Archive: Food for Thought

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Electronic waste is proliferating at an incredible speed: In 2007, an estimated 40 million computers became obsolete world-wide and the rapid turnover of cell phones, printers, cameras etc. comes on top. A US-solution to the problem is introduced by William Pentland in Forbes this week: EcoATM, a California-based startup, provides self-serve electronic recycling stations, or “ecoATM kiosks” at shopping malls, supermarkets and other high-traffic areas. Consumers can insert cell phones they want to get rid off and immediately get a quote based on the value of the device in secondary markets. The business model is about to be expanded to additional portable devices.

Rainer Floehl in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) explains that to date, leukemia diagnostics does not take important informative parameters into account. A study in about 1,400 patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) led to the development of a risk scale which was subsequently tested in a further 800 patients. The scale comprises factors like patient age, chromosomal changes and body temperature as well as concentration of thrombocytes, hemoglobin fibrinogen and lactate dehydrogenase enzyme. The new scale will allow to stratify patients for aggressive chemotherapy or milder forms of treatment, thereby reducing unnecessary, severe side effects.

Alexander Picker, David Jackson and Stephan Brock in Die ZEIT respond to an article by Martina Keller in the same paper published in January, which dismissed the majority of novel cancer drugs as providing only marginal benefit to the patients while being grossly overpriced and full of severe side-effects. The authors, biologists and managers of Life Biosystems AG (Heidelberg, Germany), a company developing decision support systems for oncologists, point out that judgements like this – frequently found in today’s media – do not take into account the progress which is currently being made with personalized cancer therapies. They state that the diagnostic and analytic advances in this field still have to reach clinics and patients as well as regulatory agencies and insurers.

Malcolm Ritter in Die Welt reports about progress in personalized prostate cancer therapy. To date, a lot of men receive over-therapy such as chemo- and radiotherapy because doctors cannot tell apart aggressive from slowly growing, more benign forms. The article introduces a test developed by Ronald DePinho of Dana Farber Cancer Institute which identifies aggressive forms.

Alexander Wehr in Die Welt reports about a paradigm shift in preventing stroke by using novel anti-coagulants such as apixaban, dabigatran, edoxaban and rivaroxaban instead of warfarin or aspirin. In the same paper, Maria Braun features a study conducted by the University of Toronto showing that bilinguality has a surprisingly high protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease.

Finally, Amy Wallace in the New York Times introduces a start-up still seeking investors that has taught parasitic wasps new tricks. The founders discovered that wasps can be drilled to sniff any volatile substance, even if it is not occurring in the wasps’ natural habitat, and that they are even better in detecting odor traces than dogs. First product of the newly founded company is a device for detecting bedbugs, but the founders think of other applications as well – from sniffing explosives to detecting drugs or cadavers. The company is seeking a modest $200,000 to get the prototype on the market.

Food for Thought: Re-thinking Operations for a Two-speed World

How to sustain in both high and slow growth markets at the same time? The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have teamed up to analyze the most recent trend for global businesses: meeting the requirements for two different rates of growth, fast and slow, simultaneously. While regions like Europe, North America and Japan have turned to slow growth rates, emerging economies like China, India and Brazil are characterized by fast growth. To succeed in this so-called “two-speed world”, companies must develop different strategies, new products, and innovative, low-cost operating models.

According to BCG, big pharma expects about 70% of future business to flow from developing countries. To stay in the game, companies will have to develop a sound corporate strategy to cope with both speeds. Key strategic differentiators include profit vs. growth, best price vs. best value, differentiated product design, and new (interal) reward systems for meeting market expansion goals. Smaller biopharmaceutical companies will need to adapt to these changes, too, if they want to sustain in this two-speed world.

The full report called “Rethinking Operations for a Two-speed World”, which was published in early Febuary, can be downloaded here

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Matthew Herper of Forbes this week takes up the issue whether a DNA sequencer can get FDA approval and quotes Jay Flatley, president and CEO of Illumina as saying the company is in talks with FDA to get regulatory clearance to use its technology for medical diagnostics. He also writes about the late Adriana Jenkins, who worked for Celgene and Third Rock Ventures, among others, and died of breast cancer earlier this month. Having been treated as one of the first patients with one of the first personalized drugs, Herceptin, which gave her a decade of life, she calls for a new law that would give drug companies extended monopolies for developing personalized medicines. Her  own last article explaining her plea for supporting personalized medicine by a legislation similar to the Orphan Drug Act  is featured in Forbes, too.

Also in Forbes, Robert Langreth explains  why Novo Nordisk decided to abandon development of diabetes pills and to ramp up insulin production instead – a move highly successful so far.

Dealing with green energy, the Economist reports on the latest efforts to develop artificial leaves for the synthesis of carbohydrate fuels directly from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. The article features efforts by the Joint Centre for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) in California, Massachusetts-based Sun Catalyx and a group at Massey University in New Zealand lead by Wayne Campbell.
For those of us who already are short-sighted and need reading glasses on top, the New York Times has good news about a new gadget that already hit the US market. Anne Eisenberg reports that with the new device the days of bifocal spectacles may be over soon. The new emPower electronic spectacles have liquid crystals inserted at the bottom of the lens which change refraction by simply touching the frame. As a result, reading power can be easily switched on and off.

Hannah Waters in The Scientist features a new pathway that may be used to develop novel antibiotics, e.g. to combat Staphylococcus infections.  The trick is done by blocking RNA degradation via a small molecule inhibiting the enzyme RNAse P found in gram-positive bacteria. This leads to accumulation of RNA transcripts and their encoded proteins so that the bugs die from chaos.

In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Jörg Altwegg reports about a baby that opened up a fierce ethical debate in France. The boy was conceived after preimplantation diagnosis made clear that he not only did not carry beta thalassemia but that he also was suited as a blood donor for his older sister suffering from the disease. Another ethical debate around human genetics is taken up by  Volker Stollorz in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) article not yet online. In the US, researchers have developed a universal gene test able to uncover the genes for hundreds of severe, rare genetic diseases. The test is going to be used for family planning, and couples at risk of conceiving a child with one of those conditions can opt to perform preimplantation diagnosis. However, while some human geneticists warn that the results might overstrain the expertise of human genetic councelors, others already are crazy about using such tests to eliminate all recessive alleles for genetic diseases from the human gene pool.

Finally, Alison McCook in The Scientist claims researchers are punks, because just like in punk music, as they are typified “by a passionate adherence to individualism, creativity and freedom of expression with no regard to established opinions.” To get a taste, she recommends listening to Minor Threat and Nomeansno for a start.

Food for Thought: Retraction Watch

Founded by two medical journalists, Ivan Oransky, executive director of Reuters Health, and Adam Marcus, managing editor of Anesthesiology News, RetractionWatch is an exciting source on scientific errors and fraud and worth watching for scientists as well as science writers.

The blog emerged late last year after Lancet Oncology “expressed concern” (the authors describe this as a “Britishism for ‘holy shit'”) on the validity of a report the paper published in 2007. The report had identified gene signatures predicting the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Not only had one of the authors falsely claimed to be a Rhodes scholar, but statisticians had questioned the methodology. Others raised concerns about how the biospecimens, which had been used for the study, had been collected, transported, preserved, processed, and stored for the actual testing. The case later unfolded into a scandal and led to the retraction of several widely cited papers by one of the co-authors of the study.

Since then, the blog has reports out every week, and the most recent ones are about Germany. The first features the latest developments in the case of the prominent German anesthesiologist  Joachim Boldt from Klinikum Ludwigshafen. According to a report by Landesärztekammer Rheinland-Pfalz around 90 papers by Boldt might require retraction because the investigator failed to obtain approval from an institutional review board to conduct the research. Moreover, at least one paper by Boldt featured a study that most likely has never been conducted. The meanwhile retracted paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia had described the benefits of using hydroxyethyl starch (HES) in adult cardia  surgery to stabilize circulation in case of huge blood and fluid loss.

The second deals with the retraction of a dozen papers by immunologist Silvia Bulfone-Paus of Forschungszentrum Borstel because of scientific misconduct.

Science writers who want to stay on top of the latest developments, might also follow Ivan’s other blog, Embargowatch, featuring news about embargo policies, breaking embargoes and whose interest they serve.

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