Category: Science

  • Study: Vaping Reduces Heart Risks Compared to Smoking

    Study: Vaping Reduces Heart Risks Compared to Smoking

    Photo: New Africa

    A new study carried out by the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction in Sicily confirms that vaping presents a lower risk to heart health than does smoking.

    The researchers replicated a 2017 BAT study, which demonstrated that the endothelial cell migration inhibition caused by cigarette smoke is not caused by e-cigarette aerosol exposure. (The endothelium is a membrane lining the heart and blood vessels).

    Using the Vype ePen3 and the heated-tobacco products Glo Pro and IQOS 3 Duo, the Replica study corroborated the findings of the BAT study.

    Riccardo Polosa

    “The interesting fact is that switching to combustion-free products reduces vascular damages and prevents the possibility of the onset of smoking-related diseases, such as arteriosclerosis and hypertension,” said Massimo Caruso, an author of the study. “Once again, our research has challenged the notion that e-cigarettes or heated tobacco cause similar damage to that of combustible cigarettes.”

    The study is part of the Replica Project, whose mission is to replicate studies conducted by tobacco companies—whose research is routinely dismissed as conflicted—in order to independently assess their scientific validity.

    “By replicating the findings generated by tobacco industry studies on e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products, we are proving that these results are robust and trustworthy,” CoEHAR founder Riccardo Polosa told Filter.

  • Vaping May Reduce Smoking Without Increasing Dependence

    Vaping May Reduce Smoking Without Increasing Dependence

    Photo: pavelkant

    E-cigarettes may help people decrease their dependence on combustible cigarettes without increasing their overall nicotine dependence, according to a recent Penn State College of Medicine study.

    The researchers enrolled 520 participants interested in reducing their cigarette intake but with no plans or interest to quit smoking and instructed them to reduce their cigarette consumption over the six-month study period. Participants randomly received an e-cigarette that delivered 36, 8 or 0 mg/mL of nicotine, or a cigarette substitute that contained no tobacco, as an aid in their efforts to reduce their cigarette consumption.

    At six months, all participants in the e-cigarette groups reported significant, decreased cigarette consumption, with those in the 36 mg/mL group smoking the least number of cigarettes per day. Those in the e-cigarette groups reported significantly lower dependence on the Penn State Cigarette Dependence Index than those in the cigarette substitute group.

    “Our results suggest that using e-cigarettes or a cigarette substitute to reduce cigarette consumption can result in a reduction of self-reported cigarette use and dependence,” said Jessica Yingst, who directs the College of Medicine’s Doctor of Public Health Program. “Importantly, use of the high-concentration e-cigarette did not increase overall nicotine dependence and was associated with a greater reduction in cigarette smoking compared to the cigarette substitute.”

  • Smoore Opens PMTA Testing Lab in China

    Smoore Opens PMTA Testing Lab in China

    Photo: Smoore

    Smoore has opened China’s first non-clinical full-scale testing laboratory for U.S. premarket tobacco product applications (PMTA).

    Operated by Smoore’s Analysis, Testing and Safety Assessment Center, the laboratory provides all non-clinical evidence required to bring a new nicotine product to market, including material safety, hazardous components and potentially hazardous components (HPHC’s), and toxicology testing.

    This is the first PMTA testing laboratory to open in China, and will allow Smoore to further improve the safety of its products, and help the brands they work with to successfully pass PMTA certification.

    Prior to Smoore opening its new laboratory, vaping companies wanting to enter the U.S. would need to use third-party partners to complete their PMTA testing, which can be a costly and time-consuming process. With the new China facility, Smoore’s brand partners can more easily complete their PMTA certification and improve their accessibility to the US market.

    “The FDA is very concerned about HPHCs and has set out a list of 33 substances which must be tested for,” said Dr Long, the director of Smoore’s new Safety Assessment Center, in a statement. “Our new laboratory can do all this and more, and has the capacity to test for 37 substances; we are the only facility in China whose testing capabilities covers the full range of HPHCs substances.”

    According to Smoore, the laboratory tests against a world-leading new database of HPHCs, developed by Smoore and derived from international toxicity databases including those maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

    Advanced computational toxicology software is also used to predict for unknown and potentially hazardous ingredients not included in these databases, further increasing Smoore’s safety assessments.

    Since establishing its first research institute in 2017, Smoore has continued to lead the industry in evidence-based research. Its Safety Assessment Center has raised safety standards to medical grade, and works to constantly review product safety.

    A total of eight products have been approved for marketing by the FDA, many of which are manufactured by Smoore.

  • BAT Conducts Real-World Vuse Study

    BAT Conducts Real-World Vuse Study

    Photo: BAT

    BAT has conducted a first-of-its-kind study of Vuse designed to assess and provide insights into the real-world health impact of vaping. The study compares biomarker measures from Vuse consumers who have been using the product for over six months with the results from smokers, former smokers and never-smokers. Protocol details explaining the innovative design of the latest study were published in the Journal of Health and Environmental Research.

    The cross-sectional study design uses a single set of data readings to measure exposure to certain toxicants and indicators of potential harm related to several smoking-related diseases in people who have been exclusively using Vuse.

    BAT hopes that the results, which are currently being analyzed and will be published later this year, will provide further supportive evidence that using Vuse can reduce relative risk for certain diseases among adult consumers compared to smoking. The company expects that once available, the results will add to the growing body of evidence on Vuse’s potential as a reduced-risk product.

    “This innovative study demonstrates our commitment to researching the reduced-risk potential of our new category products,” said Sharon Goodall, BAT’s group head of regulatory sciences, in a statement.

    “What makes it particularly relevant and exciting is that the results generated will be from people who have been using Vuse as they normally would for more than six months prior to testing. The results will provide important new insights and show us the differences between Vuse users, smokers and former smokers across a range of important biomarkers thought to be predictive of disease development. We look forward to sharing the data once available.”

  • Study: E-Cigs Help Pregnant Smokers Quit

    Study: E-Cigs Help Pregnant Smokers Quit

    Photo: seksanwangjaisuk | Adobe Stock

    New research reveals that e-cigarettes are as safe to use as nicotine patches for pregnant smokers trying to quit and may be a more effective tool.

    Quitting smoking is difficult. For smokers who become pregnant, not quitting smoking in pregnancy can increase the risk of outcomes including premature birth, miscarriage and the baby having a low birth weight, according to a story in The Guardian.

    “Many pregnant smokers find it difficult to quit with current stop smoking medications, including nicotine patches, and continue to smoke throughout pregnancy,” said Francesca Pesola, an author of the new study who is based at Queen Mary University in London.

    While e-cigarettes have been found to be more effective than nicotine patches in helping people quit, Pesola noted there has been little research into their effectiveness or safety among pregnant women despite an increase in use by expectant mothers.

    Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, Pesola and colleagues describe how they randomly assigned 569 pregnant smokers to use e-cigarettes and 571 to use nicotine patches—a form of nicotine-replacement therapy that can already be prescribed during pregnancy. The participants were, on average, 15.7 weeks pregnant and smoked 10 cigarettes a day.

    Only 40 percent of those given e-cigarettes and 23 percent of those given patches used their allocated product for at least four weeks. However, both uptake and duration of use during the study was higher among those given e-cigarettes.

    After excluding participants who self-reported not smoking but who used nicotine products other than those allocated to them—for example, those in the group given patches who used e-cigarettes—the team found those given e-cigarettes appeared to do better at quitting smoking.

  • Critics: San Francisco Flavor Ban Study Flawed

    Critics: San Francisco Flavor Ban Study Flawed

    Photo: yossarian6

    New research refutes a May 2021 study suggesting San Francisco’s ban on all flavored tobacco products was tied to higher smoking rates in high school students compared to school districts without flavor policies in place, according to the Truth Initiative, an antitobacco organization.  

    Led by Harvard University’s School of Public Health’s Jessica Liu, the most recent research found that the data for the May 2021 study was collected too early to draw meaningful conclusions.

    The San Francisco ban on flavored tobacco went into effect in July 2018. Enforcement, however, did not start until January 2019, according to the authors of the Harvard study.

    The May 2021 study used data from the 2011-2019 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) to determine smoking rates in youth after San Francisco’s flavor ban went into effect. However, the 2019 YRBSS data in San Francisco were collected between September and December 2018, before the flavor law was enforced.

    Given that compliance with flavored tobacco laws was relatively low in fall 2018 (17 percent in December 2018) and that few retailers were enforcing the restriction, data collected at this time are “an inappropriate data source for evaluating the effects of the city’s flavored tobacco sales restriction,” the authors write. “…the impact on actual access to flavored products did not really start to materialize until well after the YRBSS completed data collection in San Francisco.”

    Liu’s team also looked at Oakland, whose survey data on tobacco use in youth were collected after that city started enforcing a flavored tobacco ban in January 2019. Researchers observed that high school youth vaping and cigarette use declined between 2017 and 2019 in Oakland.

  • Bottleneck Broken in Cultivated Meat

    Bottleneck Broken in Cultivated Meat

    Photo: BioBetter

    BioBetter, an Israeli biotech firm, is using tobacco plants to significantly reduce the cost of cultivated meat and advance it rapidly to scale-up.

    As numerous cultivated meat start-ups move beyond the proof-of-concept phase, they run against one of the biggest challenges facing this budding industry. Developing a scalable and cost-effective production platform to make cultured meat affordable for the mass market has proven to be a primary stumbling block.

    Cell-derived meat requires a culture medium composed of a mix of amino acids, nutrients, and—most importantly—growth factors (GF’s) without which cells cannot multiply. Currently, such media are costly due to the complexity of producing GF’s. For example, insulin and transferrin GFs are collected from livestock, making it difficult to obtain large quantities. Some can be attained via fermentation of yeast or bacteria, but those methods require expensive facilities. The purification process also is complicated and expensive.

    “The Good Food Institutes determined that approximately a 100-fold reduction in insulin and transferrin costs is required to make cultivated meat economically viable,” explains Dana Yarden, co-founder of BioBetter, in a press note. “It is estimated that growth factors and cell-culture media can constitute 55 to 95% of the marginal cost in manufacturing cell-based foods.”

    BioBetter harnessed the inherent advantages of tobacco plants by turning them into bioreactors for expression and large-scale production of the proteins. Plant bioreactors use renewable energy (sunlight) and fixate CO2. They are self-forming, self-sustaining, and biodegradable. BioBetter uses open-field plantations to enable fast, efficient, and flexible response to market needs.

    “There are multiple advantages to using Nicotiana tabacum as a hardy vector for producing GFs of non-animal origin,” says Amit Yaari of BioBetter. “It is an abundant crop that has no place in the food-and-feed chain due to its extremely bitter taste and content of undesirable alkaloids. The global trend for reducing tobacco smoking also is raising concerns among tobacco growers that the crop might eventually become obsolete. Yet the tobacco plant has huge potential to become a key component in the future of food.” Tobacco plants can achieve up to four growth cycles annually and be harvested all year. This translates to more voluminous outputs per square meter of growing space.

    BioBetter says its uniqueness lies in refining and highlighting the advantages of the tobacco plant platform for production on a huge scale. The start-up applies a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, and at the same time deliver a high purity product at broad scale production. The company currently sources tobacco plants from local growers but the goal is to eventually source the raw material from tobacco growers globally. Based on cultivation in open fields and BioBetter’s proprietary purification technology, the cost of growth factors production is dramatically reduced, bringing cost efficiency to cultured meat production.

  • Study: Most E-Cigarette Research Flawed

    Study: Most E-Cigarette Research Flawed

    Photo: Roman Samokhin

    Errors are disturbingly common in e-cigarette research, resulting in misinformation and distortion of scientific truth, according to a new study.

    Under the guidance of Cother Hajat of the United Arab Emirates University and Riccardo Polosa, founder of the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR) at the University of Catania, a team of international researchers examined the 24 most frequently cited vaping studies published in medical journals.

    The researchers found almost all of the examined studies to be methodologically flawed. Among other shortcomings, the studies lacked a clear hypothesis, used inadequate methodology, failed to collect data relevant to the study objectives and did not correct for obvious confounding factors.

    “Most of the included studies utilized inappropriate study design and did not address the research question that they set out to answer. In our paper, we offer practical recommendations that can massively improve the quality and rigor [of] future research in the field of tobacco harm reduction,” said Hajat.

    Riccardo Polosa

    “Systematic reiteration of the same errors that result in uninformative science is the new pandemic,” said Polosa. “I’m astounded that such low-quality studies have made it through editorial review in prestigious scientific journals. The credibility of tobacco control scientists and their research is on the line.”

    The findings are concerning, according to the academics, because without methodologically valid scientific research, it is impossible to generate balanced and accurate information for the adoption of more effective tobacco control policies and healthier lifestyles. “The dissemination of inaccurate information about combustion-free alternatives in the news media contributes to public skepticism and uncertainty, particularly among smokers,” the center wrote in a press release. “Many smokers may be discouraged from switching to less harmful nicotine-delivery products as a result of this.”

    This investigator-initiated study was sponsored by ECLAT, a spin-off of the University of Catania, with the help of a grant from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, which in turn is backed by Philip Morris International.

  • Scientists Debunk Vaping Gateway Theory

    Scientists Debunk Vaping Gateway Theory

    Photo: Richard Johnson

    A study published by the scientific journal Addiction has found that prevalence of e-cigarette use in England among young adults between 2007 and 2018 did not appear to be associated with substantial increases or decreases in the prevalence of smoking uptake.   

    Several longitudinal observational studies have previously pointed towards a possible gateway effect between initiation of e-cigarettes and later use of cigarettes in adolescents. However, these findings may reflect shared vulnerability such that the same young people who would try e-cigarettes would also more likely later to smoke cigarettes. 

    One way to avoid this self-selection bias is to assess the impact at the population level rather than the individual level, using an approach called time series analysis. Using this method, the current study measured the gateway effect of vaping by looking at the association between prevalence of e-cigarette use among young adults and prevalence of uptake of smoking generally, including among people who have never smoked.  The researchers reasoned that if a gateway effect existed, there ought to be associated population-wide changes in the prevalence of smoking uptake when the prevalence of vaping changed. Conversely, if a gateway effect did not exist, changes in e-cigarette prevalence should not be associated with changes in uptake of smoking among young adults. 

    The authors found no statistically significant association between the prevalence of e-cigarette use and ever having smoked regularly (used as an indicator of uptake) among those aged 16 to 24. To interpret this finding further, the authors used Bayes factors and robustness regions. Bayes factors help interpret whether a non-significant finding is evidence of no difference or whether the study was not sensitive enough to detect an effect. Robustness regions identify the size of effect which can be plausibly dismissed.  The authors were able to rule out a gateway effect from e-cigarette use to smoking uptake of the size commonly reported in the literature but were not able to rule out very small effects for a gateway in or out of smoking (where e-cigarette use makes it less likely that young people start to smoke). 

    “These findings suggest that the large gateway effects reported in previous studies can be ruled out, particularly among those aged 18 to 24,” said lead author Emma Beard. “However, we cannot rule out a smaller gateway effect and we did not study younger age groups. If the upper estimates are true, we would estimate that of the 74 thousand e-cigarette users aged 16 to 17 in England, around 7,000 would become ever regular smokers as a consequence of e-cigarette use. At the same time, approximately 50 thousand smokers are estimated to quit per year as a consequence of e-cigarette use.”.

    “These findings are important given the contrasting advice given by health bodies and governments in different countries,” said senior author Lion Shahab. “Research to date supports the argument that e-cigarettes are less harmful than tobacco and help smokers to stop smoking. Although some harm from vaping relative to never vaping cannot be ruled out, this study suggests there is little evidence of a substantial gateway effect into smoking.” 

  • Smoore Launches TPD Compliance Lab

    Smoore Launches TPD Compliance Lab

    Photo: Smoore

    Smoore has established a vaping products risk assessment laboratory for European Union Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) compliance. The lab is part of the Smoore fundamental research center.

    Operational since the first half of 2021, the laboratory has already completed 52 product tests for leading vape brands. As China’s first corporate TPD-compliant risk assessment laboratory, it can generate test reports within five working days. Its laboratory equipment is benchmarked against those in world-class analytical testing laboratories, such as Labstat and Enthalpy, according to Smoore.

    As the industry’s harm reduction and quality benchmark, the company complies with its in-house Smoore 3.0 safety standards. Based on the risk assessment guidance of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration, Smoore 3.0 covers all of the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) vapor safety tests and FDA-listed harmful and potentially harmful constituents. In addition to vapor safety, Smoore 3.0 also involves extractable and leachable substances of medical-grade atomization materials.

    Smoore’s fundamental research center has developed a comprehensive analytical testing and risk assessment system, covering PMTA nonclinical testing and health risk assessment. Accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in 2019, the system is now capable of up to 149 CNAS tests involving the chemical analysis of e-liquids and aerosols, electrical safety, material safety and battery safety.

    Smoore entered the EU market in 2018 with its FEELM atomization brand.