Welcome To Iconocast

How to add a URL link from your web site to the Iconocast web sites

Virtual tour of Southern California

Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: drug + blood + vessel  Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/5/2008)

Chatter Shmatter Medicines Co. gets lift from drug approval The Star-Ledger - NJ.com, NJ - The drug is approved for hospital use in patients undergoing angioplasty to open blocked blood vessels. Bloomberg News contributed to this report. ... The Medicines Company?s Cleviprex? Receives FDA Approval Business Wire (press release) all 36 news articles »  MDCO Research Exposes New Target For Malaria Drugs Science Daily (press release) - After plasmodia infect a blood cell, they send out clusters of sticky proteins to the cell surface, enabling them to attach to blood vessels and escape ... J&J Receives US Subpoena Over Bile Duct Stent Sales (Update3) Bloomberg - An Abbott spokesman said last month that such stents represent a ``nominal portion'' of the company's $1.67 billion in sales in 2007 for blood-vessel ... Johnson & Johnson Receives Subpoena on Bile Duct Stents New York Times all 8 news articles »  BSX - JNJ - ABT LIVENEWS.com.au Viagra could open way to gold medal performance The Age, Australia - Viagra, a legal drug, opens up the blood vessels, allowing the transfer of oxygen to be increased and athletes use it to help their performance, ... Viagra and laughing gas the key to Olympic gold? LIVENEWS.com.au all 33 news articles » World's First Transplant Of Both Arms Science Daily (press release) - Before the donor's bones were severed, the blood vessels in the arms were filled with cooled preservation solution (perfusion). Both arms were then removed ... OXiGENE Reports Second Quarter 2008 Results MarketWatch - Aug 3, 2008 The company's major focus is developing VDAs that selectively disrupt abnormal blood vessels associated with solid tumor progression and visual impairment. ... Tracleer? (bosentan) receives EU approval for treatment of ... Ad-Hoc-News (Pressemitteilung), Germany - Aug 3, 2008 They are caused by a reduction in the lumen of small bloody vessels that decreases blood flow to the fingers and toes causing open sores. ...VTX:ATLN Medical ELeft untreated, blood disorder can cause tissue damage Post-Bulletin, MN - Without treatment, eosinophils will accumulate in various tissues and can severely damage your heart, blood vessels, peripheral and central nervous system, ... ? Macular Degeneration Clinical Trial WHOI, IL - Wet macular degeneration occurs when abnormal blood vessels grow under the retina. These vessels are fragile and leak blood and fluid into the space under ... Oneindia Blood pressure drug dementia hope BBC News, UK - Jul 28, 2008 This evidence suggests that the drugs, which help prevent the constriction of blood vessels, could not only prevent, or at least delay, the arrival of ... Blood pressure drug reduces risk Alzheimer's by 40 per cent Telegraph.co.uk Blood pressure drugs can 'dramatically cut the risk of Alzheimer's ... Daily Mail BP Drug Decreases Alzheimer's Oneindia guardian.co.uk - Irish Examiner all 678 news articles »

ANTIFUNGAL DRUG STOPS BLOOD VESSEL GROWTH

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered to their surprise that a drug commonly used to treat toenail fungus can also block angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels commonly seen in cancers. The drug, itraconazole, already is FDA approved for human use, which may fast-track its availability as an antiangiogenesis drug.

In mice induced to have excess blood vessel growth, treatment with itraconazole reduced blood vessel growth by 67 percent compared to placebo. “We were surprised, to say the least, that itraconazole popped up as a potential blocker of angiogenesis,” says Jun O. Liu, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology. “We couldn’t have predicted that an antifungal drug would have such a role.”

In their search for antiangiogenesis drugs, the researchers worked with cells from human umbilical cords, a rich source of blood vessels, and exposed them to 2,400 existing drugs - including FDA- and foreign-approved drugs, as well as nonapproved drugs that had passed safety trials - to see which ones could stop the cells from dividing.

Article continues below and (thank you)

“The best outcome was to find an already approved drug that worked, and the fact that we did was very satisfying,” says Liu, whose study appears online in ACS Chemical Biology.
 
As an antifungal drug, itraconazole blocks a key enzyme for making fungal cholesterol, causing these primitive life forms to become fragile and break apart. It turns out that itraconazole can block the same enzyme in blood vessels, but the researchers aren’t positive if that’s the reason blood vessels stop growing, because related antifungal drugs had much lower inhibitory effect.

“Our screening test did show that cholesterol-lowering statins also appear to stop blood vessel growth,” Liu says, “so there is likely some important connection between cholesterol and angiogenesis.”
 
While the researchers still must tease out exactly how itraconazole works to stop vessel growth, and test it in animals with cancer, they have high hopes for its use. “Itraconazole can be taken orally for fungal infection, and therefore oral delivery may work for angiogenesis as well,” Liu notes.  

The research was funded by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins Fund for Medical Discovery, the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, the Keck Foundation, and the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute Fund.

Authors on the paper are Curtis Chong, Jing Xu, Jun Lu, Shridhar Bhat, David Sullivan Jr. and Jun O. Liu, all of Johns Hopkins. 

On the Web:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/pharmacology/index.html
http://pubs.acs.org/journals/acbcct/index.html