Tag: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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

Hearts can heal themselves, at least in newborn mice, reports  Sindya N. Bhando in the New York Times. She features a research group that is now trying to identify the genes regulating the process. If the researchers could restart the genetic network in adult animals, science would be a step closer to a better heart disease therapy.

Matthew Herper in Forbes deals with the success of Vertex’s cystic fibrosis drug VX-770 in its 161 patients STRIVE clinical trial. While it works only in a small subset of patients carrying a particular mutation, in this group it improved the patients’ ability to exhale by about 17%. Robert Langreth, also in Forbes, introduces biotech investor Randal J. Kirk who made more than $2 billion from his biotech investments, among others, by selling New River Pharmaceuticals to Shire. Right now, he is about selling his anti-depressant play Clinical Data to Forest Laboratories. Kirk prefers to buy unknown companies at a very low price and stays until a drug gets to the market. His latest interest focuses on synthetic biology, and he runs and finances the 180-person company  Intrexon, founded in 1998 by biologist Thomas Reed. Intrexon claims to command a library of 70,000 DNA pieces that can be used to control gene expression. This enables it, as an example, to induce and regulate in vivo protein expression through dosing of a small molecule activator. Applications range from medical to agricultural and industrial biotechnology and protein production.

Kate McAlpine in New Scientist explains how a technology that manipulates light so that it can deliver sharp images through opaque materials might someday be useful to treat cancer. Like opaque material, human skin scatters light in both time and space, however with the new technology it may be possible to exactly target and destroy cancer cells by laser light without harming surrounding healthy tissue.

Joachim Müller-Jung in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports on a new technology to improve hygiene in clinics. Developed by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics it generates cold plasma gas that is able to kill bacteria even in skin pores within three to five seconds. The technology already is being used in food processing and for treating chronic wounds. The device is about the size of a hand dryer already used in public lavatories. A license to the technology is still available.

Susanne Kutter in Die Wirtschaftswoche reports on a new test to diagnose a myocardial infarction on the spot. It is based on the enzyme glycogen-phosphorylase BB which is released into the blood stream as soon as the heart muscle is suffering from oxygen deprivation. A common competitor test on the market is based on a molecule released only after disintegration of heart muscles cells and tissue, i.e. hours after the incident. The Diacordon test is marketed by Diagenics.

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: Weekly Wrap-Up

MacGregor Campbell reports in the New Scientist that DNA can stretch to nearly twice its length without breaking and explains how this feature can lead to the development of new drugs to fight cancer. Ferris Jabr in the same magazine reports about the first discovery of a virus infecting nematode Caenorhabdis elegans, a workhorse of developmental biology. The discovery will now enable biologists to study virus-host interactions in this model organism.

The Economist introduces a technology developed by Planar Energy (Orlando, Florida) which turns rechargeable batteries into thin, solid devices by printing lithium-ion batteries onto sheets of metal or plastic. The magazine quotes the company by saying the cells will be more reliable than conventional lithium-ion cells, will be able to store two to three times more energy in the same weight and will last for tens of thousands of recharging cycles. They could also be made for a third of the cost. The trick is done by using a ceramic electrolyte which can be printed and appears solid while it allows free passage to lithium ions.

Matthew Herper in Forbes reports on PerkinElmer’s entry into the DNA sequencing market by creating a service business. Researchers can send in DNA for sequencing by PerkinElmer and subsequently access and analyze the genetic data in a computer cloud. Focus will be on human exam sequencing. Matthew also features a video interview with Mischa Angrist, author of “Here is a Human Being: At the dawn of personal genomics” about what it means to look at one’s own sequence data and whether these data should be private or be available for science.

Also in Forbes, Robert Langreth introduces research by William DeGrado, of the University of Pennsylvania trying to breath new life in peptide drugs to fight infectious diseases. DeGrado uses supercomputer simulation to create antibiotics that mimic natural ones but are far simpler to produce and more stable. The first drug designed by DeGrado, PMX-30063 by PolyMedix to treat staphylococcus skin infections is now in clinical trials.

The New York Times also deals with infectious diseases. Sindya N. Bhanoo outlines efforts of researchers from seven countries to analyze how a single strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria has morphed over 30 years and spread across the world, as a result of evolutionary pressure by antibiotics and vaccines. Within three decades, the strain turned over about 75% of its genome by recombination and mutation. The study appeared in Science.

German papers feature two stories on drugs that surprisingly show efficacy in indications they have not been developed for: Cinthia Briseno in Der Spiegel reports on a study featured in Science on cancer drug Taxol paclitaxel which is able to stimulate the growth of nerve fibers that have been cut in two. The researchers are now planning clinical studies in paraplegics. Nicola von Lutterotti in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports a Lancet Neurology study on Prozac fluxetin which is able support the recovery from palsy in stroke patients.

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