Tag: Die ZEIT

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Joachim Müller-Jung in Frankfurter Allgemeines Zeitung (FAZ) this week deals with the ethic implications of non-invasive prenatal diagnosis, describing that a huge number of tests based on fetal DNA entering the mother’s blood stream is ready to enter the market. His recommendation is to start an immediate discussion about which tests should be applied and which ones should not.

Ulrich Bahnsen in Die ZEIT interviews Norbert Donner-Banzhoff, Professor at the University of Marburg’s Department of General Practice, Preventive and Rehabilitative Medicine. Donner-Banzhoff conducted a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal CMAJ investigating the influence of pharmaceutical advertising on the drug recommendations made in articles in 11 German journals that focus on medical education. Donner-Banzhoff and his team come to the conclusion that journals financed by advertisement from the pharma industry and given away for free almost exclusively recommended the use of specified drugs, whereas journals financed entirely with subscription fees tended to recommend against the use of the same drugs. In the interview, Donner-Banzhoff suggests that a lot of articles published in the free journals have been written by ghost writers and/or members of the pharmaceutical industry.

Matthew Herper in Forbes this week deals with the latest setback in developing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). He features the failure of Eli Lilly’s semagacest in a Phase III trial in more than 2,600 patients with mild-to-moderate AD. According to an interim analysis, patients receiving the drug, a gamma secretase blocker, worsened to a statistically significant greater degree than those treated with placebo. In addition, the drug was associated with an increased risk of skin cancer. Herper concludes that there is something fundamentally wrong with current hypotheses on the onset of AD and that the failure of the drug may set AD drug development back by many years (see also akampioneer’s recent comment on Probiodrug’s AD hypothesis).

While William Pentland, also in Forbes, reports a potential biofuel breakthrough in producing isobutanol directly from cellulose by using a microbe thriving in decaying grass, Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital Management, in Forbes states it is time to realize that investing in biofuels may be foolish. He states that while it is hyped as biotech 2.0, there is in fact a fundamental difference to biotech 1.0 which is often overlooked. While biotech 1.0 drugs and molecules can be protected by IP, biofuels cannot. In addition, the marginal cost of producing IP-protected molecules is really low once you did the discovery and first synthesis work (as compared to your margins) – so you can make big profits. Biofuel molecules however have to compete from the onset with the generic fuels already on the market. Biofuel is a commodity, he states, and instead of going back to an agrarian-based economy we should focus on materials and processing based on high energy density, such as uranium.

Donald G. McNeil jr in The New York Times reports on a panel of independent experts from 24 countries that reviewed the handling of the swine flu by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2009. The draft report – “posted in an obscure corner of the W.H.O.’s Web site” – criticizes the WHO’s “needlessly complex” definition of a pandemic, its inability to deploy 78 million doses donated by rich nations for use in poor ones and its “clumsy communications”.

Colin Barras in New Scientist writes about the origin of cancer and features recent contributions by astrobiologists. While many researchers think that cancer is triggered by a malfunction of the genes trying to control replication which needs to be limited in multicellular organisms, some astrobiologists think a tumor is switching back to some forms of basic cellular cooperation found in the earliest ancestors of multicellular organisms. The distinction is far from being academic: if cancer is some sort of “living fossil” revived it would have only a limited set of survival strategies. In contrast, contemporary medicine regards a tumor as independently evolving cells with nearly unlimited evolutionary potential to escape treatment strategies. The hypothesis explains the co-ordinated survival strategies of cancer, such as angiogenesis and metastasis, and will be further tested soon by genetic profiling.

 

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

In Forbes, Matthew Herper this week deals with the failure of Bydureon eventide, the once-a-week anti-diabetes shot developed by Eli Lilly and Amylin Pharmaceuticals. In a head-to-head Phase III trial Bydureon was not superior to Victoza, the once-a-day drug by Novo Nordisk, in terms of lowering blood glucose levels. Both are synthetic versions of glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1. In another article, Herper looks at the biotech busts and breakthroughs of Februay, from KV Pharmaceuticals (shares up 400%) to Orexigen (shares down 64%). Herper concludes that the rejection of the Orexigen drug Contrave by FDA – the third rejection of an obesity drug in a row – “killed the obesity drug field.”

Wired this week features a story by John Timmer who describes experiments, in which the introduction of engineered viruses boost memory recall in rats. The improment is brought about by a viral protein kinase, but the exact mechanism ist still not understood.

In Germany, Sascha Karberg in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) revisits the attempts to cure AIDS by removing the gene for the receptor protein CCRS, which serves as the entry door for the AIDS virus, from the T cells of HIV-infected patients . Humans lacking the CCRS gene show natural resistance to the disease. The genetically modified T cells are then reinjected into the patients’ blood stream (see akampioneer, January 17). In a Phase I trial of this approach by Sangamo Biosciences, preliminary results have been encouraging, leading to a significant and durable increase of CD4+ T- cell counts in the patients.

Magnus Heier in Frankfurter Allgemeines Sonntagszeitung (FAS) deals with the ignorance of medical doctors in Germany regarding therapy guidelines and attempts to solve the problem by publishing patient versions of the guidelines in the internet.

Richard Stone in Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) features an epidemic in Bangladesh caused by the Nipah virus, which was discovered only in 1998. The virus is spread by bats via raw palm tree juice, a delicacy for both bats and humans. Christina Berndt, also in SZ,  deals with the replacement of members in Germany’s federal “German Standing Vaccination Committee” (STIKO) responsible for handing out advice on vaccination practices. Berndt claims that some of the newly appointed members are too close to industry because they participate in vaccine studies sponsored by vaccine manufacturers.

In a five-part series, Kai Kupferschmidt in German weekly magazine Die ZEIT deals with synthetic biology, this week introducing companies developing synthetic fuels and novel ways to produce drugs. Surprisingly, the article does not feature a single German synthetic biology company but US companies only.

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.

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