New weapon in the global fight against fake malaria drugs: a cheap scanner

A new device that uses similar infrared light to TV remotes can accurately detect fake antimalarial drugs, according to a scientific paper published Monday.

The researchers revealed how they were able to use an optical scanner purchased online for $ 250 to distinguish perfectly between life-saving malaria drugs and deadly counterfeits.

Dozens of public health scientists declared in 2015 that a global crisis of fake drugs was undermining the fight against malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, particularly in the developing world.

The World Health Organization estimates that falsified medicines represent more than 50% of the pharmaceutical market in several African countries. Ineffective antimalarial drugs alone killed over 120,000 preschool children in Africa in 2013, according to research from the Center for Disease Dynamics.

“We’ve talked to several NGOs and government agencies who would like to do drug quality screening but can’t because they don’t have effective tools,” said Ben Wilson, a research scientist at Global Good, a collaboration between Bill Gates and the technology company Intellectual Ventures.

Wilson’s team, together with researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), set out to design an easy-to-use, portable scanner that almost any charity or rural pharmacy could afford.

Many fake drugs are almost indistinguishable from the genuine products, even down to convincing anti-counterfeiting holograms on their packaging. Testing the drugs currently requires laboratory tests with machines costing many thousands of dollars, operated by skilled technicians.

One testing process – spectroscopy – involves shining a light on a material, then analysing the light that comes back. Precise, powerful lasers allow researchers to identify every chemical in a pill, so they can determine which ones contain sufficient artemisinin – the active ingredient in most modern antimalarials.

But Wilson opted for a more rudimentary approach. He bought a spectrometer called Scio from the Israeli startup Consumer Physics, which had crowdfunded the production of the handheld device on Kickstarter. Instead of a laser, Scio uses a cheaper LED light – essentially a souped-up version of the infrared LED in a TV remote.

While infrared spectroscopy cannot pick out the individual drugs that make up a pill, it can capture a medicine’s overall spectral fingerprint. Wilson’s team scanned genuine drugs with sensitive lab equipment, then used machine learning to extract a unique algorithm for each.

Scio is used here in another capacity: to analyze food content. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Scio connects to a smartphone app that compares those fingerprints to a sample in front of it.

A paper published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene described lab tests of over 900 samples of antimalarial drugs purchased in Equatorial Guinea and Ghana, in which Global Good’s system detected every single fake.

Global Good and LSHTM want to get handheld scanners like Scio out to workers in the field, where they would connect with a smartphone app the organisation has also developed. Anyone from customs officials to aid workers would be able to scan a drug in seconds, getting an instant readout from the phone whether a medicine is genuine or not.

“Everything is hosted on the phone itself,” said Wilson. “This has to work in remote locations in India or Africa where there is no data service.”

Muhammad Zaman, professor of biomedical engineering and international health at Boston University, agreed that cheap, reliable scanning is essential. However, he argued that substandard drugs, whether the result of poor quality manufacturing or expired supplies, are as much a concern as counterfeit drugs.

“People envisage a mafia working in shadows but the problem is more complicated than that,” he said. “Sometimes good manufacturers make bad drugs because there is no regulation or quality oversight.”

Zaman is developing his own system, called PharmaChk, that squeezes an entire chemical lab into a suitcase. Unlike Global Good’s spectrometer, it destroys the pills it tests, requires a supply of chemicals to operate, and is likely to cost $ 5,000 or more. “But we can tell exactly how much artemisinin is in a sample,” he said.

Global Good’s system has trouble spotting some substandard antimalarials because they still carry the fingerprint of a reputable manufacturer. However, the organisation is already working with a more sophisticated scanner that should be better at identifying poor quality drugs and can even scan pills through a blister pack. If a trial of the new scanner in Laos goes well, Global Good and LSHTM hope to interest a large funding agency in rolling out the technology.

The US Food and Drug Administration is also developing its own handheld scanner to detect counterfeit medicines, and one Chinese company is even building infrared spectroscopy into an Android smartphone.

Ultimately, everyone could one day have the technology to check medicines in the palm of their hands. “The big effort is collecting the data,” Wilson said. “The way our system works, there’s no limit to how many drugs you can scan.”

The Guardian receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its Global Development site and homelessness project Outside in America. This news story is unrelated to either of those initiatives.

New weapon in the global fight against fake malaria drugs: a cheap scanner

The Golden Probes: humor is a weapon on "misogyny"s most glamorous evening"

Reeling off the winners and categories of the 2016 Golden Probes – a satirical award show applauding the worst of sexism and anti-choice politics – sounds hilarious, until, that is, you remember that these politicians actually determine US laws.

Ohio’s attorney general, Mike Dewine, nabbed the “best adaptation of reality” award for claiming Planned Parenthood “steam-cooked” fetuses.

Virginia state representative Bob Marshall won the “best original science” award for declaring that women who have abortions often later give birth to handicapped children.

The “best acting like you care about women in a non-supportive role” gong went to the Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa for claiming that abortion should be illegal because sexual predators can abuse children without people knowing, by aborting the evidence.

The inaugural Golden Probes, “misogyny’s most glamorous evening”, took place last Sunday night in Manhattan. The sneaker-wearing feminist favorite Wendy Davis, the former Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams and the Orange is the New Black star Lea DeLaria presented awards, while other celebrities – including comedians Sarah Silverman, Samantha Bee and Broad City’s Ilana Glaser and Abbi Jacobson – appeared in recorded videos.

The Golden Probes is just the latest project by Lady Parts Justice (LPJ), an organization created in 2012 aimed at using humor and the internet to fight for reproductive health.

LPJ creates and posts funny political videos online, “dropping information into popular culture spaces so people can swallow it a way that’s palatable, and feel outraged and motivated”, said co-founder Lizz Winstead. Winstead co-created The Daily Show and served as the show’s head writer for years, so she knows how to mix politics and pop culture.

“I think it is really important for us to have fun and to laugh and to point our finger at those that are being absolutely ridiculous,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Woman’s Health, an organization which runs abortion clinics across the country.

Hagstrom Miller was a presenter at the Golden Probes and sits on the board of LPJ’s sister organization, Lady Parts Justice League, the educational arm of LPJ.

She led her Texas clinics to the supreme court of the United States, arguing against Texas’s restrictive HB 2 law – which demanded clinics function like mini hospitals and saw half of the state’s abortion clinics closed – and won in June.

Ambrosia Parsley and Holly Miranda perform at the Golden Probe awards. Photograph: JP Yim/Getty Images for Lady Parts Justice

“Our work is very difficult on the front lines; we’re confronted every single day. Sometimes it’s just absolutely absurd so it’s fun to step back and laugh at it,” said Hagstrom Miller, speaking about LPJ.

LPJ functions in a “a kind of USO [United Service Organizations] capacity,” said Winstead, by providing support – ranging from odd jobs painting walls and fixing gardens to throwing parties – for abortion clinics around the country.

In Ohio, during the RNC, the group brought in a taco truck to the parking lot of an abortion clinic and hosted a staff party. In Montgomery, Alabama, members worked as clinic escorts helping women pass through lines of activists and also threw clinic workers a party. In Louisville, Kentucky, they hosted a breakfast for workers and held a comedy show. And in Buffalo, New York, they delivered cupcakes to a clinic.

Next week they’re off to Fort Worth, Texas, to build a fence for an abortion clinic.

The last few years have seen a “constant onslaught” of laws aimed at restricting abortion access, with 2,000 proposed or passed in state legislature since 2013, Winstead said. LPJ attempts to highlight the often forgotten work of the states – whether related to shutting down abortion clinics, restrictive voter ID laws or restricting bathroom access to trans people.

“Most important legislation is coming out of the states and it’s happening because people don’t know how all this anti-choice legislation is drafted,” said Winstead.

State politicians who make these laws – usually white, cisgender men – often run in elections with low voter turnout and little public interest, allowing them to slip under the radar. “It’s not people driven by science, facts, constitutional law or even working knowledge of anatomy that are elected,” noted Winstead.

“Women’s healthcare is compromised in order for Republican officeholders to promote their own agenda,” said Davis, who founded the political organization Deeds Not Words. She noted that the Texas maternal death rate has doubled in the last five years and that women are self-inducing abortions in higher numbers.

“It’s a whirlwind of misogyny. We see it on full display in this election, but those of us who have been fighting on behalf of gender equality for this country have been seeing it every day on both local, state and national levels,” Davis said.

At the Golden Probes, Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, might have narrowly missed out on the “outstanding underperformance by a politician in a leading role” award (that went to Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, for claiming that the blood of innocents will need to be spilled if Hillary Clinton is elected president), but several high-profile guests said they’d award their own Golden Probe to Pence’s presidential running mate, Donald Trump.

“He doesn’t say real things. He doesn’t form full sentences. And the idea of that is very …” Williams, who’s currently working on her own show for Comedy Central, trailed off, said, staring blankly ahead.

“He’s a sexist, misogynist fucking piece of shit white straight rich guy in a really shitty toupee,” said Lea DeLaria, who stars as Big Boo on Orange is the New Black.

“How can you make fun of someone for the way they look when they look like him? Unless he transplants his brain into Brad Pitt’s body, he should shut the fuck up,” quipped DeLaria.

The Golden Probes: humor is a weapon on "misogyny"s most glamorous evening"

Scientists Prime The Immune Program As A Powerful Cancer Weapon

Observe out, cancer cells. Humanity is learning how to use our developed-in weapon – our very own white blood cells – to kill you.

Early benefits displaying that genetically modified white blood cells, named T-cells, can make cancer cells disappear, at least temporarily, in 50% to 90% of patients with specific blood cancers that have failed all other remedies have ignited a land grab amid drug organizations. But until finally now it’s been uncertain whether the immune system could be weaponized towards sound tumors like individuals in breast, lung, and cervical cancer. Some doubted that the cells could make it into these cancers, which literally construct walls of flesh and blood to defend themselves.

A Human T Cell (Photograph credit: NIAID)

Now, in a review presented by scientists from the Nationwide Cancer Institute here at the yearly meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), that query has been answered: at least in principal, the cells can perform in a strong tumor, also.

The analysis was accomplished in eight women with cervical cancer. That disease is a best target, since it is triggered by a virus – the human papilloma virus, or HPV – that the body previously trains white blood cells to recognize. The NCI researchers looked in the blood of eight women for HPV-hunting white cells. They found them in 6, grew the cells up, and re-injected them. In three females, tumors shrank considerably. In two of those females, cancers that had spread to other components of the body disappeared totally, a stunning consequence, despite the fact that it is too early to say if the girls are cured.

“This evidence-of-principal research exhibits that adoptive transfer of HPV-targeted T cells can cause total remission of metastatic cervical cancer and that this remission can be lengthy-lasting,” stated lead research author Christian Hinrichs in a prepared statement. “One implication of the research is that cellular treatment might have application to a broader selection of tumor types than previously acknowledged. This therapy is nonetheless regarded experimental and is related with considerable side results. We also need to check out why this therapy worked so effectively in particular females, and not in other individuals.”

Other researchers working on cancer cell therapies rejoiced at the outcome. “It’s fantastic information for the field simply because it does show that if you can effectively isolate T-cells you can make the cancer go away even if it’s metastatic,” says Renier Brentjens, director of the Cellular Therapeutics Center at Memorial Sloan-Ketering Cancer Center in New York. “This report gives hope could be a way to treat exactly where regular chemotherapies have failed and perhaps change chemotherapies some day.” He cautions, although, that the cells presented right here are just a evidence-of-concept. “It’s a model A Ford when you want to develop a Ferrari,” he says.

But the end result is sure to bolster the already white-sizzling interest amid drug companies and traders in commercializing T-cell therapies. Brentjens is a co-founder of maybe the hottest firm in biotech, a startup known as Juno Therapeutics that has raised $ 175 million from traders including Jeff Bezos. Novartis Novartis has plowed into the discipline with a licensing deal with the University of Pennsylvania, and says has manufactured genetically modified T-cells a best priority, and is involved in patent litigation with Juno that could aid form the field. Los Angeles-based mostly Kite Pharma has licensed cell treatment tech from the NCI, and a new company, Jounce has carried out the same with function from M.D. Anderson. Cellectis, Celgene Celgene, and Bluebird Bio are all involved in the field.

This morning, GlaxoSmithKline GlaxoSmithKline entered the discipline – countering the perception that its latest sale of its marketed cancer drugs to Novartis would end its research interest – by agreeing to pay out biotech AdaptImmune as much as $ 350 million above seven years to build another variety of T-cell remedy, which it hopes could be greater at recognizing a broader swath of cancer cells, says Axel Hoos, who heads immuno-oncology research at GSK.

The cell therapy outcomes come on prime of data that will reinforce excitement about an additional, easier strategy: medicines that block the proteins that cancer cells use as cloaking gadgets to inform the body’s own T-cells not to assault. These consist of Yervoy, an accepted medicine from Bristol-Myers Squibb, and a new generation of medication named PD-one inhibitors (PD for the programmed death receptor, a switch on T-cells that tells them to kill the cell they just encountered) that are being produced by Bristol, Merck, Roche, and AstraZeneca and are almost certainly the most-watched drugs in cancer.

This yr brings a string of new final results for the PD-one drugs and for Bristol’s trial combining its PD-one with Yervoy. The final results are very likely to disappoint some investors due to the fact it is nevertheless unattainable to say if one particular drug has an edge over an additional, except that Bristol looks ahead in clinical trials and Merck has filed with the Meals and Drug Administration in melanoma sufferers who have failed Yervoy.

“They all search quite comparable,” says Jedd Wolchek, a Memorial Sloan-Kettering medical doctor who has been involved in the development of the PD-one drugs. “It’s still good to hear,” he says, “because it reinforces the thought that immunotherapy is not a treatment method for just 1 or two diseases, it can be utilized in numerous ailments.”

On Saturday, researchers presented information on Roche’s drug in bladder cancer. In sufferers whose tumors expressed PD-L1, the receptor that journeys the PD-1 switch on T-cells, 44% of individuals noticed their tumors shrink. In these with no PD-L1, the ten% saw their tumors shrink. In bladder cancer that has failed other treatments, that’s nonetheless a excellent amount. Merck released information yesterday exhibiting that its PD-1, pembrolizumab, showed that 20% of sufferers with head-and-neck cancer responded to its drug, with one particular patient’s tumors turning into undetectable.

This morning at a press conference researchers are presenting new information for Bristol’s Yervoy, Merck’s pembrolizumab, and the blend of Bristol’s nivolumab and Yervoy in melanoma. Yervoy was successful when utilised soon after surgical treatment. But Wolchek cautions that medical doctors will nevertheless require to figure who should get the drug, because some publish-surgery sufferers may have been cured previously and Yervoy has toxic side results like intestinal perforation and liver damage.

In a review of Merck’s pembrolizumab, 69% of 411 individuals with metastatic melanoma have been nevertheless alive at the finish of a 12 months. Thirty-4 % of individuals saw their tumors shrink substantially, what physicians phone a response, and 88% of those tumors have been even now shrunken at a single 12 months.

The combination of nivolumab and Yervoy produced an unprecedented survival fee in a melanoma, with a median survival of forty months – that’s far more than three years. Just a few many years in the past, median survival was only a yr. Twenty-two of the 53 sufferers (41%) responded to the remedy, and 9 (17%) had total remissions. But 53% of individuals had severe side results, which includes blood check results that indicate injury to the liver and pancreas.

Those results could be poor for other gamers in melanoma, because it could suggest medical professionals will normally combine the other medicines with Yervoy and puts Bristol very first in line for earlier tests of its drug. In lung cancer, however, a bigger market place, outcomes for the combination have been much less definitive.

None of these treatments will be low cost. A program of remedy for Yervoy has a list price tag of $ 120,000 per patient, though some insurers may negotiate discount rates. No one expects both the PD-one inhibitors or cell therapies to be inexpensive. But they do represent actual progress in our long, slow battle against a deadly sickness that is actually written into our genetic code.

“It’s not unreasonable or Pollyanish to consider we’re making considerable progress in some cancers,” says Brentjens. It could be a initial phase toward considerably better treatments for all cancer individuals.

Scientists Prime The Immune Program As A Powerful Cancer Weapon