Hello, and welcome to The Friday Kable to celebrate the onset of yet another weekend.

If you've been following the recommendation of the UK's NHS healthy eating app though, your weekend may not be that happy. Because the app has been happily recommending all sorts of unhealthy food to eat.

New day, more layoffs, this time with Janssen saying goodbye and glad tidings to people at two sites in the US.

In a massive move, Gilead has awarded $7.6 million in grants to organisations working on advancing equitable access to breast cancer treatments. Said $7.6 million will be distributed among 24 organisations. Awesome. There's so much these organisations can do with so little. Separately, Gilead recently announced revenue of $27+ billion last year. 

Two reporters from the US went tracking pills in Mexico. Turns out some Mexican pharmacies are selling fentanyl and meth as legit pharma drugs.

Even as multiple African countries grapple with cholera outbreaks, the Africa CDC says Africa lacks ‘immediate access’ to cholera vaccines. SSDD.

After AbbVie quit US-based pharma lobbying group PhRMA late last year, another jolt for the lobby came via Teva's exit. Teva is instead looking to lead a lobby for generics.

CEPI's quest for its Disease X vaccine continues in the form of an $850,000 grant to 20Med for its stabilised mRNA vaccine tech.

Starting this week, we're making our Wednesday longish read available to all our readers on our website the following Friday. Through these reads, we weave disparate threads to help you make sense of evolving stories, events and markets we're keeping a close watch on. Our latest piece on the evolving landscape in Indonesia is here.

And finally, in more bad news for the pharmacy of the world, eye drops manufactured in India by Global Pharma Healthcare have been put on alert by the US CDC. Because these drops have been linked to an outbreak of drug-resistant infections, with infections being found in blood, urine and lungs. The outbreak included at least 55 people in 12 states, with one death and at least five others with permanent vision loss. The US FDA hasn't yet issued a recall, but the CDC has recommended that clinicians and patients stop using the product EzriCare Artificial Tears. Inspections revealed the presence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a drug-resistant bacterium in open bottles of the product. The FDA did issue a recall for another Indian-made product, Lupin's blood pressure medication Quinapril. The FDA recall notice says the product may contain elevated levels of nitrosamine impurity, increasing the risk of cancer.

Newsworthy

Drugs are supposed to save lives? Nobody gave suppliers in Africa the memo. About 267,000 people die a year from antimalarial medicine use and 169,271 from antibiotics used to treat severe paediatric pneumonia in Sub-Saharan Africa. Falsified and substandard medicines are flooding the market here, with illicitly manufactured medical drugs being discovered even in authorised pharmaceutical outlets, revealing just how interconnected regulated and unregulated supply chains are.

High rates of infectious diseases paired with inadequate healthcare infrastructure and access lead to many people in the continent reaching out to informal sources for medical products. The continent has a serious counterfeit drug problem that is claiming nearly half a million lives every year. This is adding to the challenges of the already under-resourced formal healthcare sector; it costs $12-44.7 million to care for people who have consumed substandard malaria drugs. These cheaper, unsafe drugs are further exacerbating public trust in healthcare and acting as an obstacle to the development of the regulated pharma industry.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has released a report, ‘Trafficking in Medical Products in the Sahel’ detailing the crisis.
(UNODC, Devex)

R&D

Foetal proteins for adult tissue repair. Wound closure and repair in foetuses differ from that in adults. Proteins like NPGPx are mostly inactive in adults and absent in diabetic adults but active in foetuses. Such proteins could potentially be the basis for therapies targeting diabetic wound healing in adults.
(Molecular Therapy)

Hybrid brains. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found a way to implant human brain organoids grown from stem cells into the brains of rats with visual cortex injuries. These integrated organoids established connections with the rats’ retinas, successfully responding to visual stimuli. This is not the first study developing hybrids of human and rodent brains but has clinical implications for the future use of stem cell-based treatments to reverse vision loss.
(Cell Stem Cell)

Cancer subtypes. Using data from patient-derived xenografts (PDX) cancer models, scientists from Baylor College of Medicine have studied the molecular pathways of metastatic cancer cells, regardless of tumour origin, to identify 4 cancer subtypes according to the main genes expressed. Their pan-cancer analysis reveals vulnerabilities of each subtype which have implications for personalised therapeutic interventions.
(Cell Reports Medicine)

The Kibble

Ultra-processed, ultra-bad. Cheap and convenient food options like breakfast cereal, ready-to-eat meals and mass-produced packaged bread are heavily processed while being produced. They are usually high in salt, sugar, fat and artificial additives and are known to be associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Now, in the most comprehensive assessment on the topic to date, researchers have found that eating more ultra-processed foods is linked to a greater risk of developing cancer overall, specifically for brain and ovarian cancers. Increased ultra-processed food consumption is also linked with greater risk of dying from cancer. Something to think about before you make breakfast tomorrow.
(eClinicalMedicine)

Caregiving colonies vs sneaky fungi. We could learn a thing or two from ant colonies. In an act of social immunity, when an ant is sick, its colony members adopt collective hygiene and health measures to prevent the pathogen from spreading. But the infecting fungi are smart, too; when caregiving friends are around, they produce more spores but release less of the fungi-specific compound ergosterol, thus evading detection by the ants.
(Nature Ecology & Evolution)

Who needs a partner? So you’re camping in California, pitching your own tents, foraging for your own food. You see a juicy delicious-looking mushroom. Don’t eat it! The Amanita phalloides mushroom also called the death cap, is a lethal mushroom that kills one or two and sickens many more every year in the US. It has been spreading unabated across North America, and especially along the West Coast. In Europe – their place of origin – the underground parts of 2 mushrooms fuse to make a new baby mushroom. But in California, some of these dangerous fungi prefer to go solo. Each mushroom reproduces all by itself, potentially explaining the deadly species’ rapid spread in the state.
(bioRxiv) 

Bottom line

Global warming here to stay. We said it a couple of days ago, and we’ll say it again. We’re not staying within our 1.5° C warming threshold. A new report, “Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook” reiterates that our current climate action policies aren’t even enough to keep us under 2° C as compared to pre-industrial times. The report examines 10 social drivers that can influence our ability to achieve the needed “deep decarbonisation”: governance from the UN, global consumption patterns, climate litigation, corporate responses and fossil-fuel divestment, among others, none of which is currently aggressive enough to meet our 2050 goals. In fact, corporate responses and global consumption patterns are moving in the wrong direction altogether.
(Universität Hamburg)

Feed the future. The United States, in partnership with the African Union and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, has launched the ‘Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils’, a new initiative to support climate-resilient food systems in Africa. The initiative aims to help African farmers increase productivity with their soil type through support in soil mapping. The 3 stages of this programme include identifying the most nutritious crops, analysing the effects of climate change on them, and increasing public and private spending on crop adaptation.
(US Department of State)

Not worried? You should be. By 2100, ocean oxygen levels could go down by about 20%. Marine life, especially high-oxygen-burning sharks, are feeling the effects of ocean deoxygenation which could make large sections of the seas suboptimal for underwater creatures, alter ecosystems and push fisheries into unfamiliar waters. Then there’s also ocean acidification and marine heat waves doing their damage. And as the oceans’ surfaces get warmer, temperature contrasts with lower layers, meaning slower mixing with deeper water, hindering the transport of oxygen and other nutrients with the deep sea.

Oxygen-starved dead zones have been documented in water bodies around the world, including the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. In such areas, fish, crabs and sea stars can suffocate before they have a chance to escape. In the Atlantic Ocean, too, scientists have observed changes in shark swimming patterns as they swam closer to the surface. Scientists say falling oceanic oxygen can interfere with fish hormones needed for reproduction, stunt growth in young fish, weaken their immune systems, and also cause blindness in sea creatures. These troubled waters could affect not just marine ecosystems but also the livelihoods that depend on them.
(Science) 

Forever chemicals. Outdoor apparel companies have for long relied on per- or polyfluorinated chemicals (PFAS) or “forever chemicals” to make their products water-repellant. As their name suggests, these chemicals don’t degrade easily; they’re found in drinking water and the human bloodstream and have been linked to health problems, including cancer. They can affect the factory workers who make them and the consumers who wear them.

Companies like Patagonia (whom we ♥️) want to ditch these chemicals, but it’s been an uphill task so far. After years of sample trials, they are now using 8 different PFAS alternatives. By the end of 2024, they’re aiming to make all their products PFAS-free. A number of other companies have also phased out the chemicals or are in the process of doing so. But with some loss of function due to other materials or contamination by sharing production or retail space with products that contain PFAS, the process is far from easy, though necessary.

Many US states have policies banning or regulating the use of these chemicals, and more such regulations are on the way in the US and the EU. Considering the long time it takes for such products to go from the design stage to retail, companies need to start making changes yesterday.
(Bloomberg)

Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn't want you to see this.