DrugScope has today welcomed the National Treatment Agency’s announcement of a pilot scheme that will see families and carers of opiate users trained in drug overdose management and the administration of naloxone, a drug which reverses the effects of a drug overdose [1]. Naloxone is an opioid antagonist which blocks the effects of opiates, such as heroin or methadone.
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Governments and health professionals across Australia need to give full and detailed consideration to granting pharmacists and other non-medial health professionals the right to prescribe medications, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia says. President of the PSA, Warwick Plunkett, said today that some non-medical health professions have already been granted prescribing rights and it was time that this right was also granted to pharmacists.
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Nominations for the prestigious 2009 Pharmaceutical Society of Australia Awards for Excellence are being called for with winners to be announced at the Pharmacy Congress Australia in October. The PSA’s Pharmacist of the Year, Young Pharmacist of the Year and Lifetime Recognition Awards are regarded in the profession as pinnacles of achievement and are held in the highest esteem both within and outside the profession.
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The emerging field of synthetic biology draws on a variety of technologies, including genetic engineering and nanotechnology, to engineer biological systems to perform novel tasks.
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Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists’ discovery of a cancer-causing gene the first in its family to be linked to cancer demonstrates how the panoramic view of genomics and the close-up perspective of molecular biology are needed to determine which genes are involved in cancer and which are mere bystanders. The findings are reported in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature.
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Researchers at the Universities of Leeds and Bristol (UK) have developed a model of how errors are corrected whilst proteins are being built. Ensuring that proteins are built correctly is essential to the proper functioning of our bodies, but the ‘quality assurance’ mechanisms that take place during this manufacturing process are not fully understood.
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Chronix Biomedical has reported that a new study in a peer-reviewed journal further confirms the potential diagnostic and prognostic utility of using circulating fragments of DNA to detect early stage disease. These DNA fragments, referred to as serum DNA, are released into the blood stream in trace amounts during the disease process.
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Scientists trying to understand how the brains of animals evolve have found that evolutionary changes in brain structure reflect the types of social interactions and environmental stimuli different species face. The study is the first to compare multiple species of related animals, in this case social wasps, to look at how roles of individuals in a society might affect brain architecture.
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On June 18, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) announced the award of $9.16 million for the creation of a national technology platform aimed at mapping the human interactome. This national platform, headed by Dr.
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis four grants totaling $19 million to explore the trillions of microbes that inhabit the human body and determine how they contribute to good health and disease. The grants are part of the Human Microbiome Project, an ongoing, ambitious effort to catalog the bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microorganisms that naturally coexist in or on the body.
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