing board”.

Apparently, just two days before this withdrawal, the company was enthusing about its benefits? Should we be policing drug trials even more stringently than we are now to prevent products getting so far before it is discovered there are serious issues with a particular trial?

Highly strung

Stradivarius violin Infrared and NMR spectroscopy have possibly revealed one of the great secrets of the violin makers Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu – they used chemical wood preservatives to help preserve their instruments and to improve the tonal quality. The discovery could help modern-day violin makers emulate more closely the properties of irreplaceable violins from the 18th Century and well as providing music conservationists with new insights on how to best preserve the antique instruments.

Joseph Nagyvary at Texas A&M University, in College Station, and colleagues, reveal in a brief communication to the journal Nature how the maple wood used by the celebrated craftsmen could have been chemically processed before the violin makers even began crafting the wood. The researchers have analysed in detail the organic matter from small samples of shavings retrieved from the interiors of five antique instruments during repairs.

Get the score here

How Not to do Cosmetic Surgery with WD-40

Ever had the urge to hit an aerosol hard with a sledgehammer, and then thought better of it?

This video will serve as a nice little warning to any budding vandals out there who think it would be fun to smash a burning can of WD-40.

WD-40, as most Sciencebase readers, will know is a petroleum product used to quickly lubricate sticky metal joints, nuts, bolts, bike chains and such. It was named by the product’s developers Rocket Chemical Company and refers to the fact that the successful water displacement formulation was made on the fortieth attempt. Obvious really, and certainly not an urban legend. Whether or not this video clip will become an urban legend one has to wonder, it doesn’t look like the guy is wearing any protective clothing other than his nice blue baseball cap. Puts a whole new slant on the term chemical peel!

Of course, the video is surely a publicity stunt of some kind, either that or the guy’s amazingly fast drop and roll to extinguish the flames was well rehearsed before hand. How else can you explain his keeping his composure to do that while his face is on fire? I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to give this a go. By the way, there’s actually no visible evidence that this was WD-40 at all (other petroleum-based lubes are available).

Expanding proteins

Expanding proteins A new study reveals that the static snapshots recorded in protein crystallography may be missing the bigger picture. Investigations of a bacterial protein using cryomicroscopy shows the protein in a balloon-like mode previously hidden from sold state studies. The discovery suggests that techniques complementary to X-ray crystallography are essential if molecular biology is to gain a complete understanding of protein structure.

Steven Ludtke, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and co-director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging at Baylor College of Medicine and colleagues Dong-Hua Chen and Wah Chiu there and Jiu-Li Song and David Chuang at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, studied a mutant protein and came to this perhaps not so startling conclusion. The protein GroEL chaperones misfolded proteins and nudges them into their active folded state in the cell. Protein misfolding is implicated in a number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and the prion diseases including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The full story is now available at SpectroscopyNOW

Raman best for breast cancer

Breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer among women but screening with mammography involves exposure to ionising radiation and suffers from a high rate of false positives that then require a definitive assay. In the December issue of the journal Biopolymers, researchers in India describe how Raman spectroscopy might be used to discriminate between normal, benign, and malignant breast tissue and so provide a simple and relatively non-invasive complement to a suspicious mammogram.

Murali Krishna of the Center for Laser Spectroscopy at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, in Karnataka and a visiting scientist at the University of Reims, France, and colleagues at Department of Surgical Oncology, Shirdi Sai Baba Cancer Hospital and Research Center and the Department of General Surgery at Kasturba Medical College, both part of Manipal, explain that, as with most cancers, survival rates depend on the stage at which diagnosis is made. More reliable screening and diagnosis methodology could thus improve survival rates.

Read on…

Double heart trouble

US researchers have demonstrated that MRI is twice as sensitive as other techniques at detecting early heart damage in patients with the immune system disorder sarcoidosis.

The early detection of heart problems in patients with sarcoidosis is imperative if the risk of dying from heart failure is to be reduced for such patients. Sarcoidosis is characterized by tiny inflammatory growths, granulomas, that cluster in the lungs, lymph nodes and under the skin, but can also form in the heart. Conventional techniques cannot differentiate between which patients who have cardiac granulomas will suffer long-term heart damage and those who will not.

Now, caridiologists at Duke University Medical Center have shown how MRI can reveal minute areas of heart damage before they reach a critical size. The earlier diagnosis might allow physicians to reduce the incidence of sudden cardiac death, a leading cause of death in patients with sarcoidosis.

The full story is available in my science news column on SpectroscopyNOW

Chemistry with meaning

Online shopping and music downloads are full of meaning, apparently. But, they don’t mean meaning like some deep philosopical property, they mean semantics – the meta data that is hidden from shoppers and downloaders but that makes the whole consumer experience work on the web. Now, my old friends Henry Rzepa and Omer Casher, of Imperial College London, hope to adapt the semantics of other sectors of the internet to provide a richer browsing and downloading experience for chemists.

They suggest that publishers of electronic scientific journals – whether learned societies or commercial publishers – should latch on to the semantic web sooner, rather than later so that the information revolution that is underway in scientific publishing can be complete.

The Semantic Web will foster information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the Internet so that software agents can help in the dissemination of information. Chemistry is well stacked with latent information that is lost if meta data – such as spectra, physical properties, searchable chemical structures, is abandoned, as occurs when a research paper is published electronically as a two-dimensional PDF file, for instance.

Writing in the journal Chemical Information and Modeling, the researchers describe SemanticEye, a semantic web application that adapts the digital music model to chemical-related electronic journal articles. It allows journal articles to contain embedded document object identifiers (DOIs) and other material. Those clues enable software to find relationships between new articles and those already published, and collect all the relevant documents for the user’s benefit.

Ironically, their paper is available as one of those simple PDF things, but at least the html version has CrossRef links.

Cocaine pregnancy test

Incidences of poisoning and drugs overdoses are common in hospital emergency rooms the world over. But, one thing medical staff lack to deal with such cases is a quick and easy way to identify the particular poison.

For an initial diagnosis, they usually rely on circumstantial evidence provided by anyone accompanying the patient or the victims themselves. Laboratory tests on saliva, urine, or blood samples can be long winded and often the definitive identification of the poison is possible only post mortem, which is obviously too late for the victim.

A dip-test for illicit drugs and poisons that is as quick and easy as a home pregnancy test-kit could save many lives according to US researchers. The team used UV-Vis spectroscopy to verify the performance of a proof of principle test on cocaine.

“Based on this principle, we should be able to develop rapid tests for the emergency diagnosis of a large number of drugs and poisons,” says Yi Lu of the University of Illinois in Urbana. The same approach could also be used to test for physiological molecules and environmental monitoring, he adds.

Get the complete hit at SpectroscopyNOW

In vaguely related news, it has been reported that street cocaine is now more dangerous than ever before as it is allegedly being cut with a cancer-causing chemical. That’s according to the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which reports that there has been an increase in the use of “bulking” additives that resemble cocaine but don’t cut into drug dealer and supplier’s profits. The current scare surrounds the painkiller Phenacetin .

According to the current reports, phenacetin was originally banned from general use in 1968 because of a link to bladder and kidney cancer. The ban was later lifted, but doubts about its safety remain, hence the scare-mongering headlines from the BBC et al containing the phrase “cancer chemical”.

However, a little digging on PubChem reveals that this compound was actually banned because this non-prostaglandin synthase inhibitor was used as a drug of abuse and led to nephropathy in users –

Starry, starry night

Starry, starry science Determining the chemical composition of 2000 stars in four of our neighboring dwarf galaxies, is a task even the biggest parallel analytical lab would probably baulk at taking on, although of course the referral fees would be stupendous. Nevertheless, a chemical survey of just such inter-galactic proportions has been carried out.

The chemical survey was made possible by the imaginatively named European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This a bigger than normal telescope operated by Europe’s Southern Observatory, in case you couldn’t get.

The results from this survey are now shedding star light on our Galaxy’s ancient ancestry and revealing it to be very different from that of several of our near neighbors. Indeed, the findings have already cast some doubt on the theory that diminutive neighbours like these were the building blocks for our own Milky Way Galaxy.

You can find out more in the latest issue of Reactive Reports.

The Internet is a series of tubes…

…no, sorry…wrong story. Tubes, carbon nanotubes are the new material of choice for a wide range of experimental technological applications. Now, US researchers hope that they will be used to make implantable biomedical devices that could act as artificial nerve cells, control severe pain, or maybe one day move paralyzed muscles.

Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan and colleagues at Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas Medical Branch have used carbon nanotubes to connect an integrated electronic circuit to living nerve cells. The new technology offers the possibility of building cyborg type interfaces between biology and electronics only dreamed of in science fiction stories until now.

Read on…