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Under instructions from U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, economist Jim O’Neill has spent the last two years looking into the problem of drug-resistant infections—bacteria and other microbes that have become impervious to antibiotics. In that time, he estimates that a million people have died from such infections. By 2050, he thinks that ten million will die every year...The problem of drug-resistant microbes isn’t just about biology and chemistry; it’s an economic problem at heart, a catastrophic and long-bubbling mismatch between supply and demand. It’s the result of the many incentives for misusing our drugs, and the dearth of incentives for developing new ones...The scope of that problem is clear in O’Neill’s final report...resistance is not futile...O’Neill’s report includes ten steps to avert the crisis.

1. improve sanitation
2. global surveillance network
3. reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics in agriculture
4. better, faster, cheaper diagnostic tools
5. public-awareness campaign
6. promoting effective alternatives like vaccines
7. improve the numbers, pay and recognition of people working in infectious disease.
8. market-entry rewards
9. global innovation fund for early-stage research
10. build a global coalition

This week, scientists will gather in Washington, D.C., for an annual meeting devoted to gene therapy—a long-struggling field that has clawed its way back to respectability with a string of promising results in small clinical trials. Now, many believe the powerful new gene-editing technology known as CRISPR will add to gene therapy’s newfound momentum. But is CRISPR really ready for prime time? Science explores the promise—and peril—of the new technology.

• How does CRISPR work?
• What has CRISPR accomplished so far?
• So why isn’t CRISPR ready for prime time?
• With these caveats, do you even need CRISPR?
• CRISPR also has other issues
• And CRISPR still has big safety risks
• So what’s the bottom line?

Commonly used drugs for problems like colds, allergies, depression, high blood pressure and heart disease have long been linked to cognitive impairment and dementia. Now researchers have some fresh evidence that may help explain the connection...anticholinergics, stop a chemical called acetylcholine from working properly in the nervous system...they...relieve unpleasant gastrointestinal, respiratory or urinary symptoms...The list of such drugs is long. Among them: Benadryl for allergies, the antidepressant Paxil and the antipsychotic Zyprexa, Dimetapp for colds and the sleep aid Unisom...brain scans of people who used anticholinergic drugs showed lower levels of glucose processing in the brain – an indicator of brain activity – in a region of the brain associated with memory that’s also affected early in the course of Alzheimer’s disease...There are definitely medical benefits to all of the anticholinergic medications we looked at, which could outweigh the cognitive risks...But if alternative therapies are available that provide effective treatment of these conditions, patients and doctors might want to consider avoiding anticholinergic medications...

MIT researchers have developed a compact, portable pharmaceutical manufacturing system that can be reconfigured to produce a variety of drugs on demand...Just as an emergency generator supplies electricity to handle a power outage, this system could be rapidly deployed to produce drugs needed to handle an unexpected disease outbreak, or to prevent a drug shortage caused by a manufacturing plant shutdown...Think of this as the emergency backup for pharmaceutical manufacturing...The purpose is not to replace traditional manufacturing; it’s to provide an alternative for these special situations...The goal of this project was to build a small-scale, portable unit that was completely integrated, so you could imagine being able to ship it anywhere. And as long as you had the right chemicals, you could make pharmaceuticals...system can produce four drugs formulated as solutions or suspensions — Benadryl, lidocaine, Valium, and Prozac. Using this apparatus, the researchers can manufacture about 1,000 doses of a given drug in 24 hours...researchers are now working on the second phase of the project, which includes making the system about 40 percent smaller and producing drugs whose chemical syntheses are more complex. They are also working on producing tablets, which are more complicated to manufacture than liquid drugs.

Two recently released reports from the University of Nevada School of Medicine say Nevada has remained near the bottom of many health care rankings partly because of population growth...The 2016 editions of Physician Workforce in Nevada and Health Workforce Supply in Nevada...offer insight into the state’s health care workforce, including what researchers say is the importance of education and training opportunities in meeting the state’s health care needs...Nevada falls well below the national rates of medical doctors per 100,000 members of the population and doctors in patient care per 100,000 population...Nevada has seen increases in the number of health care practitioners in many fields, but that growth isn’t reflected in per capita numbers because of the state’s growth...Per capita, Nevada ranks 48th in the nation in physicians and 50th in primary care physicians...Trying to keep up with the demand is a real challenge, so that’s part of the issue...Another part of the issue is that in order to educate the health care workers of the future, you have to have clerkships and internships for them in the state....

India's lower house of parliament passed a bill this week to back a regional biotech center aimed at promoting expertise and research in South Asia and wider in the Asian region...The Regional Centre for Biotechnology--to be located in the northern state of Haryana--would offer degrees up to the doctorate level, while also serving as a home to academics with access to research facilities in biotechnology...India has lagged in comparison to other Asian nations such as Japan, China and Australia in growing a local biotech industry...The new center would seek to aid growth domestically in biotech as well as establish links abroad by offering course work training and research in biotechnology to students and researchers...

Scientists in Singapore have developed magnetic micro-sized bubbles with cancer drugs on their surface that can be guided to gather around a tumor and then release their payload...Filled with gas, the microbubbles can be coated with particles of both cancer drugs and iron oxide. The iron gives them their magnetic characteristic, allowing a robotic surgeon to guide the bubbles to a tumor’s location and thereby cutting back side effects associated with free chemotherapy in the bloodstream...Once they have reached a tumor, the surgeon would then apply ultrasound to vibrate the microbubbles, shaking loose the drug, which is then close enough to enter the cancer cells more effectively.

A novel way of synthesising a promising new antibiotic has been identified by scientists at the University of Bristol. By expressing the genes involved in the production of pleuromutilin in a different type of fungus, the researchers were able to increase production by more than 2,000 per cent...With resistance growing to existing antibiotics, there is a vital and urgent need for the discovery and development of new antibiotics that are cost effective. Promising developments are derivatives of the antibiotic pleuromutilin, which are isolated from the mushroom Clitopilus passeckerianus...These new compounds are some of the only new class of antibiotics to join the market recently as human therapeutics...with their novel mode of action and lack of cross-resistance, pleuromutilins and their derivatives represent a class with further great potential, particularly for treating resistant strains such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and extensively drug resistant tuberculosis...

For all the hoopla about CRISPR (clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats), the revolutionary genome-editing technology has a dirty little secret: it’s a very messy business. Scientists basically whack the famed double helix with a molecular machete, often triggering the cell’s DNA repair machinery to make all sorts of unwanted changes to the genome beyond what they intended...On Wednesday, researchers unveiled in Nature a significant improvement — a new CRISPR system that can switch single letters of the genome cleanly and efficiently, in a way that they say could reliably repair many disease-causing mutations...Because of "the cell’s desperate attempts" to mend its genome..."what often passes as ‘genome editing’ would more appropriately be called ‘genome vandalism,’" as the cell inserts and deletes random bits of DNA where CRISPR cuts it...Because the new version of CRISPR avoids that mess, it "offers a huge step forward,"...

Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed a new type of pill that, once swallowed, can attach to the lining of the gastrointestinal tract and slowly release its contents. The tablet is engineered so that one side adheres to tissue, while the other repels food and liquids that would otherwise pull it away from the attachment site...Such extended-release pills could be used to reduce the dosage frequency of some drugs...The ability to precisely engineer the adhesiveness of a particle opens up possibilities of designing particles to selectively adhere to specific regions of the GI tract, which in turn can increase the local or systemic concentrations of a particular drug...In addition to delivering antibiotics, the two-sided material may help to simplify drug regimens for malaria or tuberculosis, among other diseases...The researchers may also further pursue the development of tablets with omniphobic coatings on both sides, which they believe could help patients who have trouble swallowing pills...Texturing the surfaces really opens up a new way of thinking about controlling and tuning how these drug formulations travel...