Repurposing Drugs to Fight Cancer

In many poor countries, counterfeit medicines are an enormous problem. A quarter-million malaria deaths each year might be prevented if the patients were treated with real drugs instead of fake ones.

During the twentieth century, imagery on cigarette packs communicated that smoking was cool and young, and it encouraged young people, as well as adults, to smoke. In 2012, Australia started “unbranding the pack,” which standardized cigarettes without a brand and showed the physically gruesome effects of smoking with health factoids on the packaging. Since then, the World Health Organization has recommended this new kind of packaging and the idea has spread to other countries to scale the success.

While critics argue that Naloxone isn't safe for over-the-counter use, some cities have found success distributing Naloxone to community members to help save lives of addicts who overdose. Naloxone can be administered to help those overdosing survive and jump-start the withdrawal process.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury-related mortality. Naxolone, a drug used to revive overdose victims, is only available by prescription. However, private organizations have distributed Naxolone kits nationally, showing that the drug can save lives when it is more readily accessible.

Adolescent smoking remains a challenging health problem because of the allure of cigarette branding. Australia is piloting the transformation of cigarette packaging with a generic look that reduces the appeal of smoking. In Florida, the Truth campaign has exposed that cigarette companies targeted teenage consumers and, in response, created a set of new advertisements that presented the cigarette industry with transparency.

Prescription drugs are greatly polluting the national water supply, causing researchers to begin looking for a method to better filter water and dispose of unused medicine.

Dutch farmers are saying no to antibiotics for livestock. The Netherlands is in the midst of a high-stakes, government-mandated experiment: Can large-scale meat production succeed without routine use of antibiotics?

Often it is faster and easier to harvest molecules for medical purposes from nature than to make them in a laboratory. A scientist is looking for cancer-fighting molecules in coral and sponges in the tropical Pacific.

The human papillomavirus is a primary cause of cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine has reduced the rate of infection by half in recent years among teenagers. However, the vaccine has still encountered resistance by some social conservatives.

Despite significant increases in funding and advances in biomedical research, the rates of new treatments and drugs for illnesses that reach the market every year have plummeted. A group called the Myelin Repair Foundation, along with several other foundations, uses an intensely goal-directed and collaborative method to tackle the bottleneck.