Positive results from its final preclinical toxicology study of SYN-004 have led Synthetic Biologics to get ready for clinical trials of the anti-infective, second-generation product candidate for Clostridium difficile (C. difficile).

Synthetic Biologics is in the final stages of preparing its SYN-004 IND application for submission to the FDA, with the expectation of initiating Phase Ia and Ib clinical trials in the fourth quarter of 2014, and a Phase II efficacy study in the first half of 2015.

Nearly 1 in 3 young adults ages 19 to 25 years lacked health insurance in 2009 - in most cases, they didn't want to incur the cost but one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was to get all young people or their parents paying for coverage so that the people who could not get it could afford to be subsidized.

Thus, an early provision of Obamacare mandated that young people had to pay for health insurance - or insurance companies had to let them stay on their parents' policies until age 26. For a recent paper, Meera Kotagal, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues examined coverage, access to care and health care use among 19- to 25-year-olds compared with 26- to 34-year-olds after the Obamacare mandate. 

Though nearly every medical body and the United Nations would rather that epidemiologists stop talking about "pre-diabetes", concerns are still there. Governments are worried that working up the public about pre-diabetes will increase patient costs by 500 percent while advocates for it to be taken seriously believe it might head off serious issues later in life.

Pre-diabetes is a general term that refers to a vague intermediate stage between normoglycemia and diabetes mellitus. It has been broadened to include individuals with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), impaired fasting glucose (IFG) or a combination of the two.

Results to date from prospective cohort studies investigating the link between prediabetes and risk of cancer are controversial. 

A team of researchers have evaluated mepolizumab, a new antibody-based drug for certain patients with severe asthma, and found it can replace traditional, steroid-based treatments for a specific subset of patients, resulting in improved outcomes and reduced side effects.

Patients with severe asthma often require high doses of steroid-based treatments that can significantly impair their quality of life.

These high doses can cause debilitating side effects including mood swings, diabetes, bone loss, skin bruising, cataracts and hypertension.
Previous research at the Hamilton institutions has identified specific types of patient with severe asthma have an overabundance of a particular type of white blood cell (eosinophils) present in their sputum.