Los Angeles Times

One of World’s Biggest Drug Companies Just Abandoned Alzheimer’s And Parkinson’s Research

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Pfizer, the world’s third largest drug maker, has announced it is ending research to discover new medications for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

The move, which will eliminate hundreds of research positions across the pharmaceutical giant’s roster, casts an even darker shadow outside the company – dashing the hopes of millions affected by neurological disorders, whose dreams of finding a treatment just got that much more desperate.

“As a result of a recent comprehensive review, we have made the decision to end our neuroscience discovery and early development efforts and re-allocate [spending] to those areas where we have strong scientific leadership and that will allow us to provide the greatest impact for patients,” the company said in a statement to NPR.

Job reductions primarily in Massachusetts and Connecticut are expected to occur across the next several months, although the company is continuing research into rare neurological diseases, and plans to launch a venture fund committed to neuroscience.

To many, though, those gestures won’t replace the loss of some 300 neuroscientists and associated staff in an organisation that bills itself as “the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company”.

“Any decision impacting colleagues is difficult,” the company’s statement reads.

“[H]owever, we believe this will best position the company to bring meaningful new therapies to market, and will bring the most value for shareholders and patients.”

Of course, value for shareholders is one thing; but for patients, especially those affected by neurological diseases (and their families), it’s quite another, as critics of Pfizer’s new direction are eager to make clear.

“[W]ith no new drug for dementia in the last 15 years, this will come as a heavy blow to the estimated 46.8 million people currently living with the condition across the globe,” says the head of research at the UK’s Alzheimer’s Society, James Pickett.

“Every three seconds someone in the world develops dementia and, with this number set to rise, there has never been a more important time for such life-saving research.”

That’s especially so since the best, mostly ineffective medications we have for conditions like Alzheimer’s are in fact the products of research from decades ago.

While there are strong hopes they can be improved upon – and treatments for Parkinson’s and other neurological conditions too – until more research is done, a hoped-for, effective replacement won’t materialise.

“The current medication for Alzheimer’s disease is approved, essentially, because it’s better than nothing. There’s nothing else at the moment,” neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli told NPR last week.

“These drugs were pioneered in the ’70s and ’80s and they treat the symptoms, as opposed to the underlying biology.”

 Of course, one company announcing the closure of one wing of medical research doesn’t signal the end of other scientists working in that field – but in light of Pfizer’s dismaying decision, some commentators are wondering what this means for the rest of the big pharma landscape in terms of neuroscience research.

“It’s really alarming to see such a large pharmaceutical company deciding to abandon research into the brain and central nervous system,” chief scientific officer at the Parkinson’s Foundation, James Beck, told the Los Angeles Times.

“[H]aving Pfizer exit does not augur well for what other companies are likely to do.”

That’s especially so since Pfizer’s decision follows a series of clinical failures by other companies pursuing Alzheimer’s research – developments that can be extremely costly for the companies invested in the trials.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens here – and hope the companies committing to this research keep focussed on what’s really at stake here.

“[N]euroscience research is high risk, in that failure for pharmaceutical companies comes at a high price,”Alzheimer’s Research’s director of policy, Matthew Norton, told The Times.

“[But] the potential benefits of success to the millions of people around the world living with dementia are too great to ignore.”

Morning Break: Diet Pill Fail, Facebook and Depression.

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Health news and commentary from around the Web, gathered by the MedPage Today staff.

A new study says many popular diet pills and supplements contain an amphetamine-like compound never tested on humans, writes the Los Angeles Times.

New York Magazine spoke with the doctor who performed the world’s first successful penis transplant: “The penis is almost a holy thing in the community and culture.”

Your Facebook friends have fabulous lives, it seems. Does that make you depressed?

The White House is releasing data and holding meetings aimed at addressing the impact of climate change on public health.

A psychiatrist writes a letter to the New York Timesso that when his patients Google his name, they’ll see that he’s been published in the NYT.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker shaved his head to raise money for cancer research. “I think he looks cute,” says the state’s First Lady.

FDA staff aren’t happy with a proposal to soften warnings on snus, the Swedish smokeless tobacco product, reports Reuters. An advisory committee will review it later this week.

How much salt is too much? asks the Washington Post, with a handy infographic.

No surprise here: “The Food Babe” — aka Vani Hari, an actress and activist — “is full of ****”, writes Gawker.

A registered nurse who worked in Africa during the Ebola emergency reflects on the disparity of care options for Americans versus Africans.

Frank Doyle, PhD, did a Reddit AMA (ask-me-anything) about an algorithm for a closed-loop artificial pancreas for adults with diabetes his team has been developing. “Automation would be a game-changer,” he writes.

Some studies show that artificial light messes with the body’s production of melatonin, making it harder to fall asleep. But could wearing an ugly pair of orange glasses change that?

 Depression is a some kind of chemical imbalance, but what does that mean, exactly? Blogger and psychiatrist Scott Alexander shares his thoughts.

This could be an unintended consequence of Medicare expansion: more abuse of opioids.

Life insurance company John Hancock will start offering discounts and perks to policyholders who are more active.

Fashion Statement: Designer Creates Line of Drone-Proof Garments to Protect Privacy .

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As debate over the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the U.S. rages on, a fashion designer introduces clothing that blocks drone-mounted infrared cameras

As the U.S. government draws up plans to use surveillance drones in domestic airspace, opposition to what many consider an unwarranted and significant invasion of privacy is mounting across the country, from rural Virginia to techopolis Seattle. Although officials debate anti-drone legislation at federal, state and local levels, one man is fighting back with high-tech apparel.

A New York City privacy advocate-turned-urban-guerilla fashion designer is selling garments designed to make their wearers invisible to infrared surveillance cameras, particularly those on drones. And although Adam Harvey admits that his three-item Stealth Wear line of scarves and capes is more of a political statement than a money-making venture, the science behind the fashion is quite sound.

“Fighting drones is not my full-time job, but it could be,” says Harvey, an instructor of physical computing at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts and the creator of the CV Dazzle project, which seeks to develop makeup and hairstyles that camouflage people from face-recognition cameras and software.

Harvey’s newest medium, metalized fabric, has been around for more than 20 years. It holds in body heat that would burn bright for infrared cameras—a characteristic that could prove attractive to those who do not want unmanned aerial vehicles spying on them.

Metalized fabric
Metal is very good at absorbing and scattering infrared light, says Cheng Sun, a Northwestern University assistant professor of mechanical engineering. In that sense there is nothing exotic in how metalized fabric works—it “would strongly attenuate the [infrared] light,” he says. The metal would dissipate heat to surroundings as well, making the wearer harder to pinpoint.

To date, the fabric has primarily been used in tape and gaskets to protect electronics and communications equipment from static electricity and electromagnetic interference, according to Larry Creasy, director of technology for metalized fabric-maker Laird Technologies, based in Saint Louis.

Here’s how metalizing works, at least at Laird: Woven fabric, commonly nylon or polyester, is coated with a special catalyst—a precious metal Creasy declined to specify—that helps copper bind to the fiber. Once dry, the fabric is submerged in a copper sulfate–plating bath and dried. A nickel sulfamate bath follows to help the finished fabric withstand the elements and abrasions. The result is a flexible, breathable fabric that can be cut with ordinary tools but that protects against electromagnetic interference and masks infrared radiation, Creasy says. The process adds weight to the original fabric. An untreated square yard of nylon weighs about 42.5 grams. Treated, the same patch weighs more than 70 grams.

The fashion
Harvey’s fabric is coated with copper, nickel and silver, a combination that gives his scarves, head-and-shoulders cloak and thigh-length “burqa” a silvery and “luxurious” feel. The material blocks cell signals, as well, adding an element of risk to tweeting, texting and other mobile activities, as the wearer must break cover to communicate.

Stealth Wear is sold only via a U.K. Web site. The burqa goes for about $2,300, the “hoodie” is $481 and the scarf is $565—luxury items, but so, too, is privacy today, Harvey says.

The impetus
The high cost and limited availability are significant drawbacks—Harvey says he’s only sold one Stealth Wear item online, a scarf. But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts 10,000 commercial drones will ply domestic airspace by 2017—almost twice the that of the U.S. Air Force’s current fleet of unmanned aircraft. The number of drones flying in the U.S. today is hard to pin down because not every company and agency that gets FAA approval to fly a drone actually puts one in the air. In fact, 1,428 private-sector and government requests have been approved since 2007, according to the FAA. A Los Angeles Times report states that 327 of those permits are still active. Meanwhile, President Obama signed a law in February 2012 that gives the FAA until September 2015 to draw up rules that dictate how law enforcement, the military and other entities may use drones in U.S. airspace.

As of October 2012, 81 law agencies, universities, an Indian tribal agency and other entities had applied to the FAA to fly drones, according to documents released by the FAA to the Electronic Freedom Frontier following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Government entities as diverse as the U.S. Department of State and Otter Tail County, Minn., are among them.

Discomfort rising
Although Harvey’s anti-drone fashions are not currently flying off the shelves, he could soon find himself leading a seller’s market if recent events are any metric:

  • The Charlottesville, Va., city council has passed a watered-down ordinance that asks the federal and commonwealth governments not to use drone-derived information in court. Proponents had sought to make the city drone-free (pdf).

 

  • Virginia, Minnesota, Oregon, Montana, Arizona (pdf) and Idaho legislators are trying to at least regulate or even prohibit, drones in their skies.

 

 

  • A bipartisan pair of U.S. Representatives has introduced legislation to limit information-gathering by government-operated drones as well as prohibit weapons on law-enforcement and privately owned unmanned aerial vehicles.


Drone advocates defend the use of the technology as a surveillance tool. “We clearly need to do a better job of educating people about the domestic use of drones,” says Ben Gielow, government relations manager for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Gielow says U.S. voters must decide the acceptability of data collection from all sources, adding, “Ultimately, an unmanned aircraft is no different than gathering data from the GPS on your phone or from satellites.”

GPS does not use infrared cameras, however, and satellites are not at the center the current privacy debate brewing in Washington—factors that could make Harvey’s designs all the more fashionable.

Source: Scientific American.

Former climate change skeptic now says global warming is man-made.

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He finally came around to what other climate scientists have been spouting for years. Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, announced over the weekend that his much-publicized investigation into climate data has found that humans’ production of carbon dioxide is causing the world to slowly warm up. And this process could speed up dramatically in the coming years.

Muller’s conclusions attract special attention because of his vocal self-styling as a converted climate change skeptic. Muller criticized global warming studies for sloppy and self-serving data selection and a lack of transparency that obscured errors; he then lambasted fellow scientists for circling the wagons and calling any climate change deniers wrong. Muller says he’s still upset that the American Physical Society declared the evidence for warming “incontrovertible” a few years ago in an official statement.

“We don’t do things in science that are incontrovertible,” Muller said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Muller took matters into his own hands and embarked on his own investigation into the data with his daughter Elizabeth and a team of scientists two years ago. His Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project attracted funding from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the nonprofit outfit of a wealthy businessman who denies that global warming is happening. Three years later, Muller ended up surprising himself when his research confirmed everything those same studies that drew his skepticism concluded, and then some. Muller says his study’s results are more reliable than many previous ones because he intentionally avoided the data pitfalls he objected to, such as only using a portion of the global temperatures available. (He expounds on his methods here.)

Muller’s study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but he says he plans to do so at some point. One climate scientist, Benjamin D. Santer, told the Los Angeles Times he thinks posting the study online and not in a journal is in “the spirit of publicity, not the spirit of science” and may do more to hurt the global warming cause than help it. But Muller wants to get feedback on his methods and to share his results with everyone, avoiding what he sees as a secrecy and lack of transparency that surrounded earlier climate change studies.

Though Muller is now entirely convinced that the Earth is warming due to man-made causes, he still expresses disdain for people who try to raise passions around the issue by pointing to local weather events, such as the drought scorching up America’s Midwest right now, as proof of the phenomenon. (He attributes the drought to La Niña, a temporary cooling of the ocean.) The effects of global warming on local weather patterns are unknown, and even as two-thirds of the world has heated up, another one-third has shown a gradual cooling over the past 250 years, he says. The overall effect is a troubling global warming, but Muller has no patience for simplifications that stray from the truth.

“I’m personally very worried,” he says of global warming. Muller says that so far the warming has been “tiny,” but that everything points to the process speeding up. “I personally suspect that it will be bad.”

Muller is now wading into another controversy, by endorsing the process of natural gas extraction called fracking for developing countries, which tend to rely more on coal. Coal production creates more carbon dioxide, but fracking has also drawn its share of environmentalist critics.

“I believe the only kind of action that is sustainable is that which is profitable, and fortunately we can do that,” he says. “We can become much more energy efficient.”

Source: Yahoo News.