News

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Africas Malaria Battle: Fake Drug Pipeline Undercuts Progress," outlines a counterfeit pharmaceutical problem that is top of mind at Saint Marys College in Notre Dame, Ind. Chemistry professor Toni Barstis and her undergraduate students at this Catholic, womens, liberal arts college have researched and developed Paper Analytical Devices (PADs) that can screen whether an antimalarial drug is real. What they have developed, along with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, are inexpensive PADs, the size of a business card, that are simple to use and provide almost immediate results. There are two patents pending for the research.

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania have developed a new gene therapy to thwart a potential influenza pandemic. Specifically, investigators in the Gene Therapy Program, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, directed by James M. Wilson, MD, PhD, demonstrated that a single dose of an adeno-associated virus (AAV) expressing a broadly neutralizing flu antibody into the nasal passages of mice and ferrets gives them complete protection and substantial reductions in flu replication when exposed to lethal strains of H5N1 and H1N1 flu virus. These strains were isolated from samples associated from historic human pandemics one from the infamous 1918 flu pandemic and another from 2009.

New research from the University of Southampton shows that copper and copper alloys will rapidly destroy norovirus. The virus can be contracted from contaminated food or water, person-to-person contact, and contact with contaminated surfaces, meaning surfaces made from copper could effectively shut down one avenue of infection.