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When will profits-hungry drug companies finally widen their attention from treating complex lifestyle-related diseases affecting citizens in wealthy countries, to the technically simpler task of curing infectious diseases threatening billions of poorer people in the developing world? Never – if you believe the liberal media or some NGOs that regularly lambaste listed pharmaceutical companies for their focus on cancer, immune deficiency, neurodegenerative or cardiac diseases in markets [...]

From the dusty cowboy bars of the old American West to the modern cities of South East Asia, there’s an enduring myth that a shot of rattlesnake whisky will give a man extra courage and virility. And today’s macho types flashing their rattlesnake cowboy boots in the bars of New York or Lost Angeles certainly perpetuate this legend. So could there be truth in the idea that venomous reptiles could in some circumstances actually be beneficial to human health? Scientists in Brazil – whose [...]

For a disease newly-established in popular consciousness through a rash of newspaper headlines by turns plaintive or horrifying, there are hopeful reasons to believe that in epidemiological terms, the reign of the Zika virus will be short-lived and its range limited. New research shows that, contrary to early assumptions that vulnerability to Zika was linked to poverty and environment and so could quickly spread across the world’s under-developed regions, the reasons for the most horrifying [...]

Kopp Technologies. A novel technology that permits manufacturers of vaccines, drugs, and cosmetics to dispense with cumbersome filters or centrifuges for the industrial processes needed to purify liquids, will soon be on the market across Latin America. It relies on adsorbents with magnetic properties to separate impurities from liquids, using porous silica magnetic microparticles. Industrial applications frequently use enzymes to catalyse chemical transformations, but then those enzymes or [...]

Kosmoscience: Decades of animal testing with sunscreens or lotions has frazzled enough white lab-rats to start an ethical counter-revolution among bikini-clad sun worshippers of Rio’s famed Ipanema beach. Because Los Beautiful will no longer to buy skin care products that involve any animal testing, the cosmetic industry has had to move fast to find non-invasive yet scientific ways of measuring the effects of UV light on human skin, to verify the effectiveness of chemical barriers in [...]

Aché Pharmaceutical: Brazil is taking early steps that should cause it to rise up the world’s cancer research rankings, thanks to a joint initiative between its leading commercial pharmaceutical company and a highly innovative drug discovery consortium. The very first fruits of Brazil’s new collaboration are now visible. Newly-published research into human kinase proteins associated with tumour formation, could one day position it as a producer of tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) drugs of [...]

Brazil’s universities need urgent injections of cash to make up for collapsing public funding, warn senior academics seeking to convince public opinion that they represent excellent value for money and are worthy of attracting new sources of investment. Writing in the Estado de São Paulo, one of the nation’s top-selling dailies, three leading academics insist that Brazil’s universities are cheap to run, compared to the long-term cost of allowing decades-worth of knowhow to slip away. [...]

Over a decade after US agriculture authorities provoked a legal storm among wealthy homeowners in Florida by ordering the destruction of tens of thousands of healthy trees to halt a deadly tree blight called citrus canker, scientists in Brazil have just discovered exactly how this disease spreads. An article published in the journal Structure takes forward the science of this economically-significant plant disease by showing the structure and function of a key protein in the development of [...]

A sinister plant disease with the power to destroy farmers’ livelihoods named “the Ebola of olive trees”  is on the march across Europe during 2018; yet the same bacteria could for decades have been affecting coffee plantations, orange groves and other high value crops in Latin America. In fact some of the science now needed to fight the disease in Europe, may already have been completed in Brazil. In Latin America  the focus has been on protecting orange groves and coffee plantations [...]