We've all played the board game monopoly. Perhaps surprisingly, this is a pretty good introduction regarding the concept of a monopoly in economics. This is a situation when a single seller dominates a market. How do monopolies come...

This video provides an overview of the process of testing and trialing new drugs before they can be prescribed to the general public. It explains the preclinical testing phase, then describes the three stages of clinical trials. The...

Is the HIV / AIDS epidemic exceptional? Should the global health response be differentiated from mainstream health interventions? Dr Greg Martin interview Prof Alan Whiteside who talks about a paper that he published in Globalization and...

This program presents information about the use and abuse of alcohol and how it affects a person’s body and brain. Designed specifically for young learners, the program provides students with simple illustrations of how alcohol can...

There has been a lot of news lately about increasing crime in states where recreational marijuana has been legalized. Crime is rising in some of these states, but it doesn't seem to be tied to the legal weed.

What's it really like to be an engineer or a scientist? You're about to find out! In this episode of ""Profiles of Scientists and Engineers"", Rommie Amaro tells us what it's like to be a biophysical chemist. She combines biology,...

Proteins are the workhorses of cells. With support from the National Science Foundation, University of Arkansas biochemist James Hinton has been researching their structure and function for decades. Back in the 1990's, he had a vision to...

Malaria kills a lot of people every year, and many of those people are young children. Developing a vaccine against this deadly disease has been a long and difficult journey, but there’s been a breakthrough! While we are still working...

Last week, we discussed the NNT, or number needed to treat. I'm sure it made a lot of you upset to realize that many therapies you've been sold as "awesome" were, in fact, somewhat incremental with respect to benefits. But another...

Earlier in the series we talked about how it was the artificial dye industry that gave way to the pharmaceutical industry in the latter half of the 19th century. Let's now examine the first large pharma companies to emerge, and the...

We just finished learning about how the antibiotics revolution got started, with the sulfa drugs. Now let's move on to the classes of antibiotics that were discovered in the middle of the 20th century, the penicillins and the...

For 24 hours a day, Lauren Spencer has life-saving medication being pumped directly into her heart. The 18-year-old from Lodi, California has a condition known as Pulmonary Hypertension - a form of high blood pressure that affects the...

Can we keep drug prices low without hurting innovation? Well, drugs are a lot cheaper in Europe than in the US, and there's still plenty of innovation over there. So what's going on? It's called reference pricing, and it's pretty much...

A San Diego researcher has developed a way to tag cancer cells for early detection in the blood stream.

Professor Michael Sailor hopes to dramatically change how cancer is treated. He is on a quest to create nanoparticles that...

We've already discussed drug names, generic and "brand" ones. But are there differences beyond the words? That's the topic of this week's Healthcare Triage.

In 2013, a cure was found for hepatitis C. It could save millions of lives, but its price tag of between $40,000 and $84,000 for 84 pills puts it far out of most patients’ reach. However, in India, a generic version of the drug is...

In the search for a quick route to a muscular physique, many young men turn to controversial anabolic steroids to achieve their goals. But in the wake of deaths in the bodybuilding community, do the statistics showing a fourfold increase...

America is slowly edging toward a more liberal attitude toward cannabis, so we wanted to discuss how states are approaching the thorny problem and get into the weeds of the cannabis debate

Johnson's is currently in the process of rolling out a new policy to crack down on drugs across the UK, specifically targetting middle-class drug use. However, it seems there's a problem in his own backyard, with cocaine traces found in...

To treat oral cancer, NSF-funded small business Privo Technologies has created a platform that delivers treatments directly to the affected area. Privo develops new classes of targeted treatments, such as chemotherapy drugs, designed...

Jade Therapeutics, a small business with funding from the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research program, is solving a problem that has persisted in the ophthalmology and pharmacology...

Could some pharmaceutical birth-control methods be having side-effects that are more dangerous than women realise? The birth control pill was one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. But decades after its introduction, women...

We just learned about the Passerini reaction, and now it's time to learn a similar one, the Ugi reaction. This is another multi-component reaction that is excellent for generating chemical libraries. To the components of the Passerini...

For a lot of patients, prescriptions build up over time, and older people end up taking A LOT of different drugs. Doctors don't always have the time or will to assess these mounting prescriptions. Empowering pharmacists to recommend...