HIV-AIDS drug gains tentative FDA approval

HIV-AIDS drug gains tentative FDA approval

• WASHINGTON, -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has tentatively approved the 75th anti-retroviral generic drug of the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief. Marketed by Macleods Pharmaceuticals Ltd. of Kachigam, Daman, in India, the FDA said the drug -- generic lamivudine -- is a nucleoside analog reverse-transcriptase inhibitor that blocks an enzyme called reverse transcriptase that's important to human immunodeficiency virus production. HIV-infected pati- ents who take lamivudine with other anti-HIV treatments dev- elop fewer opportunistic infections, the FDA said. However, the FDA said tentative approval means that although existing patents and/or marketing exclusivity prevent the approval of the product in the United States at this time, the product meets all of the FDA's normal requirements for manufacturing quality, clinical safety and efficacy.

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Scientists find new way to fight leukemia

SYRACUSE, N.Y., -- U.S. scientists say they might have dis- covered a new way to fight leukemia and other forms of can- cer by reprogramming cancerous cells back into normal cells.
A team of Syracuse University researchers led by Assistant Professor Michael Cosgrove says it has discovered a way to disrupt the protein switch that is a critical component in the process to create white blood cells. That discovery, researchers said, could lead to a more effective way to treat some forms of leukemia and revolutionize the approach to treating other forms of cancer. "We believe our discovery is just the tip of the iceberg," Cosgrove said. "Our hope is that from the knowledge we have gained in understanding how these proteins work in normal cells, we will be able to find new ways to treat all types of leukemia. We also think the discoveries will have broad implications in treating other types of cancer." The findings were recently published online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and will appear in a forthcoming print edition.

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Heart's helical band motion studied

PASADENA, Calif., -- U.S. scientists say they've created, for the first time, images of the heart's muscular layer and the link between it and the way the heart contracts. Cali- fornia Institute of Technology researchers say their findings could help create a road map for future cardiac surgical techniques. The researchers showed the muscular band that wraps around the inner chambers of the heart in a helix is actually a sort of "twisting highway" along which each con- traction of the heart travels. "The heart twists to push blood out the same way you twist a wet towel to wring water out of it," said Professor Morteza Gharib, who led the study.
Using a new imaging technique pioneered by Han Wen and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, Gharib and Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam created some of the first dyn- amic images of normal myocardium -- the middle muscular layer of the heart wall -- in action at the tissue level.
"We tagged and traced small tissue elements in the heart, and looked at them in space, so we could see how they moved when the heart contracts," Gharib said. "In this way, we were able to see where the maximum physical contraction occurs in the heart and when, and to show that it follows this intriguing helical loop." The research appeared in the December issue of Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

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