News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Women with epilepsy who take the antiseizure drug valproic acid while pregnant are at more than double the risk of having children with autism spectrum disorder and nearly double the risk of having children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a study in the October 28, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

An international team of researchers led by Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute has performed for the first time a wide-scale characterization of missense variants from 1,330 disease-associated genes. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study identifies features associated with pathogenic and benign variants that reveal the effects of the mutations at a molecular level.

Scientists from the iMolecule group at Skoltech developed BiteNet, a machine learning (ML) algorithm that helps find drug binding sites, i.e. potential drug targets, in proteins. BiteNet can analyze 1,000 protein structures in 1.5 minutes and find optimal spots for drug molecules to attach.

Among women with breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or melanoma, those who were taking cholesterol-lowering medications, were less likely to die from cancer, according to an analysis published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Researchers in this randomized clinical trial compared the effect of early administration of tocilizumab with standard therapy in preventing clinical worsening in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 pneumonia.

Whether treatment with tocilizumab in the first two days after being admitted to an intensive care unit was associated with a reduced risk of death among critically ill patients with COVID-19 was investigated in this study.

Bacteria in the small intestine can deaminate levodopa, the main drug that is used to treat Parkinson's disease. Bacterial processing of the unabsorbed fractions of the drug results in a metabolite that reduces gut motility. These findings were described in the journal BMC Biology on 20 October by scientists from the University of Groningen. Since the disease is already associated with constipation, processing of the drug by gut bacteria may worsen gastrointestinal complications.

University of New Mexico researchers identify three existing drugs with the potential to clear SARS-CoV-2 infections.

Multidrug resistance (MDR) -- a process in which tumors become resistant to multiple medicines -- is the main cause of failure of cancer chemotherapy. Tumor cells often acquire MDR by boosting their production of proteins that pump drugs out of the cell, rendering the chemotherapies ineffective. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Nano Letters have developed nanoparticles that release bursts of calcium inside tumor cells, inhibiting drug pumps and reversing MDR.