Justices reject Johnson & Johnson appeal of $2B talc verdict
Source: AP
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is leaving in place a $2 billion verdict in favor of women who claim they developed ovarian cancer from using Johnson & Johnson talc products.
The justices did not comment Tuesday in rejecting Johnson & Johnson’s appeal. The company argued that it was not treated fairly in facing one trial involving 22 cancer sufferers who came from 12 states and different backgrounds.
A Missouri jury initially awarded the women $4.7 billion, but a state appeals court dropped two women from the suit and reduced the award to $2 billion. The jury found that the company’s talc products contain asbestos and asbestos-laced talc can cause ovarian cancer. The company disputes both points.
Johnson & Johnson, which is based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has stopped selling its iconic talc-based Johnson’s Baby Powder in the U.S. and Canada, though it remains on the market elsewhere.
Scientists Measured The Mass of The Human Chromosome For The First Time
MICHELLE STARR
2 JUNE 2021
For the first time, scientists have been able to accurately measure the mass of the human chromosome.
Using a powerful X-ray source at the UK's national synchrotron science facility, the Diamond Light Source, physicists were able to determine the individual masses of all 46 chromosomes in human cells.
A browsable 3D map of just one millionth of the cerebral cortex has been created using 225 million images and a whopping 1.4 petabytes of data.
The human brain is the most ridiculously complex computer that’s ever existed, and mapping this dense tangle of neurons, synapses and other cells is nigh on impossible. But engineers at Google and Harvard have given it the best shot yet, producing a browsable, searchable 3D map of a small section of human cerebral cortex.
With about 86 billion neurons connecting via 100 trillion synapses, it’s a Herculean task to figure out exactly what each of them does and how those connections form the basis of thought, emotion, memory, behavior and consciousness. Daunting as it may be, though, teams of scientists around the world are rolling up their sleeves and trying to build a wiring diagram for the human brain – a so-called “connectome.”
Last year, researchers at Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute paved the way with a fruit fly brain connectome that encompassed about half of the insect’s full brain. Now, Google and the Lichtman Lab at Harvard have released a similar model of a tiny section of human brain.
Tested on human blood in the lab, the selective nanocapsules could reduce the side effects of a major blood clot dissolving drug, which include bleeding on the brain. If confirmed with animal tests, the nanocapsules could also make the drug more effective at lower doses.
Blood clots, also known as thrombi, are a key cause of strokes and heart attacks which are leading causes of death and ill-health worldwide. They can be treated with a clot dissolving drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) which disrupts clots to clear the blocked blood vessel and re-establish blood flow.
However, tPA can cause life-threatening off-target bleeding, and lasts only a few minutes in circulation, so often requires repeated doses, which further increases the risk of bleeding. Consequently, it is only used for a minority of potentially eligible patients.
Now, researchers at Imperial College London have found that by encasing tPA in newly designed tiny capsules, it can be targeted more specifically to harmful blood clots with an increased circulation time. They designed the nanocapsules to attach to activated platelets present in thrombi, release the tPA payload and dissolve clots.
Nearly a quarter of the world's population is estimated to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), the pathogen that causes tuberculosis, but less than 15 percent of infected individuals develop the disease.
A study published May 24 in Nature Immunology by investigators from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard offers insights into the immune system that may help explain why some people have latent infections and others get sick.
In collaboration with Socios En Salud, (a part of Partners In Health based in Peru), researchers looked at a type of immune cell called memory T cells from 259 Peruvian individuals who were participating in a long-term program to monitor the progression of TB in people who were found to have latent infections.
FDA approves obesity drug that helped people cut weight 15%
June 04, 2021
Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy, a higher-dose version of Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug semaglutide.
In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing. In a comparison group getting dummy shots, the average weight loss was about 2.5%, or just under 6 pounds.
“With existing drugs, you’re going to get maybe 5% to 10% weight reduction, sometimes not even that,” said Dr. Harold Bays, medical director of the Louisville Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center. Bays, who is also the Obesity Medicine Association’s chief science officer, helped run studies of Wegovy and other obesity and diabetes drugs.
In the U.S., more than 100 million adults — about one in three — are obese.
ADHD medications may lower suicide risk in children with hyperactivity, oppositional defiance and other behavioral disorders, according to new research from the Lifespan Brain Institute (LiBI) of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania. The findings, published today in JAMA Network Open, address a significant knowledge gap in childhood suicide risk and could inform suicide prevention strategies at a time when suicide among children is on the rise.
"This study is an important step in the much-needed effort of childhood suicide prevention, as it leverages data collected from approximately 12,000 U.S. children to identify an actionable target to reduce childhood suicides," said senior author Ran Barzilay, MD, Ph.D., an assistant professor at LiBI. "Early diagnosis and treatment of behavioral symptoms with ADHD medication, particularly among children with severe externalizing symptoms, may serve not only to improve learning and behavior problems, but also to decrease suicidality risk."
Non-caloric sweetener reduces signs of fatty liver disease in preclinical research study (Rebaudioside A from Stevia)
MedicalXPress/Children's Hospital Los Angeles ^ | May 05, 2020
There is clear evidence that high sugar consumption leads to obesity and fatty liver disease. Synthetic and natural alternatives to sugar are available, but little is known about the effects of these non-caloric sweeteners on the liver. A new study led by Rohit Kohli, MBBS, MS, shows that stevia extract can reduce markers of fatty liver disease.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that obesity affects nearly 19% of children. An associated condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease affects one out of every 10 children. Fatty liver disease can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Consumption of too much sugar can lead to both obesity and fatty liver disease.
"Sugary foods and drinks can cause scarring in the liver," says Dr. Kohli, "but we don't know how non-caloric sweeteners may affect liver disease." In a first-of-its-kind study, Dr. Kohli addressed and answered the question: Can non-caloric sweeteners improve signs of fatty liver disease?
Using a preclinical model, he tested two non-caloric sweeteners, sucralose and stevia extract. Both are widely available and appear in many sweetened foods and drinks. "We were interested in those two compounds because they are the newest and least studied in the context of liver disease and obesity," says Dr. Kohli.
The results were striking. "We compared these sweeteners head to head with sugar," he says. "Stevia extract lowers glucose levels and improves markers of fatty liver disease." These markers include fibrosis and fat levels in the liver. The study also uncovered some potential mechanisms that could be responsible for reversing these markers of fatty liver disease. "We saw a decrease in signs of cellular stress and some changes in the gut microbiome," says Dr. Kohli
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first new medication for Alzheimer’s disease in nearly two decades, a contentious decision, made despite opposition from the agency’s independent advisory committee and some Alzheimer’s experts who said there was not enough evidence that the drug can help patients.
The drug, aducanumab, which go by the brand name Aduhelm, is a monthly intravenous infusion intended to slow cognitive decline in people in the early stages of the disease, with mild memory and thinking problems. It is the first approved treatment to attack the disease process of Alzheimer’s instead of just addressing dementia symptoms.
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease in which a misdirected immune system gradually destroys healthy pancreatic islet β cells, resulting in a lack of insulin. The exact cause of T1D remains unknown. However, β cell-reactive autoantibodies can be detected in circulating blood months to years before diagnosis, raising the possibility of intervening to stop or delay T1D before children develop the disease.
Monitoring the number, type, and concentration of autoantibodies appearing in the blood can help predict the long-term risk of progression from autoimmunity to symptomatic T1D.
Now new findings suggest that measuring how patterns of gene expression in white blood cells change in children starting in infancy—before autoantibodies appear indicating an autoimmune reaction against the β cells—can predict earlier and more robustly which genetically-susceptible individuals will progress to T1D. The comprehensive international study included co-investigators from the University of South Florida Health Informatics Institute (HII).
