Artemesinin emerged from a Chinese herbal medicine, Qinghaosu, where it was used as a fever treatment for generations. I remember writing about the earliest research in my New Scientist days and have watched the drug discovery process bring us to the point where a potent pharmaceutical could, it seemed, defeat the disease…

…no more. In Cambodia, at least, resistant strains of malaria have been spotted by two teams of scientists, working on separate clinical trials who reported disturbing evidence of reduced drug efficacy.

The BBC says researchers are blaming a weak public health system and poorly controlled drug use, as well as fake drugs, produced by international criminals, for the problem. But, the problem is not really socioeconomic at all - it’s natural selection in action. We present the disease with a changing environment and it evolves to fill the niche.

Malaria Drug Fail

They claim that the compound is a precursor for the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, a precursor for the pigment compounds melanins, and for the thyroid hormones (e.g. thyroxin). Lifelink, for instance, makes the bold statement:

Most of the medical research relating to tyrosine supplementation has been conducted using L-tyrosine itself, not acetyl-L-tyrosine. It is logical to assume, however, that the conclusions reached will apply to acetyl-L-tyrosine as well, since the latter is converted to L-tyrosine in the body. The following discussion therefore draws from studies of L-tyrosine.

By implication then N-acetyl-L-tyrosine can purportedly be used in treating mood problems and depression, hair and skin colour, blood pressure, and Parkinson’s disease!

If you were offered a drug by your physician to improve your hair colour but the doc then pointed out that it might affect your brain and your blood pressure, wouldn’t you be worried? Indeed, the pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars trying to eliminate side effects and focus the specificity of its products to avoid such issues as multiple activities of any given drug.

Several of the references given to support the use of N-acetyl-L-tyrosine are nothing more than Wikipedia entries. I don’t want wiki entries when I’m assessing a medical effect, it’s not that Wiki is not credible, but how can the lay reader be sure that what they’re reading on there is valid, it may have been edited to promote the compound by someone with a vested interest or a conflict of interest.

Give me large-scale, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, clinical trials every time and you’ll convince me. Spurious musings on possible benefits are not medical evidence.

Also of note are the physical properties of N-acetyl-L-tyrosine listed by ChemSpider:

CAUTION: May irritate eyes, skin, and respiratory tract

N-Acetyl-L-Tyrosine

Interestingly, this drugs in the water supply is a topic I discussed at least a decade ago in the original ChemWeb Catalyst column (now available on Sciencebase.com) and one that was also in the news in India not too long ago: Indian Stream A Cocktail Of Drugs. The exact same news was also discussed back in January on the thdblog: Pharmaceutical Waste Dumped at Record Levels.

Drugs in the Water Supply

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) cost $2b annually in the US and are a major burden on healthcare systems. They are common in patients with a urinary catheter in place, but some people are also more susceptible to such infections than others, particularly after sexual activity, although the infections are rarely sexually transmitted in nature.

Adhesion of Escherichia coli bacteria (which live in the lower gut) to cells lining the urinary tract is the first step in the development of a UTI. Chemicals found in cranberry products called proanthocyanidins (PACs) prevent this microbe from adhering to these urinary tract epithelial cells by affecting the surface properties of the bacteria.

Paola Pinzón-Arango, Yatao Liu, and Terri Camesano, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, exposed E. coli grown in culture to either light cranberry juice cocktail or cranberry PACs and measured the adhesion forces between the bacteria and a silicon surface using atomic force microscopy. They demonstrated that the longer the bacteria were exposed to either the cranberry juice or the PACS the less able were the bacteria to adhere.

Cranberries, one of only three species of fruits native to North America, have a long history of medicinal food use. Native Americans used the fruit for the treatment of bladder and kidney ailments.

Cranberries and Urinary Tract Infections

EEStor’s CEO and president Richard Weir, named as co-inventor on the company’s main patents was interviewed last year by the Barium Titanate blog, but other than that there is scant information about EESUs.

Are they a scam like so many other claims for perpetual motion and free energy? If only, the company would tell us more, science could decide.

EEStor’s patents describe the sintering of tiny grains of coated barium titanate powder into a bulk ceramic, which is claimed to eliminate pore spaces and so take full advantage of barium titanate’s extremely high permittivity without void arcing that would otherwise discharge the capacitor. Sounds reasonable, so far.

However, there are many skeptics. Jim Miller, a capacitor expert who visited EEStor in 2007 to evaluate the technology reckons there will still be current leakage at the typically high operating voltages caused by microscopic fractures in the sintered ceramic caused by temperature fluctuations.

Andrew Burke, another expert who visited EEStor also says that the permittivity could not be maintained at the high level claimed at the high voltage required. The energy density could not be that high, he says.

EEStor will apparently not provide supporting data for their claims to contradict the experts. Such reluctance to share knowledge and evidence around such a potentially revolutionary device inevitably leads to more skepticism than support. The EEStor website is still labeled “under construction“, which does not inspire confidence. Wonderful as the idea of a supercapacitor to help us harness renewable energy may sound, one cannot help but feel that EEStor is probably just another Steorn in a teacup.

EEStor Super Capacitor

Arul Chinnaiyan and colleagues profiled the metabolites present in the urine of prostate cancer patients compared and compared it to those of healthy individuals. They found that sarcosine - a derivative of the amino acid glycine - was present at higher levels in the urine of patients with aggressive prostate cancer. The team went on to show that simply adding sarcosine to cultures of benign prostate cells was enough to turn them into invasive cancer cells capable of spread, indicating that the molecule may have an important role in disease.

This is the first time a biomarker for prostate cancer has been detected in urine. Follow up research is now needed to develop a non-invasive approach to testing. The researchers hope that their findings could one day be used to aid prostate cancer diagnosis and may offer new opportunities for therapeutic intervention.

10.1038/nature07762

Urine clues for prostate cancer

The team was developing a computational method to help them predict the structure of various types of material and applied the technique to a newly synthesized form of pure boron that possesses some
unusual physical properties.

They were surprised to discover that this novel boron was more unusual than they could have imagined, revealing a degree of ionic bonding between boron atoms, that theoretically should not exist, but apparently do.

The new structure can be viewed as a NaCl-type structure, with anionic and cationic positions occupied by two different clusters of boron atoms (B12 and B2). The difference of the electronic properties of these clusters brings about charge transfer, making this material a partially ionic boron boride. the press release on this work says that boron is the chemical element most susceptible to changes in structure due to the presence of impurities. Maybe that’s the explanation…but of course it cannot be so, this is a computer simulation, there are no impurities.

The discovery could mark an important step towards a better understanding of boron. But, perhaps more intriguingly is that it beggars questions about what we mean by a chemical bond…

Ionic Boron

In humans, oxytocin, which comes from the Greek meaning “quick birth”, increases social behaviors like trust, but its role in social memory has been unclear. “Recognizing a familiar face is a crucial feature of successful social interaction in humans,” said Peter Klaver, of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In this study undertaken with Ulrike Rimmele, of New York University and colleagues, the team investigated for the first time the systematic effect of oxytocin on social memory in humans.

“This is the first paper showing that a single dose of oxytocin specifically improves recognition memory for social, but not for nonsocial, stimuli,” said Ernst Fehr, who has studied oxytocin’s effect on trust and is unaffiliated with the new study. “The results suggest an immediate, selective effect of the hormone: strengthening neuronal systems of social memory,” Fehr said.

Oxytocin Facial

Melamine, commonly used as a fire retardant and polymerized to a plastic resin, was added to milk during processing to artificially boost its apparent protein content.

David Muddiman, professor of mass spectrometry at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, US, describes the techniques as “marvellous examples of how innovative, direct analysis ionisation methods, when coupled with mass spectrometry have the ability to address contemporary problems facing the world. The [researchers have removed all the major obstacles allowing for mass spectrometry not only to compete, but to take the lead in these types of analyses.”

More details here.

Melamine Detector

For a group of delightful young women in Northern England, where the sun shines strongly only rarely I can tell you having grown up there, the answer was obvious - (a) the regular injections.

But, what are they injecting daily for a week and then weekly thereafter? What is this compound that stimulates a higher than normal skin pigmentation level and gives the young women the appearance of having just returned from a fortnight lounging by the pool somewhere much warmer and sunnier than oop north? Well, it is called Melanotan and it’s illegal in the UK, i.e. it has not received approval from the medical authorities. It is nevertheless, being sold illegally over the internet and in some tanning salons and body building gyms.

So, is it worrying is that melanotan has not gone through the full gamut of safety tests required of pharmaceutical products, and yet the young women seem unconcerned when confronted with that fact in the following BBC news video clip.

There is the possibility that it is perfectly safe and if not perfectly safe then safer than ultraviolet tanning beds, and according to cancer charities possibly a whole lot safer than chronic sunbathing. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has said that injecting Melanotan could have serious side-effects. But, given that full clinical trials have not yet been completed, they could just as easily have said that it could have no serious side-effects.

Melanotan purportedly boosts the body’s production of melanin, the natural pigment produced by the skin on exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. To be honest, to my eye, none of the young women in the video even looked particularly tanned.

Apparently, there are two versions of the injectable suntan - melanotan I and melanotan II and both are analogs of the naturally occurring peptide hormone alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone. I’d certainly never consider injecting with any hormone except under doctor’s orders and certainly not for the sake of getting an artificial tan. If the health experts are right and there are safety problems with melanotan, then who’s to say these girls aren’t putting themselves at risk of some nasty effects, melanoma in a syringe, perhaps?

But, like I say, I much prefer the great outdoors and a sensible attitude to sun exposure. (Oh, except for that time I got burnt on that warmer and sunnier fortnight).

Melanotan Suntan in a Syringe