Очередные новости об избавлении от опиатной зависимости

Действительно интересно. оказывается, на подходе очередное средство борьбы с героиновой и морфиновой наркоманией. Более того, учёные утверждают, что с помощью новейших подходов можно не только избавиться от зависимости, но и не страдать от болезненных ощущений. Подробности:

Unlike the heroin-specific vaccine we covered last year, an international team of scientists from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Colorado Boulder has now found a way to block addiction to various opioid drugs, including heroin and morphine. Importantly, the new approach doesn’t negatively affect the pain-relieving properties of these drugs.
The central nervous system and the immune system both play important roles in the development of an addiction, with opioid drugs such as heroin and morphine binding to an immune receptor known as Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) in a similar way to the normal immune response to bacteria. Dr. Mark Hutchinson, ARC Research Fellow in the University of Adelaide’s School of Medical Sciences says, “The problem is that TLR4 then acts as an amplifier for addiction.”
In studies on rats using (+)-naloxone, a drug that automatically shuts down the opioid addiction by altering brain chemistry to stop production of the feel-good chemical dopamine, the researchers found that blocking the immune response is all that is required to prevent cravings for opioid drugs.
“Our studies have shown conclusively that we can block addiction via the immune system of the brain, without targeting the brain’s wiring,” said Hutchinson, who was lead author of the study.
“This work fundamentally changes what we understand about opioids, reward and addiction,” adds senior author Professor Linda Watkins, from the Center for Neuroscience at CU-Boulder. “We’ve suspected for some years that TLR4 may be the key to blocking opioid addiction, but now we have the proof.
“The drug that we’ve used to block addiction, (+)-naloxone, is a non-opioid mirror-image drug that was created by Dr. Kenner Rice in the 1970s,” Watkins said. “We believe this will prove extremely useful as a co-formulated drug with morphine, so that patients who require relief for severe pain will not become addicted but still receive pain relief. This has the potential to lead to major advances in patient and palliative care.”
The researchers say clinical trials may be possible within the next 18 months.
The results of their study are being published in the August 15 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Source: University of Adelaide

За инфу спасибо http://www.gizmag.com/opioid-addiction-immune-system/23706/ 

О накоплении ошибочных и непроверенных данных в науке

Вот ведь, наконец, этот вопрос забеспокоил не только нас с шефом. :) Столько всего делается в мире в фундаментальных областях, но столько взаимоисключающих результатов, что нормальный человек не может разобраться в этой массе данных сам. А надеяться исключительно на авторитет учёных - тоже опасно...
 Актуальнейшая статейка на http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/14/us-science-replication-service-idUSBRE87D0I820120814

By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK | Tue Aug 14, 2012 9:25am EDT
(Reuters) - So many scientific studies are making incorrect claims that a new service has sprung up to fact-check reported findings by repeating the experiments.
A year-old Palo Alto, California, company, Science Exchange, announced on Tuesday its "Reproducibility Initiative," aimed at improving the trustworthiness of published papers. Scientists who want to validate their findings will be able to apply to the initiative, which will choose a lab to redo the study and determine whether the results match.
The project sprang from the growing realization that the scientific literature - from social psychology to basic cancer biology - is riddled with false findings and erroneous conclusions, raising questions about whether such studies can be trusted. Not only are erroneous studies a waste of money, often taxpayers', but they also can cause companies to misspend time and resources as they try to invent drugs based on false discoveries.
"‘Published' and ‘true' are not synonyms," said Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and a member of the initiative's advisory board.
Last year, Bayer Healthcare reported that its scientists could not reproduce some 75 percent of published findings in cardiovascular disease, cancer and women's health.
In March, Lee Ellis of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and C. Glenn Begley, the former head of global cancer research at Amgen, reported that when the company's scientists tried to replicate 53 prominent studies in basic cancer biology, hoping to build on them for drug discovery, they were able to confirm the results of only six.
The new initiative, said Begley, senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, "recognizes that the problem of non-reproducibility exists and is taking the right steps to address it."
The initiative's 10-member board of prominent scientists will match investigators with a lab qualified to test their results, said Elizabeth Iorns, Science Exchange's co-founder and chief executive officer. The original lab would pay the second for its work. How much depends on the experiment's complexity and the cost of study materials, but should not exceed 20 percent of the original research study's costs. Iorns hopes government and private funding agencies will eventually fund replication to improve the integrity of scientific literature.
The two labs would jointly write a paper, to be published in the journal PLoS One, describing the outcome. Science Exchange will issue a certificate if the original result is confirmed.
Founded in 2011, Science Exchange serves as a clearinghouse that connects researchers who want to outsource parts of experiments, from DNA sequencing ($2.50 per sample) to bioinformatics ($50 per hour). It is funded largely by venture capitalists and angel investors.
INCENTIVES FOR INTEGRITY
It may not be obvious why scientists would subject their work to a test that might overturn its results, and pay for the privilege, but Iorns is optimistic. "It would show you are a high-quality lab generating reproducible data," he said. "Funders will look at that and be more likely to support you in the future."
If results are reproduced, "it will increase the value of any technology the researcher might try to license," she said, adding that it would also provide assurance to, say, a pharmaceutical company that the result is sound and might lead to a new drug.
Experts not affiliated with Science Exchange noted that if science were working as it should, the initiative would not be necessary. "Science is supposed to be self-correcting," said Begley. "What has surprised me is how long it takes science to self-correct." There are too many incentives to publish flashy, but not necessarily correct, results, he added.
Virginia's Nosek experienced the temptation firsthand. He and his colleagues recently ran a study in which 1,979 volunteers looked at words printed in different shades of gray and chose which hue on a color chart - from nearly black to almost white - matched that of the printed words. Self-described political moderates perceived the grays more accurately than liberals or conservatives, who literally saw the world in black and white, Nosek said.
Rather than publishing the study, Nosek and his colleagues redid it, with 1,300 people. The ideology/shades-of-gray effect vanished. They decided not to publish, figuring the first result was a false positive.
Typically, scientists must show that results have only a 5 percent chance of having occurred randomly. By that measure, one in 20 studies will make a claim about reality that actually occurred by chance alone, said John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who has long criticized the profusion of false results.
With some 1.5 million scientific studies published each year, by chance alone some 75,000 are probably wrong.
In addition, Ioannidis said, "people start playing with how they handle missing data, outliers, and other statistics," which can make a result look real when it's not.
"People are willing to cut corners" to get published in a top journal, he said.
There are numerous ways to do that. Researchers can stop collecting data as soon as they obtain the desired result rather than gather more as originally planned. Conversely, they can continue to gather data until they get the desired result.
How common might such sleights of hand be? In a 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, Ioannidis used statistical and other methods to show that "most published research results are wrong." It remains the most-viewed paper in the journal's eight-year history.
"Until recently, people thought you could trust what's published," Ioannidis said. "But for whatever reason, we now see that we can't."
(Note: Amgen researcher C. Glenn Begley is not related to the author of this story, Sharon Begley.)
(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Douglas Royalty)

Опять результаты исследований эффектов экстази

Ну, в общем, читайте: экстази и память, некоторые новые данные.

Though ecstasy is known to cause health risks such as depression, sleep problems, severe anxiety and increasing other drug cravings, there has been a considerable amount of debate questioning whether or not government officials have over-reacted to ecstasy.

Как достать всех в лабе

Гениальная статья о том, как стать "звездой" в лабе. Цитирую:

We all know them. You might even be one. The Lab Bastard is the one who considers himself (or herself!) superior to all other mere mortals in the lab. He would never degrade his talent by doing communal jobs in the lab, but swans around, absolutely sure that his experiments are most important and his results will be the most groundbreaking.
Above all, The Lab Bastard never misses an opportunity to claw his way to the top and doesn’t mind who he tramples on along the way.
I hope you don’t want to be The Lab Bastard. But in case you do, here are some useful tips:
When starting in a new lab, establish your superior credentials:
1) Never miss an opportunity to say how thing were done much better in your previous lab/your country.
2) Do a bit of namedropping; it always helps to impress the poor no-hopers you work with.
3) Declare equipment, supplies and methods that your colleagues use as outdated and insufficient for your needs. Order a lot of new stuff immediately, or even better, tell a technician do it for you.
Ensure that your talents are not wasted on menial tasks. Put technicians and your other colleagues in their rightful place as servants who are lucky to have a bit part to play in your journey to brilliance:
4) Make a point of never ordering ANYTHING. Ensure that no matter how small the order is, you pass it off to someone else to do it for you.
5) Never do any lab jobs – defrosting the freezer, cleaning the water bath, etc. It distracts you from doing experiments and there is always a backup freezer/another water bath, when they break because of the lack of maintenance.
6) If you finish a communal solution, be happy that there was enough left for you. You either won’t need it for a while, or, if it is widely used, somebody else will have to make it very soon.
7) Feel free to take stuff from other people’s benches. They have plenty of it or are not using it at the moment and you are working so much, you don’t have time to prepare or order this in advance.
Help No-one
8) Never volunteer to help anybody and never share your things, this will diminish your resources in exchange for a hazy possibility that people will pay you back in kind. They never do, you know, because you don’t.
Claim your rightful credit
9) Always ensure that you talk loudest in lab meetings – if you can talk over others, then so much the better. When you are making your razor sharp observations, be sure to keep eye contact with the boss at all times to ensure that your brilliance is noted.
10) A caveat to number 8: There is a time to volunteer to help people, and that is when they are close to publishing. At this point, use all of your skills and influence to secure the opportunity to do a (preferably very small) piece of work for the prospective author, then push like hell to be added as a co-author.

Спасибо http://bitesizebio.com/articles/how-to-be-the-lab-bastard/ 
Самое смешное - что такие везде находятся :) 

Хроническая боль - в голове!

О хронической боли. Новости: 

When people have similar injuries, why do some end up with chronic pain while others recover and are pain free? The first longitudinal brain imaging study to track participants with a new back injury has found the chronic pain is all in their heads –- quite literally.
A new Northwestern Medicine study shows for the first time that chronic pain develops the more two sections of the brain --- related to emotional and motivational behavior --- talk to each other. The more they communicate, the greater the chance a patient will develop chronic pain.
The finding provides a new direction for developing therapies to treat intractable pain, which affects 30 to 40 million adults in the United States.
Researchers were able to predict, with 85 percent accuracy at the beginning of the study, which participants would go on to develop chronic pain based on the level of interaction between the frontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.
The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"For the first time we can explain why people who may have the exact same initial pain either go on to recover or develop chronic pain," said A. Vania Apakarian, senior author of the paper and professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
"The injury by itself is not enough to explain the ongoing pain. It has to do with the injury combined with the state of the brain. This finding is the culmination of 10 years of our research."
The more emotionally the brain reacts to the initial injury, the more likely the pain will persist after the injury has healed. "It may be that these sections of the brain are more excited to begin with in certain individuals, or there may be genetic and environmental influences that predispose these brain regions to interact at an excitable level," Apkarian said.
The nucleus accumbens is an important center for teaching the rest of the brain how to evaluate and react to the outside world, Apkarian noted, and this brain region may use the pain signal to teach the rest of the brain to develop chronic pain.
"Now we hope to develop new therapies for treatment based on this finding," Apkarian added.
Chronic pain participants in the study also lost gray matter density, which is likely linked to fewer synaptic connections or neuronal and glial shrinkage, Apkarian said. Brain synapses are essential for communication between neurons.
"Chronic pain is one of the most expensive health care conditions in the U. S. yet there still is not a scientifically validated therapy for this condition," Apkarian said. Chronic pain costs an estimated $600 billion a year, according to a 2011 National Academy of Sciences report. Back pain is the most prevalent chronic pain condition.
A total of 40 participants who had an episode of back pain that lasted four to 16 weeks --- but with no prior history of back pain --- were studied. All subjects were diagnosed with back pain by a clinician. Brain scans were conducted on each participant at study entry and for three more visits during one year.
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Northwestern University: http://www.northwestern.edu