NIH researchers create comprehensive collection of approved drugs to identify new therapies

                                                                                                   http://www.ncgc.nih.gov/

From the 27 April 2011 Eureka News Alert

Researchers have begun screening the first definitive collection of thousands of approved drugs for clinical use against rare and neglected diseases. They are hunting for additional uses of the drugs hoping to find off-label therapies, for some of the 6,000 rare diseases that afflict 25 million Americans. The effort is coordinated by the National Institutes of Health’s Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC).

“This is a critical step to explore the full potential of these drugs for new applications,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “The hope is that this process may identify some potential new treatments for rare and neglected diseases.”

The researchers assembled the collection of approved drugs for screening based on information from the NCGC Pharmaceutical Collection browser at http://tripod.nih.gov/npc. This publicly available, Web-based application described in a paper appearing in the April 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, provides complete information on the nearly 27,000 active pharmaceutical ingredients including 2,750 small molecule drugs that have been approved by regulatory agencies from the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan, as well as all compounds that have been registered for human clinical trials……

Related Rare Diseases Resources

• National Organization for Rare Disorders
• Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center(Office of Rare Diseases, National Human Genome Research Institute)
• Office of Rare Diseases
• Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network(Office of Rare Diseases, National Center for Research Resources)
• Rare Diseases (MedlinePlus)

Related Articles

• Push to spur more drugs for deadly rare diseases (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• U.S. Rolls the Dice on Pharmaceutical Drug Innovation (livescience.com)
• Guidelines on rare diseases: Methods on handling evidence neither identified nor required

  Manuals and methods papers provide only isolated references; different requirements than those for more common diseases do not seem meaningful

Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (Journal Article)

From the March 18 2011 DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB **posting

Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness
The March 2011 issue of this journal includes an article titled,
“Supporting Evidence-based Health Care in Crises: What Information Do Humanitarian Organizations Need?” ***as well as a selection of open access articles relevant to the Japan earthquake. [Submitted by Anna Gieschen]

Abstract

Supporting Evidence-based Health Care in Crises

What Information Do Humanitarian Organizations Need?

Tari Turner, PhD, Sally Green, PhD and Claire Harris, MBBSAuthor Affiliations: Dr Turner and Dr Green are with the Australasian Cochrane Centre, Monash University, Victoria, Australia; and Dr Harris is with the Centre for Clinical Effectiveness, Southern Health, Victoria, Australia.

In crisis situations, there is an enormous burden of disease and very limited resources. To achieve the best possible health outcomes in these situations and ensure that scarce resources are not wasted, knowledge from health research needs to be translated into practice. We investigated what information from health research was needed by humanitarian aid workers in crisis settings and how it could be best provided. Semistructured interviews were conducted by telephone with 19 humanitarian aid workers from a range of organizations around the world and the results analyzed thematically. Participants identified a clear and currently unmet need for access to high-quality health research to support evidence-based practice in crisis situations. They emphasized that research into delivery of health care was potentially morevaluable than research into the effectiveness of particular clinical interventions and highlighted the importance of includingcontextual information to enable the relevance of the research to be assessed. They suggested that providers of health research information and humanitarian aid organizations work together to develop these resources. [editor Flahiff’s emphasis]

**DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB is a discussion group for librarians, information specialists and othersinterested in disaster information outreach to their communities and responding to information needs for all-hazards preparedness, response and recovery.
The DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB archives are available at
https://list.nih.gov/archives/disastr-outreach-lib.html.

*** For information on how to get this article for free or at low cost, click here

Related Articles

• U.S. Unprepared for Major Radiation Emergency: Survey (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Emergency mental health lessons learned from Continental Flight 3407 disaster (scienceblog.com)
• Disaster Preparedness: Is Your Family Ready? (abcnews.go.com)
• Japan earthquake – disaster relief information sources (openmedicine.ca)
• Japan’s Disaster and the Limits of Self-Sufficiency (scienceblogs.com)
• Health care needs public acceptance of evidence based medicine (kevinmd.com)

Brain researcher recognized for contributions to understanding, treatment of drug dependence

Brain researcher recognized for contributions to understanding, treatment of drug dependence

Warren K. Bickel, director of the Center for Substance Abuse at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, examines decision-making processes in the brain that support dysfunctional decision-making, including addiction, and seeks novel therapeutic means to repair those processes.

From the February 11, 2011 Eureka news alert

Warren K. Bickel, director of the Center for Substance Abuse at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, has been selected as the 2011 recipient of the American Psychological Association Don Hake Translational Research Award. Sponsored by the Association for Behavior Analysis International, the award recognizes individuals whose work spans basic and applied research.

According to awards chair Cythia Pietras, the award is being presented to Bickel for his contributions to understanding drug dependence and treatment, impulsivity, and behavioral economics, and for disseminating that work to a wide audience.

Bickel, who is a professor with the research institute and professor of psychology at Virginia Tech, examines decision-making processes in the brain that support dysfunctional decision-making, including addiction, and seeks novel therapeutic means to repair those processes. One area of his research is directed at the process involved in preferring instant gratification over a future health benefit. His research demonstrating that this preference for immediate rewards can be changed with a novel therapeutic approach appears in the February 2011 issue of Biological Psychiatry.***

According to Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute Executive Director Michael Friedlander, “Dr. Bickel’s research is blazing a new path to understanding how the brain’s temporal discounting system –the ability to differentially value things based on how far into the future they may occur — contributes to decisions regarding substance abuse, as well as how the executive processes in the human brain can be enhanced through rehabilitative training to potentially improve outcomes for those who are affected by substance abuse. He also has a commitment and well honed skill for effectively communicating the significance of his work to the scientific and medical communities and the general public. We are very fortunate to have such a talented scientist and communicator as part of the research institute here in Roanoke.”

***For suggestions on how to get this article for free or at low cost, click here