Thursday, November 17, 2016

Scientists Invent a Better Pill, a Much Better Pill

Do you have some hare-brained system of rotating the bottle to different places to help track whether you took your daily pill today.  I do because otherwise it's easy to lose track of whether I think to today or yesterday for when I last took it.  No more of that since now they can package a month's medicine into a single pill.  (Science Daily:  Ultra-long acting pill releases daily doses of medicine for a month)

This monthly medication only works one drug but it's impressive what it can do.

Imagine swallowing a pill today that continues releasing the daily dose of a medicine you need for the next week, month or even longer. Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and their collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a long-acting drug delivery capsule that may help to do just that in the future.  To test the capsule's real-world applications, the team used both mathematical modeling and animal models to investigate the effects of delivering a sustained therapeutic dose of a drug called ivermectin, which is used to treat parasitic infections such as river blindness.  Ivermectin has an added bonus of helping keep malaria-carrying mosquito populations at bay.  The team found that in large animal models, the capsule safely stayed in the stomach, slowly releasing the drug for up to 14 days, and potentially providing a new way to combat malaria and other infectious diseases.  The results of this work are published Nov. 16 in Science Translational Medicine.

- Science Daily


This isn't science which applies directly to us but it may as they continue pursuing it.

In collaboration with research teams at Imperial College London and the Institute of Disease Modeling in Seattle, the team applied mathematical modeling of malaria transmission and found that long-lasting ivermectin levels could amplify the efficacy towards malaria elimination of mass drug administration campaigns.

In addition, they envision potential applications beyond infectious disease, including chronic diseases such as psychiatric disease, heart disease, renal disease and more.  They plan to investigate the system's applications for these conditions as well.

- Science Daily


Sometimes I get a bang out of trying to find the sci fi extension but I'm sure you can already see it.  This isn't something we anticipated because pills are just one of the hassles in life and we have accepted them but now they make a better one.  Well.


The diversity of the research I see is enormously encouraging because it counters the malaise seen in so many other views.  These people are doing intriguing research and they thoroughly enjoy doing it so there's a bit of feeding on that enthusiasm and particularly when enthusiasm is easily drained going in other directions.


Ed:  is that a back-handed apology for the ultraviolence articles?

Nope.  Sometimes my interests go to B-52 strikes and mass killers.  Collecting baseball cards just doesn't do it for me.

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