Prescribe at your own risk. That is the general feeling that most doctors get when prescribing medicine to children. Due to ethical and legal challenges, conducting clinical trials on children has proven to be a major obstacle for drug researchers. In fact, many prescription drugs rarely go through clinical trials using children. As a result, doctors only have two options in pediatric care: 1. Don’t prescribe children drugs shown to be effective in adults, or 2. Prescribe drugs off-label to children at their own risk. That’s where Dr. Bhagwat Prasad, Associate Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences at WSU, is transforming pediatric precision medicine so that drugs … » More …

By Judith Van Dongen, Office of Research, WSU Health Sciences Spokane

SPOKANE, Wash. – A study led by researchers at Washington State University has uncovered a potential new treatment approach for diseases associated with inflammation, including sepsis, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, acute lung injury, and atherosclerosis.

Published in the open-access journal Science Advances, their paper describes a novel, patent-pending technology that uses nanosized particles to transport cell-killing drugs directly to activated neutrophils, the cells that drive the exaggerated immune response involved in inflammatory diseases. They also demonstrated the technology’s feasibility at selectively killing activated neutrophils without harming other cell types or compromising the immune system.

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