@BillHandelShow – ‘Medical News’ with Dr. Jim Keany

. Dr. Jim Keany, Chief Medical Officer at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, joins The Bill Handel Show for 'Medical News'! Dr. Keany talks with Bill about whether Benadryl is still safe, what we know about Chikungunya, and a news Asthma pill potentially could end serious food allergies.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jim Katy, who is with us every Wednesday, and Jim,
of course chief medical officers for Dignity Saint Mary Medical
Center in Long Beach. Okay, asthma pill connect that with
allergies asthma, I guess that's an allergy kind of Jim
explain that.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, so what this is about, and I apologize It
sounds like we might not have a great connection and
so hopefully we'll get through this. But god, so, yeah,
this is a So there's a drugging out there for
asthma in the past, and it's to stop a cute
asthma attack. It's to print the attack occurring. So we

(00:44):
do we Yeah, we.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Have a crap line. You were right, Okay, you want
to call it? Do we call in or does he
call or we just keep on going out.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, we tried a couple of times.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
All right, all right, let's just do it, and let's
just do it.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
And so far you talk about as a drug and
it can all right, moving on.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, and so if you can hear this drug is
made for asthma. But researchers have looked for food allergies
and a phylaxis, the kind of severere allergic reaction you
get when you when you you know, have like a
peanut dodgy blood sushre ops. I mean it could be fair.
So right now, what we have are basically we can

(01:30):
give people or all you know, allergens and kind of
slowly up being able to talk. Nuts or exensive all
antibodies can give and they don't really work in everyone.
This has been amazing because it reduces severe allergy symptoms
by ninety five percent. And so this is a medication.

(01:50):
Say you're going to go light and you're worried about
what you know, cross contamination are your food, or you're
going to go to a birthday party, kids are going
to a birthday party. You can just take this pill
before you go. It doesn't have to be something you
take every day. It's an interesting pathway. If we're going
to be able to get we'll see, but it's interesting
path Look, this was started in mouse research. I mean

(02:13):
we found out that the gut ands that I am
like that of a mouse will it stops leakiness of
the you know, of allergens that are and then they
get absorbed in the bloodstream. And what happened is researchers
took that and developed a drug that's very called zoloton.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Okay, a couple of things about animal studies. I know
you wanted to talk about that and this legitimate and
if I'm right, let me start with two.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Kinds of people out there.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Those that look at animal studies, mice studies, somehow it
connects to human beings and look, therefore you got to
get this disease, you're going to be cured whatever. And
then those people that look at animal studies and how
dare you use animals, these in innocent animals for testing
when we now have computer models that can do the
same thing.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
So would you comment please?

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Sure? I mean so in the story we did last
segment that was a perfect example of a mouse model
that they used that showed how certain these enzymes work
in the body and that they can block an allergic reaction.
That we could translate that directly to humans. After learning

(03:31):
about that and a drug that has a similar effect
that's already on the market that's he being used for asthma,
could be all of a sudden, these researchers realize, wait
a second, if this works in a mouse, it really
should translate to humans. And it turns out it does.
And it's pretty dramatic how it does. So we suddenly
found by doing mouse research, found a very low cost,

(03:54):
high quality solution. I mean, this medicine is not super
low cost, but compared to bringing a new rug to
market and going through all of that, we've got a
drug on the market that we can repurpose for a
pretty good effect here.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
And now mouse studies.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
You know, for example, I drink diet coke and I
think it has aspartame in it, and people say I'm
going to die because my studies show how dangerous it is.
And then I always reply with, do you know how
much aspartame I actually have to take into my body?
That's equivalent to one thousand cans a day. So you
said on the on the drug is a direct connection.

(04:35):
Yet the amount that mice take to either have or
cure a disease is just insane.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Talk about the difference, please.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah. So, I mean there's different ways, right we use
We can use bacteria or a mouse or a lot
of different things to determine whether something has a toxic
effect or whether it has you know, this kind of
effect where it causes cancer, especially when you have you know,
you want to see something that replicates very quickly over
and over again. That's why we use a lot of

(05:07):
bacteria models to see if it's if it's damaging DNA
and it's causing some type of mutations. But when you're
talking about so that's what you're talking about the aspar
team is when we're exposing these models to certain chemicals
or anything, we're looking to see does it cause any damage. Now,
on the other side, when we're trying to find novel

(05:28):
ways to treat a disease, what you're looking for is
some type of model that can prove a theory that says, look,
when we block this, something happens, or when we enhance this,
something happens. And that's where a lot of times these
animals studies can translate directly to humans.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
Do they still do animal studies with thumper rabbits, for example,
or even the chimpanzees, I know that was a period
of time, which, of course chimpanzees are just insanely expensive.
How far up the food chain do we go with
animal studies or has that been way curtailed.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
It's been curtailed because like you said, there's we've gotten
better at using certain you know, smaller rodent type of
things like mice to do studies. It's easier, cheaper. But no,
definitely we're still using you as far as I know,
we're still using primates things like that for research because
there's some things that you can't model in a mouse,

(06:31):
or somethings that just don't don't translate or don't cross over.
But absolutely all a lot of that's been curtailed. I mean,
you know when I remember when UCLA had a pig
lab and many years ago, and that was being attacked
by by animal rights people, so you know.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
Definitely, Okay, what's that I was attacked by the beef industry.
That was a bad joke, by the way. I just
wanted to point that out out. Okay, I think we'll
end up there, Jim uh as always and all we
always end the program in the in the segment with
you is go ahead and kill somebody today, Jim.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
We'll catch you next week. Okay, take care