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 Economistreports 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.
Hamburg-based immunotherapeutics company Provecs Medical this week announced the signing of a collaboration with the prestigious German Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNI). The partners will design and evaluate novel vaccine candidates based on Provecs Medical’s technology platform. Indications are four undisclosed infectious diseases, three of them transmitted by insects.
Provecs Medical uses a proprietary adenoviral vector technology to achieve the targeted expression of multiple signaling molecules relevant for the immune system in the microenvironment of a disease site. Please click here for further information.
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.
Joachim Müller-Jung in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung deals with the importance of high quality tissue for the development of personalized cancer therapies. He quotes Catheryn Compton, Director of the NCI’s Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research (OBBR), as saying that billions of dollars have been wasted in the past because researchers developing biomarkers supposed to be predicitive of cancer and responses to therapies relied on tissue samples that were utterly useless: tissue had been subject to careless handling and storage, and patient histories, data on origin and sampling procedure were missing, so that results were not reproducible. Müller-Jung features Hamburg-based Indivumed as the first and only ISO9001:2008 certified biobank in the world which offers cancer patient tissue and related technical and medical data derived in a standardized procedure accompanied by a detailed protocol.
Jef Akst in The Scientist reports on a new biomarker that can tell at early stages of liver and rare endocrine cancer whether a patient is likely to develop metastases. The biomarker, a protein called CPE-delta N, was able to predict the occurrence of metastases with greater than 90% accuracy, and using the associated RNA as a biomarker, the accuracy was even greater. Preliminary findings suggest it may also be applied to other cancer types.
In the same magazine, Megan Scudellari reports on findings that human cells reprogrammed into multipoint stem cells (so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS) have hotspots in their genome that are not completely re-programmed. The article raises the question whether iPS are really suited to replace embryonic stem cells.
Detecting volatile substances is the topic of several papers. In New Scientist, Jessica Hamzelou reports on attempts by various research groups to accelerate diagnosis in the operation theater by combining electrosurgery with NMR spectroscopy. The smoke emanating from the cut tissue is directed to a NMR spectrometer which analyses on the spot whether the surgeon is cutting healthy or cancer tissue.
Also in New Scientist, Arlene Weintraub reports on the Israeli start-up BioExplorers which claims that trained mice are better at detecting explosives than currently used devices and methods. As soon as the mice sniff traces of any of 8 explosives, they flee to a side chamber of their cage as if they are smelling a cat. Scientists from Colorado State University have taught tobacco and mouse-ear cress plants a similar trick – exposed to vapors from TNT, the plants change color. The trick is done by reengineering a certain receptor, reports Ferris Jabr. German Spiegelfeatures a publication by Japanese scientists from Kyushu University who trained a dog to sniff out early-stage colon cancer with a success rate of 90%. The researchers now try to find out which chemicals the dog reacts to.
Ben Coxworth in Gizmag reports on blood clots made visible by nanoparticles. Each particle, developed by Dr. Dipanjan Pan at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, contains a million atoms of bismuth and molecules binding to fibrin, a key component of blood clots, at the outside. Bismuth is a toxic heavy metal, which can be detected by a spectral CT scanner. In contrast to regular CT scanners, this new type of scanner is capable of displaying detailed objects or metal in color. Coxworth concludes that “not only could the technology be used to locate blood clots, but it could possibly even treat their cause – ruptures in artery walls. If the nanoparticles contained some sort of healing agent, then once they attached to the fibrin in a blood clot, they could set about sealing any weak spots.”
