Tag: Jessica Hamzelou

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) Martina Lenzen-Schulte this week reports about an oncology symposion in Wiesbaden/Germany that dealt with oncology patients increasingly turning towards alternative medicines – 40 to 70% according to recent estimates. Oncologists now start to notice they cannot ignore patents’ needs and hopes, and therefore a number of clinicians have turned to looking at available studies on complementary medicine to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, it turns out that many of these studies – on mistletoe therapy as well as on dietary recommendations – are insufficient to provide sound evidence.

Werner Bartens in Sueddeutsche Zeitung features a 3,700 patients study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that contrary to common wisdom low salt diets increase the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

In Wirtschaftswoche, Susanne Kutter introduces the Diapat diagnostic test developed by German biotech company Mosaiques DiaPat GmbH that analyses more than 6,000 different peptide and protein molecules in human urine in one run. The test can be used to diagnose and even predict the onset of diseases. It has just been approved by FDA for the diagnosis of renal diseases. Already, the company markets a prostate cancer urine test in Germany. Mosaique’s test, Kutter claims, is but one of the many achievements to come from proteomics. She adds that the tests will have the potential to save the healthcare system billions of Euros.

Haydn Shaughnessy in Forbes states the record of cancer treatment still looks poor, with cancer mortality not improving a lot – as for example compared to heart diseases. Likewise, many preventive measures such as exercise and low fat diets don’t work. Shaughnessy therefore makes the case to support crowdsourcing approaches to develop a cancer cure like Pink Army and Cancer Commons (see akampioneer’s earlier entry on Open Source Principles – a Concept for the Life Sciences?). Also in Forbes, Matthew Herper forecasts that Pfizer will break itself up and spin out companies soon.

Eric Pfanner in New York Times looks at new European ventures to fill a void in world news after so many news organizations are laying off journalists or closing shop. As examples, he introduces Worldcrunch, a web-based start-up translating newspaper articles from around the world into English and Presseurop which translates into other languages, too.

In the New Scientist Jessica Hamzelou writes that people easily distracted might have more grey matter in their brains than focused people. In a separate article, she also features a pacemaker-like, implantable device that can deliver timed doses of medications for a year. Boonsri Dickinson, also in New Scientist, interviews nobelist Eizabeth Blackburn, the co-discoverer of the telomerase enzyme and its role in aging. Blackburn co-founded biotech company Telome Health, which is now starting to sell a test for telomere length. While at present it is sold for research purposes, e.g. to know more about telomer length as markers of aging, the test will be offered to the public through physicians for $200 later this year. Ferris Jabr in New Scientist introduces an approach fastening nanocapsules filled with interleukins to T cells as a way to cure cancer. So far, it seems to work in mice.

And here our favorite quote from Matthew Herper’s blog, who recently mused about whether entrepreneurs share some genetic characteristics, and if so, whether one could invent an antibody to turn someone into an entrepreneur: “‘Entrepreneur Antibody:’ Serious Side Effects Might Include Visual Hallucinations of Venture Capital.”

And finally, Norbert Lossau in Die Welt features a study by LinkedIn into the most common given names of CEOs, finding that in Germany they are Wolfgang, Christoph and Michael. In France, Gilles is number one, while it is Charles in the UK, Ray in Canada, Guido in Italy and Howard in the US. Marketing people often have short names like Chip, Todd or Trey, while engineers seem to have much longer give names. So think twice before naming your next newborn!

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

According to a study by researchers from the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD, Dresden, Germany), it is possible to increase the brain’s pool of brain stem cells by overexpressing cdk4 and cyclinD1 via the introduction of programmed viral vectors. Subsequently, the increased stem cell pool leads to the increased production of neuronal cells, reports Die Welt. The study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine was conducted in the brains of adult mice and may allow researchers to better understand the function of neuronal stem cells and to develop new therapies to combat neurodegenerative diseases.

Brain cell formation is also boosted by certain antidepressant drugs, reports Jessica Hamzelou in New Scientist. The study conducted at King’s College, London found that antidepressants such as sertraline work by acting on glucocorticoide receptors. However, they activate the receptor in a different way than glucocorticoide hormones.

Hayley Crawford in the New Scientist introduces the world’s first  computerized map of the human brain. This novel Human Brain Atlas developed by the Allen Institute for Brain Research in Seattle (Wash.) is an interactive tool scientists can use to search for data, e.g. all known locations in the brain where targets of a certain drug are expressed.

In Forbes, Parmy Olson reports on Seedcamp, a concept developed in 2007 by Index Ventures partners Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni. Seedcamps are conferences in which start-ups present their business ideas and have the opportunity to sell a 8-10% equity stake in return for 50,000 Euros and a year-long support program. The conferences are held throughout Europe, but also in India, Singapore and South Africa. The program at present support 38 start-ups and is now expanding to the US.

The Economist reports on Asthmapolis, a US-based company, and its Spiroscout inhaler that comes with a built-in Global Positioning System locator and a wireless link to the internet. Whenever someone uses the inhaler, it broadcasts the location and time to a central computer. Asthmapolis plots and analyses the data, and sends weekly reports to participating patients and their doctors summarizing the observations and making recommendations.  The device allows to identify threats patients are unaware of and helps doctors identify those patients whose asthma is not under proper control.

Roni Caryn Rabin in The New York Times reports on a recent study in more than 800 elderly people. Researchers observed  that older people suffering from mild memory and cognition problems seem to be less likely to develop full-blown Alzheimer’s disease if they receive proper treatment for conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol.

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

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 Spiegel features 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.”