Tag: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

The human genome of newborns contains an unexpectedly low number of mutations, writes Joachim Müller-Jung in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Contrary to earlier estimates of 100-200 mutations generated in the germ cells of parents, the number is only about 60. Results come from sequencing the entire genomes of two families with one child each. The results have implications for understanding human evolution and genetics.

Sonja Kastilian, also in FAZ, features a preliminary report of IQWiG, Germany’s watchdog agency appraising drugs and treatments for quality and cost effectiveness, on the benefits of HPV testing of women as a screening for ovarian cancer. IQWiG set out to compare DNA tests for HPV with common pap smear tests and reported that the HPV tests leas to an earlier diagnosis and better follow-up examinations, regardlesss of whether it is applied alone or in combination with the conventional test. A final decision on whether the test is to be reimbursed by Germany’s statutory healthcare system is expected for 2012. In 2006, the Joint Federal Committee (G-BA), the body in charge, had voted against reimbursement for cost reasons. Kastilian also points out that HPV vaccination rates at present are below 30% in young women in Germany, in contrast to up to 81% in the UK, Portugal, and Australia. Reason has been an unduly discussion in German media about potential risks, high costs and lack of efficacy.

Uta Neubauer in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reports on novel approaches to use cold plasma to disinfect wounds, hands, and food. A method and device developed by the German Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has already demonstrated safety and efficacy in treating wounds and disinfecting hands. At present, it is under investigation for the treatment of foods, e.g. food additives and berries.

Sven Titz, also in NZZ, deals with latest insights into the physics of the water surface. Using vibration spectroscopy, physicists of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles found that the surface is made up basically by -OH groups of the water molecules sticking out from the liquid. The discovery will lead to better understanding solubility of molecules in water.

Forbes this week introduces two innovations in optics. Jennifer Hicks writes about the “socialization of the microscope” by a technology that allows the display of microscopic images on an extremely large multitouch screen, just like an oversized iPad. Thereby, groups of students, pathologists or researchers can focus on tiny details by touching, gesturing, and zooming in and out. A video of the microscope at work can be found here.

Californian-based start-up Lytro has unveiled a camera that can take pictures without focusing, writes Tomio Geron in Forbes. Instead, focusing on any point of interest in the photo is done once the image is loaded on a computer. The consumer camera is based on the light field technology invented by Stanford University researchers. The camera is fitted with special lenses and a sensor that captures every ray of light hitting it, regardless of whether it is from the fore- or the background, and records its individual color, intensity and direction. The camera therefore also can be used to generate 3D-pictures. Examples can be found here.

The Economist this week introduces an intelligent drug delivery approach using nanoparticles. It can be used to deliver anti-cancer chemotherapeutic drugs and makes use of the blood-clotting mechanism: first, nano-sized golden rods are injected into the blood stream. They fit into the unusual pores common in capillaries nourishing tumors and thereby mark tumor sites. Once they are in place, the tumor site is treated with laser light bursts. Their energy is absorbed by the gold and converted to heat destroying the capillaries so that the body’s coagulation system is triggered to repair the damage. This is when the second nanoparticles come into play. They carry the chemotherapeutics together with a fibrin-binding protein fragment and are designed to release the drug upon fibrin-binding only. The treatment strategy therefore delivers the drug exactly to the site the coagulation system is active, that is, at the tumor. The method developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has proven safety and efficacy in mice and will be tested in humans soon.

Researchers from the University of Rochester have come up with just another idea to release drugs on target, the New Scientist reports. They found that nanocarbon tubes containing aqueous solutions can be made to pop open by heating them from the outside with infrared lasers. Patients could be administered nanocontainers carrying drugs to deliver it to a desired target where the drug then is released by laser light.

And finally, Die Welt this week deals with wrinkles and high tech attempts to avoid or get rid of them. Clinical studies in people with an average age of 87 prove that vitamin A1 (retinol) is useful to smooth skin. Also, light from LEDs is able to remove a water film caging the skin’s elastic fibers so that they become rigid. The method is best applied by pre-treating the skin with green tee polyphenols to deactivate free radicals generated by the LEDs. Moreover, scientists from Hamburg-based Skin Investigation and Technology SIT found out that eating one bar of dark chocolate a day also leads to a 34% improvement of skin elasticity after 6 months. Further attempts to eliminate wrinkles are being made by using signaling peptides activating collagen-producing cells and by polymers carrying nanoparticles that are injected between outer and inner skin layers. The resulting films disperse the compression forces within the skin, thereby “ironing” it from inside.

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Rationing medicine already is clinical reality in Germany, reports this week’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Christina Hucklenbroich features a representative survey among the members of the German Society for Hematology and Oncology (DGHO) about therapeutic decisions in treating cancer patients. According to the survey, 59% of the responding 345 oncologists said that they abstain from treatment options if they think the therapeutic benefit is too small as compared to the cost of treatment. However, 19% responded they even refrain from therapeutic options for cost reasons even if the treatments provide an additional, considerable benefit to the patients.

Michael Feld also in FAZ reports on a study by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the Darmstadt Economics Research Institute Wifor that Germany will be lacking 56,000 physicians and 140,000 nursing staff by 2020, a situation that will hit the eldery most. The author, a practicing physician, states that the situation is not only caused by lack of money but also by disappearing values like charity, social responsibility and a sense of honor.

Focus magazine this week features a study from the University of Michigan giving rise to concerns that taking dietary supplements and OTC medications to stimulate the immune system can be counterproductive in patients with autoimmune diseases. The study demonstrates in animals that a strong immune response to common cold viruses can exacerbate inflammations and even lead to asthma attacks while the infection with a weaker immune system proceeds without complications.

Die Welt reports about clinical results on a new test for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) communicated by the University of Leipzig. The test is based on radiolabeled Florbetaben which is injected into the blood stream. The substance binds to beta-amyloid peptides in the brain, and binding can be assessed using PET imaging. Thereby, AD can be diagnosed up to 15 years before onset of the disease. The paper does not mention, however, that the (preliminary) results are from an international multi-center Phase III trial sponsored by Bayer Schering Pharma that was designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of florbetaben (BAY 94-9172) developed by the company. PET images are compared to corresponding histo-pathological specimens. Details will be published in the next issue of Lancet Neurology.

Christian Meier, Aitziber Romero and Dino Trescher in Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) maintain that industry is trying to block attempts to regulate nanotechnology products. While the EU Commission prefers to define nanotechnology products by counting the number of particles smaller than 100 nanometers, industry wants a definition by determining the fraction of the particles contributing to the mass of the product. The authors, which claim that nanotech products bear all sorts of unforeseen health and environmental hazards, say that this is an attempt by industry to reduce the number of products defined as being nanotechnology.

The Economist makes a case in how food poisoning by EHEC, salmonella and other dangerous bacteria can be effectively prevented: radiating food. Irony is that it was Germany, the country currently suffering from the worst and most deadly EHEC epidemic ever, that vetoed a proposal by the European Commission to allow radiation for a greater range of food and at higher doses, e.g. for sprouts which caused this year’s epidemic, in 2000. However, the author doubts the epidemic will change the German government’s attitude for fear to upset Germany’s influential Green movement.

Last not least, comics are becoming increasingly popular among biotech companies and researchers. Silver Spring, MD based biotech company United Therapeutics chose to publish its annual report as a comic book, while researchers from the Department of Neurosurgery of Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf published a retrospective study on traumatic brain injuries in comics, analyzing more than 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books: “Although over half of patients had an initially severe impairment of consciousness after TBI, no permanent deficit could be found. Roman nationality, hypoglossal paresis, lost helmet, and ingestion of the magic potion were significantly correlated with severe initial impairment of consciousness (p ≤ 0.05).”

 

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Manfred Lindinger reports on progress in designing intelligent materials. Physicists of Technical University Hamburg-Harburg succeeded in designing gold- and platinum-based materials that can be switched between hard and brittle or soft and elastic, just by applying different voltages. The trick is done by etching pores and channels into the material which subsequently are filled with perchloric acid.

Martina Lenzen-Schulte, also in FAZ, deals with the surprising finding that a screening test for ovarian cancer increases the number cases detected but at the same time does not improve survival. The test based on the CA-125 tumor marker was investigated in the PLCO longitudinal analysis comprising more than 75,000 women aged between 55 and 74 years, who were diagnosed as cancer-free at the beginning of the study. Half of them was tested once a year with the CA-125 test. While more women were diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the CA-125 test group, the outcome did not improve – in part, because the test did not detect the cancer early enough. Moreover, it resulted in a high number of false positives, and these patients were put at unnecessary risk of bleeding, infections, colon injuries and blood loss due to attempts to confirm the diagnosis via biopsies.

In Forbes, Matthew Herper features an interview with David Urdal, the now retiring CSO of Dendreon, who pioneered Provenge, the prostate cancer vaccine approved by the FDA last year as the first anti-cancer vaccine ever. Urdal in detail explains why the company did not specify overall survival as primary endpoint but choose to follow every patient for three years instead. While the FDA first ok’ed the approach and the FDA advisory committee recommended approval in 2007, the FDA did not approve it: in the committee, cell therapists were in favor of Provenge while the oncologists had doubts. The drug was approved only after another study, the famous IMPACT study, had been finished. Urdal maintains that this turned out to be very positive for Provenge: the study revealed new insights about progression in asymptomatic patients and demonstrated that the method to measure disease progression just by counting the time to the next progression event was inadequate. Urdal states that the FDA may have been right to reject Provenge in the first place: “I think if you follow the sentiments within the clinical community I think there was a sense of, okay, if it’s approved I’d probably prescribe it, but geez, it’s a small study, overall survival wasn’t the primary endpoint, there wasn’t a sense of enthusiasm for it, and I think in the end of course the IMPACT study results came back and this completely vindicated the results from the earlier trials.”

William Pentland, also in Forbes, introduces a new battery architecture invented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. The semi-solid flow cell basically runs on “sludge”, combining the structure of so-called flow batteries, where the electrolytes are replaced from outside once they are consumed with the favorable energy potential of lithium-ion batteries. Pentland says the new design may have the potential of a game-changer, in particular in combination with electric cars and smart grids.

Todd Woody, also in Forbes, describes buildings that clean up after itself via panels coated with titanium dioxide particles that serve as photocatalysts. Once illuminated by the sun, the particles start destroying dirt on the panel’s surface and, as a side effect, can also clear the surrounding air from nitrogen oxide. The company selling the panels claims they can cut a building’s maintenance costs by a third to half.

The Economist this week makes a case for using personalized medicine approaches in clinical trials earlier. In most cases, the Economist writes, oncologists “base their treatment on where in the body a tumour has sprung up, rather than on which molecular aberrations have caused it”, adding that the same is true for recruiting volunteers for clinical trials, in particular Phase I.

Drawing conclusions from this year’s ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) meeting, the Economist argues it may be much better to match the genetic profiles of patients to the drug being tested, rather than looking for the organs affected. The magazine introduces a study  by Apostolia-Maria Tsimberidou of the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Centre, in which the author selected volunteers with late-stage cancer across various organs whose tumors were caused by a single, known mutation. 175 volunteers were administered a targeted therapy in a low-dose, Phase I setting while 116 received traditional therapy. In the targeted therapy group, 29% responded, while in the untargeted therapy group there were only 5% responders.

Mark Brown in Wired reports on Harvard University researchers who created the first living laser, a human embryonic kidney cell that was genetically engineered to produce a visible laser beam. The cell producing green fluorescent protein was put between two mirrors and when the team ran pulses of blue light through the cell, it began to emit green light. When bouncing between the mirrors, certain wavelengths were preferentially amplified until a visible laser beam was created for a few nanoseconds. The cell was left unharmed. At present, researchers foresee applications in cell biology research.

Last not least, Herbert Renz-Polster in Der Spiegel this week answers crucial questions on why  kids like jelly babies buth not salad and Brussels sprouts and how they can be made to eat healthy. The answer: it’s the evolution stupid! It is more advisable to eat fat in order to survive the next famine, to eat hastily (who knows when the next rival appears) and it is also wise to avoid eating the unknown (maybe it’s poison). The simple advice: be patient, keep offering the healthy stuff and play while having a meal. That way, kids even learn to like seal fat, whale blubber and roasted locusts.

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

This week, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) deals with potential origins of the enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) epidemic in Germany. Christina Hucklenbroich details the consequences of feeding cattle mixed provender, a forage that changes the environment of the intestinal tract so that it becomes an ideal habitat for bacteria like E. coli. In a separate article the same author deals with an EHEC outbreak in 1997 in the US which affected mostly women – similar to the current epidemic in Germany. Back then, the source had been alfalfa sprouts used in salads. While the ultimate source had never been found, scientists suspected that already the seeds had been contaminated. Richard Friebe, also in FAZ, deals with slurry from pigs, cattle, and fowl that is know to contain all sorts of bacteria and viruses. It is used either directly as fertilizer (though not on vegetables and salad plants) or may contaminate adjacent fields through spillover, spray or via irrigation using water contaminated with slurry.

Susanne Kutter in Wirtschaftswoche introduces Holger Zinke, co-founder and CEO of BRAIN AG, a biotech company specialized on “white” biotechnology, using the skills of microbes to re-design industrial processes or to come up with entirely new ones. Thereby, pharma and chemical industry can save energy, money, and expenses for raw materials. The article is part of a series on pioneers of the “greentech-era”, trying to change the industry to make it more energy-efficient and sustainable.

In Forbes, Matthew Herper analyses why scientists in Germany and China used small desktop sequencers by Ion Torrent rather than big machines by Illumina, Life or 454 Life Sciences to decipher the sequence of the EHEC strain rampaging through Germany. Herper claims it is speed and cost. However, the choice was also influenced by the fact that the sequence of the new strain matched strains with sequences available in public databases relatively closely so that puzzling together the short sequence data generated by the machine was easy.

In reporting on this year’s annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Andrew Pollack in The New York Times (NYT) introduces two drugs for the treatment of melanoma: vemurafenib (developed by Genentech, part of Roche Group), which attacks a specific mutation accelerating tumor growth and Yervoi ipilimumab (developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb), which unleashes the body’s immune system to fight the cancer. Yervoi was approved by FDA in March this year. Pollack also features latest clinical results for Aromasin exemestane, a drug marketed for preventing recurrences of breast cancer.

Gina Kolata, also in NYT, deals with the phenomenon of “linguistic toxicity”, i.e. drug labels listing more and more side effects, even contradictory ones such as that a medication can cause diarrhea or constipation. As of today, drug labels in the US list an average of 94 side effects (the top numbers already are exceeding 500), despite efforts of FDA to make drug makers avoid listing of side effects that are infrequent and minor, commonly observed in the absence of drug therapy or not plausibly related to drug therapy. Main reason is pharma companies trying to protect themselves against lawsuits.

Last not least, New Scientist features the latest advice for those of you on diet: psychologist found that if you succeed convincing yourself that everything you eat bears enormous amounts of calories, your ghrelin hormone level will drop much lower after eating so that you feel being full faster.

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