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Cancer patients need time and drugs that, over time, are effective. They might have more of both according to the results of a new study...The study...showed that the creation of what the researchers are calling microtumors can help predict drug effectiveness in cancer patients better than the current standard method of testing the drugs on rodents. Researchers took biopsies from 71 colorectal cancer patients and made "cancer organoids," or cell culture models of cancerous organs. Researchers then treated these microtumors with drugs and observed the effectiveness in the laboratory...The microtumors grow in a 3-D matrix called a matrigel, and the whole process only takes six to eight weeks...If doctors can more accurately predict what drugs will treat someone's cancer, they can select the right drugs for the right patients. If they know for sure what drugs won't work, they can spare patients the painful side effects..."You can avoid unnecessary toxicity to patients who won't benefit,"..."You can switch to another treatment”...

Replacing daily pills with a weekly regimen could help patients stick to their dosing schedule... Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a capsule that can deliver a week’s worth of human immunodeficiency virus drugs in a single dose. This advance could make it much easier for patients to adhere to the strict schedule of dosing required for the drug cocktails used to fight the virus...The new capsule is designed so that patients can take it just once a week, and the drug will release gradually throughout the week. This type of delivery system could not only improve patients’ adherence to their treatment schedule but also be used by people at risk of HIV exposure to help prevent them from becoming infected...The MIT/BWH team is also working on adapting this technology to other diseases that could benefit from weekly drug dosing. Because of the way that the researchers designed the polymer arms of the capsule, it is fairly easy to swap different drugs in and out, they say. They are also working on capsules that could stay in the body for much longer periods of time...

The illegal drug trade on the dark web is growing rapidly, despite authorities shutting down major market sites like AlphaBay, as crime gangs diversify and seek new clients online, a report by two European Union agencies warned...The report, which is the first of its kind to analyze the drug trade in Europe on the dark web, showed that online markets are becoming increasingly sophisticated and offering growing numbers of illegal products to buyers...Users are largely anonymous and untraceable and mainly pay with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin...Two thirds of dark web transactions involve drugs, the report by Europol and EMCDDA (The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction) found. The biggest European markets are Germany, Britain and the Netherlands. From 2011-2015, drugs worth more than 170 million euros were sold over the dark web worldwide, including nearly 80 million euros worth in Europe...the dark web is an increasingly attractive market because buyers and sellers are anonymous and there is a perception that drugs bought there are good quality...

An early lab study supporting a cancer drug bought by British drugmaker AstraZeneca was falsified, the company has admitted...AstraZeneca bought a majority stake in US rival Acerta Pharma at the end of 2015 for $4bn on the strength of its novel drug acalabrutinib under development for treating blood cancers and solid tumours. More than 2,000 patients are taking part in more than 25 acalabrutinib clinical trials...Last month Acerta retracted an abstract, published in medical journal Cancer Research in August 2015 – four months before the AstraZeneca investment – purportedly showing the drug was effective in treating solid tumours in mice...AstraZeneca admitted this evidence had been fabricated. It blamed a “former Acerta employee who acted alone to falsify a pre-clinical data set provided through external collaborations”. It confirmed the incident pre-dated its investment and US medicines regulator the Food and Drug Administration had been notified...AstraZeneca added: “It’s important to note that this isolated issue had no impact on the integrity of acalabrutinib data in any clinical trials, and there was no risk to patient health.”...

“Benzos” is shorthand for benzodiazepines, a class of drugs often used to treat anxiety and insomnia. The dozen or so different types include Ativan, Klonopin, Valium, and Xanax...More people than you might think are taking them (three benzodiazepines are in the top 10 most commonly prescribed psychotropic medications in the United States). Yet few people realize how many people get addicted to and die from them...Between 1996 and 2013, the number of adults who filled a benzodiazepine prescription increased by 67 percent, from 8.1 million to 13.5 million. Unlike opioid prescribing, which peaked in 2012 and has decreased nearly 20 percent since then, benzodiazepine prescribing continues to rise. The risk of overdose death goes up nearly fourfold when benzodiazepines are combined with opioids, yet rates of co-prescribing benzodiazepines and opioids nearly doubled between 2001 and 2013. Overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines increased more than sevenfold between 1999 and 2015...

When pharmacy professionals, rather than doctors or nurses, take medication histories of patients in emergency departments, mistakes in drug orders can be reduced by more than 80 percent, according to a study led by Cedars-Sinai...Cedars-Sinai now assigns pharmacy staff members to take medication histories for high-risk patients admitted to the hospital through the emergency department...Injuries resulting from medication use are among the most common types of inpatient injuries at U.S. hospitals, affecting hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Errors in medication histories contribute significantly to such problems, and those errors can lead physicians to order the wrong drug, dose or frequency.

About 11 percent of medicines in developing countries are counterfeit and likely responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children from diseases like malaria and pneumonia every year, the World Health Organization said...It's the first attempt by the U.N. health agency to assess the problem. Experts reviewed 100 studies involving more than 48,000 medicines. Drugs for treating malaria and bacterial infections accounted for nearly 65 percent of fake medicines... Between 72,000 and 169,000 children may be dying from pneumonia every year after receiving bad drugs. Counterfeit medications might be responsible for an additional 116,000 deaths from malaria mostly in sub-Saharan Africa...Counterfeit drugs include products that have not been approved by regulators, fail to meet quality standards or deliberately misrepresent an ingredient...In 2013, WHO set up a voluntary global monitoring system for substandard and fake drugs and has received reports of about 1,500 problematic medicines including drugs that claim to treat heart problems, diabetes, fertility problems, mental health issues and cancer. WHO also reported problems of fake vaccines for diseases including yellow fever and meningitis...

Nordic Universities will investigate 3D printing, electrospraying, and microfluidics in an industry supported collaboration aimed at revolutionising production in an age of personalised medicine.
The collaboration, known as Nordic POP (Patient-Oriented Products), will use 35m DKK ($6m) of funding from NordForsk...to create flexible and translational approaches to personalised medicine manufacturing…Jukka Rantanen...University of Copenhagen...said that new patient-oriented and personalised drug products require a “totally new mindset”​ in the drug development process...“The project team is aiming to create new innovative drug products, where the dose, release mechanism, and size/shape of the product could be easily personalised based on the patient needs...“Instead of one-size-fits-all medication, the potential of new patient oriented products considering gender, age, lifestyle, genetic profile, metabolic capacity, and microbiota will be explored​,”...

It is shaping up to be a bumper year for drug approvals, with U.S. officials clearing twice as many novel medicines as in 2016, yet returns on research investment at leading pharmaceutical companies are down...In fact, projected returns at 12 of the world’s top drugmakers have fallen to an eight-year low of only 3.2 percent...The disconnect reflects the rising cost of developing new drugs, meager peak sales expectations for individual products and the fact that younger biotechnology companies are accounting for a growing proportion of new products...So far this year, the Food and Drug Administration...has approved 41 novel drugs compared with 22 for the whole of 2016...It’s been a great year for approvals in 2017...But for the giants of the pharma world...things are not so rosy. This decade has seen shrinking profitability in their research labs, with the average internal rate of return down sharply from 10.1 percent in 2010 to 3.2 percent this year...A separate group of four large biotech companies are projected to enjoy an IRR nearly four times higher at 11.9 percent. The calculations are based on long-term sales forecasts...The biotech companies are seeing more success...biotechs typically had a leaner cost structure...

The thought of lab-grown organs conjures up Frankenstein-like imagery. The reality however, is somewhat less visually dramatic, with the term ‘organoids’ used to describe tiny 3D structures of human tissue, a millimeter or so in diameter...these tiny lumps of cells are creating a lot of excitement in the world of medical research...Cells in dishes and animal models have been used for preclinical testing of drugs for decades. Success in these experiments is a key hurdle for any new medicine to overcome before being given the green light for all-important human clinical trials...Organoids are most commonly made either from a small sample of tissue needled out of a person or from stem cells cultured in a cocktail of nutrients intent on pushing them towards becoming a particular tissue type. So far, organoids have been made resembling several tissues including lung, liver, brain, kidney and intestine...as a relatively new innovation they are being used to investigate dozens of conditions from infectious diseases to cancer.... A study published last year in Science Translational Medicine by scientists at the University Medical Centre, Utrecht generated organoids formed from the rectal tissue of 71 people with cystic fibrosis and exposed them to experimental drugs. By observing changes in the organoids, the scientists accurately predicted which patients would respond to the therapies in just one week at a cost of around $1200 per patient. The results were so convincing that a positive organoid test is now considered sufficient evidence for insurance companies to fund the new therapies in the Netherlands...