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Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

John Markoff reports in the New York Times about scientists who created online video game EteRNA in which players can come up with novel ways of folding RNA. The scientists claim it is “democratizing science” by attracting thousands of citizens to participate in constructing new ways to understand and use the folding of RNA.

Finally, the NYT reports about wine. While archaeologists discovered the earliest winemaking facility of the world in Armenia where wine was being made there as early as 7,400 years ago – proving that mankind must have found something positive in consuming red wine, today’s scientists still grapple at understanding the benefits. Dealing with the halt of the last resveratrol trial in which biotech company Sirtis (now GSK) tried to prove that this particular ingredient of red wine is able to extend the life span of obese Rhesus Monkeys, Nicholas Wade casts doubt about the usefulness of resveratrol and resveratrol-mimicking chemicals as anti-aging drugs.

The Economist this week deals with epigenetics in a story featuring that not only mothers but fathers as well may be able to pass on a propensity to obesity if they themselves have been starved during their life before fathering offspring. The findings are from mice.

A separate story deals with attempts by British researchers to attach glowing proteins to cancer cells so that they emit red light. However to detect it doctors would have to use a specially developed camera that scans the body slice by slice. Such cameras are expensive, and the £500,000 ($750,000) they cost may be the greatest hurdle to deploying the technique.

Djuke Veldhuis reports in New Scientist about a simple blood test for Down’s syndrome that successfully detected all 86 cases confirmed by other methods. The validation study is published in BMJ 2011; 342:c7401.

In The Scientist, Vanessa Schipani elaborates why it is not a good idea to use the usually well-fed, parasite-free and genetically similar lab animals to study immunology. Instead, she makes a case for ecoimmunology, a new field studying immunology in wild animals and still trying to attract more researchers and funding. Jef Akst reports about cancer researchers identifying an increasing number of proteins that have a dual nature in cancer: they may initially promote the development of tumors, but in the long run make them less aggressive, or vice versa. “One problem in identifying such two-faced proteins may stem from the fact that these opposing effects are rarely demonstrated in the same research paper,” Jef writes, adding that both reviewers and funding agencies do not like this kind of complex stories and rather prefer focusing on one side of the coin.

Speaking of peer reviews, Martina Lenzen-Schulte in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)  reports about efforts of peer-reviewed journals like the British Medical Journal or the EMBO Journal to make the peer review process more transparent by disclosing the names of the reviewers and the review or even the complete review process. Goals are to improve the quality of the process and of reviews in general and to prevent reviewers from either stealing ideas or putting a spoke in competitors’ wheels.

Volker Stollorz in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) provides a concise review of the ongoing debate whether the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is caused by the newly discovered retrovirus XMRV or whether contamination of specimens, the lab or chemicals used in experiments have produce results that could be mistaken for XMRV. The article clarifies that there are increasing doubts about the hypothesis as many independent researchers have not been able to find the virus in the blood of CFS patients and/or from blood banks.

Focus reports on new efforts to combat AIDS by learning from the about 1% of humans resistant to the virus. The article cites James Hoxie, of Penn Center for AIDS Research, who is trying to cure AIDS by removing from immune cells of AIDS patients those genes that provide entry to HIV. Subsequently, the immune cells are transferred back to the patient. Focus states the approach goes back to findings in Germany at Charité Berlin where a patient suffering from both AIDS and leukemia received a bone marrow transplant from a HIV resistant donor. Citing an article in Blood (DOI 10.1182/blood-2010-09-309591), Focus states the patient is now virus-free and off AIDS medications.

Food for Thought: What Would You Do With a Personal Sequencer?

Basically, it is the smallest pH meter in the world, but its impact on science, medicine, and even daily life is likely to be huge. The pH meter developed by Ion Torrent sits on a semiconductor chip beneath very tiny wells containing a single-stranded DNA probe and DNA polymerase in a buffer. The wells are flooded by the nucleotides A, T, G and C in a sequential manner, and incorporation is recorded by measuring the proton released in the reaction. Thereby, the pH meter can be used to sequence DNA. The chip contains 1.3 million wells, the device measures about 60x50x55 cm (24x20x21 inches), costs $50,000 and is named  PGM – Personal Genome Machine.

Already on the market, it puts DNA sequencing within the reach of nearly every lab, doctor’s practice, clinic, and even college. While it still has certain limitations – it can read only 20 genes at once at present – DNA sequencing never has been easier and less error-prone. Other devices with similar elegance and even more speed are around the corner – as an example, scientists from Imperial College of London last month demonstrated in NanoLetters that they can sequence genes by propelling a DNA strand at high speed through a tiny 50 nanometre (nm) hole cut in a silicon chip, using an electrical charge. As the strand emerges from the nanopore, its coding sequence is read by a ‘tunnelling electrode junction’. This 2 nm gap between two wires supports an electrical current that interacts with the distinct electrical signal from each base code. The speed is unbelievable and translates into sequencing an entire human genome in 5 minutes.

Certainly, these machines will have a huge impact on the amount of data generated for the development of personalized medicine and individualized therapies. But now that DNA sequencing is approaching a mass market, it will inevitably reach anyone, just like cameras, computers and mobile phones that turned from “professional only” machines into commodities. The statement that no one needs such a machine is refuted by history: when the telephone was invented, US president Rutherford B. Hayes could not think of anyone wanting to use it, XEROX once was sure that the world market for photocopiers would be around 50 machines, and even Intel’s founder Gordon Moore could not think of using personal computers at home for anything meaningful other than “maybe filing cooking recipes”.

What would you do with a personal sequencer at home? Screen your blood for disease on a daily basis? Check your food for microbial contamination? Classify the bugs and shrubs in your garden to find new ones? Secretly sequence the DNA of you neighbors, boss or affair to find out about genetic weaknesses? In a decade, ads might state once again: “There is an APP for that!”

Company News: biocrea expands management team

The German biotech company biocrea GmbH today announced the expansion of its management team by appointing Martin Gunthorpe (formerly GlaxoSmithKline, GSK) as Chief Scientific Officer, Viktor Viehweg (formerly Sibur Ltd.) to the position of Chief Financial Officer, and Simon Ward (formerly GSK) to Executive Vice President Chemistry & Development.

biocrea was established in November 2010 following a management buy-out from Biotie Therapies Corp. (HSE: BTH1V; Turku, Finland). In the transaction, biocrea acquired the CNS pipeline and a cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibitor platform from Biotie. biocrea’s team has a long-standing, exceptional track record in the development of CNS therapeutics, e.g. the development of a PDE10 inhibitor portfolio for the treatment of schizophrenia in collaboration with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer, which acquired Wyeth in 2009. The company plans to expand its pipeline and to obtain attractive assets in order to build a more mature portfolio. Already, it is in advanced negotiations with several pharma partners, such as GSK.

biocrea’s management will attend the J.P. Morgan 29th Annual Healthcare Conference 2011, San Francisco, January 10-13, 2011. If you wish to make an appointment, please contact akampion via info@akampion.com.

Food for Thought: Update on Germany´s Drug Reimbursement Law

Based on the latest developments in the debate about Germany´s new drug reimbursement law (AMNOG), we have updated our analysis, which was originally published in September 2010.  Please click here for the updated article.

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