Manfred Lindinger in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) introduces a giant molecule the size of a virus. It is not a macromolecule – instead, it consists of just two rubidium atoms glued together by one electron.
Forget about “good” cholesterol, writes Nicola von Lutterotti, also in FAZ. Latest studies revealed that drug therapies to increase HDL failed to reduce the risk for cardiovascular events and did not prolong life.
Klaus Sievers in Die Welt explains how sewage plants can be used to produce electricity. The trick is done by microbial fuel cells populated by metal-reducing bacteria.
Garage biotech is approaching fast, writes Ted Greenwald in Forbes. He introduces OpenPCR, a $599 build-it-yourself PCR machine and PersonalPCR, a $149 2-tube PCR thermocycler by a company called Cofactor Bio. The DNA analysis is performed by Cofactor. Already, the machines have been used by high school students to identify tilapia fish sold as white tuna in a sushi restaurant.
The Economistfeatures Ron DePinho, the new president of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, a serial entrepreneur who us planning to use the results of the International Cancer Genome Consortium to develop new drugs against five cancers. The effort is financed by a $3 billion cancer-research fund created by the state of Texas and local philanthropists.
In the New York Times (NYT),Gina Kolata profiles Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the MIT, who excelled as a mathematician but then was attracted by fruit flies and nematodes so that he finally decided to become a geneticist.
Susanne Kutter introduces in Wirtschaftswoche the latest, indispensable winter outfit: gloves that allow for the handling of smartphone and camera touch screens.
Last not least, Hanna Wick in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) introduces “Science Ink”, a book by US science writer Carl Zimmer which features tattoos worn by researchers and science enthusiastics, e. g. Schroedinger’s cat, a geological cross section or a piece of DNA.
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.
Die Welt this week reports on attempts by researchers from the University of Heidelberg to grow a human heart as a replacement organ. As a matrix, they plan to use the collagen structure of a pig’s heart depleted by all its cells. The structure will be incubated in a bioreactor with the cells of the patient who needs a new heart.
How damaged arteries or wounded skin may be regenerated by a new method, which will be available soon, is described by Wendy Zukermann in New Scientist. The trick is done by turning tropoelastin, a precursor of elastin found in skin and blood vessels, into a flexible fabric by electrospinning. The technology will now be further explored with support by Australian biotech company Elastagen.
Novel insights into how tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, exerts its mind-altering and pain-relieving effects revealed that THC binds to different molecular targets on cells to produce the to effects. As Andy Cochlan describes in New Scientist, the pain-relieving effect is caused by THC binding to glycine-receptors, increasing their activity. The typical “high” in contrast is caused by THC binding to the cannabinoid type-1 receptor (CB1). As a result, it may now be possible to create new pain killers.
In the same magazine, Mark Buchanan features a computer model of neural networks supporting the idea that the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are caused by excessive uncontrolled synchronization of neurons. This makes it more difficult for the brain to end a task or begin a new one. In healthy brains, neurons fire synchronously only in a brief and controlled way.
Gina Kolata in the New York Times features two new, large gene association studies on Alzheimer’s disease that led to the discovery of five novel genes involved in the disease, making onset more likely and/or influencing disease progression. The studies, which are to appear today in Nature Genetics, confirm already existing hypotheses that the onset of AD is linked to inflammatory processes in the brain as well as to blood cholesterol levels.
The Economistintroduces a powerful new battery suitable for cars that can be recharged completely in minutes. It is based on Nickel and charging rates are ten to 100 times higher than that of marketed battery. However, the development is still at a very early stage.
Much more advanced is a revolutionary car battery developed by German DBM Energy. The lithium polymer based battery enabled an electrically powered Audi A2 last autumn to drive 600 km from Munich to Berlin without recharging and has now been meticulously tested by the Germany’s Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM). Jürgen Rees in Wirtschaftswoche reports that BAM found the battery to be safe and confirmed the extraordinary cruising range. In the BAM tests, the car drove more than 450 kilometers on a single charge. Media reports had cast doubt about the features and performance of the battery after the test car was destroyed by a fire shortly after the record drive last year.
In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Manfred Lindinger takes up the issue whether nanotechnology poses danger to human health and the environment in an article and an interview with Jochen Flasbarth, president of the German Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt – UBA). Flasbarth points out that UBA’s nanotechnology study published last year, highlighting gaps in knowledge about potential health hazards, was misunderstood by the media and the public as a sweeping warning of all things nano. He also dismisses calls for introducing a label for products containing nanotechnology: “If there is no risk, we don’t need to put up a warning sign.”
Several German papers feature and discuss an ad-hoc statement on preimplantation diagnosis issued January 18 by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. It was drafted by 13 eminent German academians from biology, medicine, law and philosophy & ethics, among them nobelist Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard. The statement calls for admission of PID under narrowly defined circumstances (high risk of serious monogenic disorder, chromosomal dysfunction, miscarriage or stillbirth). The parliament needs to to regulate PID after the German Federal Supreme Court last year ruled that Germany’s ban on PID was based on misinterpretation of the country’s Embryo Protection Law.
John Tierney in The New York Times provides new insights on people who underwent personal genetic testing to learn about their risk for conditions from obesity to cancer and Alzheimer’s. It is widespread belief among experts and politicians that personal DNA testing needs careful supervision and cannot be offered without expert guidance. The NYT introduces two studies – one follow-up study of about 2,000 people who had a genomewide scan by Navigenics and one representative sample of 1,500 people – and found that the medical field overestimates the level of psychological anxiety or trauma caused by the results and is way too paternalistic about the tests. One researcher is quoted by saying: “We should recognize that consumers might reasonably want the information for nonmedical reasons. People value it for its own sake, and because they feel more in control of their lives.”
Gardiner Harris reports that the Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharma industry that it has decided to start a federal billion-dollar drug development center. The “National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences” will open in October this year and will beef up early research results by finding leads against new targets or even perform preclinical studies so that projects become attractive to the pharma industry. NIH director Francis S. Collins who is behind the idea, is quoted by NYT as saying: “I am a little frustrated to see how many of the discoveries that do look as though they have therapeutic implications are waiting for the pharmaceutical industry to follow through with them.” In a first step, more than $700 million in research projects from other NIH institutes will be brought together at the new center.
Gina Kolata reports on an FDA advisory committee recommending approval of a new brain scan that can detect the typical plaques in the brains of living Alzheimer disease patients. The test has been developed by Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, now a subsidiary of Eli Lilly (see akampioneer, June 24, 2010).
In the New Scientist,Anil Ananthaswamy features findings from Australian researchers suggesting that Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis and maybe other, more common diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes, might be cured by antibiotics and subsequent (re-)colonization of the colon with bacteria from healthy people. The hypothesis was derived from case studies of Parkinson’s patients treated for colon infections, in which the treatment also abated the Parkinson’s symptoms. The researchers from the Center of Digestive Diseases in New South Wales are now planning a pilot study in Parkinson’s patients. Already, neuroanatomists from German Ulm University have suggested in 2003 that Parkinson’s might be caused by a bug that breaks through the mucosal barrier of the GI tract and enters the central nervous system via the vagus nerve (Journal of Neural Transmission, DOI: 10.1007/s00702-002-0808-2).
Linda Geddes reports on how cytokines associated with inflammation can enter the brain under certain circumstances and cause depression. Unfortunately, the article fails to mention German biotech company Affectis which already has Cimicoxib, an anti-inflammatory COX-2 inhibitor, in Phase II trials for the treatment of depression, after researchers discovered that COX-2 inhibitors can alleviate depression.
