Tag: Drug

Hidden Dangers of the Bay Area Drug Trade

The Bay Area, known for its stunning landscapes, vibrant culture, and technological innovation, is also grappling with a dark and dangerous reality — the illicit drug trade. Behind the facade of this thriving region lies a hidden underworld that poses significant threats to the community. In t...

Drug Dealing Beside A Family Neighborhood

This story is the account of one resident with her children, saw a drug exchange along with one of the persons clearly high on illegal substances. Poor handling of the safety and security when the Yaletown Roundhouse Community centre was turned into a shelter for homeless addicts. Vancouver city ...

Decriminalizing Drug Use: A Call for Change

In a recent proposal concerning individuals who use drugs, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, suggests the implementation of substance abuse screening and treatment as a prerequisite for low-income residents to access welfare funds. Earlier this year, Breed made the decision to dep...

Detroit Man Sentenced to 15 Years for Drug Trafficking and Unemployment Fraud

A Detroit man, Robert Lampkin, has been handed a 15-year federal prison sentence for his involvement in a drug trafficking ring and an unemployment benefits scam, according to officials. The sentencing took place in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit, as ...

High Throughput Screening: Paving the Path for Accelerated Drug Discovery

High throughput screening (HTS) has emerged as a pivotal technology in the pharmaceutical industry, enabling rapid and efficient evaluation of large libraries of chemical compounds. This technique is crucial for identifying active compounds, antibodies, or genes that modulate a particular biomolecul...

The Economics of Drug Discovery and Development are Not What You Think

Simply stated, without a dramatic increase in R&D productivity, today’s pharmaceutical industry cannot sustain sufficient innovation to replace the loss of revenue due to patent expirations for successful products (Nature Reviews, March 2010). In addressing this crisis, next-generation app...

Drug Approvals in 2023

Oncology had the most approvals at 13, or about 24% of the total. This included several notable first-in-class therapies like AstraZeneca’s AKT inhibitor capivasertib for certain breast cancers, Springworks’ gamma-secretase inhibitor nirogacestat for desmoid tumors, and J&J’s G...

How I Built a Generative AI Model that can Generate Novel Small Molecules for Drug Discovery! — Part 3: Putting it all Together in a WGAN

Here, we just extend keras.Model and initialize our WGAN with a generator, discriminator, and related parameters. generator and discriminator are the models we defined earlier to use in our GAN. discriminator_steps and generator_steps represent the num...

What makes a drug work? Understanding “Receptors” (I)

Imagine you take a pill when you have a headache (perhaps like now when you are trying to understand some pharmacology lol). What happens after you swallow it? How does the pill reduce your headache from your digestive tract to the site of action? Definition/Nature of a drug “In the most...

Senolytics: The “Magic” Drug to Live Another 100 Years

I’m sure you’ve heard of “The Fountain of Youth”, supposedly letting us live forever. Most people would say it’s a myth. I wouldn’t. I just believe it comes in a different form. Instead of eternal life, (I mean, would you really even want to live forever?) extr...

“The Art of Molecular Docking: Optimizing Drug Interactions”

Molecular docking is a computational method used in structure-based drug design (SBDD) to investigate the interactions between small molecules (ligands) and a target protein. It explores how the ligand binds to the protein’s active site and predicts the optimal conformation, position, and orie...

One Drug Does Not Fit All

Let me tell you a story. Meet Eve. Eve just gave birth to this beautiful baby boy and she’s now a mother (congratulations!! ). After delivering the baby Eve was experiencing a lot of pain that was unbearable. She tells the doctor and she prescribes her some Codeine, a painkil...

What Is a Blockbuster Drug?

A blockbuster drug is a medication that generates annual sales of $1 billion or more. These drugs usually treat conditions that affect many people — like hypertension, high cholesterol, cancer, arthritis, and diabetes — and require chronic care over the long term. Examples of blockbus...

Could a Single Drug Treat Cancer and Heart Disease?

What would you guess are the two biggest killers in the world? Based on media coverage, maybe you guessed gun violence, accidents or COVID-19. But the top two killers are actually cardiovascular disease and cancer. These two diseases combined account for nearly 50% of deaths in the U.S. Card...

Transdermal Drug Delivery Systems: Formulating Medicines through the Skin

Transdermal drug delivery stands as a remarkable innovation in the realm of pharmaceuticals, offering a non-invasive approach that allows medications to be absorbed through the skin for systemic effects. This article provides an in-depth exploration of transdermal drug delivery systems, focusing on ...

Biophysics and Drug Design: Using Physics to Develop New Therapeutics

The field of biophysics plays a crucial role in the development of new therapeutic drugs. By applying the principles of physics to understand biological processes at the molecular level, researchers can design more effective and targeted treatments for a wide range of diseases. In this blog po...

When You Know It’s Time To Stop Talking to Random Drug Addicts on the Street

I have a habit of meeting random strangers. From the moment I learned to talk, I chatted it up with everyone I met. My dad said I’d make new friends every time we went grocery shopping. I’ve maintained that reputation as an adult, to my kids’ embarrassment. Not only do I meet pe...

Days of Wildfires, or (The End of My Father’s Drug-Addicted Life)

The mountains were on fire, and I drove as Amanda rode beside me. The smell of burning forests penetrated every gap it could find in Black Betty, my 2012 Chevy Impala, the first car I ever bought on my own. Black Betty had done her fair share of trips into the Cumberland Gap since March 2014, whe...

Mental Health and Drug Addiction: Crisis Within Our Borders

Politicians spend an abundant amount of time and resources trying to solve what the Republicans label as a crisis at our country’s southern border. Politics aside, many Americans, especially those in disadvantaged communities, grapple with chronic substance abuse often facilitated by entities ...

Science will likely never find a safe drug for anxiety.

My aunt takes gabapentin every night to sleep. She tried several times to quit, failed each time, and resigned herself to taking it for life. I’m failing to believe the “non-addictive” line. Insomnia runs in my family, I’ve had a lifelong struggle with it, myself. I took a...

The 13 Rules of Drug Dealing I Learnt As The Son Of A Dealer

My father was a drug dealer. He would use the profits from what he sold, to pay for what he used himself. Growing up I was exposed to his dealing on a daily basis. I watched and learnt. Taking in all of the lessons he didn’t realise he was teaching. I had to keep myself sa...

How to become a (psychedelic) drug researcher

A question that students have asked me fairly often over the years since I’ve been doing drug research is some variation of “How can I become a drug researcher myself?” This is a very nice question to get, in that it’s very gratifying to be in a field that young people aspire...

The Worst Drug Dealing Horror Story I’ve Ever Heard

The cottage industry that is student dealing flourished around 2008; partly as a result of a decline in academic values within many British universities and partly due to the arrival of the student-favoured cheap stimulant mephedrone. By 2009, reports began to surface claiming that some people ac...

White Trauma and Drug Addiction

One of my favorite rap songs as a child was about a 15 year old junkie trying to shake his drug habit. The title was “Doing Bad” by Cash Money rapper B.G. As a child I couldn’t fully comprehend the lyrics. I didn’t know what heroin was, nor did I understand the graveness of a...

A New and More Dangerous Drug Market Requires a New Approach

This tragedy has continued to play out for decades, but has worsened sharply since 2014 when illegally manufactured, highly potent fentanyl was introduced to American drug markets. Many of the same traits that make fentanyl an attractive drug for illegal suppliers and Mexican traffickers c...

Fighting Drug Cravings with Marijuana Concentrates

I got clean off the heroin four years ago by moving to a marijuana farm. It wasn’t the first time I quit, but it was the first time the quitting stuck. Having a purpose and unlimited weed for a year after quitting gave me responsibility without needing to get a job. That first year off hard...

Fighting Drug Cravings with Marijuana Concentrates

Unintentional Drug Overdose Fatalities in Philadelphia, 2019

In Philadelphia, PA, unintentional drug overdoses contribute to significant premature mortality, with 1,217 deaths in 2017 and 1,116 deaths in 2018. Most overdose deaths in Philadelphia involve opioids, a class of drugs that includes heroin and pharmaceutical painkillers like oxycodone. Over the pas...

We Don’t Have a ‘Drug Problem’

There’s been a lot of debate around drugs in the US, from the legalization of marijuana to the stunning fatality rates of our ‘opioid crisis.’ We’ve built up such a tremendous fear, negativity and stigma around drugs that our main solution has been to throw enough enforc...

Short Story: Drug Addiction (Part 2)

Samantha had always been a social butterfly. She was the life of every party, and her infectious laughter could fill any room. However, as she got older, Samantha started to experiment with drugs. It started with just a little weed, but soon she was dabbling in cocaine and other harder substances. ...

This drug eases one’s pain, but it also takes lives, if exceeds its limits.

Opioids are the class of drugs that is widely prescribed for pain throughout the world. Life without opioids is unimaginable in many patient’s life. It is one of the mandatory drugs for most of the in-patient treatments. Opioids are extracted from Poppy seeds. Chinese were smoking opioids w...

Those Crazy Drug Names

Here are two things people are likely to say when I tell them I create names for a living: “Wow, really? Sounds like a lot of fun!” “Do you make up those crazy drug names?” To #1, I reply honestly that, like most professions, name development is often fun and alw...

Suramin: A Century-Old Drug with New Promise for Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has become an increasingly prevalent condition, affecting millions of children worldwide. The rise in ASD diagnoses has sparked a fervent search for effective treatments, and a surprising contender has emerged from the annals of medical history. Suramin, a drug develop...

Is Artificial Intelligence Changing Drug Discovery?

You know how long and hard it is to make new medicines nowadays. Companies must test thousands of chemical compounds to see if any can treat a disease. This costs tons and tons of money and takes so many years. Even after all that work, over 90% of possible new drugs fail during testing in human vol...

What Are The Challenges Of Ai In Drug Development?

AI models need high-quality data to learn. However, drug data could be more extensive and consistent. Some diseases have few patient cases. That makes it hard to get insights. Other times, data is collected differently across hospitals and trials. So, it takes a lot of work to combine into excellent...

AI in Drug Discovery: Transforming Pharmaceutical Development

Introduction: Pioneering a New Era in Medicine The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the realm of pharmaceutical development is not just an advancement; it’s a revolution. At the intersection of technology and healthcare, AI stands as a beacon of innovation, transforming...

How to Use Machine Learning to Forecast Adverse Drug Reactions

When patients suffer unintended reactions to medicines, it can be both dangerous for the individual and costly to society. However, what if medical professionals could use machine learning to forecast adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and minimise risks to patients? ADRs are a huge concern within the...

My Life Has Been Ruined by an Anti-Baldness Drug

tsucks to be a teenager losing your hair. You start to notice your friends’ eyes darting up to your hairline. You become the butt of jokes. You feel marked out, as if the gene gods have tagged you as defective and old before your time. I was 17 when I noticed the hair on my temples was rece...

AI in drug discovery

AI in drug discovery 2022: $0.6 billion; 2027: $4 billion; CAGR: 45.7% (forecast period) Major market segments Natural language processing, context-aware computing, and deep learning (the largest) Learn More

“The Art of Molecular Docking: Optimizing Drug Interactions”

Unlocking the Code to Faster Drug Development

We seem to have a love-hate relationship with prescription drugs. They save lives every day, yet they’ve also become a source of discomfort, confusion and frustration. First, there are the side effects — which I see so often as a practicing emergency physician. When you have an infection...

Using NLP to identify Adverse Drug Events (ADEs)

An adverse drug event (ADE) is defined as harm experienced by a patient as a result of exposure to a medication. A significant amount of information about drug-related safety issues such as adverse effects are published in medical case reports that usually can only be explored by human rea...

Ethereum-Based Simulation of Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Drug Interactions

For a while I have been studying DeSci (Decentralised Science) in all its glory, for me this is the pinnacle of what Ethereum smart contracts can do. Helping us to solve complex real world expensive problems in a controlled and cost efficient way. The beauty of the EVM is its self executing natur...

Process Analytical Technology (PAT) and Artificial Intelligence: The Expanding Impact of ML in Drug Manufacturing

Process Analytical Technology (PAT) is an analytical technique that measures critical quality and performance indicators in raw materials, in-process materials, and processes during manufacturing. PAT solutions are now embracing improvements with recent advancements in artificial intelligence. ...

Frankincense as a Psychoactive Drug

The LORD said to Moses: Take an equal amount of each of these spices: gum resin, onycha, galbanum, and pure frankincense. Like a skilled perfume maker, carefully blend them together and make incense, seasoned with salt, pure and holy. — -Exodus 30:34–5 When anyone presents a...