Food Giant Nestle set to develop new drug(s) based upon Chinese Herbal Medicine

Food Giant Nestle in works to develop new drugs based upon Chinese Herbal Ingredients and TCM. 

From: South China Post 

Hutchison Whampoa's pharmaceutical unit has joined forces with Swiss food giant Nestle to develop a new drug, which they said had the potential to be the first Chinese herbal-ingredient-based drug candidate to conduct a large-scale clinical trial for registration in a major disease area.

London's Alternative Investment Market-listed Hutchison China Meditech (Chi-Med), 70.4 per cent owned by Hutchison Whampoa, formed an equally owned joint venture in November last year with Nestle's wholly owned Nestle Health Science to develop nutritional and medicinal products derived from botanical plants.

Last week, the venture said the first patient had been enrolled to begin treatment in a phase-three clinical trial for a botanical-ingredient-based oral drug aimed at treating patients with moderate ulcerative colitis, a disease of the large intestine. The trial is expected to take 24 months.

Chi-Med chief executive Christian Hogg said the firm had spent 13 years identifying 15,000 "molecular level" substances by breaking down some 1,300 herbs, and come up with a "library" of data. The substances are being screened for medical efficacy.

"Back in the early 2000s, there was a lot of talk in Asia about bringing traditional Chinese medicine to the world, but it has taken this long to do it in a scientific and methodical manner," Hogg said. "It is only now that all this effort is reaching the final stages of registration trial."

Chi-Med started discovery work in 2003 and won approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2005 to go into clinical trial for the oral drug, Hogg said last week.

He would not disclose the amount of money spent so far but said the drug's efficacy and safety had been demonstrated in more than 400 patients. He also declined to divulge the budget for the stage-three trial, which will enrol more than 2,500 patients, mainly in the US and Europe.

http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1225520/hutchison-develop-herbal-drug-nestle

A natural folk remedy that can stop bedbugs in their tracks?

"Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations." 

Which has the medical and pest fighting communities working on it. 

Now a group of American scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.

A study published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of  how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.

At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.

“If someone had suggested to me that impaling insects with little tiny hooks would be a valid form of pest control, I wouldn’t have given it credence,” she said in an interview. “You can think of lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. That’s why it’s so amazing.”

But even though there is no indication that the bean leaves and the bedbugs evolved to work together, the leaves are fiendishly clever in exploiting the insects’ anatomy. Like the armor covering knights in medieval times, the bedbug’s exoskeleton has thinner areas where its legs flex and its tiny claws protrude — like the spot where a greave, or piece of leg armor, ends.

“The areas where they appear to be pierceable,” Dr. Loudon said, “are not the legs themselves. It’s where they bend, where it’s thin. That’s where they get pierced.”

This folk remedy from the Balkans was never entirely forgotten. A German entomologist wrote about it in 1927, a scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture mentioned it in a paper in 1943, and it can be found in Web searches about bedbugs and bean plants.

But the commercial availability of pesticides like DDT in the 1940s temporarily halted the legions of biting bugs. As their pesticide-resistant descendants began to multiply from Manhattan to Moscow, though, changing everything from leases to liability laws, the hunt for a solution was on.

The first task was to determine exactly how the hooks — the technical name is trichomes — worked. The process was viewed through an electron microscope, Dr. Loudon said. “The foot comes down onto the surface, but as it’s lifting up, it’s catching on these hooks,” she said. “The point is pointing down. So all of their legs get impaled.”

“And as soon as one leg gets caught,” she added, “they are rapidly moving legs around and try to get away on the surface. That’s when they get multiply impaled.”

Dr. Loudon and her co-authors — Megan W. Szyndler and Robert M. Corn from Irvine and Kenneth F. Haynes and Michael F. Potter of the University of Kentucky — then set out to mimic the mechanism.

Using a casting process similar to one a sculptor might choose, the scientists replicated, with polymers from different epoxies, the geometry of the trichomes, the sharp point on their tips and their flexibility and strength. Sometimes the tips of the hooks broke off during the molding process, resulting in a hybrid of biological and fabricated materials.

On the natural leaves, bugs were snagged, on average, after six steps, or locomotory cycles. (In one cycle, each of the insect’s six legs moves once.) Once stuck, they tried to free themselves, but they usually ended up just flailing in place around the impaled limb.

Read more: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/earth/how-a-leafy-folk-remedy-stopped-bedbugs-in-their-tracks.html?ref=science&_r=1&

Alternative Treatments For Easing End of Life Pain.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Of the countless painful decisions surrounding a loved one's end-of-life care, among the trickiest is how to provide physical comfort in a way that also provides a dignified ending.

"For end of life, the opioids are very important for pain management, but they do leave people very sedated," says researcher and physician Josephine Briggs, who heads the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. "Some people are looking for adjuncts to help with that."

Increasingly, those adjuncts include acupuncture, massage and other complementary therapies.

"We're seeing increased interest in complementary approaches in hospice settings," Briggs says, "and recognition by patients and caregivers that some of these approaches may be helpful in this stage of life."

A comprehensive survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2007 found that 41 percent of hospice care centers offered complementary and alternative therapies (CAT), had a CAT provider on staff or under contract, or both.

Those numbers have likely gone up, experts say.

"It's certainly been gaining momentum in the past four of five years," says Dr. Porter Storey, executive vice president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

"There are patients who are not getting adequate relief from usual medications," Storey says. "Sometimes it's people who don't tolerate medicine well or get bad side effects and still have the pain or nausea. And sometimes it's people who value mental clarity so much they would rather have the symptoms than any kind of drowsiness.

"We try really hard to make sure whatever we're doing matches the patient's goals and desires and is most likely to provide the most relief with the fewest side effects."

Acupuncture proves particularly helpful with nausea, Briggs says.

Read the full story here: 

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-27/health/sc-health-0327-dying-complimentary-therapies-in-th-20130327_1_acupuncture-nausea-end-of-life-care

The affect of even a little sugar on obesity and diabetes rates.

From United Press Intl. 

Although obesity predisposes people to type 2 diabetes, U.S. researchers suggest sugar may also have a direct, independent link to diabetes.

Lead author Dr. Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and colleagues examined data on global sugar availability and diabetes rates from 175 countries over the past decade.

The study, published in the journal PLoS One, found, after accounting for obesity and a large array of other factors, increased sugar in a population's food supply was linked to higher type 2 diabetes rates, independent of obesity rates.

"It was quite a surprise," Basu said in a statement. The research was conducted while Basu was a medical resident at University of California, San Francisco, and working with senior author Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital.

"We're not diminishing the importance of obesity at all, but these data suggest that at a population level there are additional factors that contribute to diabetes risk besides obesity and total calorie intake, and that sugar appears to play a prominent role," the researchers said.

For every additional 150 calories of sugar available per person per day, the prevalence of diabetes in the population rose 1 percent, even after controlling for obesity, physical activity, other types of calories and a number of economic and social variables, the study found.

Bitter Melon Could Hinder Survival Of Pancreatic Cancer Cells, Study Suggests

A fruit commonly consumed in Asian countries could also play an important role in fighting cancer, according to a new study in mice.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Cancer Center found that the juice of the bitter melon -- a green squash-shaped produce with a bumpy skin -- could stop pancreatic cancer cells from metabolizing glucose. This is important because cancer cells need this energy in order to survive -- and blocking off their glucose supply kills them.

"It's a very exciting finding," study researcher Rajesh Agarwal, Ph.D., who is the co-program leader of Cancer Prevention and Control at the university, said in a statement. "Many researchers are engineering new drugs to target cancer cells' ability to supply themselves with energy, and here we have a naturally-occurring compoundthat may do just that."

Researchers tested bitter melon juice's effects on pancreatic cancer cells in mice, and found that the mice that were given the juice had a 60 percent lower risk of developing pancreatic cancer compared with control mice.

The new findings are published in the journal Carcinogenesis.

In 2010, researchers from Saint Louis University found that bitter melon extract couldstop breast cancer cells from proliferating in a lab setting.

Read the original article here.

New Study: Acupuncture beneficial for Bell's Palsy treatments.

New York (Reuters Health) - Patients with facial paralysis saw greater improvements in function after a more intensive form of acupuncture in a new study from China that compared the treatment to standard acupuncture.

Researchers found that wiggling the acupuncture needles to produce a sensation called "de qi" led to a patient's having a better chance of recovering full facial function in six months than if the needles were just inserted and left alone.

De qi "should be considered to be included in clinical guidelines for acupuncture treatment," said Dr. Wei Wang at Key Laboratory of Neurological Diseases of Chinese Ministry of Education in Wuhan, Hubei.

The study did not measure how well people would have recovered without receiving acupuncture, so it's impossible to say whether the therapy worked any better than conventional, Western approaches or no therapy at all.

De qi is combination of feelings - including achiness, coolness, warmth, and tingling - which is considered by traditional Chinese medicine to ensure the best therapeutic benefit, said Wang, one of the authors of the study.

But "this long held belief has never been confirmed," he told Reuters Health.

To see whether de qi makes a difference to the effectiveness of acupuncture therapy, he and his colleagues asked 317 adults with Bell's palsy to undergo five half-hour acupuncture treatments for four weeks.

Bell's is usually a temporary facial paralysis that typically affects one side and lasts a few months.

It often results from a viral infection that inflames facial nerves, and the steroid prednisone is a common treatment. Over the counter analgesics, vitamins and physical therapy are also sometimes used to treat the condition.

About 40,000 Americans get Bell's palsy each year, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Wang said his group focused on this condition because recovery of the facial nerves affected by Bell's does not seem to be as susceptible to the placebo effect as other nerve conditions, such as pain.

Half of the participants were randomly assigned to receive treatments that would elicit de qi, in which the acupuncturist twisted the needles and moved them up and down several times during the session.

The other participants had the needles inserted and left alone.

All of the patients also received prednisone.

Neurologists, who didn't know which treatment each participant had received, determined the patients' facial function score on a scale of 200, with higher numbers corresponding to better movement.

In both groups, patients had started with facial function scores around 130 to 135. After six months of treatment, participants in the de qi group had somewhat greater facial function, such as in raising the eyebrows, blinking and baring teeth.

The de qi group scored an average of 195, while the other acupuncture group scored 186.

Wang said it's difficult to interpret just what these numbers mean in terms of muscle performance - say, whether a person can smile fully or not - but that a difference of nine points would be noticeable to the patients.

In addition, the team found that 94 percent of participants who received de qi acupuncture completely recovered their facial function by the end of six months, while 77 percent did in the other acupuncture group.

read more: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/acupuncture-bells-palsy_n_2767694.html

Study: External Qi Gong therapy can help control drug cravings.

Excerpt From NewsMedical.Net

Cocaine is one of the most addictive drugs of abuse. Few effective treatments are available to help control cravings and withdrawal symptoms among individuals undergoing therapy to overcome cocaine abuse. Promising results from a study of qigong therapy are published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal website at http://www.liebertpub.com/acm.

Individuals undergoing residential substance abuse treatment who received qigong therapy, compared to a similar duration of sham treatment, reported significantly reduced cravings for cocaine in response to viewing and handling items related to cocaine use. The qigong treatment group were also significantly less likely to have symptoms of depression than the sham treatment group.

In the article "A Pilot Study of Qigong for Reducing Cocaine Craving Early in Recovery," David Smelson, PsyD, David Eisenberg, MD, and coauthors demonstrate the feasibility of delivering external qigong therapy (EQT) to a population of recently abstinent cocaine-dependent individuals. In EQT, a trained qigong practitioner using focused intention directs and unblocks bioenergy (qi) to help an individual achieve balance that facilitates healing and equilibration in withdrawal.

"This early work may have profound consequences in drug rehabilitation programs, and certainly deserves further focused and rigorous evaluation," says Editor-in-Chief Kim A. Jobst, MA, DM, Functional Shift Consulting Ltd., Hereford, U.K.

Veterans finding benefit in Qi Gong.

While many veteran's medical benefits cover medication to mask the aches and pains accumulated in years of service, they do not cover preventative maintenance and other alternative ways to prevent or ease these ailments, including PTSD. Alternative treatments such as Qi Gong are now gaining popularity. Read more: 

From the Columbia Daily Tribune 

Jerry Cupit, 65, said it was by accident that he wound up in a workshop demonstrating the traditional Chinese healing practice of qigong.

Cupit, a Vietnam War veteran, said he was at Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans' Hospital to be treated for post-traumatic stress disorder on a recent Friday night. When he walked by the door of the auditorium, he saw a group of people gathered and was interested to find out what was going on.

What he discovered was a newfound passion for meditation and qigong, despite initial skepticism about the practice. He came back for a second workshop yesterday and plans to attend a weekly class.

"It was a sense of spirituality," he said. "I feel like there were some things in my life I needed to work on, like concentration, relaxation and the ability to heal myself."

Cupit said he has a lot of bone pain, and the qigong techniques helped ease it. By yesterday afternoon, he said his hip didn't hurt and he was able to stand up straight for the first time. Emotionally, he felt better, too. As he's aged, he said he's started to feel more sad and guilty about surviving a war when so many of his friends didn't. After some qigong, those feelings started to fade.

"I feel stronger, I feel like I'm centered. I feel balanced," he said.

read the original article here: Veterans Learn to Heal With Qigong