In The News; New hepatitis C drug

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In The News; New hepatitis C drug

Happy Valentines Day

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The Medicine of the Heart by ~aFiolettWishing you all a heartfelt Valentines Day. If you need a bit of inspiration today take a few minutes

and visit the Fight Like A Girl Club..The site has this lovely program....,Our “Recycled†Club Members Photo Gallery spotlights amazing Fight Like A Girl Club members who have undergone organ transplants as well as some of the beautiful people who have donated organs. If you are an organ donor recipient, we would love to add your photo to this Gallery. We do require that you be a member in order to appear in our photo albums, however, if you are not a member yet, it is super easy and FREE. CLICK HERE to take the Power Pledge and join the Fight Like A Girl

Club. If you are already a member and would like to have your photo added, CLICK HERE to upload.New hepatitis C drug14 February 2011Scientists in the UK have developed a compound to combat the hepatitis C virus that could be taken as a pill. Pryde and his team from Pfizer Global Research and Development, Sandwich, have made new compounds to activate a protein in the immune system called TLR7 - toll-like receptor 7 - which fights the infection. Toll-like receptors identify foreign DNA, such as a virus, and produce proteins that inhibit the virus' replication.300 million people suffer from hepatitis C worldwide. The virus that causes the

disease resides in the liver and can lead to cirrhosis, with some sufferers requiring liver transplants. Current treatments only cure half of patients and are administered intravenously. Recent research has focused on increasing the effectiveness of the drugs and on developing oral treatments.Pryde's team made heterocyclic analogues based on the structure of purines, known activators of TLR7 and the basis of current oral drugs. 'The most potent TLR7 agonists are purine-based,' explains Pryde. 'But we wanted to design potent non-purine based agonists to maximise the chances of avoiding any unwanted off-target pharmacology.'When they tested the compounds against a hepatitis C cell line, the team found that one of the compounds, a trifluoromethyl derivative, was highly selective for TLR7. The agonist also had comparable performance to injected alternatives at doses below 50mg.'Medicinal chemistry is often castigated for surrendering

synthetic elegance in order to gain compound access. Pryde elegantly repudiates this, accomplishing both elegance and access,' says Adam McCluskey, an expert in drug design and discovery from the University of Newcastle, Australia.Pryde and his team hope to make the agonist more soluble and to increase its potency further before moving on to human trials. BaconSource

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FDA’s lack of oversight of foreign pharma manufacturing.February 14, 2011

FDA looks to contractors for foreign inspections

The US Food and Drug Administration is planning to outsource more of its international factory inspections to third-party auditors, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.The announcement comes in the wake of a September 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office criticizing the FDA’s lack of oversight of foreign pharma manufacturing plants, many of which have never been inspected. According to the report, the agency inspects drug facilities abroad once every nine years on average, compared with once every two to three years for plants on local soil.“We recognize that third-party inspection programs need to be a bigger part of the discussion because we can’t do all the work ourselves,†, FDA acting principal deputy commissioner, said at a conference in Washington, DC last week. “We’re looking at anything, anything and everything that will allow us to leverage our resources better.â€For more on the FDA’s ‘Beyond Our Borders’ initiative, check out our news story from last year