Xiabin Chen et al. (1) describe pioneering work with a modified drug-metabolizing enzyme, a butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) analog, intended to prolong BChE activity in humans, hoping that the result would be accelerated cocaine metabolism. This work is exciting to those involved in pharmacokinetic approaches to drug toxicity; such constructs promise to be the first drug-metabolizing enzymes used ...

Hair testing for the determination of drug exposure has many useful applications. Drug incorporated into hair can be found for extended periods following drug exposure. There are few controlled drug administration studies investigating drug distribution into human hair. Ten volunteers participated in a 10-week controlled cocaine and codeine administration study while residing in the secure rese...

In this issue of the Journal, Thompson and Dasgupta describe the use of microwave irradiation to drive the derivatization of cocaine, its ethyl homologue and the major cocaine metabolites, benzoylecgonine and ecgonine methyl ester. Although more needs to be done to characterize the reaction, this interesting approach may have broad applications to the analysis of drug metabolites and other biol...

This experiment is an investigation of used cooking oil as a sustainable and renewable resource for methyl ester production. with more than 95.5% production yield, thermally activated hydrated cement has been carefully discussed as a catalyst in the transesterification of used cooking oil into methyl ester to use waste cement as a heterogeneous catalyst for methyl ester production through elect...

Background: Cocaine poisoning is known for causing severe clinical effects such as tachycardia, hypertension, agitation and confusion. Absence of clinical manifestations in cocaine poisoning is unusual. Case report: A 26-year old man, known to be a cocaine addict, declared that he was forced by cocaine dealers to swallow many tablets of cocaine, six hours prior to admission to emergency departm...

The chemical composition of fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) from seeds of S. thymbra and S. cuneifolia were analyzed by GC/MS. 7 FAMEs were identified from the seeds of S. thymbra mainly as 9-octadecenoic acid methyl ester (43.9%), hexadecanoic acid methyl ester (11.4%), 9,12,15-octadecatrienoic acid methyl ester (Z,Z,Z) (30.2%), and octadecanoic acid methyl ester (14.1%), while from the seed ...

Calcium oxide is one of the appropriate catalysts for biodiesel production. In this study, cheap and compatible with environment catalyst has been used. Mussel shell of Persian Gulf coast is one of the sources of calcium carbonate that is converted to calcium oxide at calcination temperature up to 950°C. Transesterification reaction was carried out at optimum condition of our previous study...

As is well known, and also pointed out correctly by Curry and Coombs (1), cocaine has three metabolic pathways associated with butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), carboxylesterase, and microsomal cytochrome P450 3A4, which convert cocaine to ecgonine methyl ester (EME) + benzoic acid (BA), benzoylecgonine (BE) + methanol, and norcocaine (NC), respectively. However, in contrast to what Curry and Coomb...