Publications by authors named "Brittany Karas"

Article Synopsis
  • AJHP is posting accepted manuscripts online promptly to speed up publication, even before final formatting and author proofing are completed.
  • The article highlights the essential role of health-system pharmacists in managing drug formularies and resources, focusing on upcoming drug approvals that could impact clinical practices.
  • Anticipated drug approvals include new treatments for various cancers and rare diseases, with several innovative therapies and delivery methods under review by the FDA for the period of late 2024 to mid-2025.
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Article Synopsis
  • Health-system pharmacists are vital for managing drug formularies and clinical programs, and this article provides updates on upcoming drug approvals to aid their work.
  • The article reviews drug approvals expected between Q2 2024 and Q1 2025, focusing on those that may significantly impact healthcare settings and are awaiting FDA approval.
  • New therapies are being developed for cancers and rare diseases, alongside drugs addressing conditions like diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
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Purpose: Health-system pharmacists play a crucial role in monitoring the pharmaceutical pipeline to manage formularies, allocate resources, and optimize clinical programs for new therapies. This article aims to support pharmacists by providing periodic updates on new and anticipated novel drug approvals.

Summary: Selected drug approvals anticipated in the 12-month period covering the first quarter of 2024 through the fourth quarter of 2024 are reviewed.

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Biallelic mutations in Protein O-mannosyltransferase 1 (POMT1) are among the most common causes of a severe group of congenital muscular dystrophies (CMDs) known as dystroglycanopathies. POMT1 is a glycosyltransferase responsible for the attachment of a functional glycan mediating interactions between the transmembrane glycoprotein dystroglycan and its binding partners in the extracellular matrix (ECM). Disruptions in these cell-ECM interactions lead to multiple developmental defects causing brain and eye malformations in addition to CMD.

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Purpose: Health-system pharmacists play a crucial role in monitoring the pharmaceutical pipeline to manage formularies, allocate resources, and optimize clinical programs for new therapies. This article aims to support pharmacists by providing updates on new and anticipated novel drug approvals.

Summary: Selected drug approvals anticipated in the 12-month period covering the fourth quarter of 2023 through the third quarter of 2024 are reviewed.

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One hurdle in the development of zebrafish models of human disease is the presence of multiple zebrafish orthologs resulting from whole genome duplication in teleosts. Mutations in inositol polyphosphate 5-phosphatase K (INPP5K) lead to a syndrome characterized by variable presentation of intellectual disability, brain abnormalities, cataracts, muscle disease, and short stature. INPP5K is a phosphatase acting at position 5 of phosphoinositides to control their homeostasis and is involved in insulin signaling, cytoskeletal regulation, and protein trafficking.

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Metals and metal-based compounds comprise multifarious pharmaco-active and toxicological xenobiotics. From heavy metal toxicity to chemotherapeutics, the toxicokinetics of these compounds have both historical and modern-day relevance. Zebrafish have become an attractive model organism in elucidating pharmaco- and toxicokinetics in environmental exposure and clinical translation studies.

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Objectives: Spelling during medication ordering is prone to error, which can contribute to frustration, confusion, and, ultimately, errors. Typo correction can be utilized in an effort to mitigate the effects of misspellings by providing results even when no exact matches can be found. Although, typo correction can be beneficial in some scenarios, safety concerns have been raised when utilizing the functionality for medication ordering.

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Ruthenium is popular as a metal core for chemotherapeutics, due to versatile molecular coordination. Because new metallodrugs are synthesized at high rates, our studies included assays in zebrafish to expedite the initial evaluation as anticancer agents. Here we evaluated novel metallodrugs (PMC79 and LCR134), and cisplatin, a widely used platinum-based chemotherapeutic.

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The value assessment framework (VAF) is one approach to assessing the evidence and value of medications. VAFs are a way to measure and communicate the value of medications and other health care technologies for decision-making purposes. Given the increasing number of high-cost medications, challenging formulary inquiries, and critiques of currently available tools, health systems need to explore a standardized way to incorporate value assessment into formulary decision making.

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Zebrafish have gained popularity as a model organism due to their rapid, external, and transparent development, high fecundity, and gene homology with higher vertebrate models and humans. Specifically, drug discovery has had high success in the implementation of zebrafish in studies for target discovery, efficacy, and toxicity. However, a major limitation of the zebrafish model is a dependence on waterborne exposure in order to maintain high throughput capabilities.

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Prospective anticancer metallodrugs should consider target-specific components in their design in order to overcome the limitations of the current chemotherapeutics. The inclusion of vitamins, which receptors are overexpressed in many cancer cell lines, has proven to be a valid strategy. Therefore, in this paper we report the synthesis and characterization of a set of new compounds [Ru(η-CH)(P(CHR))(4,4'-R'-2,2'-bpy)] (R = F and R' = H, ; R = F and R' = biotin, ; R = OCH and R' = H, ; R = OCH and R' = biotin, ), inspired by the exceptional good results recently obtained for the analogue bearing a triphenylphosphane ligand.

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As novel metallodrugs continue to emerge, they are evaluated using models, including zebrafish, that offer unique sublethal endpoints. Testing metal-based anticancer compounds with high-throughput zebrafish toxicological assays requires analytical methods with the sensitivity to detect these sublethal tissue doses in very small sample masses (e.g.

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Two new ruthenium complexes, [Ru(η-Cp)(PPh)(2,2'-bipy-4,4'-R)] with R = -CHOH (Ru1) or dibiotin ester (Ru2) were synthesized and fully characterized. Both compounds were tested against two types of breast cancer cells (MCF7 and MDA-MB-231), showing better cytotoxicity than cisplatin in the same experimental conditions. Since multidrug resistance (MDR) is one of the main problems in cancer chemotherapy, we have assessed the potential of these compounds to overcome resistance to treatments.

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