NEWS
APP CAN HELP PEOPLE REDUCE THEIR ALCOHOL INTAKE
A free smartphone app , Drink Less , can help people who would benefit most from reducing their alcohol consumption to do so successfully . That ’ s according to a large randomised controlled trial funded by NIHR .
The study , published in eClinicalMedicine , was led by researchers at UCL . It found that people randomly recommended to use the Drink Less app reduced their drinking by 39 units a week at six months . This was two more units a week on average than a control group which received standard NHS advice .
There were 5,602 participants in the study . All were increasing or higher risk drinkers interested in reducing their alcohol consumption . They were either sent a link to an NHS alcohol advice webpage , or a link to download the Drink Less app .
Lead author , Dr Melissa Oldham ( UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care ), said : “ These results show that the Drink Less app can be useful for people looking to reduce their alcohol consumption .
“ Reducing intake by an extra two units a week on average may seem small but is significant both in terms of preventing potential health harms as well as reducing costs to the NHS .”
Senior author , Dr Claire Garnett ( UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care and the University of Bristol ), who led a team in developing the app while at UCL , added : “ Many apps offer to support people to cut down their drinking but this is the first randomised controlled trial of an alcohol reduction app for the general population in the UK .
“ If people are going to use an app , it would be better if they tried one that had good evidence behind it . An app that is not effective may make it less likely for that person to try to reduce their drinking in future .”
The team also estimated that if the Drink Less app were rolled out widely , it would save the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds over 20 years .
ELSEVIER AND IKTOS PARTNER TO DELIVER AN AI-DRIVEN SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY PLATFORM FOR DRUG DISCOVERY
Elsevier , a global leader in information and data analytics , has signed a multi-year agreement with Iktos , a company specialising in Artificial Intelligence for new drug discovery . The partnership will strengthen Elsevier ’ s flagship chemistry solution , Reaxys , by combining the company ’ s high-quality chemistry data with synthetic planning AI technologies developed by Iktos to accelerate chemistry research for pharmaceutical companies .
Mirit Eldor , Managing Director , Life Sciences Solutions , Elsevier said : “ Our mission is to support research and development ( R & D ) organisations in fuelling innovation and drug discovery with industry-leading predictive algorithms trained on our high-quality data . We are delighted to partner with Iktos to bring the valued industry insights that Reaxys offers powered by Artificial
Intelligence , which will help re-shape the landscape of small molecule discovery .”
The partnership aims to support R & D organisations to critically decrease the time required to complete Design- Make-Test-Analyse cycles of small molecules , thus reducing the length and cost of early-stage drug discovery . New predictive models will be launched to support use cases including retrosynthesis , synthetic accessibility and other reaction-based analyses . The new tools will be delivered via Reaxys ’ user-friendly interface and Application Programming Interface ( APIs ), accelerating research for synthetic , medicinal , computational and process chemistry teams at pharmaceutical , agro-chemical and contract research organisations .
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