Arizona Bioscientist

New URL for the Arizona Bioscientist

2009-02-17T09:08:00.002-07:00

The Arizona Bioscientist URL has been moved the the Flinn Foundation's home page.

Please access news and information about Aizona's Research in the Biosceinces at:

Bio Briefs (Research): www.flinn.org/bio-briefs/topic/Research

Arizona's TGen joins with Michigan's Van Andel Research Institute in alliance promoting worldwide science and health

2009-02-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

[Source: TGen] - The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and the Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) will forge a strategic alliance that will enable both to maximize their worldwide contributions to science and health.

The non-profit researcher institutes jointly announced today the initiation of an "alliance and affiliation agreement."

The partnership between Phoenix, Ariz.-based TGen and Grand Rapids, Mich.-based VARI will enable both institutes to speed up their mutual goals of moving research discoveries about cancer and other debilitating medical conditions as quickly as possible from laboratories to patient care.

"Combining many of the scientific, educational, financial and business potentials of TGen and VARI will advance the research of both institutions and enhance the economic development of both Arizona and Western Michigan," said Dr. Jeffrey Trent, President and Scientific Director of TGen since its founding in 2002.

"This alliance will elevate both organizations in the world of scientific research," said Dr. Trent, who will retain his roles at TGen, but upon implementation of the agreement also will become President and Research Director of VARI.

VARI is the research arm of the Van Andel Institute (VAI), established in 1996 as a philanthropic research and educational organization by the late Jay and Betty Van Andel.
"We are excited to welcome Dr. Trent and TGen as they combine forces with us in our mission to conquer cancer and human disease," said VAI Chairman and CEO David Van Andel. "This alliance demonstrates that VARI and TGen are at the forefront of redefining a borderless, collaborative, national and international scientific community that transcends geographical limitations."

The alliance combines the groundbreaking basic research expertise of VARI with the cutting-edge translational genomics and analysis of TGen.

Dr. Trent will replace Dr. George Vande Woude, who in 1998 was appointed the founding Director of VARI.

"The search for a new director has ended with the best possible results - a renowned, research director in Dr. Trent, who will now lead VARI, and an alliance that strengthens two of the nation's fast-emerging leaders in biomedical research," David Van Andel said.

Dr. Vande Woude, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, will remain at VARI as head of the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology. Dr. Vande Woude, who held top-level administrative posts at the National Cancer Institute since the early 1980's, will be able to achieve a long-held desire to return to the lab full-time.

"This is a great moment for both Institutions. I have known Dr.Trent professionally for nearly 20 years and have always admired him as one of the nation's leading scientists. One of Dr. Trent's greatest attributes is bringing together researchers from many disciplines to work on problems that will improve human health," Dr. Vande Woude said.

TGen is dedicated to conducting groundbreaking research with life changing results. Research at TGen is focused on helping patients with diseases such as cancer, neurological disorders, diabetes and infectious diseases. TGen is on the cutting edge of translational research, in which investigators unravel the genetic basis of complex diseases and medical conditions.

VARI opened its facility in 2000. Its 18 research laboratories are primarily dedicated to molecular cancer research, but it also focuses on conditions such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease, osteoporosis, and heart disease. VARI will open a 240,000 square-foot building expansion this fall, which will allow it to broaden its efforts to include additional neurological disorders and chronic illnesses. VARI's primary work has been in basic research - looking for what occurs to cause disease in individual cells, and using that information to identify "biomarkers" that can help predict and diagnose diseases, and lead to the development of safer, more effective drugs.

"VARI is on the verge of expanding its already strong basic research programs and implementing further translational research," said Dr. Daniel Von Hoff, TGen's Physician-In-Chief and a world-renowned cancer scientist.

"TGen is poised to translate the discoveries generated in laboratories from both organizations into real solutions for patients," said Dr. Von Hoff, who also is Chief Scientific Officer of TGen Clinical Research Services at Scottsdale Healthcare. "This is a terrific opportunity to work together and increase our chances of making a difference for our patients."

Both TGen and VARI are relatively young organizations that have triggered regional growth of the life sciences and biomedical industries in Arizona and Western Michigan.

Both organizations have a strong focus on cancer, collaborations and expansion locally, nationally and internationally.

The "alliance and affiliation agreement" is expected to become effective July 1, 2009.

RECOMB: The 13th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology May 17-21

2009-02-05T11:08:00.001-07:00

Registration is now open for the RECOMB 2009, the 13th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology. The conference is hosted by the BIO5 Institute and will be held in Tucson. Keynote presenters scheduled to date include: Carlos Bustamante, Cornell University; Eran Halperin, Navigenics; Michael Hammer, The University of Arizona; Joanna Mountain, 23andMe; Stephen Quake, Stanford University; Pardis Sabeti, Harvard University; and Michael Snyder, Yale University. RECOMB is a well-established scientific conference bridging the computational, mathematical, and biological sciences. More information: http://www.bio5.org/recomb2009/

Arizona Board of Regents approves new cancer prevention company

2009-02-05T11:05:00.001-07:00

The Arizona Board of Regents gave approval for a UA researcher to take on part ownership of the new Tucson company Cancer Prevention Pharmaceuticals (CPP). CPP's work may one day help prevent colon cancer in those at high risk for the disease. UA Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy Eugene Gerner will run CPP with his colleague Frank L. Meyskens, Jr., Professor of Medicine and Director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California in Irvine. Gerner is a member of UA's BIO5 Institute and the Arizona Cancer Center. (Read More)

Renowned researcher Dr. Fernando Martinez to lead UA’s BIO5 Institute

2009-02-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

One of the most highly regarded researchers worldwide in childhood lung diseases, Fernando Martinez, has accepted the position of interim director for the BIO5 Institute at The University of Arizona (UA) beginning February 9, 2009. Dr. Martinez is the Swift-McNear Professor of Pediatrics, the director of the UA College of Medicine's Arizona Respiratory Center, and a long time BIO5 faculty member. (Read More)

Atrium Innovations acquires Arizona-based Nutri-Health Supplements

2009-01-06T09:07:00.001-07:00

[Source: StockHouse.com] - Quebec-based Atrium Innovations (TSX: T.ATB, Stock Forum) announced Monday morning that it has acquired Nutri-Health Supplements, LLC of Arizona.

Atrium acquired NHS for a first consideration of US$23.9 million, with additional earn-out payments structured based on NHS' 2009 and 2010 EBITDA growth, says the company.
NHS owns proprietary Multi-Probiotic blends which include 16 probiotic strains that are “matrix encapsulated to survive stomach acid and deliver a high concentration of active cell cultures per capsule,” says Atrium.

"Buying Nutri-Health marks our first acquisition into the DTC segment with a company aligned with our values and objectives. NHS allows us to acquire complementary expertise in this market segment in which we had a limited business presence until now. This opens the door to promising, synergistic development opportunities within Atrium," said Pierre Fitzgibbon, president and chief executive officer of Atrium.

Atrium develops, manufactures and markets products for the health and nutrition industries. NHS markets, via multi-channel distribution, specialty niche products endorsed by health professionals.

Breast Cancer: Diet High In Vegetables, Fruit And Fiber May Cut Risk Of Cancer Recurrence In Women Without Hot Flashes

2009-01-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily ] - A secondary analysis of a large, multicenter clinical trial has shown that a diet loaded with fruits, vegetables and fiber and somewhat lower in fat compared to standard federal dietary recommendations cuts the risk of recurrence in a subgroup of early-stage breast cancer survivors – women who didn't have hot flashes – by approximately 31 percent. These patients typically have higher recurrence and lower survival rates than breast cancer patients who have hot flashes.

The study team, led by researchers at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, along with six other sites, including the University of California, Davis, reported its results online December 15, 2008, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The results come on the heels of a report last year on the findings of the original study, the Women's Healthy Eating and Living Trial (WHEL), which compared the effects of the two diets on cancer recurrence in more than 3,000 early-stage breast cancer survivors. That study showed no overall difference in recurrence among the two diet groups.

"Women with early stage breast cancer who have hot flashes have better survival and lower recurrence rates than women who don't have hot flashes," said Ellen B. Gold, Ph.D., professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences and first author of the study. "Our results suggest that a major change in diet may help overcome the difference in prognosis between women with and without hot flashes."

"Our interest in looking at this subgroup came because hot flashes are associated with lower circulating estrogen levels, while the absence of hot flashes is associated with higher estrogen levels. Reducing the effect of estrogen is a major treatment strategy in breast cancer," said the WHEL study principal investigator John P. Pierce, Ph.D., Sam M. Walton Professor for Cancer Prevention and director of Cancer Prevention and Control at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Moores UCSD Cancer Center. "It appears that a dietary pattern high in fruits, vegetables and fiber, which has been shown to reduce circulating estrogen levels, may only be important among women with circulating estrogen levels above a certain threshold."

About 30 percent of the original group of 3,088 breast cancer survivors did not report hot flashes at study entry. The women had been randomly assigned to one of the two diets between 1995 and 2000 and were followed until 2006. About one-half (447) of the "no hot flashes" group were randomized to the special, "intervention" high-vegetable fruit diet while the other half (453) was given the generally recommended diet of five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. The team found that those on the intervention diet had a significantly lower rate of a second breast cancer event (16.1 percent) compared to those eating the government-recommended five-a-day dietary pattern (23.6 percent).

The dietary effect was even larger (a 47 percent lower risk) in women who had been through menopause.

According to Pierce, another possible mechanism has been proposed recently for why this diet may have affected only 30 percent of the WHEL study population. Women with estrogen receptor-positive cancers usually receive hormone therapy (tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors) aimed at combating the effect of circulating estrogen. However, more than 30 percent of these women appear to have a gene-drug interaction that prevents them from getting an effective dose of this therapy.

"This hypothesis says that if the endocrine therapy is working, no further reduction in estrogen levels would be needed," said Pierce. "If your genes are preventing you from getting a therapeutic dose, then following this rigorous dietary pattern may reduce estrogen levels enough to reduce risk." Because this is speculation, he said, the research team will be using biological samples collected throughout the study to further investigate the mechanisms behind the study diet's protective effects.

Other co-authors include: Cheryl Rock, Ph.D., Barbara Parker, M.D., Lisa Madlensky, Ph.D., Loki Natarajan, Ph.D., Linda Wasserman, M.D., Vicky Jones, M.D., Gail Laughlin, Ph.D., Nazmus Saquib M.D., Ph.D., Sheila Kealey MPH, Shirley Flatt, Jennifer Emond and Minya Pu, UCSD; Joanne Mortimer, M.D., City of Hope; Marcia Stefanek, Ph.D., Stanford University; Bette Caan, Dr.P.H, Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, Cynthia Thomson, Ph.D., University of Arizona, Njeri Karanja, Ph.D., Kaiser Permanente, Portland, OR; Richard Hajek, Ph.D., M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The Gold Standard: Nanoparticles Used To Make 3-D DNA Nanotubes

2009-01-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily ] - Arizona State University researchers Hao Yan and Yan Liu imagine and assemble intricate structures on a scale almost unfathomably small. Their medium is the double-helical DNA molecule, a versatile building material offering near limitless construction potential.

In the January 2, 2009 issue of Science, Yan and Liu, researchers at ASU's Biodesign Institute and faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, reveal for the first time the three-dimensional character of DNA nanotubules, rings and spirals, each a few hundred thousandths the diameter of a human hair. These DNA nanotubes and other synthetic nanostructures may soon find their way into a new generation of ultra-tiny electronic and biomedical innovations.

Yan and Liu are working in the rapidly proliferating field of structural DNA nanotechnology. By copying a page from nature's guidebook, they capitalize on the DNA molecule's remarkable properties of self-assembly. When ribbonlike strands of the molecule are brought together, they fasten to each other like strips of Velcro, according to simple rules governing the pairing of their four chemical bases, (labeled A, C, T and G). From this meager alphabet, nature has wrung a mind-bending multiplicity of forms. DNA accomplishes this through the cellular synthesis of structural proteins, coded for by specific sequences of the bases. Such proteins are fundamental constituents of living matter, forming cell walls, vessels, tissues and organs. But DNA itself can also form stable architectural structures, and may be artificially cajoled into doing so.

In his research, Yan has been much inspired by nanoscale ingenuity in the natural world: "Unicellular creatures like oceanic diatoms," he points out, "contain self-assembled protein architectures." These diverse forms of enormous delicacy and organismic practicality are frequently the result of the orchestrated self-assembly of both organic and inorganic material.
Scientists in the field of structural DNA nanotechnology, including Dr. Yan's team, have previously demonstrated that pre-fab DNA elements could be induced to self-assemble, forming useful nanostructural platforms or "tiles." Such tiles are able to snap together—with jigsaw puzzle-piece specificity—through base pairing, forming larger arrays.

Yan and Liu's work in Science responds to one of the fundamental challenges in nanotechnology and materials science, the construction of molecular-level forms in three dimensions. To do so, the team uses gold nanoparticles, which can be placed on single-stranded DNA, compelling these flexible molecular tile arrays to bend away from the nanoparticles, curling into closed loops or forming spring-like spirals or nested rings, roughly 30 to 180 nanometers in diameter.

The gold nanoparticles, which coerce DNA strands to arc back on themselves, produce a force known as "steric hindrance," whose magnitude depends on the size of particle used. Using this steric hindrance, Yan and Liu have shown for the first time that DNA nanotubules can be specifically directed to curl into closed rings with high yield.

When 5 nanometer gold particles were used, a milder steric hindrance directed the DNA tiles to curl up and join complementary neighboring segments, often forming spirals of varying diameter in addition to closed rings. A 10 nanometer gold particle however, exerted greater steric hindrance, directing a more tightly constrained curling which, produced mostly closed tubules. Yan stresses that the particle not only participates in the self-assembly process as the directed material, but also as an active agent, inducing and guiding formation of the nanotube.

With the assistance of Anchi Cheng and Jonanthan Brownell at the Scripps Research Institute, they have used an imaging technique known as electron cryotomography to provide the first glimpses of the elusive 3-D architecture of DNA nanotubules. "You quickly freeze the sample in vitreous ice," he explains, describing the process. "This will preserve the native conformation of the structure." Subsequent imaging at various tilted angles allows the reconstruction of the three-dimensional nanostructure, with the gold particles providing enough electron density for crisp visualization.

DNA nanotubules will soon be ready to join their carbon nanotube cousins, providing flexible, resilient and manipulatable structures at the molecular level. Extending control over 3-D architectures will lay the foundation for future applications in photometry, photovoltaics, touch screen and flexible displays, as well as for far-reaching biomedical advancements.

"The ability to build three-dimensional structures through self-assembly is really exciting, " Yan says. "It's massively parallel. You can simultaneously produce millions or trillions of copies."
Yan and Liu believe that controlled tubular nanostructures bearing nanoparticles may be applied to the design of electrical channels for cell-cell communication or used in the construction of various nanoelectrical devices.

Arizona Health Query Uses SAS® to Create a Unique Community Health Data System

2009-01-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

[Source: Business Wire] - A model collaboration between academia and the healthcare community is benefiting Arizona communities and citizens, thanks to advanced analytics software from business analytics leader SAS. The Arizona Health Query database (AZHQ) is using SAS® software to integrate and analyze millions of anonymized healthcare records. Analyzing data over time and across health systems, researchers identify specific community health needs, inform public policy and, ultimately, lower costs.

Created by Arizona State University’s Center for Health Information and Research (CHiR), AZHQ consolidates health information from dozens of healthcare organizations in Arizona to form a community health data system. Previously, patient data was spread across different healthcare providers, which hindered effective research of community health issues. With more than 40 data partners, including the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) – the state’s Medicaid system – that is no longer an issue.

“With the participation of many public and private healthcare data partners, we’re able to apply SAS data integration and analytics capabilities to track patients over time and location, and identify trends and patterns in healthcare within and across communities,” said Wade Bannister, creator of the AZHQ database and Associate Director for CHiR.

Researchers have also used AZHQ to analyze health disparities in Hispanic and non-Hispanic children, the evolution of Valley fever, asthma patterns in Arizona, and the efficacy of hospitals in serving the needy. It has also been used to conduct community health assessments.

A good example of how AZHQ is affecting community health is the program’s study of MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a staph infection that is resistant to antibiotics. By tracking the disease’s spread by zip code, researchers were able to postulate how and why it was spreading.

Since its inception, AZHQ has consolidated data on 9 million people and 200 million healthcare encounters, pulling data from more than 60 healthcare delivery institutions, including hospitals, insurers and employers. Patient privacy is paramount; AZHQ complies with HIPAA regulations and is regularly audited to ensure continuing compliance. AZHQ received the university’s President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness in 2005 and 2008.

SAS predictive analytics present an opportunity for cost savings, according to William Johnson, who founded AZHQ and directs CHiR. Using SAS, he and fellow researchers analyzed AHCCCS data to develop a model that predicts risk associated with future high-cost Medicaid users.
“By assessing risk factors and predicting costs of patient care years in advance, steps can be taken to alleviate costs through intervention and more informed budget decisions,” said Johnson.

“The breadth of data in the system makes it unique in the US,” said Johnson. “With the advanced research capabilities we have, we’re confident our partnership with the community impacts Arizona healthcare in a very positive way.”

Blind man "sees," cruising through obstacle course without a hitch

2009-01-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

[Source Scientific American, Coco Ballantyne ] - A man left totally blind by a massive stroke navigated a complex maze of boxes, chairs and other objects without stumbling or colliding into any of the obstacles.

Brain scans showed that after suffering two consecutive strokes, the man, 56, lost all function in his visual cortex, the brain's primary vision-processing center. But despite the loss, an international research team (from the U.S. and five other countries) reports in the journal Current Biology that "he could successfully navigate down the extent of a long corridor in which various barriers were placed."

Neuroscientists call this ability blindsight. People with blindsight, "usually tell you that they cannot see a thing…. They cannot consciously see but they have some type of awareness," says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. For instance, she notes, they will correctly guess the number on flashcards more than 50 percent of the time even though their eyesight is shot.

In a person with normal vision, information is passed from the retina (light sensitive area at the back of the eyes) to the visual cortex (the brain's vision center), which relays it to other brain processing areas such as the posterior parietal cortex. In this man's case, the retinas worked perfectly well, but the information highway to the brain was blocked at the visual cortex.

This means that the man must have been using alternative pathways (that bypassed the visual cortex) to connect to the other brain processing regions, Martinez-Conde says, noting that most people likely have these alternate routes but don't rely on them because the dominant visual cortex pathway functions properly.

This study is not the first to document blightsightness, but it is first to describe the phenomenon in a patient who had suffered destruction of the visual cortex in both hemispheres of the brain, according to Nature News.

Over the past several years, scientists have identified brain circuits that may serve as alternative routes, but have yet to pinpoint which ones enable blindsightness, and exactly how they function. But Martinez-Conde says that a combo of electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain over time, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows blood flow to areas of the brain that are active, may shed light on these circuits.

8 ASU faculty elected as AAAS Fellows

2008-12-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

[Source ASU, Skip Derra] - Eight Arizona State University faculty members are among the 486 newly elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a prestigious international scientific society. AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society.

Brad Allenby, Richard Creath, James Elser, Patricia Gober, Nancy Grimm, Sudhir Kumar, Thomas Moore and John Spence will be recognized Feb. 14 at the Fellows forum, during the 2009 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago.

This year's election brings the total number of AAAS Fellows at Arizona State University to 54.
Becoming a Fellow is in recognition of efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Within that general framework, each awardee is honored for contributions to a specific field.

Braden Allenby is cited by the AAAS for "distinguished contributions to earth systems engineering and management, design for environment, industrial ecology and science and technology policy." He is a professor in ASU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, as well as a professor of law and of engineering and ethics with the Joan and David Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Recognized as a pioneer of modern industrial ecology, Allenby is co-director of the Center for Sustainable Engineering and is helping establish a new Center of Earth Systems Engineering and Management. He recently was named as one of the U.S. Professors of the Year for 2008 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Higher Education.

Richard Creath is cited by AAAS for "achievements in archiving and interpreting key documents in the historical development of scientific philosophy and demonstrating their relevance to current problems." Creath, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, is a philosopher of science and epistemologist who uses historical methods to illuminate fundamental questions about the nature of scientific reasoning and knowledge. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on philosophers Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. Quine. As general editor of the multi-volume Carnap Project, he leads an international team of two dozen leading researchers.

James Elser is cited by AAAS for "pioneering work in developing the theories of ecological and biological stoichiometry to integrate levels of biology from the genome to the biosphere and thereby improve our management of renewable resources." Elser, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, has built a career asking questions about evolutionary biology and energy and material flows in ecosystems, traveling from Antarctica to alpine lakes of Norway and Colorado to the Mongolian grasslands of China, to find answers. Understanding the balance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in systems forms the backbone of Elser's worldview, known as "stoichiometric theory." He has taught more than 10,000 students and his pioneering studies have shaped young minds and jumpstarted new research approaches, as well as provided insights into nutrient limitation, trophic dynamics, and biogeochemical cycling, evolution and integrated levels of organization from molecules to cells to ecosystems.

Patricia Gober, a human geographer and demographer, is co-director of the National Science Foundation's Decision Center for a Desert City, part of ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, and a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences. A former president of the Association of American Geographers, Gober's research focuses on the use of science and visualization for real-world decision-making, particularly in tackling the difficult water management decisions necessary in the face of growing climatic uncertainty in metropolitan Phoenix. Gober is cited by AAAS for her "outstanding record of scholarship and disciplinary leadership" and because she "clearly established herself as a leader within the discipline and has left a permanent mark within American geography."

Nancy Grimm is cited by AAAS for "pioneering studies of urban social-ecological systems that conceptually expand urban resource management, and for innovative contributions in stream ecology and biogeochemistry that have stimulated decades of research." Grimm, a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences, has for the past 10 years led the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project. CAP-LTER is centered on the analysis of urban-semi-arid ecosystem relationships. Through her collaborative work, Grimm has established a conceptual basis for including human choice and action in theory of urban ecosystem dynamics. The work on biogeochemistry, species distribution and abundance, and designed aquatic ecosystems in cities has revealed that many ecological features are best explained by combinations of social and biophysical drivers.

Sudhir Kumar directs the Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics in ASU's Biodesign Institute and is a professor of biology in the School of Life Sciences. He is cited by AAAS for "exemplary contributions in evolutionary bioinformatics, particularly in developing high-impact comparative analysis software for biologists and in illuminating the evolutionary dynamics of mutations and species through comparative genomics." Among his pioneering efforts was the software analysis of gene expression patterns from early gene expression patterns of fruit fly development, advanced work using protein molecular clocks to illuminate the Evolutionary Timescale of Life and the Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software package that makes useful methods of comparative sequence analysis easily accessible to the scientific community for research and education. Kumar also has received an Innovation Award in Functional Genomics from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2000.

Thomas Moore, a biochemist, is cited by AAAS for "pioneering research in artificial photosynthesis including the design of artificial reaction centers, antenna and assembling an energy-converting artificial photosynthetic membrane." Moore is a professor in ASU's chemistry and biochemistry department and director of the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis. Most recently, he served on the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Grand Challenges Committee, which produced "Directing Matter and Energy: Five Challenges for Science and the Imagination," outlining research priorities for the foreseeable future. Moore and colleagues collaborate on research in artificial photosynthesis, which is aimed at providing a deeper understanding of natural photosynthesis and the design, synthesis and assembly of bio-inspired constructs capable of sustainable energy production and conversion for human use.

John C.H. Spence is a Regents Professor in ASU's Department of Physics. He was cited by the AAAS for "distinguished contributions to diffraction physics, especially atomic-resolution electron microscopy, electron diffraction studies of the chemical bond and diffractive (lens-less) x-ray imaging." Spence undertakes experiments in condensed matter physics based around the use of electron beams for imaging, spectroscopy and diffraction. The work requires Spence's group to build or modify advanced instruments in order to do their experiments. Spence is currently working with others to get femtosecond "snapshots" of individual proteins using the first hard x-ray laser facility in the U.S., which will begin operation next year.

UA losing major bioscience researcher

2008-12-23T10:14:00.001-07:00

[Source: Aaron Mackey, ARizona Daily Star] - The leader of the UA's top research institute — whom colleagues hail as a key architect of the region's burgeoning bioscience industry — is leaving to head a San Francisco-based non-profit's scientific endeavors, the university announced Monday.

Vicki Chandler, director of the University of Arizona's Bio5 Institute, played a critical role in establishing the collaborative research center, which has brought tens of millions of grant dollars to the UA, including a $50 million award thought to be the largest grant in Arizona history.
The second high-profile professor with ties to Bio5 to leave the UA this year, Chandler will become chief program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's science efforts in February.

In July, Bio5 founder Thomas Baldwin left the UA to become dean of UC-Riverside's College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. Baldwin founded the program, which at the time was known as the Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology, in 2001.

Besides being one of the UA's premier scientists, Chandler has become a regional ambassador for bioscience research, lobbying for state money to build research facilities while striving to tell the public about the importance of the work.

"She had a vision for Bio5 that was about much more than just scientific research," said Leslie Tolbert, the UA's vice president for research. "She has an enthusiasm for outreach and the role a university can play in community development."

Taking over Bio5 in 2002, Chandler led several efforts that culminated in the UA's landing a $50 million grant in January to establish the iPlant Collaborative, a research program aimed at unlocking the secrets of plant biology. That alone accounted for roughly 10 percent of the UA's overall $500 million research budget.

The project, co-led by Chandler, was seeded by state support in research funding and new buildings — both of which Chandler lobbied for, Tolbert said.

Chandler "has been a strong spokesperson with the Legislature and with private donors as well," Tolbert said. "She gets them to see that it isn't just about the institute in the abstract, but the people doing the science and getting results."

The Bio5 Institute is the UA's most prominent interdisciplinary research center, blending researchers from five fields —agriculture, medicine, pharmacy, basic science and engineering — with industry leaders to find solutions to common problems, such as disease.

The institute has been a pipeline for grants and also has proved successful at creating a number of spin-off companies that use technologies developed in UA laboratories.

Managing the complex relationships between business leaders and researchers, Chandler was integral in convincing several bioscience companies to either expand in or move to Tucson, said Joe Snell, president and CEO of Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc.

"Her leadership has been incredibly valuable in helping to position Tucson as the next bioscience hub," he said.

"I don't think we would be where we're at or where we're going without her efforts."

Chandler also has helped build interest in science among high school students and UA undergraduates. She holds summer programs that get high schoolers in laboratories with researchers and often touts how half the Bio5 researchers are undergrads.

She also has narrated the UA-produced PBS show "WaveLengths," which provides a 30-minute snapshot of some of the research produced on campus.

On top of that, Chandler maintains a full-time lab and conducts field research as a Regents Professor in both the plant science and molecular and cellular biology departments. She also holds the Weiler Endowed Chair for Excellence in Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Chandler, who has been at the UA since 1997, said she has mixed emotions about her new role.
"It's always exciting to take on a new challenge, but I poured my heart and soul into the University of Arizona and really care deeply for it," she said.

The move will take her back to her roots. She grew up in Northern California and studied at the University of California-Berkeley and UC-San Francisco while later working at Stanford after earning her Ph.D.

The foundation she is joining invests $300 million each year in projects, including science and environmental conservation research around San Francisco.

Even with her new job, Chandler will be in Tucson often. She plans to retain her endowed chair and conduct research as part of the iPlant Collaborative, a process she says will take up about 20 percent of her time.

"The university has been incredibly gracious to allow me to continue to research," she said. "By keeping my feet squarely planted in science, it will hopefully help me in my new position."

The UA will name an interim director of Bio5 early next year and plans to conduct a national search for a permanent replacement, Tolbert said.

Economic downturn hurts ASU nursing school

2008-12-22T09:33:00.001-07:00

[Source: Jahna Berry, The Arizona Republic] - Arizona State University's nursing school capped a historic and challenging year this week, honoring a record-breaking graduating class.

"It's been an unbelievable journey," graduate Gina Dioguardi, 24, said Wednesday as she helped fellow graduate Leticia Medina, 22, put on her cap and gown. The two were part of 276 graduates from ASU's College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation who were recognized at the Phoenix Convention Center.

Like any new degree-holder, the nurses are worried about jobs.

"Because of the economy, there aren't a lot of places that are hiring," Medina said.

Even though the state has a nursing shortage, some employers have a limited number of slots for entry-level nurses because they cost more to train, Medina added.

The economic downturn is also taking a toll on the school.

As the nursing school celebrated its 50th year, the college was one of several ASU divisions hurt by university-wide budget cuts.

Officials say enrollment will be cut from 80 students to 40 at ASU's Polytechnic campus this spring and by the same amount at the West campus next fall.

Enrollment at the downtown Phoenix campus will remain the same. ASU plans to cut enrollment because it expects to lose some state funding.

The nursing school has 1,800 students. The college is based in downtown Phoenix, but students can take nursing classes on several ASU campuses.

The nursing cuts would come at a time when Arizona is struggling with a nursing shortage.
Last year, the state had 681 registered nurses per 100,000 people, below the national average of 825 registered nurses per 100,000, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

UA provost suggests pay cuts

2008-12-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

[Source: AzCentral/AP] - When it comes to fixing budget shortfalls, some high earners at the University of Arizona should cut their pay.

That suggestion comes from one of the school's highest paid employees, University of Arizona Provost Meredith Hay, who earns more than $100,000 a year.

The number of employees making more than six figures at the UA has increased 45 percent since 2005 while costs of paying those workers jumped 53 percent, according to an Arizona Daily Star analysis.

Officials acknowledge there are more employees earning more than $100,000 in what they call the reality of the highly competitive academic market and a product of growth in programs such as the UA's medical school in Phoenix.

They add it's not as if those workers are getting raises at the expense of lower-paid staffers.
It costs the UA $76 million to pay 2,323 workers who earn less than $50,000 a year and account for nearly half of all state-paid employees.

It also costs about $71 million to pay the 568 employees making more than $100,000.
The idea to cut into UA employee earnings has gained steam as officials look at ways to offset what they expect to be a series of state cuts that could leave them $50 million in the red by next summer.

Cutting pay could pose potential long-term consequences that could affect the UA's ability to hire and retain employees.

"What does that do for our competitiveness? We're already below where we need to be," said Allison Vaillancourt, UA's vice president for human resources. "If we take another whack at employees, who will come to work for us? Will we be able to attract people in the future?"
Overall salary costs have increased by 18 percent since 2005, putting UA in line with other universities, she said.

Faculty members who get raises actually save the UA money in the long run because it's cheaper than advertising for an open position and training a new employee, university officials said.

"If they need lab equipment or special office space, we could be looking at several hundred thousand dollars," Vaillancourt said. "It doesn't make any sense for us to spend that money if we don't have to."

Telemedicine protects Arizona, its many regional communities

2008-12-19T11:19:00.001-07:00

[Source: Nogales International, Roger Conroy] - Centered in Phoenix and Tucson, a beneficial net covers Arizona communities from Ajo to Nogales to Yuma, the New Mexico communities of Bloomfield, Crownpoint, Gallup, Shiprock and Tohatchi and Utah’s Fort Duchesne and Salt Lake City.

The Arizona Telemedicine Network gives people in Santa Cruz County access to specialty care--that’s care beyond what is offered at Mariposa--applying the latest technology, said Mariposa Health Clinic CEO Jim Weldon. “Doctor (Ronald S.) Weinstein founded the program, and it’s very innovative--a national model.” Weinstein was the third guest speaker in the Mariposa Series on Thursday at Holiday Inn Express in Nogales.

The network gives local clinics access to information and specialties above the level normally available in Nogales, Mariposa chief of medicine Eladio Pereira said. Mariposa Clinic uses rheumatology, dermatology and gastroenterology services over the Telemedicine Network. “It’s incredible--speed, accuracy, consults right away. It’s very, very important.”

There are several cases each month that are aided by use of the network at Mariposa, Pereira said.

The network had it’s beginnings at Massachusetts General in 1968, Weinstein said. Telepathology, or remote diagnosis began in the 1980s. The concept is illustrated by the television shows “CSI,: and earlier, “Quincy, M.E.,” Weinstein said.

Arizona Sen. Robert Burns was instrumental in the establishment of the network, Weinstein said. “He’s now president of the Arizona state senate. He founded it. He came to us and asked us to do it.”

The network began at the Phoenix campus of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, where Weinstein is director of the program. It now includes 171 sites in 71 communities. “Doctor Pereira is the best director in those 71 communities,” Weinstein said. “He has been a supporter of Mariposa efforts in telemedicine since the beginning.”

24-hour access

The network gives 24/7 access to pathology (the study of disease) at the UA College of Medicine. “Telemedicine is a large program that provides services at a distance,” Weinstein said.

Nogales came on board through a grant from the Department of Agriculture. Originally, the program was designed for “end of the dirt road” clinics, Weinstein said. Mariposa was brought on to allow doctors in Phoenix and Tucson to travel to a remote site that was easily accessible to evaluate the network in the beginning.

The U of A created a unique network for Arizona. In 1996, there was a problem of broadband access in Arizona, and the U of A created the Telemedicine Network outside the Internet to meet its telecommunications needs, Weinstein said.

By 1998 there were 55 sites, including Nogales. Nogales was the first rural site, Weinstein said.

Communities served include remote Indian reservations and prisons in rural settings. The Department of Corrections facilities are placed in remote locations in Arizona. The Indian reservations saved $200,000 in costs over the last year. “The dollar savings in the Department of Corrections is enough to fund the entire program,” Weinstein said.

It is easier to use telemedicine for the prison system than to transport prisoners, and the prisoners like it better, Weinstein said.

Radiology is huge in the prison system, Weinstein said, but it is only one of the specialties that use the Telemedicine Network.

Real-time use

One example is doctors use real-time ultrasound to diagnose fetal problems. There are many applications, Weinstein said. They include tele-psychiatry, tele-dermatology, tele-cardiology, tele-ophthalmology, infectious disease diagnosis and family teleconferencing.

There are many times a patient is confined for long periods at a hospital and the family is in a remote community. The system allows families to continue interpersonal relations, which benefit the patient, Weinstein said.

Tele-pediatrics and tele-trauma, which began in Douglas, are also important, Weinstein said. “It provides a telepresence for trauma physicians. “It saves lives,” Weinstein said.

Broadband access promises more access for remote communities in the future, Weinstein said. “Many sites are now interoperable over the broadband network. Many of the communications issues are not minimized because of the availability of the Internet. That’s a real advance.”

Thus far, the network has handled more than 700,000 cases. More than 150 physicians from the college of medicine handle cases. “We have a long way to go,” Weinstein said. “The university still doesn’t have access to all the information to assist in all cases.”

That is due to the fragmented nature of the U.S. health-care system, Weinstein said. Some patient records may not be accessible through the network.

The latest advance is in digital mammography, Weinstein said. “The Navajo Nation wants to be first in telemedicine. They now have a 45-minute turn-around for digital mammography, where the follow up was only 50 percent, and entailed a long wait.”

Patients are often without communications on reservations, Weinstein explained. The network shortened a weeklong turnaround to allow patients to remain at the clinic to hear results.

Dramatic change

The change is dramatic. “It has altered the way physicians look at disease,” Weinstein said. It gives physicians the opportunity to communicate and to compare things.

Still, one of four to six visits should be in person, for most cases, Weinstein said. Some procedures can be completely remote, such as the digital mammography, with the on-site physician handling consultation.

The Mariposa Series of lectures is an opportunity to bring folks together for lunch and to hear about the latest developments in medical care from a well-respected speaker, Weldon said. The series began in 2007 and is held twice a year, said Norma Villasenor executive assistant to the CEO.

Firms hope their compounds will be tomorrow’s medicines

2008-12-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

[Source: Phoenix Business Journal, Angela Gonzales] - While only a handful of big pharmaceutical firms have a presence in Arizona, the Grand Canyon State is home to a plethora of smaller companies in the early stages of drug development.

The problem is, it’s getting more expensive and taking longer to get drugs to market, and most of the drugs being tested are failing long before they hit the shelves.

Only 16 new medicines were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2007 — one of the lowest totals in more than two decades, said Dr. Ray Woosley, president and CEO of the Tucson-based Critical Path Institute, which is working with big pharma and the FDA to get drugs to market quickly and safely.

As a result, the world’s pharmaceutical industry is turning its attention to biotech companies, hoping their compounds are tomorrow’s answer to today’s diseases.

Local biotech companies are positioning themselves to catch big pharma’s attention as they test their novel compounds in animal studies and early human trials. Many of them are counting on getting licensing agreements before their compounds reach the expensive phase three clinical trials.

For example, InNexus Biotechnology Inc. has a commitment from Ontario, Canada-based Royalty Pharma Inc. for $34.5 million in funding to help get its compounds through the early phases of human clinical trials. At that point, the goal is to hand the drugs off to the pharmaceutical industry, said Jeff Morhet, president and CEO of InNexus.

“Given this market, distinction is critical,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to show what you’ve been able to produce is going to provide value.”

John Carroll, editor of FierceBiotech, which tracks the industry nationwide, said it has been a seller’s market for quite some time, which has been good for biotech companies.

“I’ve seen some very sweet deals,” he said. “Pharma companies need these new therapies, and they haven’t done well coming up with new major drugs to replace the blockbusters that they’re losing off of patent.”

However, Carroll said the tide changed in October.

“It’s not a seller’s market anymore,” he said. “It’s more of a buyer’s market.”

Now, big pharma is in a position to swoop in and buy struggling biotech firms’ assets at a mark-down, he said.

“If you’re a little biotech company and got two years of operating capital, that’s OK,” he said. “It’s all a question of positioning right now.”

He’s seeing biotech companies laying off 25 percent to 40 percent of their work forces nationwide.

“Usually, if I had one biotech restructuring or laying off staff as a result of an FDA rejection or failure, that was not uncommon,” Carroll said. “Now, you’re just seeing a whole slate of different biotech companies laying off.”

2009 will be a ‘long, hard row’

Carroll said he doesn’t see any short-term prospects for a turnaround.

“We’re just getting into it,” he said. “2009 is going to be a long, hard row for a lot of people to hoe.”

Biotech companies that have two years of operating capital will be able to weather the storm, he said, but he doesn’t see many with that much capital.

Pharma doesn’t have to be so desperate anymore, according to Steven Burrill, president and CEO of San Francisco-based Burrill & Co., a financial firm that focuses on life sciences.

“They know biotechs will come and talk with them,” he said. “They can hang back and wait. They do have rapidly depleting pipelines, but they don’t have to be in as big a hurry and they may not have to pay as much.”

Michael Wilhelm, president and CEO of Scottsdale-based ImmuneRegen BioSciences Inc., said he hopes a large biotech or pharma will acquire or license his company’s drugs.

“Those conversations are happening more so than they were,” he said.

Spreading out the Risk

Large pharma companies have invested a lot of money in research and development, and they have not seen a commensurate increase in the number of drugs that have been approved, said Hal Siegel, chief scientific officer for ImmuneRegen.

“They’re looking to spread out the risk by partnering with small companies earlier in development so they can fund the research in a broad number of compounds that are still early-stage,” he said. “They’re hedging their bets, making larger investments in better compounds later on.”

Gail Thurston, vice president of corporate and business development for Apthera Inc. in Scottsdale, said the pharmaceutical companies have distribution networks set up to take new drugs to market — something Apthera and other small biotechs don’t have.

“We will provide the tools for a big pharma company to go out there and get the numbers that we projected for sale over the next decade or so,” she said. “Our patents are quite young. They won’t turn into generics any time soon anyway.”

She said she hopes Apthera’s compound will enter phase three clinical trials by the end of next year, with a global partner to co-develop its portfolio of cancer drugs.

“There are not a heck of a lot of companies like ours that have late-stage products that are available for licensing,” she said. “People are taking notice.”

Jeffrey Berk, president of Scottsdale-based MedPredict Market Research, said it’s crucial for biotech and pharmaceutical firms to trudge forward in their research efforts for new drugs and therapies.

He pointed to Novartis Pharma US’ 9-year-old drug, Gleevec, which treats chronic myeloid leukemia. Before the drug was invented, patients with that disease would live for about a year. With Gleevec, their life expectancy increases to eight to 10 years. About 4,500 Americans get the disease each year. Now, fewer than 400 die from it each year.

“You have to understand what pharma can deliver,” Berk said.

When Medicine Meets Marketing

2008-12-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

[Source: Newsweek, Mary Carmichael] - Dallas Hextell was just a baby when his parents bought him a walker—not because he was late reaching a milestone, but because they worried he might never toddle on his own. At 9 months he had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a form of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation in utero or at birth. A neurologist had told Derak and Cynthia Hextell there was no cure, that it was best to wait and see if their son improved. But Cynthia, after months of research, enrolled Dallas in a highly experimental trial at Duke University, where a pediatric-transplant surgeon infused him with a sample of his own stem cells harvested from his umbilical-cord blood. A few days later, Derak and Cynthia went home with their son, who was 18 months old and still not crawling, much less walking or talking. They "stared at him" for a week, says Cynthia. "One day he just started saying, 'Mama, mama, mama.' And I started crying." The Hextells ended up donating the walker to another child. By 2, Dallas was not only walking unaided, he was chasing the family dogs.

If the Hextells' names sound familiar to some readers, it is because, in the wake of their son's remarkable recovery, they have become minor celebrities. Their story has appeared on the "Today" show and in advertisements in almost every pregnancy magazine in the country. The ads are not for the trial at Duke, which remains a small, academic endeavor. They are for a company called Cord Blood Registry, which charges parents $2,000-plus to freeze and store samples of their children's umbilical-cord blood, a fluid rich in stem cells. Cynthia Hextell paid the company to freeze Dallas's cord blood at his birth. That sample was the source of the stem cells used in the Duke trial—and as the ads remind parents, it was available only because the Hextells had paid for it to be.

The Hextells' story has become the centerpiece of CBR's marketing efforts. Recently the company invited about 30 obstetricians and midwives to the Westin La Paloma resort in Tucson, Ariz., for a weekend of sun, golf and medical briefings, including dinner in a ballroom with the Hextells as guest speakers. Since these doctors had collected cord blood for CBR clients in the past, the company hoped to turn them into evangelists. The next day, the group went for a tour of CBR's glittering 60,000-square-foot lab. The agenda also included more time at the La Paloma, home to a Jack Nicklaus golf course, a spa, five restaurants and a swim-up bar. CBR can easily afford to put on this kind of show. Ten years ago it was a fledgling business with 10,000 clients. Today it is the country's largest private cord-blood bank, with 250,000 samples in storage, 300 employees and $100 million in annual revenue.

In medicine, money often comes with controversy—and right now, CBR has plenty of both. The company says it is providing precious biological insurance, that to freeze a child's cord-blood stem cells is to provide him a medical option for the future, perhaps a lifesaving treatment for childhood cancer or brain injuries. But critics, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, accuse private cord-blood banks like CBR of making exaggerated medical promises and exploiting vulnerable new parents. Cord blood's uses are limited at best, they say. The blood does not provide enough cells to cure an adult of a disease or injury; it is not appropriate for treating genetic conditions; and thus far there have been few trials to determine how effectively the cells can repair damaged tissue. Even Joanne Kurtzberg, the Duke transplant specialist who treated Dallas Hextell, is skeptical. She says it's difficult to know if his improvement is related to the cells or would have occurred without them—he probably would have gotten better on his own; some cerebral-palsy patients do—and she points out that her trial is small and yet to be analyzed and published. But CBR has a response for this. It says more uses for cord-blood stem cells will surely be discovered in the future. It also knows the power of a good story. David Zitlow, the company's senior vice president of public affairs, says doctors "haven't made a big enough deal about anecdotes" like the Hextells'.

So what are other parents, faced with the choice of banking their children's cord blood or brushing off the idea as a luxury—the medical equivalent of an $800 stroller—supposed to make of Dallas Hextell's case? Is it a breakthrough, a harbinger? Or is it ultimately just an anecdote, a moving tale with a happy outcome that may or may not have anything to do with cord blood and stem cells?

Doctors have been wondering if cord blood is something of a miracle cure for the past 15 years. The blood—which is usually thrown away in delivery rooms—contains a distinct type of stem cell that may act as a biochemical foreman, helping to build healthy tissues and repair damaged ones. In the early 1990s— before embryonic stem cells took over the spotlight—researchers began to explore whether cord-blood cells might be of practical medical use. At Duke, Kurtzberg performed a few cord-blood transplants on patients with leukemia and rare types of bone-marrow failure, sending them into remission. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health started funding public banks of frozen, donated cord-blood samples, modeled on adult blood banks. A cord-blood stem-cell transplant at that point was a long shot, an experiment to see if stem cells could either become new tissue or trick the body into fixing itself. But the idea behind the public banks was to make the option available to all families who might want to try it as a last resort.

It was around this time, in 1992, that Tom Moore, a technology and pharmaceutical executive with passion for startups, hatched a plan to found a cord-blood bank of his own. Unlike the NIH banks, this one would operate for profit. Its clients would retain exclusive access to their own genetically identical samples, for a fee of $1,500 up front plus $125 for each year of storage. One problem: Moore "didn't really know anything about stem cells except the name," he admits. So he sought out David Harris, a University of Arizona immunologist and cord-blood researcher, to serve as CBR's scientific director; meanwhile, as the CEO, he took care of the business side. Now it takes care of him. CBR is the largest of 30-some private cord-blood banks in the United States, with a 45 percent share of the $250 million market. It's probably not done growing yet. Moore's "big, hairy, audacious goal" is a million clients, quadruple the company's current size.

A number of trends have likely contributed to CBR's growth, including the enormous boom in the baby-products market and the hype around stem cells in general. But one thing that has not been a factor is a rapid rise in medical uses for cord blood—because there hasn't been one yet. Just as it was in the '90s, a cord-blood stem-cell transplant is still an experimental procedure. This hasn't deterred CBR from publicizing the results of a few positive studies, including a small, preliminary trial in kids with type 1 diabetes from last year.

In Dallas Hextell, CBR has another case to promote. In ads, the Hextells call the cord-blood treatment "a miracle." But nobody really knows what has happened in Dallas's brain. The story sounds less clear-cut coming from Kurtzberg, the doctor who performed the transfusion and who examined Dallas again in November. "He has made progress, there's no question," she says. "But he still has a global developmental delay of about a year. He looks like where we would have expected him to be without cells." When she saw him at his follow-up visit, she adds, "I thought, wow, he doesn't look as good as I was expecting based on what's been in the press." (The Hextells find Kurtzberg's assessment frustrating and note that Dallas's therapists at home—who knew him before the transfusion—are impressed and surprised at his improvement.) Kurtzberg also has not completed the follow-up and analysis of the study or published the results from 50 other kids with cerebral palsy who have enrolled in her trial thus far.

Kurtzberg, it turns out, is not a big booster for private cord-blood banks; although she uses samples from CBR, she does not receive funding from the company, and also uses cells from public banks and other companies. In fact, she's one of the authors of a statement the American Academy of Pediatrics put out last year discouraging parents from using private banks on the grounds that the science isn't solid enough yet to justify a multi-thousand-dollar gamble. (The AAP does support public, nonprofit banks, which patients can use for free.) The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released its own statement in February, noting that "there is no reliable estimate of a child's likelihood of actually using his or her own saved cord blood later." Then it made a guess anyway: 1 in 2,700, which Kurtzberg calls "generous."

Why is this number so small? There are reasons to think cord-blood treatment will never be a widespread medical procedure. The blood contains only enough stem cells to treat a small child; unlike embryonic stem cells, cord-blood cells cannot be multiplied into self-rejuvenating "lines" in a petri dish. The cells are limited in other ways, too. There's little point in treating a genetic condition with a patient's own cord-blood cells, which have the same DNA and thus the same deleterious mutations. Scientists could someday overcome these hurdles; they could develop new ways of cultivating and genetically tweaking cord-blood cells in the lab. But by then, the same scientists will probably know much more about all stem cells, especially once restrictions on embryonic research are lifted—and there may be better ways of getting safe, usable cells from other sources, ways that won't require a lot of technological wizardry.

These difficulties don't deter everyone, of course. The pediatrician Robert Sears, a talk-show regular and the coauthor of popular parenting books, supports private cord-blood banking; he froze his own kids' samples with CBR. It's also possible that 1 in 2,700 is too conservative. CBR's executives toss around much more dramatic odds. Harris, the scientific director, puts them at a breathtaking 1 in 3. His calculations, unlike the professional groups', include injuries to the brain. There is, he notes, "no genetic predisposition to falling out of a crib"—so as he sees it, every child, technically, is at risk.

Until widespread trials of cord-blood treatment take place, both sides will be able to use arbitrary calculations. Those trials, alas, are probably far off: rare conditions are difficult to study on a large scale, since by definition there aren't many patients to enroll. Three years ago, Congress tried to put cord-blood trials on a faster track by expanding funds for the NIH's public banks—more donations to the banks could mean more studies—but the law hasn't made much of an impact. Public banks have collected cord blood from just 105,000 babies, and fewer than 200 hospitals in the U.S. are able to draw and ship the blood to public centers. The private banks, of course, have larger stores. But they are not huge contributors to research either: only 100 of CBR's 250,000 clients have enrolled in trials thus far.

For now, parents are left to make the same speculative wager at the heart of CBR's business model: how much should you invest in science that's promising but not proven? Back in the ballroom in Tucson, the OBs and midwives on the CBR junket were considering that question too. They pressed Cynthia Hextell for more details. How were the other kids in the Kurtzberg trial doing? Cynthia said the few other families she had talked to had seen improvements like Dallas's. And what risks were they warned about? "The only risk was that it wouldn't work and we would be out the money," she said. "But we just knew in our hearts that it was going to work." Other parents will have to decide whether they have that kind of faith.

TGen, Scottsdale Healthcare, Mayo Clinic study starts for new drug that could bolster the immune systems of cancer victims

2008-12-19T11:13:00.001-07:00

[Source: TGen] - The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), Scottsdale Healthcare and Mayo Clinic are testing a new drug that could help cancer patients by stimulating the immune system.
Clinical trials of the drug VTX-2337 are being conducted at TGen Clinical Research Services at Scottsdale Healthcare, a partnership of Phoenix-based TGen and Scottsdale-based Scottsdale Healthcare Corp., and at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

Dr. Ramesh Ramanathan, Medical Director of TGen Clincal Research Services at Scottsdale Healthcare, said the new drug appears promising.

"VTX-2337 is a new, novel, small molecule aimed at stimulating the immune cells in the blood, lymph nodes, and in and around the tumor. It represents an exciting new class of agents for cancer therapy with good preclinical evidence of activity," Dr. Ramanathan said.

The Phase I trial, a yearlong first-in-humans test, will study the drug's safety. If successful, a Phase II trial will test the drug's effectiveness on tumors.

A weakened immune system is often the result of advanced cancer. The hope is that this new drug will actually help enable the immune system to slow down the growth of tumors, and perhaps even shrink them, Dr. Ramanathan said.

VTX-2337 is the first drug of its kind developed by San Diego-based VentiRx Pharmaceuticals Inc. The biopharmaceutical company is focused on the development of new Toll-Like Receptor 8 (TLR8) agonists, which are small molecules that prompt a response in the body's immune system. The drugs are intended to treat cancer, respiratory and autoimmune diseases.

"VentiRx is very excited to be working with TGen, Scottsdale Healthcare and Mayo Clinic on this important and novel program," said Michael Kamdar, Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer at VentiRx. "Entering Phase I clinical trials represents a significant milestone for VentiRx and our TLR efforts in that we have rapidly advanced into a clinical development company with a novel molecule that may play an important role and have broad application in the treatment of cancer."

VTX-2337 is a small molecule TLR8 agonist that is expected to be used in combination with standard of care for the treatment of patients with cancer. Preclinical evaluation of VTX-2337 suggests that it may play a key role in augmenting the innate arm of the immune system.

There are two broad components of the immune system, the innate arm, and the adaptive arm. Both generally aim to eliminate viruses and bacteria.

-- The innate arm senses infectious agents as they infect the body by recognizing structures they have in common, such as lipids, proteins, sugars, and nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). This is an initial rapid response, which is not precise but potent.
-- The adaptive arm of the immune system is instructed by the innate arm to devise more specific responses to unique components of the invading pathogens. This is a more precise response and takes longer, especially when an infectious agent is encountered for the first time.
The first clinical trial at TCRS at Scottsdale Healthcare will investigate the safety and pharmacology of multiple doses of VTX-2337 in patients with late-stage cancer. For more information about this clinical trial, please call Joyce Ingold, R.N., research patient care coordinator for Scottsdale Healthcare, at 480-323-1339.

The clinical trial coordinator for Mayo Clinic is Dianna Boughter, who can be reached at 480-301-9875.

"VTX-2337 is the first selective TLR8 compound to reach the clinic, and we are hopeful that modulation of the innate immune response will provide a benefit to patients in a number of oncology indications," said Dr. Robert Hershberg, Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at VentiRx.

Vit. E, selenium don't cut risk of prostate cancer, big study finds

2008-12-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

[Source: Arizona Daily Star, Evan Pellegrino] - Two natural supplements that have been promoted as possibly helping prevent prostate cancer actually have no effect, according to a national study that included University of Arizona researchers at the Arizona Cancer Center.

According to the study, vitamin E and selenium supplements do not aid in preventing prostate cancer, the most common cancer in American men other than skin cancers.

The study examined the effects of both supplements in more than 35,000 men nationally, including several hundred in Tucson. It was the largest trial ever on prostate-cancer prevention, according to officials at the Arizona Cancer Center. The study included the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System.

Called SELECT (the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial), the study was funded by the National Cancer Institute and coordinated through the Southwest Oncology Group.

"A large trial like SELECT is the only way to determine for certain the real value of supplements," said Frederick Ahmann, professor of medicine and director of the Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program at the Arizona Cancer Center, in a news release.

"Using science to study and determine whether there is value to taking a specific substance for health or disease prevention is vital, telling us what is helpful, what is harmful and what is not useful to take."

Millions of Americans take dietary supplements such as vitamins, minerals and herbs with the thought that they can help prevent or cure illnesses and ailments.

The Food and Drug Administration considers supplements foods, not drugs, so they don't need to be approved by the FDA before going on the market.

The SELECT study on vitamin E and the trace mineral selenium was based on previous research on other cancers that suggested the supplements might reduce the risk of prostate cancer.

In 1998, a study of 29,133 male smokers in Finland who took vitamin E to prevent lung cancer showed 32 percent fewer prostate cancers. In 1996, a study of 1,312 men and women with skin cancer who took selenium showed that men who took the supplement had 52 percent fewer prostate cancers than those who did not take it, according a National Cancer Institute news release.

Based on these and other earlier findings, men age 50 and older were recruited to participate in SELECT earlier this decade. The men were randomly chosen and grouped to take one of four combinations of supplements or placebos. One group took selenium and vitamin E; one took selenium and a vitamin E placebo; one took vitamin E and a selenium placebo; and the final group received placebos of both supplements.

It was a blinded study — neither the men nor their physicians knew who was taking supplements.

Now, five years after the trial phase of SELECT began, an initial, independent analysis of the study data determined that taking vitamin E and selenium together or alone didn't prevent prostate cancer.

The study actually showed very small increases in the number of cases of prostate cancer in men taking only vitamin E as well as diabetes in men taking only selenium, but researchers dismissed the increase as statistically insignificant.

Participants in the study are being told to stop taking their supplements; however, they will continue to have their health monitored.

Researchers intend to follow the participants for about three years to determine the long-term effects of having taken the supplements.

"As we continue to monitor the health of these 35,000 men, this information may help us understand why two nutrients that showed strong initial evidence to be able to prevent prostate cancer did not do so," said Eric Klein, a study co-chair for SELECT and a physician at the Cleveland Clinic, in the national news release.

The $114 million study was funded by the National Cancer Institute, with additional support from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

UA Vice President Dr. William Crist to Lecture on Childhood Cancer

2008-12-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

[Source: East Valley Living] - Conquering Childhood Cancer: A Paradigm for Translational Research; Lecture to be Held Wednesday January 14, 2009 at Virginia G. Piper Auditorium

PHOENIX - The advances in treatment of childhood cancer in the last generation have been nothing less than life-changing, says William M. Crist, MD, the new vice president for health affairs for The University of Arizona.

The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix in partnership with Arizona State University and the Flinn Foundation will host Dr. Crist, who will talk about his experience in a presentation titled, “Conquering Childhood Cancer: A Paradigm for Translational Research,” on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009, 5:30 p.m., in the Virginia G. Piper Auditorium, 550 E. Van Buren, in downtown Phoenix. The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking in the College of Medicine lot, with entrance on Seventh Street, also is free. (Dr. Crist also will speak in Tucson on Thursday, Jan. 15, 5 p.m., at DuVal Auditorium at University Medical Center, 1501 N. Campbell Ave.)

Dr. Crist is among the scientists credited with dramatically improving our understanding of childhood leukemias and their treatments. He spent much of his career from the 1970s through the 1990s in the field of pediatric hematology and oncology first at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, the University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Memphis, and St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis before becoming chairman of pediatric and adolescent medicine at Mayo Medical Center in Rochester, Minn. Dr. Crist had been serving as dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri before being named UA vice president for health affairs last summer. He began his new duties Oct. 31.

The Donald K. Buffmire Visiting Lectureship in Medicine, begun in 1997, continues the Flinn Foundation’s commitment to bringing to Arizona leading practitioners and thinkers in the medical field. The lectureship aims to offer to physicians, students and community members opportunities to hear from distinguished leaders in the field of medicine and medical education. In 2008, the annual lecture was expanded to a biannual basis and includes presentations in both Phoenix and Tucson.

The lectureship is named for late Donald K. Buffmire, MD, in recognition of his distinguished career as a medical practitioner in Arizona and his leadership role with the Flinn Foundation in supporting the College of Medicine. Dr. Buffmire, who died this year, served as a board director from 1965-99, including 15 years as president and chairman.

The Phoenix-based Flinn Foundation is a privately endowed organization that awards grants to nonprofit organizations in Arizona, primarily to improve the competitiveness of the state’s biomedical-research enterprise.

The UA College of Medicine is the only MD degree-granting college in Arizona. Beginning in 1967 with a class of 32 students on its Tucson campus, the college today encompasses full, four-year medical-education programs in Tucson and since 2007, in Phoenix.

Tissue samples collect, store and analyze

2008-12-18T12:09:00.001-07:00

[Source: Luxemburger Wort (via Google Translate)] - (fh) - About 200 biobanks exist in Europe. The new Integrated biobank of Luxembourg (IBBL), which yesterday the press was presented, differs in two respects from other tissue banks: in addition to the collection and storage of biological samples (tissue, tumors, blood, urine, saliva ...) leads the IBBL also analyzes and stores this addition is a national project, which represents an independent unit. The samples or data of research made available. The IBBL is part of the biotechnology project in the field of molecular medicine, the 140 million euros over five years will cost and also the creation of a Center for Systems Biology and the implementation of a cancer research project covers. The goal of the biotech project is among other things, one day, drugs and therapies targeted to be able to treat patients more efficiently and reduce costs. Founded as the IBBL by CRPs Santé, Henri Tudor and Gabriel Lippmann and the University of Luxembourg. Has inspired a look at biobank model of the company "Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), by Dr. Jeffrey Trent, which, in Phoenix in the U.S. state of Arizona is located. The IBBL has the shape of a foundation. Your Board includes nine persons.Chairman of the Board is Dr. Jean-Claude Schmit, director of the CRP Santé. IBBL to include also a Board of Directors, an external ethics committee, a scientific project evaluation committee, a scientific council and a monitoring committee for the hospitals and the National Health Laboratory. Hospitals are important partners of the country and the wider region.

Strict conditions

The biobank itself has no research. It mainly manages data to interested researchers. If samples are made available, then only under very strict conditions. Each research project must be ethically tested and approved. The donations are voluntary, donors may withdraw their consent at any time.

If desired they can test for a special project available. The data of the donors are encrypted on several levels - the technology is called de-identification. It plays a so-called trusted third party, it still applies to define an important role. This alone can, if necessary, the data back together. This could for example be necessary if one for the health of the donor beneficial discovery is made.

In contact with the doctors

In Luxembourg, 200 people are annually diagnosed with lung cancer, but only a few surgery. These operations are carried out in two hospitals of the country. The IBBL is in contact with the concerned physicians, their patients about a possible use by the tissue biobank information. In addition, samples of healthy individuals to be collected. This is a call made via the press. Soon more information www.ibbl.lu available.

Arizona companies get $1.2 million cancer grant

2008-12-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

[Source: Arizona Republic, Ken Alltucker] - Defense contractor Raytheon wants to parlay its knowledge of remote satellite systems into a new system capable of accurately and consistently detecting skin cancer.

Raytheon has teamed with the Arizona Cancer Center on a research project to build an automated imaging system that could create a standard way to detect cancerous skin lesions.

Researchers have spent about $1.3 million to develop the project over the past three years. Science Foundation Arizona has approved a $1.2 million grant to move the research forward.

Now, doing a whole-body scan for early detection of skin cancer is an inexact science. One method consists of doctors comparing multiple photographs of a patient's skin over time. So a diagnosis may vary, depending on a doctor's interpretation of the images. If a patient has dozens of moles, a harried doctor may miss a potentially dangerous skin lesion altogether.

"Being able to (diagnose) a lesion accurately, in a short period of time, is not an easy thing to do," said Dr. Clara Curiel, a dermatology professor at University of Arizona and a director at the Arizona Cancer Center.

Curiel and Karleen Seybold, a systems-engineering senior manager at Raytheon, have led a team of about 13 engineers and researchers who are working on a system that would automate the process.

Raytheon engineers are working to adapt remote-sensing algorithms that can lead to early skin-cancer detection. Researchers have a prototype of the imaging station that could be used with the Raytheon-developed algorithm to help doctors track skin cancer.

Researchers envision developing an imaging station similar to a metal cage with different bars that could hold cameras, which would snap images of a person's body and analyze the skin.

Gut Instinct: Salmonella Bacteria's Molecular Tactics To Cause Illness

2008-12-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Hundreds of trillions of bacteria make their home in the vertebrate gut. Though many of these microbes perform helpful duties for their host, others—the pathogens—are unwelcome visitors, causing disease.

Salmonella typhimurium is one such pathogenic bacterium. It has evolved sophisticated means of growth, replication, transport and survival within the forbidding environment of the body, where it is responsible for most cases of food-borne illness. Yixin Shi, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, has taken a keen interest in the regulatory mechanisms that allow Salmonella bacteria to overcome their surroundings and continuously modify both their own and their host's responses in order to stay alive.

By cooperating with the Dr. Roy Curtiss' lab in the Biodesign Institute, Shi's research, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS) unveils a key survival circuit, which activates a signaling cascade, switching on or off a suite of genes necessary to circumvent the body's multiple defense mechanisms.

A corrosive course

The bacteria are tenacious, surviving acidic pH conditions, digestive enzymes, bile salts, antimicrobial peptides, and other hazards as they pass through the stomach and intestine, and invade the mucosa of the small intestine. Once they make contact with the intestinal lumen, their goal is to secure a safe haven—within the cells of the intestinal epithelium.

To reach this sanctuary, Salmonella first invite themselves in by secreting specific protein factors derived from a region of DNA known as the Salmonella Pathogenicity Island 1 or SPI-1. These factors trick the body, inducing the reorganization of the host cell's cytoskeleton. Epithelial cells respond to the Salmonella secretions by surrounding the bacterial cell in a membrane-bound balloon—the Salmonella Containing Vacuole or SCV. Once the bacterium is taken up in the SCV by the epithelial cell, this secretion system is no longer needed and is switched off. At the same time, another system, SPI-2 is activated and will respond to the altered environment of the internalized Salmonella.

Starving the beast

As the Salmonella penetrates through the epithelial layer, it encounters a dense population of macrophages that normally act to engulf and digest pathogens and debris. Unlike other gut commensal microbes—E. coli for example—Salmonella is able to survive and replicate within SCV of these macrophages, which eventually transport it to organs including the liver and spleen. "The host cells isolate nutrients from bacteria," Shi explains. "They may deplete metal ions, nucleotides, and amino acids which are essential for bacterial life and growth. In this way, Salmonella are essentially starved to death."

But the Salmonella are prepared, and respond— first by sensing the new conditions, then synthesizing proteins allowing them to acquire nutrients from this new environment while switching on genes girding the bacteria against destructive host peptides.
A switch in time

As Shi explains, a regulatory system allowing Salmonella to monitor and respond to rapidly changing conditions is made up of two proteins: PhoP and PhoQ. The PhoP/PhoQ regulators act as a master control, switching off invasion proteins when they are no longer required while switching on a new set of protein factors necessary for intracellular survival. In a domino effect, part of this transition activates magnesium transporters, which act to reestablish metal ion levels in the depleted conditions of the vacuole.

But now a problem arises. Salmonella must maintain proper Mg2+ concentration in their cytoplasm, though PhoP, once turned on, acts to continually increase these levels. The single master switch PhoP/PhoQ is not sufficient to provide this level of control. Salmonella uses an RNA Mg2+ riboswitch to ensure downregulation of Mg2+ transporters without shutting down bacterial resistance to antimicrobial peptides. Likewise, instead of one regulatory switch, two are needed to properly mitigate conditions of resistance to the bacteriocidal peptides, and amino acid starvation. Enter SlyA.

Two to tango

SlyA is a regulatory protein which cleverly integrates itself into the PhoP/PhoQ regulatory system, allowing for multivariable control. Only when both the PhoP/PhoQ and SlyA regulatory systems are activated can the proper activation of genes for intracellular survival be switched on and delicately maintained.

The sequence of events appears as follows: after cellular invasion and formation of the vacuole, PhoP responds to antimicrobial peptides and/or low levels of Mg2+ within the vacuole by switching on, activating Mg2+ transporters and stimulating the production of SlyA. The PhoP/PhoQ system is sufficient to maintain proper Mg2+ levels, but it is SlyA's job to respond to nutrient starvation. Shi believes SlyA does this by sensing the presence of a particular chemical signal—ppGpp, (guanosine tetraphosphate), indicative of amino acid depletion. If SlyA detects this chemical, it will act in consort with the PhoP/PhoQ system. With both PhoP/PhoQ and SlyA switches thrown, all the necessary regulatory genes are brought into play, as conditions warrant.

Shi emphasizes that the cluster of genes responsible for this sequence of environmental adaptations to adversity in virulent bacteria like Salmonella are arranged in particular chromosomal regions, the so-called horizontally acquired loci, which are absent in helpful gut bacteria like E. coli.

Disabling either PhoP or SlyA renders Salmonella virtually impotent, its virulence severely attenuated. The bacteria lose their survivability within the macrophage environment, succumbing either to nutrient starvation or direct obliteration by host antimicrobial peptides.
Shi suggests that the specificity of SlyA's activity within Salmonella's regulatory universe may be good news for those hoping to target this system through vaccine development or other therapeutic intervention. Discovering competitive analogs of ppGpp, for instance, could provide an alternate approach, curtailing SlyA's function.

Shi is optimistic that a firmer grasp of such regulatory mechanisms of virulence as PhoP/PhoQ and SlyA will ultimately lead to life-saving applications. "I never think I'm doing basic science," Shi stresses. "I always think I'm working on the first steps of an application. "

Yixin Shi is an assistant professor of ASU's School of Life Sciences and researcher in the Biodesign Institute's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology.

Breast Cancer: Diet High In Vegetables, Fruit And Fiber May Cut Risk Of Cancer Recurrence In Women Without Hot Flashes

2008-12-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

Just A Little Squeeze Lets Proteins Assess DNA

2008-12-18T08:02:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - To find its target, all a protein needs to do is give quick squeezes as it moves along the DNA strand, suggests new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

Scientists had thought DNA-binding proteins primarily used full-body hugs for accurate readings of the information coded in the DNA's sequence.

Even a protein known to use the hug method, called direct readout, can effectively pinpoint sites on DNA using indirect readout, found researcher Nancy C. Horton and her colleagues.
"It was a total surprise," said Horton, a UA associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. "No one had ever seen it before."

Doing the quick squeezes that scientists call indirect readout probably works faster than requiring full-body contact with all the DNA, the researchers suggest. Quick and accurate identification of key sites on DNA is important for the health of all kinds of cells, from bacteria to humans.

To detect the protein-DNA connection in such detail, Horton and her co-authors Elizabeth J. Little and Andrea C. Babic studied a DNA-binding protein that bacteria use to protect themselves from viral infections.

The finding has implications for the development of designer drugs.

"People have and are developing DNA-binding proteins to turn genes on and off," Horton said. Such designer proteins can be used to cut out the bad copy of a gene and help replace it with good copy.

"We found that indirect readout is important for finding the right sequence, and we now think indirect readout is also important for finding it quickly," she said.

The team published their paper, "Early Interrogation and Recognition of DNA Sequence by Indirect Readout," in the December issue of the journal Structure. First author Little and co-author Babic were postdoctoral research associates in Horton's laboratory when they did the research. The two are now senior scientists at Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. in Tucson, Ariz.
The National Institutes of Health funded the research.

Horton studies proteins that bind to DNA.

Seven years ago, she figured out the structure of a protein called HincII that snips up DNA. The protein is a type of enzyme called a restriction endonuclease and comes from Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.

Since that time, Horton has been trying to learn how HincII interrogates the DNA to find the right place to cut.

The protein protects bacteria by cutting up DNA from invading viruses. Without the protective protein, viral DNA would commandeer the bacterium's cellular machinery to produce viruses and ultimately kill the bacterial cell.

The HincII protein distinguishes between bacterial DNA and viral DNA by recognizing certain sequences on DNA. Such a defense requires speed to prevent the marauding virus from killing the cell and also accuracy so the protein doesn't accidentally hack up the bacterium's own DNA.
Horton knew from her previous work that the HincII protein used the direct readout method to find the particular sequence of DNA that corresponded to enemy DNA. The protein seemed to distort the DNA to read it.

Removing the direct readout contact between the protein and the DNA might show whether the DNA distortion or the contact itself was important, Horton said.

Therefore Little and Babic created a mutant protein that couldn't hug DNA closely and therefore couldn't use the direct readout method. Little described the mutant protein as missing the fingers the normal protein used to probe the DNA.

"If the finger was doing all the recognition, then the mutant should cut any DNA sequence," Horton said.

To see how the mutant interacted with DNA, the researchers crystallized the mutant protein-DNA complex in action.

Initially, Horton thought the assay had gone wrong and almost threw the results in the trash, she wrote in an e-mail.

The mutant protein had chosen the proper site on the DNA with 100 percent specificity, which was opposite from what she expected. In addition, the DNA was distorted, even though the mutant couldn't make the strong contact a normal protein would.

"I did a double-take. I was just taking a picture to have a record that it was non-specific," she said.

Understanding how endonucleases and other DNA binding-proteins recognize a particular DNA sequence provides insight into key cellular processes including the replication, transcription and repair of DNA.

Little said, "In every single one of your cells are proteins looking for the proper sequences in DNA in order to make the proteins you need to stay alive."

Horton added, "Understanding how these processes work helps in the understanding of diseases so that we could potentially cure the disease."

Male Circumcision May Decrease Risk Of HPV Infection And Cervical Cancer

2008-12-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Two new studies suggest that male circumcision may assist in the prevention of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, particularly infection with the high-risk subtypes associated with cervical, penile, and other cancers.

Both studies are published in the January 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

High-risk subtypes of HPV have been estimated to be present in 99.7 percent of cervical cancers worldwide. Evidence has shown that women with circumcised partners have a reduced risk for genital cancer. Two new studies sought to discover if HPV infection is more likely to occur in uncircumcised compared with circumcised men.

Bertran Auvert MD, PhD, and his team of researchers in France and colleagues from South Africa studied data from a trial conducted in Orange Farm, South Africa. Uncircumcised men aged 18-24 years were randomized into either an intervention group, to be circumcised, or a control group, to remain uncircumcised. During this study, urethral swab samples were collected and analyzed for presence of HPV among men followed up for 21 months. Information about sexual behavior was also collected.

Dr. Auvert and colleagues found that the percentage of high-risk HPV genotypes was lower in the circumcised group than in the control group. The most important implication, according to researchers, was that “reducing the frequency of HPV infection among men will reduce the risk of exposure in their female sexual partners.”

A second study by Carrie Nielson PhD, at the Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues at the University of Arizona, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested more than four hundred men aged 18-40 years in two U.S. cities during 2002-2005. Sixteen percent of participants were uncircumcised. Researchers tested for HPV in skin swabs of the anogenital area and semen samples in participants with no HPV symptoms (such as warts or lesions).

Investigators found that circumcised men were about half as likely to have HPV as uncircumcised men, after adjustment for other differences in the two groups. These results demonstrated that lack of circumcision is associated with cervical cancer because of the increased risk of HPV infection. Nielson suggested that it may be useful to consider circumcising newborn boys in order to decrease the risk of HPV infection for them and their future partners. “Parents are not currently advised of this risk,” she said. “These studies contribute to the evidence that might help to inform that decision.”

In an accompanying editorial, Ronald H. Gray, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, said that the evidence was persuasive but not entirely consistent and that it may be premature to promote circumcision as a way to prevent HPV infection in men and to protect female sex partners from infection. He advised that policy decisions should await results from two ongoing trials of male circumcision. Alternatively, Gray noted that consistent evidence has suggested that male circumcision reduces the frequency of HIV infection in men.He also pointed out that because of the lack of conclusive data relating circumcision and prevention of HPV, Medicaid does not cover circumcision costs, which may account for a decline in neonatal circumcisions in the United States.

According to Dr. Nielson, the findings they reported present compelling arguments to promote male circumcision in developing countries where circumcision is not widely used and the HIV epidemic is severe. Additionally, she said, it is “the first clear demonstration of the indirect but substantial beneficial effect of male circumcision for women.” The authors of both studies and the editorialist agreed that more studies will be needed to confirm the efficacy of male circumcision in HPV prevention.

Medipacs named best of show at Invest Southwest

2008-12-16T09:28:00.001-07:00

[Source: Phoenix Business Journal,Patrick O'Grady ] - Medipacs, a maker of infusion pumps for the medical industry, was named the top presenter at the annual Invest Southwest conference Thursday in Scottsdale.

The Tucson company received a $200,000 prize from SCF Arizona for the presentation and idea judged to be the best of the year’s crop — just a drop in the bucket toward Medipacs’ quest to land $8 million to $10 million.

The conference brought together a dozen companies from throughout the Western U.S. — and for the first time, a company from Mexico. Unima Bioseguridad Integra presented its method for using natural methods to prevent food-borne illnesses. The company already has another technology, Custovac, being distributed by German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim for use in animal vaccinations.

The conference had more attendees this year than last, a feat praised by organizers given the economic climate. Still, it may be a few weeks or months before this year’s attendees find out whether they will garner funding.

Other presenters at the event:
• AmpliMed Corp of Tucson brought in its phased cancer drug approach. The company has gone through three funding rounds and is working on its fourth as it moves to a trial for the drug.
• CaptiveMotion LLC of Tempe brought its computer face modeling technology. The startup by former video-game developer Adam Kraver allows game and film companies an easier way to convert images of the human face for digital uses.
• CellTrust Corp. displayed its technology to encrypt and store secure text and voice messages. The Scottsdale-based company sees a large market for the technology, particularly in medical fields where new federal laws require patient data be kept confidential.
• Consolidated Energy Systems LLC of Salt Lake City brought its technology for taking petroleum-based fuels that ordinarily could not be used and converting them to run large diesel electrical generating plants. To keep the project carbon-neutral, the plan would be to use the carbon dioxide in underground oil recovery.
• Eco Pool Technologies Inc. of Phoenix has begun production of a solar pool cleaner on a limited basis. The company also is developing a new version that would be able to work 24 hours a day, and other products that could lower electric costs for pool owners.
• Grip Audio LLC of Glendale presented a way to use computer software and local-area networks to replicate the cabling necessary for live music and studio productions. The company is looking at the professional audio market and has begun testing with several businesses and groups.
• Targeting the home video market, iMemories LLC of Scottsdale has developed a way to transfer VHS tapes to digital format and gives users the option of storing them online.
• MedTrust Online LLC, a spinoff of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, is an online resource for oncologists looking for up-to-date information in the fight against cancer. The database will provide physicians with data to help them better and more accurately treat their patients.
• NanoMR of Albuquerque, N.M., offered a patented medical diagnostic tool that could examine blood cultures in minutes, targeting detection of blood-borne bacteria.
• Protein Genomics Inc. of Sedona made its pitch for Tropoelastin, a device that can help in healing and preventing scarring.

NHLBI Opens Resource for Genetic and Clinical Asthma Data

2008-12-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

[Source: GenomeWeb News, a GenomeWeb staff reporter] — The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has expanded its genetic and clinical data collection to include information collected from three asthma research networks, the National Institutes of Health said today.

The new project is part of the NHLBI’s SNP Health Association Resource (SHARe), a web-based dataset that provides researchers with free access to data from multiple, large population-based studies such as the Framingham Heart Study.

The new asthma component, called the SHARe-Asthma Resource Project (SHARP), includes data on 2,332 people with asthma and 805 families whose DNA was tested for 1 million genetic variations. SHARP also includes clinical data about lung function, allergy status, and respiratory symptoms.

The clinical data used in SHARP is being provided by the Childhood Asthma Management Program, the Childhood Asthma Research and Education Network, and the Asthma Clinical Research Network, all of which are funded by NHLBI.

The project will enable scientists to link participants’ genetic variations to their lab test results, making it possible to find out more about genetic influence on asthma and other airway diseases.

“Expanding the SHARe program to include asthma through the SHARP initiative will greatly expand our understanding of lung disease biology using genetic and genomic technologies,” NHLBI Director Elizabeth Nabel said in a statement.

SHARP data is available through the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes, or dbGaP, hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Affymetrix developed SNP genotyping data for the asthma program under a contract with NHLBI.

More information about the new asthma program is available at the NIH’s website.

DFMO May Affect Barrett's Esophagus

2008-12-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - "While there was a suggestion that DFMO may influence the extent of Barrett's dysplasia, this finding is very preliminary and further study of this agent in a larger number of patients is needed," said Frank A. Sinicrope, M.D., professor of medicine and oncology at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.

Sinicrope presented his findings at the American Association for Cancer Research's Seventh Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research.

The single-arm study included 10 patients with Barrett's esophagus and low-grade dysplasia. The patients received 0.5 g/m2/d of DFMO for six months. Using an endoscope, the researchers examined esophageal biopsies at enrollment and at three, six and 12 months (where available). A gastrointestinal pathologist who was blinded to the clinical/biomarker data graded the dysplasia.

Sinicrope conducted this study while at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. He collaborated with colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, and the Arizona Cancer Center, Tucson.

After six months of DFMO treatment, one patient's dysplasia regressed, one patient's progressed, and eight patients had stable disease. At six months, two patients in the stable group who started with extensive low-grade abnormal cells had only limited or focal dysplasia based on four or more biopsies. These improvements remained at 12 months.

DFMO lowered the level of the polyamine putrescine, a target of the drug and a possible cancer risk marker. The agent works by inhibiting an enzyme in polyamine synthesis called ornithine decarboxylase (ODC). "ODC activity in Barrett's mucosa has been shown to be significantly higher in Barrett's than in normal adjacent mucosa from the same patients," Sinicrope said.

"Since DFMO inhibits polyamine synthesis, the fact that putrescine levels were decreased at six months and later returned to baseline after being off the drug for six months suggests that the drug is affecting its target."

Interestingly, DFMO also reduced expression of Kruppel-like factor 5 (KLF5) gene, an important marker of abnormal cell proliferation in the esophagus that may represent a novel drug target.

"The results are encouraging because they identify KLF5 as a potential target of DFMO, which suggests a potential mechanism contributing to the chemopreventive effects of DFMO," Sinicrope said. "KLF5 has been shown to regulate proliferation, apoptosis and invasion in esophageal cancer cells."

Generally, DFMO was well tolerated. One patient had hearing loss and balance-related problems related to treatment.

"DFMO warrants further evaluation as a chemopreventive agent in patients with Barrett's esophagus and mucosal dysplasia," Sinicrope said. Currently, the Mayo Clinic researcher and his colleagues are planning a placebo-controlled chemoprevention trial in this patient population.

The Medium Is The Message: Manipulating Salmonella In Spaceflight Curtails Infectiousness

2008-12-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Infectious pathogens like Salmonella typhimurium employ a startling array of techniques to skillfully outwit the body's defense mechanisms and produce illness. Through their expression of genes—the fundamental building blocks of cellular physiology—such microbes ingeniously adapt to varied environments, modifying their disease-causing potential or virulence.

Although the study of a broad range of microbial virulence factors is now well advanced, many pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Cheryl Nickerson, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, has explored the novel environment of space to investigate the cellular and molecular machinery of virulence. There, the space shuttle crew grow the bacteria in triple-enclosed containers under conditions of minimized gravity (or microgravity). Nickerson's spaceflight experiments have shown that Salmonella gene expression and virulence are profoundly altered by microgravity, with the pathogenic cells undergoing a significant increase in their infectious disease potential.

Nickerson's latest findings, published in the journal PLoS ONE, are derived from experiments aboard NASA space shuttle mission STS-123, launched in March, 2008. This research validated results and broadened the scope of spaceflight experiments from STS-115, conducted two years earlier.

In addition to confirming the effects of microgravity observed in the STS-115 experiments (known as MICROBE), the new study homed in on the importance of the microbial growth medium to gene expression and virulence during spaceflight. "Pathogenic cells are smart," Nickerson stresses, pointing to their remarkable ability to fine-tune virulence factors in response to subtle environmental cues.

S. typhimurium, Nickerson's pathogen of choice, is a rod-shaped, motile bacterium and occasional unwelcome visitor to the human gastrointestinal tract, where it is a leading cause of food poisoning and related illnesses.

In both spaceflights, bacteria cultured in a nutrient-rich medium known as Lennox Broth (LB) consistently displayed a heightened virulence and exhibited differential expression of 167 distinct genes. These results were largely consistent with previous earthbound experiments in the laboratory, in which microgravitational conditions were simulated using a rotating wall vessel bioreactor—a device designed by NASA engineers to replicate elements of spaceflight.

Nickerson was able to examine the activity of genes in fine-grained detail through a technique known as microarray analysis, which allowed for a complete profile of gene expression across the entire 4.8 million DNA base pairs that make up the circular Salmonella chromosome. The 167 changes in gene levels produce a tremendous diversity of protein products, pointing to a global transformation in response to microgravity.

Interestingly, many of the 167 differentially expressed genes observed in the space-traveling microbes coded for an assortment of ionic response pathways. To Nickerson, these compelling results now suggested a possible means of limiting or eliminating the enhanced virulence imparted by spaceflight, through manipulation of the ionic content of the bacterium's surrounding environment.

In both the STS-115 and STS-123 missions, Nickerson compared the spaceflight response of Salmonella grown in Lennox Broth to the same bacteria grown in a minimal medium—one requiring the cells to synthesize most of their metabolic needs from scratch. This alternate growth medium, dubbed M9, contained high concentrations of five critical ions. The effects of this medium were dramatic, with the M9 cultures exhibiting a decrease in virulence in response to microgravity, despite exhibiting altered expression of many of the same genes and gene families that were observed in the LB cultures, where virulence under microgravity was intensified.

To test the hypothesis that ionic concentrations present in the M9 medium played a role in virulence reduction, a hybridized culture media known as LB-M9 was prepared for the March 2008 mission, consisting of the LB formula supplemented with five ions occurring in the M9 medium, but which were found to be at lower concentrations in LB. Bacteria cultured with LB-M9 again displayed a decreased virulence in response to microgravity. Subsequent bioreactor studies conducted by Nickerson's team on earth have hinted that phosphate ions may be a principle component of the observed virulence reduction.

One of Nickerson's most intriguing findings involves a specific RNA-binding protein known as Hfq, which appears to regulate central aspects of S. typhimurium's response to the spaceflight environment, acting as a "global molecular master switch." Hfq is known to regulate one third of the 167 differentially expressed genes in the spaceflight LB cultures. Interestingly, a large number of Hfq-regulated genes were also found to be differentially expressed in the M9 flight samples. In addition to Hfq's known properties as a virulence factor, the protein also acts to regulate ion response pathways,and has been associated with phosphate regulation. Moreover, Hfq appears to be an evolutionarily conserved regulatory factor, and may serve to globally modify bacterial responses to microgravity, regardless of the phenotypic outcome—a decrease in virulence for M9 cultures grown in microgravity environments and an increase for bacteria steeped in the LB medium.

But what was causing Salmonella to undergo such a dramatic transformation under conditions of microgravity? At least part of the answer, Nickerson believes, is related to the mechanical forces exerted upon the bacterial cell's membrane by the growth conditions—a property known as fluid shear. Specifically, the microgravity conditions aboard the space shuttle produce a condition of reduced fluid shear, an effect that appears to trigger an intensification of virulence in Salmonella grown in LB medium. As Nickerson points out, "No one had thought to look at a mechanical force like fluid shear on the disease-causing properties of a microorganism."

If a rolling stone gathers no moss, a bacterium like S. typhimurium appears to gather virulence when its movement is slowed down and fluid shear across its surface is minimized. Nickerson speculates that Salmonella encounters just such conditions not only during spaceflight but also in vivo in an infected individual when the bacterium makes contact with an intestinal host cell and becomes ensnared in the fingerlike projections known as microvilli.

Thus, space travel may trick the microbes into behaving as though they were in an environment hospitable to cell infection, thereby switching on an increased virulence response, given appropriate environmental preconditions. "They're responding to an environmental signal that they're used to seeing right here on earth, during the natural course of the infectious disease process," Nickerson states, emphasizing that this response is masked in traditional microbial studies performed using lab cell cultures, which fail to replicate the low fluid shear conditions found in vivo, particularly in the gastrointestinal tract—Salmonella's favored site of infection.

One result of spaceflight not replicated in the earthly bioreactor simulations was the formation of what appear to be biofilms—conglomerations of bacterial cells associated with infectious virulence. Nickerson emphasizes the potential importance, should such findings be confirmed. Up to 70 percent of bacterial infections in humans may be associated with the formation of such biofilms, which seem to arm bacterial pathogens with formidable resistance to the host's immune system as well as to antibiotics.

How do the disparate variables—extracellular phosphate concentration, mechanical forces like fluid shear and genetic regulation of pathogenic virulence—combine and interact during the infection process? While the current research provides tantalizing hints, a full understanding of the complex interplay of forces and the in vivo mechanisms of Salmonella pathogenesis await further research.

Fortunately, new opportunities for study are opening up, which may illuminate these issues. NASA is one of the primary partners in the construction and operation of the International Space Station (ISS), a semi-permanent research platform allowing for further investigations into microbial responses to low fluid shear environments. Because cells cultured in microgravity exhibit biomedically relevant phenotypes that can not be observed using traditional experimental approaches, Nickerson believes the therapeutic benefits of such research will extend beyond infectious pathogens like S. typhimurium, eventually inspiring new clinical approaches to cancer, aging, bone and muscle wasting diseases, among other earthly afflictions.
"We can use the innovative research platform of the ISS to contribute to these new translational advances for the development of new strategies to globally advance human health."

ASU study aims to fight symptoms of Parkinson's

2008-12-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

[Source: Scott Huscher, ASUWebDevil] - Although many wouldn’t think ski poles could fight the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD), a new Arizona State University study is trying to prove just that.

“Exercise training in Parkinson’s disease: Neural and functional benefits” aims to see if exercise is a key component in decreasing the symptoms of PD. The study will utilize “polestriding,” which is walking with the aid of ski-like poles. Also known as Nordic walking, the poles will help with balance, which many people with PD have trouble with.

“PD is a progressive disease in which the cells in an area of the brain called the substantia nigra that produce the neurotransmitter called dopamine keep dying,” said Narayanan Krishnamurthi, principal investigator for the study and assistant professor of research at ASU’s Center for Adaptive Neural Systems in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. “So if exercise can protect neurons or it can create new neurons it’s a good possibility that the progression of the disease can be stopped or reversed.”

Krishnamurthi said that he was motivated to do the study based on previous reports that animals with PD-like symptoms benefited from exercise.

“The animals that participated in the exercise program had less severe symptoms and didn’t lose as many neurons as the animals that didn’t participate in the exercise.” Krishnamurthi said.
Krishnamurthi said that other studies have shown that people with higher cardiac and aerobic fitness have better brain health than those who do not regularly exercise.

“This study investigates the functional benefits with respect to motor and non-motor symptoms before and after the exercise training for 12 weeks,” Krishnamurthi said.

This study, which was recently funded by the National Institutes of Health, is a collaborative effort between the Center for Adaptive Neural Systems at ASU, the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at the Barrow Neurological Institute, the PET Imaging Center at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, and the Christopher Center for Parkinson’s Research at Sun Health Research Institute.
It will involve sixteen participants with PD between the ages of 50-70, because PD usually has its onset after the age of 50.

Each participant will be involved in a 36-week period in which half of the participants will receive PET scans before and after the exercise period to see if there are any positive changes in their brain glucose consumption. The PET scans will be conducted at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute.

“We’ll see if the exercise training produces changes in the brain metabolic activity patterns from abnormal patterns specific to PD towards the patterns of healthy people,” Krishnamurthi said. “That will give us an indication whether exercise is capable of improving brain health in PD.”

The functional outcome measurements will be completed at the Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City. The exercise sessions will be conducted by Darolyn O’Donnell, recreation therapy coordinator at the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at the Barrow Neurological Institute.
“What we aim to do is establish and provide exercise therapy people can do on their own,” O’Donnell said.

The initial idea to use poles came from a personal experience. James Abbas, a co-investigator on the study and co-director of the Center for Adaptive Neural Systems at ASU, learned about how the use of poles can increase the intensity of walking exercise and observed how they helped his mother feel more secure while walking. Since previous research results suggested an important role for exercise and clinical experience pointed to the need for some assistance during walking, the team decided to go forward with the study.

O’Donnell also said that the polestriding was chosen because it provides balance, helps work the upper body and targets core muscle. It’s also more aerobic than normal walking.
The exercise will last 45 minutes to an hour, three times per week.

Right now, the study is still in its initial phases, setting up software and hardware and recruiting participants for the study. Krishnamurthi said they should begin data collection with the first group of participants either this February or March.

“If it is really beneficial, it will be very helpful to alleviate the symptoms since current treatments do not provide cure and are generally ineffective during advanced stages of the disease,” Krishnamurthi said.

If the exercise helps fight against symptoms of PD, he said it will help those with PD everywhere.

“Since exercise can be done in any part of the world, people in underdeveloped countries where medical treatment for diseases like PD is not easily affordable can also benefit significantly.”

Understanding Brain Tumor Growth Through Applying Weather Forecasting Technology

2008-12-09T15:08:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Researchers and students from St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center and Arizona State University's Math Department are applying weather forecast technology to model and track the growth patterns of brain tumors.

The technology allows researchers to study various growth patterns of brain tumors and apply treatment parameters to determine the best option for patients. It will forecast how a patient's tumor may grow with different treatment scenarios, help physicians make a much more informed prognosis and be used as a patient consulting tool.

The research study began when Barrow and ASU researchers Mark Preul, Yang Kuang and Eric Kostelich used data from a collection of normal brain images to create a life-like recreation of the brain. They positioned a virtual tumor in the brain image and applied intricate math formulas used in weather forecast technology to predict how the tumor would grow.

Once the virtual tumor began to grow, the researchers determined a way to resect part of the tumor and gave it the effects of radiation and chemotherapy to see how the tumor would respond. A patient study was eventually used to compare the tumor growth and outcome between the patient and virtual model. They closely matched.

"This study has resulted in the most accurate and life-like recreation of the growth of malignant brain tumors," says Mark Preul, MD, Newsome Chair of Neurosurgery Research. "The technology used in the study could pave the way for better treatment plans enabling a greater outcome for patients,"

The study will be published in Cell Proliferation and is the basis for a National Science Foundation grant submission. The Barrow Neurological Foundation funded the initial study.

For Nanotechnology, Religion In U.S. Dictates A Wary View

2008-12-09T15:04:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - When it comes to the world of the very, very small — nanotechnology — Americans have a big problem: Nano and its capacity to alter the fundamentals of nature, it seems, are failing the moral litmus test of religion.

In a report published Dec. 7 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, survey results from the United States and Europe reveal a sharp contrast in the perception that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. Those views, according to the report, correlate directly with aggregate levels of religious views in each country surveyed.

In the United States and a few European countries where religion plays a larger role in everyday life, notably Italy, Austria and Ireland, nanotechnology and its potential to alter living organisms or even inspire synthetic life is perceived as less morally acceptable. In more secular European societies, such as those in France and Germany, individuals are much less likely to view nanotechnology through the prism of religion and find it ethically suspect.

"The level of 'religiosity' in a particular country is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not people see nanotechnology as morally acceptable," says Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication and the lead author of the new study. "Religion was the strongest influence over everything."

The study compared answers to identical questions posed by the 2006 Eurobarometer public opinion survey and a 2007 poll by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center conducted under the auspices of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Nanotechnology and Society at Arizona State University. The survey was led by Scheufele and Elizabeth Corley, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.

The survey findings, says Scheufele, are important not only because they reveal the paradox of citizens of one of the world's elite technological societies taking a dim view of the implications of a particular technology, but also because they begin to expose broader negative public attitudes toward science when people filter their views through religion.

"What we captured is nanospecific, but it is also representative of a larger attitude toward science and technology," Scheufele says. "It raises a big question: What's really going on in our public discourse where science and religion often clash?"

For the United States, the findings are particularly surprising, Scheufele notes, as the country is without question a highly technological society and many of the discoveries that underpin nanotechnology emanated from American universities and companies. The technology is also becoming more pervasive, with more than 1,000 products ranging from more efficient solar panels and scratch-resistant automobile paint to souped-up golf clubs already on the market.
"It's estimated that nanotechnology will be a $3.1 trillion global industry by 2015," Scheufele says. "Nanotechnology is one of those areas that is starting to touch nearly every part of our lives."

To be sure that religion was such a dominant influence on perceptions of nanotechnology, the group controlled for such things as science literacy, educational performance, and levels of research productivity and funding directed to science and technology by different countries.

"We really tried to control for country-specific factors," Scheufele explains. "But we found that religion is still one of the strongest predictors of whether or not nanotechnology is morally acceptable and whether or not it is perceived to be useful for society."

The findings from the 2007 U.S. survey, adds Scheufele, also suggest that in the United States the public's knowledge of nanotechnology has been static since a similar 2004 survey. Scheufele points to a paucity of news media interest and the notion that people who already hold strong views on the technology are not necessarily seeking factual information about it.

"There is absolutely no change in what people know about nanotechnology between 2004 and 2007. This is partly due to the fact that mainstream media are only now beginning to pay closer attention to the issue. There has been a lot of elite discussion in Washington, D.C., but not a lot of public discussion. And nanotechnology has not had that catalytic moment, that key event that draws public attention to the issue."

Pharmacy dean elected to national position

2008-12-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

[Source: Daily Wildcat, Adam Curtis] - The UA College of Pharmacy has just added another notch on its post of faculty with distinguished honors, with the election of its associate dean of academic and professional affairs, Dr. John Murphy, as president of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy.

As president of the ACCP, Murphy will lead an organization of approximately 10,000 clinical pharmacists while also continuing his work with the UA.

Murphy said although the position will require him to work more, "The opportunity to work with dedicated individuals in an attempt to improve the lives and conditions of others truly provides great returns."

"The extra work yields so much that it is hardly noticed," Murphy said.

"(Murphy) is helping to promote the profession at a time when we desperately need more pharmacists," said Karin Lorentzen, communications coordinator for the College of Pharmacy.
Lyle Bootman, the college's dean, said that because of Arizona's aging population, the demand for pharmacists is high.

"There is … an extreme shortage of pharmacists, especially in a fast-growing state like Arizona," Bootman said.

Murphy said there is a high burden on writing prescriptions, both due to the fact that "baby boomers are reaching the point of high medication use" and that there are a lot of new drugs being discovered and promoted.

Writing prescriptions is not the only concern, however. "There are many opportunities to serve patients better, but we don't have time," Murphy said.

Murphy said he is working to "pursue payment for direct patient care services" not only for dispensing medication but also rendering services like counseling, medication monitoring and preventative care, Murphy said.

He is also working to promote pharmacogenomics, a branch of pharmacology that focuses on prescribing personalized medication, Murphy said. This enables pharmacists to find "who (the medication) works best for" with the fewest adverse effects, he said.

Murphy's election to the ACCP is an "indicator that the college is among the highest ranked in the world," Bootman said. "For the past 20 years, someone (from the College of Pharmacy) has been an officer of a national or international professional health-related association."

Health care is one of the top three priorities of President-elect Barack Obama's administration, and "they will be looking to the John Murphys for guidance," Bootman said.

"(Murphy) is a highly developed problem-solver and innovator," but students are always the first thing on his mind, Bootman said. "He serves as a role model for students" who want to serve their profession by becoming leaders in their profession, he said.

"I think it is invaluable for students to realize that their faculty serves the public, so students learn to serve as well," Murphy said.

Sun Health launches Parkinson's study

2008-12-08T12:30:00.002-07:00

[Source: AzCentral.com] - The Michael J. Fox Foundation has awarded the Sun Health Research Institute a $75,000 grant to study new equipment that treats Parkinson's disease, adding to the growing list of activities at the Northwest Valley research facility.

The Parkinson's study is the institute's first major undertaking since it was acquired by Banner Health in September. The merger gave the institute a larger talent pool of scientists for such studies, since it now has access to resources at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute, a research facility in Phoenix.

The growth in local medical research doesn't only mean access to top-notch care for local residents. It is another piece in the economic-development puzzle for Surprise, the Sun Cities and other area communities, improving their prospects for attracting high-paying jobs in the fields of health and sciences.

"It just sort of shows there's activity going on here, and it plays into our overall strategy in trying to create some jobs in the whole medical arena, whether it's health care or research and development," Surprise Economic Development Director John Hagen said.

The new Parkinson's study examines the use of Nexalin headgear, a pad that attaches to patients' forehead. Electrodes connected to the pad emit low-frequency triggers that are supposed to stop Parkinson's tremors. The treatments are administered one hour a day, five days a week, for two weeks during the study.

What has researchers excited is Nexalin's "no fuss, no muss" appeal. Surgery is not required for the treatment.

"The procedure is non-invasive because it's actually headgear that you wear. It would be invasive if it went inside your body," said Banner Health spokeswoman Elle Shelley.

The Institute has six participants for the study, and a goal of getting 18 more.

Since opening its clinical-trial program eight years ago, Sun Health has conducted a variety of studies, and the Parkinson's trial is just one of a handful currently getting underway, according to Brian Browne, the Research Institute's public information officer. Eleven clinical studies are preparing to enroll participants, he said.

Most of Sun Health's trials involve those afflicted with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, though one underway is a bladder-cancer clinical trial.

Browne said the Valley, particularly retirement areas like the Sun Cities, are prime targets for such clinical studies because it is in these communities "where we are seeing a number of neurological degenerative diseases of aging."

Browne said the recent merger of Banner and Sun Health "has positively impacted the way we do clinical trials. Some of our clinical trials are done in conjunction with our sister institute, Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix, and when you have that kind of synergy, you do much more in collaboration than separtely."

Banner's ownership transition, however, will continue to affect Surprise's efforts to get a biotech campus off the ground, Hagen said.

"Until that acquisition is fully digested, they're not going to be as big a player as we like," Hagen said, adding he expects the transition to last another six to 12 months.

Surprise, however, continues to pursue other medical and biotechnology opportunities.
The city recently announced that three science-related firms are interested in leasing the old City Hall building on Bell Road to serve as an incubator for start-up companies. City leaders are weighing each option, and a decision eventually will go before the City Council.

The city will not elaborate on the proposals until discussions proceed, Hagen said.

The city also has identified several key land parcels with potential for biotech development. It has put the most emphasis on 500-plus acres south of Bell Road and Bullard Avenue that is expected to become the future downtown. Sun Health Properties, a land-ownership group separate from the research institute, has a stake in that property.

There also is land at the city's Southwest Railplex, bordered by Peoria Avenue and Dysart, Waddell and Litchfield roads, and at the Prasada development along Loop 303, Hagen said.
For information on the new Parkinson's clinical trial, call 623-875-6500.

HTG SIGNS COLLABORATION AGREEMENT WITH HARVARD CATALYST LABORATORY FOR INNOVATIVE TRANSLATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES AT HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

2008-12-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

(Source: HTG] - HTG, Inc., provider of the quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay (qNPA™) system and service partner for the life sciences industry, today announced a collaboration agreement with researchers at Harvard Catalyst Laboratory for Innovative Translational Technologies (HC-LITT) at Harvard Medical School. Under the terms of the agreement, HTG and HC-LITT will collaborate to generate a novel microRNA biogenesis assay that can measure expression of both pre-microRNA (miRNA) precursors, mature-microRNAs and regulated RNA using HTG’s qNPA™ (quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay) technology.

Researchers at the HC-LITT are investigating the implications of differential microRNA expression in human diseases such as cancer. MicroRNAs are singlestranded functional RNA species encoded in the human genome that regulate protein expression of numerous gene products. HC-LITT will utilize HTG’s technology to evaluate regulation of miRNA biogenesis by established oncogenic cell signaling pathways in order to develop novel diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets for the molecular characterization and treatment of cancer.

“We selected HTG’s technology due to the high precision and sensitivity of the product platform,” said Winston Patrick Kuo, Director, Harvard Catalyst Laboratory for Innovative Translational Technologies at Harvard Medical School. “I’m looking forward to utilizing HTG’s gene expression assay technology and imagers for HC-LITT’s research initiatives.”

HTG’s qNPA technology is used to carry out quantitative, multiplexed gene-based drug discovery programs, including target validation, HTS lead optimization, metabolism, toxicology and clinical development. HTG’s platform is highly flexible and designed for high throughput automation; it allows scientists to test any sample, including fixed tissues, without RNA extraction or target amplification. The technology is ideal for detecting small yet important changes in gene expression levels which other gene expression platforms cannot reliably detect.

Cutting The Cord To Determine Babies' Health Risk From Toxic Exposure

2008-12-05T15:36:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Despite the well-known dangers of first- and secondhand smoke, an estimated ten percent of pregnant women in the U.S. are smokers. Exposure of a developing baby to harmful cigarette byproducts from mothers who smoke affects an estimated 420,000 newborns each year and poses a significant health care burden.

Now, in the first study of its kind, a team of researchers has completed a global assessment of newborns' umbilical cord blood to better understand the fetal health risks from smoking mothers. The research was led by Johns Hopkins University and included Rolf Halden, a researcher from the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University.

"Cigarette smoking is a massive onslaught on human physiology," said Halden, who works in the institute's Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Cigarette smoke is known to contain more than 4,000 chemicals, potentially affecting the health of a newborn baby on multiple levels, including low birth weight, premature delivery and small size for gestational age. The exact cause of these health effects continues to be the subject of investigation.

"Unfortunately, maternal cigarette smoking puts babies at risk of adverse birth outcomes and increases susceptibility to other diseases later in life," said Halden.

The research team's goal was to provide the first assessment of proteins detectable in infant blood and to identify possible molecular predictors, or biomarkers, of fetal health risks.
The emergence of improved analytical tools allowed the researchers to address newborn health risks and explore the environmental effects of a well-known toxin in a level of detail not previously available. These tools include high-speed DNA sequencing, a powerful instrumental analysis called proteomic mass spectrometry to enhance the detection of proteins in complex samples, and bioinformatics, or the raw computing power to perform massive data crunching to tease out and identify biomarkers.

In doing so, the team described over 200 serum proteins contained in umbilical cord blood, the vital link between mother and developing baby that shares between the pair both essential nutrients as well as unwanted toxins absorbed by the mother.

"Modern tools in mass spectrometry and bioinformatics have enabled us to obtain a first view of proteins contained in fetal cord blood serum and to single out among these more than a dozen interesting ones whose concentrations change as a function of chemical exposure. These biomarkers of exposure and early effect are the gold of protein mining," said Halden, who is also an associate professor in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Halden, who joined ASU's Biodesign Institute in 2008, initiated the study while at Hopkins along with lead author David R. Colquhoun, and colleagues Lynn R. Goldman, Frank R. Witter, Robert N. Cole, Marjan Gucek, Malini Mansharamani, and Benjamin J. Apelberg. The results were published in the early online edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (http://www.ehponline.org).

To best obtain a snapshot of fetal proteins at birth, the study needed to obtain cord blood samples as soon as possible after newborn delivery. This required the coordinated efforts of multiple investigators and the resources of the large teaching hospital at Hopkins to recruit study subjects. Among the participants were many doctors and nurses to help with deliveries and obtain cord blood samples along with graduate students who were on call and had to rush out in the middle of the night to collect samples, transfer and process them, and analyze the data from the study population.

The group started with a large pool of more than 300 cord blood samples, and after adjusting for parameters such as the age of the mothers, narrowed down their focus to a dozen babies, half from non-smoking mothers and the other half from pregnant smokers.

"The study was a little bit challenging in that we went out on a fishing expedition," said Halden. "We wanted to look at everything at the same time, and the ability to tease out from the soup of proteins only those of interest was the chief technical challenge of this project."

The team looked for new proteins or proteins levels that may have changed between the smoking and non-smoking groups. After analyzing more than 200 proteins through mass spectrometry in smoke-exposed and control groups, they found small changes in the levels of some proteins, which represented biomarkers of cigarette smoke exposure.

"Of 17 proteins that were significantly up- or down-regulated in the cord blood of babies born to smoking mothers, 14 have previously been described to be related to smoking in either adults or in the fetus," said Lyne Goldman, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health.

The protein biomarkers have been linked to key metabolic pathways involved in regulating nutrients, oxygen and inflammation processes. After their analysis, the team also discovered some surprising results that illustrate the subtlety of using biomarkers as an approach to peer into the molecular makeup of human health. "There was not a single protein unique to either the smoking or non-smoking group," said Halden. "The remarkable finding is that there were no unique biomarkers."

Halden explains that only through the combined use of the new technologies was the research team able to tease out the small differences in the proteins levels between the two study groups.
Asked about the reliability of the biomarkers that the research team identified? Halden said, "The truth is that we don't know yet. We only took a first snapshot of the protein profile in baby blood right after birth. But does it change over time and will the differences we detected persist? We don't know."

The group hopes to use the same techniques to examine a wide range of environmental exposures and their effect on human health. "These findings confirm and underscore the serious metabolic alterations that are occurring in utero to children of smoking mothers, alterations that may increase risk for chronic disease over a lifetime," said Hopkins colleague Frank Witter. "We hope that this method will be sensitive enough to detect proteomic changes associated with environmental exposures as well."

The ultimate hope is that through the use of biomarkers identified by the team, it may become possible to detect effects of toxic exposures early on, before the onset of disease. "This may open opportunities to improve health outcomes by reducing the occurrence and severity of disease from environmental exposures, said Halden."

HIV Dementia: How Major HIV Strains Affect The Brain Differently

2008-12-05T15:33:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily ] - A new study led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has clarified how two major variants of HIV differ in their ability to cause neurologic complications. The finding, published in Journal of Neuroscience, highlights a new target for drugs that could prevent HIV-associated dementia, an incurable and increasingly common complication in people with AIDS.

Even with anti-retroviral drug therapies, up to one-half of people infected with HIV will develop mild to moderate neurological complications, according to some estimates.

Earlier this decade, scientists observed that people with AIDS in India developed dementia at a far lower rate than comparable populations in the U.S. and Western Europe. Most cases of AIDS in India are due to infection with a subtype or clade of HIV, known as clade C, while most cases in the U.S. and Western Europe are due to clade B.

Based on these observations, in 2004, a team of researchers led by Dr. Vinayaka R. Prasad, professor of microbiology and immunology at Einstein, began searching for genetic variations between the two clades that could explain the differing rates of HIV-related dementia. The team, in collaboration with Dr. Udaykumar Ranga of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India, focused their search on Tat, a protein that helps HIV replicate and leads the attack on the brain.

Dr. Prasad and colleagues compared the sequences of the Tat protein of the two clades and noted a key difference. Where the clade B Tat protein contained the amino acid cysteine at a specific position in the Tat protein, the clade C Tat had the amino acid serine. The next step, and the focus of the current study, was to compare the two viruses in a single host to determine whether this key change in the amino acid sequence makes a practical difference in HIV's neurotoxicity.

To find out, the researchers injected either clade B or clade C HIV into the brain of a special strain of immunodeficient mice. After six days--enough time for the viruses to cause neurologic damage--the mice were tested in a complex water maze that challenged their long term memory as well as their short term working memory (the type that temporarily stores and manages the information needed to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension).

Mice infected with clade B performed significantly worse in the maze than those infected with clade C. Moreover, when the researchers examined the mouse brains, they found more damage to neurons in the brains of mice injected with clade B than with clade C. These results were in line with the fact that people infected with clade B HIV are at greater risk for dementia than people infected with clade C.

This is the first evidence in an animal model that HIV variants from different parts of the world differ in their ability to cause neurological complications. Further, test tube studies conducted at Einstein showed strain differences in recruiting inflammatory cells to the brain. Thus, these data now provide biological evidence that Tat protein plays a crucial role in the development of HIV-related dementia.

"Tat seems to be responsible for most of the neurological symptoms seen in patients with HIV-associated dementia," says Dr. Prasad. "People have always suspected Tat to be a key protein in HIV dementia based on test tube studies. Credit for that work belongs to, among others, Dr. Joan Berman, also from Einstein. Our results, obtained using live virus in an animal model to compare genetic variants, suggest that a drug that targets HIV-1 Tat might prevent the neurological effects of AIDS."

The need for drugs that prevent HIV-dementia has grown more acute in recent years, notes Dr. Prasad. Thanks to advances in therapy, people with HIV are living increasingly longer. In 1996, a 20-year-old newly diagnosed with HIV could expect to live another 36 years, according to a recent study in The Lancet. Today, that same person could expect to live another 49 years.

However, because anti-retroviral drugs do not fully eradicate HIV from the brain or the rest of the body, the low levels of virus that remain can cause significant damage.

The findings raise a larger issue, say the researchers. There appear to be significant differences between the major strains of HIV, perhaps warranting different therapeutic approaches.

"Roughly 60 percent of the HIV infections worldwide are due to clade C, but all effective therapies are based on clade B," says Dr. Vasudev R. Rao, lead author of the study and research associate in microbiology and immunology at Einstein. "While our findings specifically address the differences between clade B and clade C with regard to the manifestation of HIV-associated dementia, investigating subtype differences has broad implications for clinical management and treatment for the global AIDS epidemic."

In addition to Drs. Prasad and Rao, the research team included Dr. William R. Tyor of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and a member of his research team, Dr. Andrew R. Sas; Dr. Eliseo A. Eugenin, assistant professor of pathology at Einstein; Dr. Udaykumar Ranga and a member of his laboratory, Dr. Nagadenahalli B. Siddappa of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India; Dr. Heather Bimonte-Nelson of Arizona State University in Tempe and Dr. Joan W. Berman, professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Einstein.

Breast Cancer Treatment Offers Better Outcome To Women With Implants

2008-12-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Women with early-stage breast cancer who have undergone breast augmentation may be treated successfully with a partial-breast radiation treatment called brachytherapy, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Patients treated with brachytherapy have better cosmetic outcomes and avoid the risk of the implant hardening, compared to patients who undergo whole-breast radiation therapy.

"We are seeing an increasing number of breast cancer patients with augmentation," said Robert R. Kuske Jr., M.D., clinical professor at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center and radiation oncologist at Arizona Oncology Services in Scottsdale, Ariz. "By nature, these women are concerned about their appearance and we need to have options for them."

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation is the most popular cosmetic surgery in the U.S. with 347,500 procedures performed in 2007. This represents an increase of 64 percent since 2000.

Approximately one in eight women who undergo breast augmentation will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives.

The most common breast cancer treatment for patients with breast implants is skin-sparing mastectomy and implant exchange. Whole-breast radiation therapy after lumpectomy is an option, but carries a substantial risk during the healing process of scar tissue wrapping around the implant, causing it to become rock-hard and extremely painful. This condition, known as capsular contracture, also distorts the appearance of the breast.

Dr. Kuske set out to determine if partial-breast radiation with brachytherapy might offer a better outcome for women with implants wishing to avoid mastectomy.

Breast brachytherapy is a radiation treatment that can be given in higher doses to a small, targeted area of the breast after lumpectomy. Radioactive "seeds" are guided into place through small plastic tubes, or catheters, with the aid of imaging and a computer. The seeds emit high doses of radiation in short bursts.

Scar tissue is minimal, the implant remains unaffected and treatment time is shortened from 6 ½ weeks with whole-breast radiation therapy to five days with brachytherapy.

For the study, 65 women who were diagnosed with small, early stage malignant tumors were treated with brachytherapy after a lumpectomy. The women received two doses per day, separated by six hours, over a five-day period. Follow-up was six months to five years. None of the patients experienced tumor recurrence during the follow-up period. Cosmetic outcome was determined to be good to excellent in 100 percent of patients with 95 percent judged excellent. Implant hardening was not observed in any of the patients.

"Compared to traditional treatments, brachytherapy offers an excellent alternative for these women," Dr. Kuske said. "It offers very high rates of tumor control with fewer side effects and is easier on their lifestyle."

Ant Researcher Nets Collaborative Innovation Award

2008-12-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

[Source: Margaret Coulombe, Imperial Valley News] - The Fountain of Youth to be found in an anthill? Aging - we are all doing it. It is relentless and terminal. Auguries and alchemists, mendicants and magicians, philosophers and science fiction writers, researchers and plastic surgeons have employed all their various arts in the pursuits of “turning back the clock.” Yet, we stand in modern times with a span of a century to our name, at most. Technological wizardry abounds, so why do the factors that determine life span still elude us?

If you ask Arizona State University researcher Juergen Liebig, he would point to his favorite study animal, the ant, to provide answers.

Liebig is one of a trio of scientists who are taking an audacious approach to studying gene regulation, using the ant to model human aging, with support from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) $40 million pilot program, The Collaborative Innovation Awards.

As its name suggests, the award will allow scientists to attack problems that one person can’t solve, according to Jack Dixon, HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer.

“We were looking for projects that could really represent breakthroughs and change the way we think,” says Dixon.

One of eight teams selected, Liebig, assistant professor in School of Life Sciences and member of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will partner with team leader Danny Reinberg, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the New York University School of Medicine, and colleague Shelley Berger of the Wistar Institute, both top researchers in the field of epigenetics.

The eight collaborative projects collectively engage 33 researchers and 16 institutions in the United States and Chile. What can ants, not typically known for long life, tell us about human aging?

Potentially much, says Liebig. Ants in a colony are genetically closely related, yet these sisters’ body types, behavior and purpose can become specialized and vastly different. Queens typically arise as the single reproductive female in an ant colony, living for as long as 30 years in some species. As head of the colony they stay in the nest dedicated to perform one major task, egg-laying, for their whole life. Workers on the other hand perform brood care, colony maintenance, and complex foraging tasks. Among the workers additional behavioral and morphological differences may exist. Some individuals are larger and more robust with a focus on colony defense, which earned them the name soldiers. How can such big differences arise in each of these ant types’ longevity and behavior without some real differences in their DNA?

According to Liebig and his collaborators, the answer can be found in the rising field of epigenetics – the study of inherited changes in the activity of genes - for example, when they turned on or off; changes not caused by alterations in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic changes occur during normal development and tissue differentiation, and correlate with certain disease states in humans, such as cancer.

“But, little is known about the molecular basis for epigenetic changes that underlie aging or behavior,” Liebig says. “One advantage of using ants as models is that as individuals they follow very different behavioral and developmental trajectories, and these changes are plastic.”

It is this behavioral and developmental plasticity that drew the collaborators to work together.

Liebig studies three species of ants, each which allows the HHMI team to examine a different aspect of how epigenetic factors can influence outcomes in behavior, morphology, and longevity.
Harpegnathos saltator (literally meaning “jumping sickle jaw”) is a primitive species of ant where workers are able to perform either reproductive or helper tasks. A worker can become a reproductive functional queen, if the original queen dies or is removed. Such a trait is not found in “higher” order ants because these species have become structurally specialized. Carpenter ants, Camponotus floridanus, allow Liebig, Reinberg and Berger to examine what epigenetic factors or genes control longevity. Queens in this species are structurally specialized, growing large and also long-lived. Finally, using ants from the genus Pheidole, whose soldier caste development can be artificially induced, allows the researchers to closely examine (and potentially manipulate) what genes are expressed or repressed, and identify the factors regulating structural specialization and behavior.

The first task for the collaborative team will be to get the complete sequences of the genomes for these three ant species. Reinberg is currently identifying partners specialized to do this task. Then the group will examine the gene expression profiles of the different castes (worker, queen, soldier).

“This collaboration is fortuitous,” says Liebig. “Danny and Shelley were looking for a model system to study epigenetic factors of differences in ant behavior and development. They contacted my colleague Bert Hölldobler, who knew I was looking for geneticists interested in differential gene expression in behavior, aging, and development in ants.” Hölldobler is the Pulitzer Prize winning coauthor of “The Ants,” and leading expert in ant communication and social organization.

Liebig notes that the project is risky. For example, the complete sequence of the ant genome has never been achieved before.

“Often potential research partners are reluctant to cross barriers in scientific specialties and there is not funding for such risky ventures when there is interest to do them,” Liebig says.

“The beauty of this project is that the HHMI Collaborative Innovation Awards create the opportunity for us to blend our skills to develop a new approach and model system for the study of behavior and aging.”

Arizona State University has become the world leader in the study of social insects, and study of their levels of organization from organism to society, according to luminary Edward O. Wilson. Liebig believes that the study of social insects and using them as models for human systems has the potential to transform understanding about aging, sociobiology, neurobiology, learning and memory and behavior. Liebig believes his collaborators on the HHMI project would agree.

“Social insect societies are remarkable in that their specialization extends beyond the organism level, to function at the level of the ‘superorganism,’” Liebig notes. “In that way, the division of labor seen between reproductive and non-reproductive individuals is analogous to cellular specialization in different organs in a multicellular organism. The prediction is that epigenetic regulation may determine behavioural castes in ant colonies.”

“Who knows? Separating these effects may even give us the tools and understanding to look at what regulates longevity in humans,” Liebig adds.

ART OF HEALTHY LIVING: UA staff updates its cancer prevention book; it's on sale

2008-12-04T16:06:00.001-07:00

[Source: The Explorer News] - Faculty of the nationally renowned Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Arizona Cancer Center have updated their collaborative work, “Fundamentals of Cancer Prevention.” The second edition of the work was published in October.

The book delivers “leading-edge information for primary physicians and health care providers in an effort to continually stress the importance of cancer prevention and the latest early-detection strategies,” a release said.

The book was edited by Arizona Cancer Center Director David S. Alberts, M.D., and Lisa M. Hess, PhD., a former scientific investigator for the Arizona Cancer Center.

“A famous 17th century physician, Dr. Thomas Adams, once said, ‘Prevention is better than treatment, because it saves the labor of being sick,’” said Dr. Alberts. “We continue to be convinced that the war on cancer can be won. That effort starts with educating primary care physicians and caregivers.”

Contributing Arizona Cancer Center authors include Frederick Ahmann, David Alberts, Setsuko Chambers, Zhao Chen, Kathryn Coe, Stephen Joel Coons, Francisco Garcia, Linda Garland, Eugene Gerner, Iman Hakim, Karen Taraszka Hastings, Ayaaz Ismail, Myron Jacobson, Lindsay Kreykes, Robert Krouse, Peter Lance, Linda Larkey, Maria Lluria-Prevatt, Ana María López, Naja McKenzie, Jessica Ray, Alison Stopeck, Cynthia Thomson, Patricia Thompson, G.T. Wondrak.

Fundamentals of Cancer Prevention is available for purchase online at www.springer.com.

The Arizona Cancer Center is a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center. With primary locations at the University of Arizona in Tucson and in Scottsdale, the center has more than a dozen research and education offices throughout the state and 300 physician and scientist members working to prevent and cure cancer. For more information, go to www.azcc.arizona.edu.

Improving Military Relationships

2008-12-04T16:00:00.001-07:00

[Source: Rick Nauert, Ph.D, PsychCentral] - A positive employer-employee relationship is necessary to retain employees and deliver a quality product. Consider the impact when the employer is the United States military. Integral to a successful work relationship is a balance between the work environment and the home. As a result, the military provides its members with policies to help balance their work and family commitments.

But a researcher at Kansas State University has found that simply providing programs might not be enough to maintain a supreme equilibrium.

Satoris Culbertson, assistant professor of psychology at K-State, and colleagues have been studying how soldiers’ perceptions of a family-friendly environment relates to their physical fitness, confidence in task performance and intentions to remain in the military.

“Given the especially difficult circumstances surrounding military obligations for U.S. soldiers — for example, an increased threat of deployment due to the current wartime context — a better understanding of how family-friendly perceptions can benefit soldiers is increasingly important,” Culbertson said.

Culbertson and colleagues examined survey data and performance measures of 230 U.S. Army personnel who were stationed in Europe in units with high deployment loads in 2001.

Work environments are considered family-friendly when they help employees manage family time and responsibilities, Culbertson said, adding that the U.S. military has policies in place like on-site educational classes and support groups for family members to create this ideal environment.

“The issue we were concerned about was not merely the availability of such programs, but the perceptions of the workplace as being family-friendly,” Culbertson said.

“Perceptions of a family-friendly organization can differ among employees because much of the perceptions are formed through policies, culture of the organization, and the attitudes and behaviors of the most direct supervisor or work group.”

Some military personnel might not perceive the environment to be family-friendly if they have a superior or peer who is unsupportive or disparages them for taking advantage of a particular policy, Culbertson said.

The study’s results indicated that a perceived family-friendly environment benefited both the individual and the organization. It increased the individuals’ intent to remain in the military once they completed their obligation, and it increased the soldiers’ feelings of their unit’s capability of successful performance.

To better create a family-friendly culture, Culbertson concludes that the military’s local leadership needs to foster and support the policies.

Culbertson collaborated on the project with Ann Huffman, assistant professor of psychology at Northern Arizona University, and Col. Carl Castro, chief of military psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

“Family-Friendly Environments and U.S. Army Soldier Performance and Work Outcomes” was published in the October 2008 issue of Military Psychology and details the researchers’ findings.
Culbertson has performed numerous studies focusing on individuals’ work-life conflicts. She said studies show that individuals who report higher levels of work-life conflict also report lower levels of general well-being, lower levels of job satisfaction, higher levels of burnout, more alcohol use and lower levels of performance.

They also are more likely to leave an organization.

“Ideally, we can balance these responsibilities so that we are effective in each of these roles,” Culbertson said. “Or, even better, we can somehow make the participation in one role benefit another role.”

Desert plant's properties eyed for Canadian oilseed

2008-12-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

[Source: Manitoba Cooperation] - Properties of a "cactus-like" plant from Arizona might have a future in Canada in an oilseed crop for the industrial lubricant market.

Randall Weselake, a professor at the University of Alberta's department of agricultural, food and nutritional science, has lined up $360,000 for a research team to experiment with seeds from the plant, called lesquerella.

Lesquerella naturally produces high levels of certain fatty acids that are "particularly suited" to production of lubricants and other industrial oils, the university said in a release Friday.

Weselake's team aims to transfer that particular trait into a "canola-like" oilseed plant grown in Canada, the end goal being to produce a "fine liquid wax with superior industrial properties."
If such research pans out, it could "substantially increase the industrial uses of plant oils and serve as a high-performance lubricant," Weselake said in the release Friday.

The canola-like plant in this case would be Brassica carinata, which would be genetically modified using an enzyme from lesquerella, to help convert the plant oils into a liquid wax that's more resistant to high temperatures and pressures than unmodified plant oils, the university said.

Potential applications include automobile transmission fluid, hydraulic fluids, adhesives and numerous industrial lubricants, the university added.

"The overall goal is to decrease reliance on fossil oils currently used in the global chemicals industry," Chris Kazala, manager of the university's BioActive Oils program and a research team member, said in the same release.

"Using plants to produce these products provides a secure, environmentally sustainable supply of these materials for industry and is, in many cases, easier to manufacture."

The funding for the U of A project comes from Avac Ltd., the Calgary-based venture capital fund launched in 1997 by the province with added start-up money from the federal government, to expand value-added industry in Alberta with a focus on the "agrivalue" sector.

The U of A noted this research is part of the ICON Project, a four-year worldwide collaboration involving 23 partners from 11 countries and sponsored by the European Union.

Several U.S. research projects have recently focused on bringing lesquerella itself directly into crop production, for its seed oil's use in industrial oils and biodiesel additives.

Arizona Biotechs Won’t Escape Pain in Economic Upheaval, Communications Consultant Says

2008-12-04T15:54:00.001-07:00

[Source: Bioregion News] - The economic upheaval will hurt the prospects of Arizona life sciences companies seeking capital for growth, a marketing and communications consultant to life-sci and other tech companies has told the Arizona Daily Star.

“I wish I could say otherwise, but the current economic situation is going to hurt biotechnology and all emerging tech sectors — and now even green/clean tech will probably take a hit, too. Everybody is holding onto their cash,” Sandra Kay Helsel, founder and managing director of SK Helsel & Associates, told the newspaper.

“The emerging technology sectors such as biotechnology are the very businesses that will eventually bring us out of this collapse. Innovation and emerging tech are the drivers of the future,” added Helsel, whose firm has offices in Tucson, Ariz., and San Diego. “The downward spiral of the economy may slow things down a bit, but the strengths of Tucson and the greater Arizona biotech cluster are evident.”

Tucson’s strengths, Helsel said, include research activity at the University of Arizona, cohesion among life-sci and civic leaders, and the region’s quality of life. But the region lacks a regional focus on how to compete against aggressive biotech clusters elsewhere, she added.

UA president: Job cuts likely permanent

2008-12-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

[Source: The Associated Press] - Until now, University of Arizona officials have tried to downplay the possibility of long-term layoffs.

But this week, University President Robert N. Shelton and Provost Meredith Hay sent out a strongly worded e-mail warning of permanent cuts to the school's budget that will lead to job losses on campus.

Shelton wrote that to address the long-term budget challenge at the university, there will need to be permanent reductions through the elimination and merger of programs.

That process will necessitate job losses on campus.

Shelton says "there is no way to meet our long-term, permanent budget needs without them."

Napolitano exit worries biotech, climate-change, education boosters

2008-12-04T15:48:00.001-07:00

[Source: The Arizona Republic] - Gov. Janet Napolitano's selection for a job in Washington, D.C., may be secure, but her vision of a research-based economy in Arizona is no sure thing.

Napolitano has been a key figure in the state's push to foster the biosciences since she became governor in 2003. She played a critical role in securing funding for the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and establishing Science Foundation Arizona.

But if she takes over the reins of the Homeland Security Department in Barack Obama's administration, she will leave Arizona as the state faces a $1.2 billion budget shortfall this year and the Legislature is poised to make sharp cuts.

Fiscal conservatives may see biotechnology programs as a ripe target, which is making many bioscience and research boosters nervous. They insist that cutting research programs now would be a mistake.

"If this economic downturn does anything, it shows we must diversify our economy," said John Murphy, president and chief executive officer of the Flinn Foundation in Phoenix. "The investments that have been made should be sustained."

The state's push to grow a bioscience economy has been ambitious.

Arizona and Phoenix combined have committed more than $1 billion to bioscience and research initiatives this decade.

A large chunk has paid for new research labs such as the TGen building in downtown Phoenix, the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University in Tempe and Bio5 Institute at the University of Arizona. The Legislature this year also approved a stimulus package that would provide $470 million to expand the campus of the UA College of Medicine, in partnership with ASU, in downtown Phoenix.

Science Foundation Arizona secured a $25 million annual commitment over five years from the state Legislature provided that it raises an equal amount from private donors.

The funding commitment is subject to review each year, and groups such as the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers have targeted the foundation for cuts in past years.

The nonprofit foundation uses the state money to fund grants for everything from science education in high school to new research projects that cement ties between university researchers and large corporations in Arizona.

William Harris, the foundation's chief executive officer, said the group already has secured its matching private funds for 2009 from a large base of donors. Harris realizes that Napolitano has been the foundation's prime backer, but he also has high hopes that successor Jan Brewer, a fiscal conservative, will support the foundation's goals of strengthening the state's economy through targeted investments in science and research.

"We have to control our own destiny and get out of this ditch we're in," said Harris, who modeled the foundation after a similar group he led in Ireland. "We do that by diversifying our economy and strengthening our education in Arizona."

Climate change

Napolitano's departure could also portend a major shift in policy for one of her biggest local priorities: climate change.

Environmental groups, elected officials and other political watchers say that a new Republican administration would likely significantly reduce Arizona's involvement in the Western Climate Initiative.

Napolitano was a founding member of the regional effort, which brings several Western states and a handful of Canadian provinces together to limit and reduce man-made greenhouse gases, among other things.

"As far as what I know about Jan Brewer, I would say she is probably not going to go along with (the WCI)," said Republican Rep. Ray Barnes, who serves as chairman of the House Environment Committee, adding that other priorities, such as dealing with the state's billion-dollar budget deficit, would likely be higher on the new governor's to-do list.
Education

Educators agree that Napolitano's most substantial contributions were providing free full-day kindergarten, allocating new money to rebuild dilapidated buildings on state university campuses and preventing cuts to existing education budgets.

With Napolitano's expected departure, some education leaders worry about keeping the gains made under her leadership, but many expect Brewer to be a similar, practical politician. Brewer has not been willing to talk about her role as governor or her education agenda.

"I'm sure Miss Brewer will have the best interests of the state at heart and a good agenda at all levels," said Fred Boice, president of the Arizona State Board of Regents, which oversees the state's three universities.

TGen and international team identify gene that could put people at risk for age-related hearing loss

2008-12-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

{Source: TGen] - Researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, working with scientists from Los Angeles and Belgium, have identified a gene that could help explain why some people lose their hearing as they age.

In a study released online today in the journal Human Molecular Genetics, researchers identified a gene that could help lead to the treatment of presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss, which accounts for 30 percent of all deafness.

“Finding the genetic causes of age-related hearing loss could lead to treatments that would bring relief to millions of people worldwide who now suffer from social isolation, depression and even cognitive impairment as a result of not being able to properly understand what others are saying,’’ said Dr. Matthew Huentelman, an Investigator in TGen’s Neurogenomics Division and one of the scientific paper’s lead authors.

Researchers at TGen, the Los Angeles-based House Ear Institute, and the University of Antwerp, Belgium, said they believe the paper’s findings represent important and significant progress in the efforts to discover the origins of presbycusis.

“This is the first ever and largest genome-wide association study for age-related hearing loss,” said Dr. Rick Friedman, another lead author who also is a Principal Investigator at the House Ear Institute and surgeon at the House Clinic.

The study uncovered several genes, but one gene stands out and is believed to put people at risk for hearing loss as they age. The research team believes a common variant in the GRM7 gene may be associated with susceptibility to glutamate excitotoxicity and hearing loss. It is the overexpression of glutamate that causes damage to the inner and outer hair cells in the inner ear leading to age-related hearing loss.

“We have known for a long time that genes play an important role in presbycusis. But until now, genetic research has lagged behind compared to other important diseases,” said Guy Van Camp, director of the Hereditary Deafness Laboratory and professor, University of Antwerp, Belgium. “The identification of GRM7 is a very exciting result, as it may provide insights in the development of the disease.”

The study participants were Caucasian, ages 53 to 67, and the samples were collected at eight centers in six nations throughout Europe from population registries or audiological consultations. The team of investigators analyzed the samples and identified genetic risks. In the lab, the research team scored markers across the entire genome of more than 2,000 samples.
Friedman said the next step is developing a laboratory model to test pharmaceuticals for possible treatment of presbycusis in the future.

Keeping Chromosomes From Cuddling Up

2008-12-04T09:15:00.001-07:00

[Source: Mari N. Jensen, UA College of Science] - If chromosomes snuggle up too closely at the wrong times, the results can be genetic disaster.

Now University of Arizona researchers have found the molecular machines in fruit flies that yank chromosomes, the DNA-carrying structures, apart when necessary.

The machines, proteins called condensin II, separate chromosomes by twisting them into supercoils that kink up and therefore can no longer touch.

Scientists had known of condensin II but did not know how it functioned inside cells.

Keeping specific parts of chromosomes from touching can change how the instructions carried in the DNA are read, said BIO5 member Giovanni Bosco, a UA assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology.

"It's like picking up your favorite book and, depending on what chair you chose to sit in, it turned into a different story -- even though the printed words in the book never changed," research team leader Bosco wrote in an e-mail.

"This now changes the way we think about genetic information. Taking a literal reading of it is not what actually happens," he wrote. "Instead, context matters."

The team also found that condensin II plays a key role in making sure that fruit fly sperm cells each receive the proper number of chromosomes -- not too many, not too few.

Bosco suspects that condensin II plays the same role in the formation of human sperm and eggs.

Having too many or too few chromosomes in egg or sperm cells is the source of several important genetic disorders, including Down syndrome.

Abnormalities in chromosome number is also the cause of some miscarriages of early-term fetuses in humans.

The research is published in two separate papers. "Chromosome Alignment and Transvection are Antagonized by Condensin II," by Tom A. Hartl and Helen F. Smith, UA doctoral students, and Bosco is in the Nov. 28 issue of the journal Science.

Hartl, Sarah J. Sweeney, Peter J. Knepler and Bosco published their paper, "Condensin II Resolves Chromosomal Associations to Enable Anaphase I Segregation in Drosophila Male Meiosis," in the October 2008 issue of PLoS Genetics. Sweeney and Knepler, now doing research at UA, were UA undergraduates when they conducted the research.

The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funded the research.

Learning how cells control chromosomes and how DNA is transcribed will lead to better understanding of how an organism's DNA affects the organism's final form.

Scientists have known for about 50 years that when chromosomes are in direct contact, the transcription machinery can choose to transcribe either the gene from the mother or the gene from the father.

Many researchers investigated how the specific genes were brought close together so that process, known as transvection, could happen.

Bosco wondered, what if the chromosomes stayed stuck together?

To find something that separated chromosomes, he looked for female fruit flies that were sterile because chromosomes in their eggs had stuck together.

Once he had those fruit flies, Hartl isolated the gene that kept the chromosomes from coming apart. He found that the gene coded for condensin II, indicating that the sterile flies couldn't make condensin II.

To be able to watch how condensin II affects chromosomes, the researchers used the salivary glands from normal Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies. Fruit fly salivary glands are unusual, because they have many copies of the same chromosome coiled together like a rope.

Hartl said, "You can actually see chromosomes, because the cells are so huge and the chromosomes are so huge."

The team inserted an additional gene into the chromosomes that would turn the condensin II-producing gene off at 77 F (21 C) and on at 95 F (35 C). The researchers also marked one gene on the chromosomes with green fluorescent protein, or GFP, to be able to see changes in the chromosomes' positions.

The scientists then looked at the salivary glands at the two temperatures to see what happened when condensin II was present and when it was absent.

Bosco said, "Simply turning the condensin gene on or off, we could watch the chromosomes move right before our eyes, demonstrating that condensin was mostly likely the tiny machine that was ripping the chromosomes apart."

He said these findings are significant because more and more genetic tests to sequence people's DNA are becoming available, but the DNA sequence alone does not completely determine what diseases the person will have.

Even if it's in the genes, it might not show, he said. "It's what your cells are doing with your genes that's important."

To pull the chromosomes apart, condensin II changes its shape. Smith said the team's next step is figuring out how condensin II proteins are recruited to the chromosomes and how the condensin II proteins use the cellular energy packets known as ATP to change shape.

Reliability Of Cognitive Assessment Tool Varies Widely, Study Suggests

2008-11-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - A new suggests the reliability of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale – Cognitive (ADAS-Cog) may vary and possess the ability to affect clinical trial outcomes.

Moreover, this study further suggests that ADAS-Cog rater training and experience are factors that contribute to variances seen in this assessment tool.

The importance of a reliable diagnosis of the Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical as new pharmacotherapies are being developed. The ADAS-cog is considered the gold-standard and the most popular cognitive testing instrument used in clinical trials to detect changes in the core symptoms of AD.

This study critically looks at various factors that might influence the way the ADAS-cog is administered and therefore may lead to and yield unintended outcomes. The study found factors such as rater training, rater education, variance in time allotment during testing as well as rater experience and individual judgment may contribute to variance in scoring when using this assessment.

"Clinical trials for the possible treatment of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias are becoming more expansive and being run in many countries. The necessity for the primary outcome instrument to be administered consistently in different countries, cultures and between different clinical trials is critical if we are to determine which treatment works better than others. Any variability in how the instruments are administered can adversely affect the ability to detect positive outcomes," says Donald Connor PhD, PhD, director of neuropsychology at Banner Health's Sun Health Research Institute.

Rater experiences were not the only factors that contributed to variances in ADAS-cog scoring. The study also suggested that test materials changed over time including large ranges in the quality of naming materials, word card decks, instruction manuals and worksheets, all factors that can affect outcomes.

"Even as we try to develop better instruments for the detection of meaningful change we must make sure that our current instruments are utilized as effectively as possible," Dr. Connor says. "As the population continues to age rapidly and new Alzheimer's medications are being developed, it is critical that all who are involved in clinical evaluation and testing does so with precision and consistency."

The study is published in the November issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (Volume 15:3).

Gasping Helps Cardiac Arrest Victims Survive, New Research Shows

2008-11-25T11:10:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily ] - People who witness an individual collapse suddenly and unexpectedly should perform uninterrupted chest compressions even if the patient gasps or breathes in a funny way, research from the Resuscitation Research Group at The University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center shows.

When an individual breathes abnormally or gasps after collapsing from sudden cardiac arrest there is a greater chance of surviving, the researchers report. Gasping can be thought of as a survival reflex triggered by the brain.

Each day, about 500 Americans collapse because their hearts suddenly stop beating. Data collected by Sarver Heart Center researchers show that in more than half of witnessed cardiac arrest cases, the patient gasped.

"Gasping is an indication that the brain is still alive, and it tells you that if you start and continue uninterrupted chest compressions, the person has a high chance of surviving," said Gordon A. Ewy, MD, corresponding author of the study, professor and chief of cardiology at the UA and director of its Sarver Heart Center. "We need people to promptly recognize sudden cardiac arrest, to call 9-1-1 and to start chest compressions right away."

Gasping has been described as snoring, gurgling, moaning, snorting or agonal or labored breathing. However, bystanders often misinterpret gasping and other unusual vocal sounds as normal breathing and don't call 9-1-1 or begin lifesaving chest compressions quickly enough, Dr. Ewy said.

The authors hope their findings lead to greater willingness of untrained bystanders to jump in and perform continuous chest compressions. Bystander-initiated CPR has been shown to be a cardiac arrest victim's only chance of survival until an automated external defibrillator or the paramedics get to the scene.

Many bystanders are hesitant to perform mouth-to-mouth ventilation, and in a case of a witnessed (seen or heard) collapse, so-called rescue breathing is not necessary and may be harmful, Dr. Ewy said. "When the patient gasps, there is a negative pressure in the chest, which not only sucks air into the lungs but also draws blood back to the heart. In contrast, mouth-to-mouth breathing creates overpressure in the chest and actually inhibits blood flow back to the heart. Gasping during cardiac arrest is much better than mouth-to-mouth breathing."

But what about choking? "That's very different," Dr. Ewy said. "Someone who is choking will be seen to grasp their throat and struggle to breathe, which means they're responsive. These individuals need the Heimlich maneuver." A primary cardiac arrest is the witnessed unexpected collapse of an individual who is not responsive, Dr. Ewy said. "Cardiac arrest will cause the stricken individual to pass out and collapse to the ground within seconds."

The Arizona researchers examined data from two sources. Transcripts from the Phoenix Fire Department Regional Dispatch Center included information on gasping in patients found by bystanders, whether their collapse was witnessed or not. The department's first-care reports on 1,218 witnessed patients provided the incidence of gasping upon or after the arrival of emergency medical service (EMS) personnel. Among the 481 patients who received bystander CPR, 39 percent of gaspers survived, but only 9.4 percent of those who didn't gasp survived.

Performing uninterrupted chest compressions (a technique developed at the UA Sarver Heart Center and endorsed by the American Heart Association as "Hands-Only CPR" for lay individuals) may cause a person who has stopped gasping to resume gasping. "This scares many people and they stop pressing on the chest," Dr. Ewy said, "This is bad because gasping is an indication that you're doing a good job."

The study is set to publish in the Nov. 24 online issue of Circulation, the official journal of the American Heart Association.

The authors of the study are: Bentley J. Bobrow, MD; Mathias Zuercher, MD; Gordon A. Ewy, MD; Lani Clark, BS; Vatsal Chikani, MPH,; Dan Donahue BS, NREMT-P, Arthur B. Sanders, MD; Ronald W. Hilwig, DVM; Robert A. Berg, MD; and Karl B. Kern, MD.

Experts continue to promote a combination of rescue breathing and chest compressions for victims of cardiac arrest due to non-cardiac causes, like near drowning or electrocution, and all victims of pediatric cardiac arrest.

The study was funded in part by a grant from the Arizona Department of Health Services Bureau of Emergency Medical Services.

HTG Names Fredrick Pollock VP of Corporate Development

2008-11-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

[Source: BUSINESS WIRE] - HTG, Inc., provider of the quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay (qNPA(TM)) system and service partner for the life sciences industry, today announced it has appointed Fredrick L. Pollock to Vice President of Corporate Development. Pollock will be responsible for leading commercial sales efforts in the academic and research markets, spearheading efforts for bio-marker and signature discovery collaborations and supporting commercialization efforts for the company's mid-density array product line.

Over the past eight years, Pollack has served in management, sales and business development roles most recently as Director of Strategic Businesses and Translational Medicine at Affymetrix, Inc., a leading microarray technology vendor. His accomplishments include implementing a global alliance management program, developing strategies for sales expansions, launching several partner clinical laboratory improvement amendments (CLIA) certified clinical tests, and securing multi-millions in additional sales.

"Fred brings a wealth of industry knowledge and expertise to our leadership team and he will help us accelerate our commercial and corporate development efforts," said TJ Johnson, President and CEO, HTG. "HTG's portfolio strategy is to leverage the precision of the qNPA assay into the mid-plex market and establish the assay as a new standard for gene expression based diagnostics. Fred's background is perfectly suited to help us in these specific areas."

"I am eager to work with the HTG management team and build on the proven success of HTG's platform to further expand the company's customer base," said Fred Pollock. "With my biotechnology and translational medical industry experience this was an ideal fit. I look forward to contributing to HTG's future success in my new capacity."

Prior to Affymetrix, Pollock worked at Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, now part of GE Healthcare, for 11 years. He most recently served as a business unit manager where he was responsible for managing sales in the central United States. He also held positions at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Photon Marketing.

Pollock earned a B.A. in Molecular Biology from the University of North Texas.

HTG's qNPA technology is used to carry out quantitative multiplexed, gene-based drug discovery programs, including target validation, HTS lead optimization, metabolism, toxicology and clinical development. HTG's platform allows scientists to test any sample, including fixed tissues, while avoiding the need for extraction or target amplification. The platform provides high-quality quantitative test results enabling clients to compress drug discovery and development program timelines, increase program success and reduce costs.

Arizona Heart Innovative Technologies Licenses New Endovascular Device

2008-11-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

[Source: Biospace.com/PRNewswire] - Arizona Heart Innovative Technologies, LLC (AHIT) announced the license of a new medical device for endovascular use to a publicly traded medical device company. "This is the second AHIT-developed product that we have licensed in the past ten months. We continue to demonstrate our ability to bridge the gap between good ideas from the medical community to commercially viable products for medical device companies. This confirms the viability of our business model to serve as a cost-effective supplementary research and development resource for companies," says AHIT President and CEO, Bill Colone. "We have additional products that have completed the development process and we are continuing to discuss options with many device companies."

AHIT licensed the endovascular product in July of 2007 from Hani Shennib, MD, a cardiovascular surgeon formerly at the Arizona Heart Hospital. The product was prototyped, tested and marketed to multiple medical companies immediately following positive clinical test results. The product should reach both the U.S. and international markets by the first quarter of 2009.

New small-business center ready to hatch

2008-11-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

[Source: Joe Ferguson, Arizona Daily Sun] - The first home for what Flagstaff officials hope will be the next generation of businesses focusing on clean energy and technology officially opened Tuesday on McMillan Mesa.

The 10,000 square-foot, state-of-the art facility, known as the Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies, will serve as a small-business incubator for entrepreneurs and startups. NACET will focus on high-tech, science-based businesses as well as renewable energy firms.
Gov. Janet Napolitano was one of several politicians who hailed the incubator as a step to diversify the local economy and support fledgling businesses. She touched on the current economy, saying Arizona needs to reduce its dependence on industries like home construction prone to boom and bust cycles.

“I think in Arizona we have seen why it is that we must continue to plant the seeds of diversifying ... so that we are not overly dependent on one industry such as construction. We have been through several construction cycles now since I’ve been governor, each one worse than one before. We always come out, but they are very difficult to go through,” Napolitano told reporters.

She said she was pleased to see a new incubator that will benefit communities in northern Arizona.

“One of our chief goals is to keep improving education, workforce development and projects such as NACET right here in Flagstaff. To keep diversifying the economy and to do it outside of Maricopa County,” Napolitano said.

One of the incubator’s first tenants is SenesTech, a fledgling biotechnology company started six years ago by NAU alum Loretta Mayer.

The company has one of the largest presences in the incubator, with several employees working out of a total of seven labs and offices.

The company is working on manufacturing a nontoxic alternative to the poisons currently used to keep rice-field rats under control.

The company recently signed a contract with the Australian government to produce the compound. Senestech hopes to have a marketable product with the next two years, according to NACET.

Local businessman Lavelle McCoy said he has been working on establishing a business incubator in Flagstaff for eight years. He currently serves as the chairman of NACET’s board of directors.
McCoy was proud of the new building but said it’s the companies that are the future of northern Arizona.

“This is more than just a facility. The facility is an instrument. What really matters is what we are going to accomplish going forward,” McCoy said.

The incubator was nearly scrapped by NAU a few years ago when increases in the cost of construction materials caused the university to scale back the project to half its originally planned size — 5,000 square feet.

The Flagstaff City Council then stepped in to take the lead on the incubator using a federal grant from the Economic Development Administration to help build the facility on city land adjacent to the USGS campus.

NACET will also be the home to Northern Arizona University’s tech-transfer office, which will help the school develop and commercialize inventions made by NAU faculty.

The agreement will be more efficient than the previous agreement NAU had with the Valley-based Arizona Science and Technology Enterprises.

NAU President John Haeger said NACET will be “economic breadbasket” for the local economy in the future.

Andy Kruse, a co-founder of Southwest Windpower, said he could have used the support now offered by NACET back in 1987. Back then, he and co-founder David Calley were tinkering in his garage with a prototype wind turbine using a modified Ford alternator.

At the time, the closest place the would-be entrepreneurs could go for help was the Small Business Administration in Phoenix.

“When we started out, the SBA was the place to go for small businesses to try and get advice and to build your businesses. But it was in Phoenix,” Kruse said. “It was really difficult starting out because we didn’t have any of the tools and we probably made more mistakes than we would have if we had NACET here back then. We would have probably been bigger by now.”

Joe Ferguson can be reached at 556-2253 or jferguson@azdailysun.com.

Companies currently at NACET
— Ambature LLC, is developing a new class of materials that improve the efficiency of power distribution while reducing electricity consumption.
— Algae Biosciences Corporation discovers, develops, produces, manufactures, and markets products that originate from marine and fresh water organisms.
— Foresight Wind Energy develops wind energy sources throughout the West.
— Keya Earth focuses on sustainable development strategies for Native American communities.
— SenesTech specializes in reproductive physiology. Specifically, nonsurgical methods for controlling reproduction in rodent and wildlife populations.
— Quantance, a semiconductor startup, has developed and patented technology innovations in radio frequency transmission efficiency that significantly increases signal power while requiring less battery power.
— SunWind Solutions produces web-based software for designing renewable energy systems.
Companies affiliated with NACET
— Abineau Communications is a boutique digital communications company that develops fixed and mobile wireless applications.
— Arizona High Spirits Distillery/Mogollon Brewing Company has launched a number of sustainable-technology initiatives related to the production of beer and high-end, distilled consumer products.
— Density Investments develops planning strategies that are designed to address urban sprawl using unique products.
— Motor Excellence is developing a disruptive electric motor and generator technology with broad potential applications.
— Visible Energy provides customer-friendly monitoring services that reduce energy usage and costs.
— Source: Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies

Stopping Germs From Ganging Up On Humans

2008-11-24T13:51:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Keeping germs from cooperating can delay the evolution of drug resistance more effectively than killing germs one by one with traditional drugs such as antibiotics, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

John W. Pepper proposes a new strategy in the arms race between humans and germs-- targeting the teamwork within gangs of germs.

Most drugs used to fight infections kill the vulnerable disease-causing organisms, or pathogens, but the resistant ones survive. The next generation will all carry the resistance to the drug.

"We know that the pathogen is causing the disease. The obvious solution is to kill the pathogen. It makes perfect sense, and that's what we've always done," said Pepper, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "But there's one big flaw with that -- and that is the evolution of resistance."

Pepper's mathematical models show it takes longer for a group of cells to develop resistance to drugs that attack the teamwork factors than for individual cells to become resistant to a traditional antibiotic.

He advocates developing drugs that attack the pathogens' methods and resources for cooperation. Pepper said once the teamwork is disrupted, the immune system can combat any remaining infection.

He said this new approach will work against "old enemies and some new ones" that are becoming drug resistant, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (MRSA), HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, avian influenza and cancer.

Pepper is also a member of UA's BIO5 Institute and an external professor at the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico. His paper, "Defeating Pathogen Drug Resistance: Guidance from Evolutionary Theory," is scheduled for publication in the December issue of the journal Evolution.

Pepper began investigating cooperation by studying parrots and dolphins. Now he studies cooperation among individual cells.

Most cells such as a bacterium produce materials that ensure their own survival and maintain infections by helping both themselves and their fellows.

For pathogens, there's strength in numbers. As they form groups, they become a greater threat.
For example, MRSA produce more than 50 resources essential for the group.

Where others may see an unconquerable defense, Pepper sees 50 opportunities.

The number and type of materials produced within a gang of pathogens varies. However, if one material is eliminated, none of the cells will survive. Neither will the infection.

He is currently collaborating with cancer biologists to attack chemicals that allow cancer cells to gang up on normal cells.

One type of chemical, the angiogenesis factor, is secreted by cancerous cells to stimulate the growth of blood vessels into tumors. Blood vessels carry oxygen and nutrients to the cells in the tumor.

Some doctors currently use angiogenesis blockers, such as the anti-cancer drug Avastin, to inhibit the signal. Without blood vessels, tumors suffocate and starve.

As opposed to toxic drugs that poison and kill cancer cells, Pepper said these new types of anti-cancer drugs will stay potent longer.

"The basic point I'm making is in order to save the patient, we don't have to have a drug that kills the cancer cells," Pepper said.

If drug development continues to focus on killing individual cells, he said, "We're always going to keep running on the same treadmill.

"We're going to be in this situation where we desperately need a new antibiotic by tomorrow, or maybe by yesterday," Pepper said. "That's not going to be a temporary emergency -- it's going to be a permanent emergency, unless we take a new approach."

Environmentalists, developers on same team in planning future

2008-11-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

[Source: Joe Snell, Special to the Arizona Daily Star] - A visually attractive, highly functioning community is an important competitive advantage in economic development. Unfortunately, Tucson's development history is often marred by perceptions that progress is slow.
The key to overcoming these perceptions and improving the region's development processes is community agreement on which areas to develop and which areas to preserve.

We must act now so opportunities do not pass us by. Coordinated planning and responsible stewardship of the region's land resources are important to balancing growth with environmental objectives.

Often land developers and environmentalists are seen as opponents in land use planning. But what we all need to realize is that we are on the same team in planning for the future of our community. We must act as a metropolitan community and realize that we are stronger together than the sum of our parts.

Labor drives economic development, and it is increasingly in short supply. Talent today values a community with beauty, recreational opportunities, an adequate transportation system, sustainable principles and sound environmental practices.

If we can agree on where to grow and what to preserve, then we can attract and retain the jobs and talent we all want for ourselves and future generations.

An emerging example of where to grow — and how — lies in packaging our regional assets in a way that is attractive to potential regional employers. For example, the biosciences industry, anchored by companies like Ventana Medical Systems and Sanofi Aventis, and supporting regional assets like C-Path and BIO5, can be marketed together as a bioscience corridor.

Another example is our 150-plus strong transportation and logistics providers who care deeply about where they operate and how they market themselves to take advantage of billions of dollars of freight that come across our rail lines each year.

TREO's Economic Blueprint has identified 10 quality growth zones in the Tucson region that are important areas for commercial and industrial activity. These areas are targeted for master planning and strategic investment.

Successful development of commercial and industrial employment and investment in these zones is critical in attracting and creating high-wage jobs for our residents. For maps of these areas, go to www.treoaz.org/QGZ-Maps.aspx online.

In order to compete in the global economy, a community must have it all – the work force to attract and retain business, and the community assets and jobs that attract that work force.

TREO's regional approach to development involves a strategic focus on four targeted industries that will increase the number of high-skilled and high-wage jobs in our region:

● Aerospace and defense (top 5 region in the United States).
● Bioscience (regional assets are growing, state strategy is strong).
● Solar (an emerging industry and a natural fit).
● Transportation and logistics (building on an already strategic location).

As we begin to attract these kinds of companies and jobs to our region, we must all work together to ensure that we grow strategically in a way that preserves our natural landscape while utilizing the developable land.

You vote in elections once a year. But when you engage in community issues, you are voting every day about the community you want to live in.
Don't miss this chance to cast your ballot for the future of the region by participating in "A Community Conversation on Regional Land Use" on Dec. 3.

Contact Joe Snell at Joe.snell@treoaz.org

Sky's the Limit for High Tech in the Grand Canyon State

2008-11-24T13:45:00.001-07:00

[Source: Jenny Vickers, BusinessFacilities.com] - Arizona's tech sector is heating up the sun-kissed state due to a number of unique university programs and government economic development initiatives, as well as a growing biotech hub.

Businesses interested in expanding and relocating to Arizona will find one of the fastest-growing economies in the nation, a skilled, knowledge-based workforce, and a competitive business climate and tax structure. Phoenix, the state's capital, is now the fifth most populated city in the country.

ARIZONA FAST FACTS

Population (2006): 6,166,318Largest Cities (2005): Phoenix, 1,461,575; Tucson, 515,526; Mesa, 442,780; Glendale 239,435Targeted Industries: Biotech, environmental technology, food, fiber and natural products, optics, advanced composites, metal fabrication, transportation and distribution, software Key Incentives: Commerce and Economic Development Commission grants; R&D Tax Credit Program; Enterprise Zones; Governor's Strategic Plan for Economic Development; Arizona Technology Incubator; Small Business Innovative Research Loans

The Grand Canyon State is well known for its technology-related industry specializing in semiconductors, aerospace and defense, navigation and controls, and business information services. One of the largest portion's of the state's high-tech industry is semiconductor manufacturing, which produces chips for a myriad of consumer electronic products such as MP3 players, cell phones, and computers.

The industry was recently enhanced when ASIC North, a Vermont-based semiconductor design company, announced plans to expand its operations to Tempe in September, creating 25 new jobs with an annual payroll of $1.75 million. Its location in Tempe puts the company in close proximity to other major semiconductor producers such as Intel, Freescale, Microchip Technology and ON Semiconductor.

After looking at many locations, including the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina and Austin, TX, ASIC North selected metro Phoenix because of its large semiconductor industry, good transportation and proximity to Silicon Valley, where many of the firm's customers are located.

Investment Activity

• Abraxis BioScience CEO, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced a $14-million letter of intent to establish Catapult Bio, a non-profit that will accelerate research to commercialization.
• Science Foundation Arizona is committed to investing $100 million over the next four years to strengthen the region's existing scientific, medical and engineering research infrastructure.
• The $20-million TRAC fund finances early-stage life science companies located in Arizona or those planning to move to the state.
• Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale received a $49-million grant to accelerate cancer research and treatment.
• The Angel Investment program is a state tax credit to expand early-stage investments for targeted.

"ASIC North is growing into new markets," says ASIC North president Mike Slattery. "After surveying many cities it was apparent metro Phoenix was the best choice to provide the new business opportunities and skilled workforce needed for our expansion."

Arizona also is home to a burgeoning bioscience industry. According to the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, bioscience employment and number of establishments has outpaced nationwide growth since 2002. Between 2002 and 2006, employment in Arizona's bioscience industry increased 18.5 percent (compared to 4.7 percent nationally), adding more than 12,600 jobs totaling 80,909. The number of bioscience establishments in the state increased 16.7 percent during the same time period, rising from 639 to 745. In addition, through three-quarters of 2007, Arizona already had recorded its most successful year in attracting bioscience venture capital ($77 million) since 2002.

Earlier this year, Abraxis BioScience, a Los Angeles pharmaceutical company that uses nanotechnology to kill cancer cells, announced plans to locate in Phoenix. The now- opened 200,000-square-foot-facility will create 205 jobs with an average annual salary of $72,200. Its location in Phoenix puts the company in close proximity to global bioscience leaders such as the Mayo Clinic, Covance, Barrow Neurological Institute and Medtronic Microelectronics Center, as well as world-class research establishments, such as Arizona State University, Translational Genomics Research Institute, and Sun Health Research Institute.

The new facility allows Abraxis to expand its manufacturing capabilities and provide the necessary infrastructure for worldwide growth of the company. In 2005, Abraxis received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a drug called Abraxane to treat metastatic breast cancer with nanoparticles. The drug accounted for $78.7 million in revenue during the second quarter of 2007.

For businesses locating and expanding in Arizona, the state offers one of the largest workforce footprints in the West, a myriad of unique government programs, as well as targeted incentives that produce some of the lowest effective tax rates in the nation.

One such program helping to train workers in the state is Arizona's Job Training Program. Considered one of the best cash grant job training programs in the country, it has been successful in helping businesses train, create new jobs and help increase the skill and wage levels of employees. Qualified businesses can receive up to 75 percent of the cost to train new employees and up to 50 percent of the cost to train incumbent employees.

This program is helping Victory Industrial Products, a company which designs and manufactures equipment for power generators, train new employees at their new 30,000-square-foot facility in Tolleson, AZ. Victory is making an initial capital investment of $3 million and expects to have an annual payroll of $3.5 million with 100 new jobs.

The state also has launched two new programs to attract and retain new businesses. Arizona's new R&D tax credit program provides income tax credit for qualified research and development done in the state, including company-funded research at a state university. Qualified companies can receive up to $2,500,000. The Arizona Innovation Accelerator Program offers a unique combination of grants, tax credits, seminars and other tools to help businesses develop technologies for the marketplace.

Ventana buys Integrated Biomolecule Corp. facility

2008-11-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

[The Explorer Newspaper] - Up until yesterday, Nov. 18, the small Oro Valley biotech firm operated somewhat in the shadow of its multi-national neighbors.Integrated Biomolecule Corp., which specializes in laboratory analysis and synthesis, on Wednesday sold its lab space off Innovation Park Drive to Ventana Medical Systems, the Roche-owned diagnostics firm that stands directly across the street."IBC began in my garage and operated at the University of Arizona Tech Park for years, until we became successful enough to build a facility of our own," IBC founder and president Robert S. Green said in a statement. "IBC will continue to provide many of its services directly and through its affiliates."The biotech firm, however, can operate out of other venues and no longer needs its own facility, Green said.Ventana will use the IBC labs for its own purposes.Terms of Ventana's purchase of the IBC facility were not disclosed. Green says he will remain as IBC's president, and the firm will continue providing analytical and synthesis services to a variety of companies."Acquiring the existing IBC facility allows for immediate expansion of our research and development capabilities," Ventana spokeswoman Alana Bolton said in a statement. "This purchase underscores our commitment for further growth in the community."In February, Swiss-based drugmaker Roche Holdings bought Ventana for $3 billion. The conglomerate has since made known its plans to aggressively expand Ventana's presence in Oro Valley, including hiring about 250 additional employees.By the end of 2009, Ventana wil employ more than 1,000 people, Roche CEO Severin Schwan told local leaders during a recent visit to Oro Valley.

Integrating Genomics Technology and Information into Toxicology Studies Benefits Development

2008-11-19T15:48:00.001-07:00

[Source: Gail Dutton, Genetic Engineering News] - Whether toxicogenomics—gene-expression profiling—can be said to have lived up to its potential depends upon how it is used. The tool is applied mainly to determine mechanisms of action and, to a lesser extent, as a predictive tool. The key is to place the data into a contextual framework, according to many leading researchers.

“Toxicogenomics reflects an integration of genomics technologies and information into toxicology studies,” explained Cindy Afshari, Ph.D., scientific director, Amgen. Dr. Afshari hosted the “ILSI Health and Environmental Sciences Institute Genomics Applications in Safety Studies—Case Study Workshop” held last month.

Salah-Dine Chibout, Ph.D., global head of investigative toxicology at Novartis, said that toxicology identifies whether a drug is or is not toxic. Toxicogenomics, on the other hand, “takes you to another level of complexity, which could provide mechanisms of toxicity.”

“Proper execution and interpretation requires specialized expertise and training that not all toxicologists have,” Dr. Afshari emphasized. Consequently, many toxicogenomic studies occur in investigative or discovery toxicology groups. The move a decade ago to develop special toxicogenomics departments has largely fallen by the wayside as the technologies used in toxicogenomics such as microarrays have become mainstream.

Bruce Carlson, analyst for Kalorama Information, noted “there are no good market numbers on toxicogenomics.” The market for gene-expression profiles, however, a cornerstone of the field, was $1.1 billion globally in 2007. Over time, Dr. Afshari predicted, it is likely that toxicogenomics and standard toxicology assessments will become integrated.

Predictive Toxicogenomics

Lilly Research Laboratories is at the forefront of predictive toxicogenomics work. This area was the focus of intense interest when the field emerged a decade ago. Since then, it has been slow to fulfill its promise.

Craig E. Thomas, Ph.D., senior research advisor, investigative toxicology, suspects the barriers are as much cultural as technological. “As safety assessment in the pharma industry has traditionally been initiated in the latter stages of the discovery process, overcoming the natural fear of failure associated with anything new or unproven is even more daunting.”

“Our feeling is that one of the primary barriers to using transcriptomics predicatively is an inability to put the data into a context that allows decision-making,” said Dr. Thomas.

The challenge for researchers is that with more than 30,000 data points for each microarray, “scientists will undoubtedly see expression changes relative to the controls. What was lacking for many years, however, was an ability to attach toxicologic significance to those changes. For example, is the pattern of gene-expression changes representative or associated with an adverse event?”

Addressing those changes, explained Dr. Thomas, requires developing a large chemogenomics database. During the past three years, Lilly has leveraged DrugMatrix®, a contextual database from Entelos.

“A key feature of having a large database of expression changes integrated with traditional toxicity endpoints is mathematically derived gene signatures that are predictive or coincident with toxicologic endpoints,” he continued. Because the gene signatures are often composed of genes that are not readily associated biologically to outcomes, “you have to believe in the numbers.”

Dr. Thomas said that Lilly’s experience with toxicogenomics has been positive largely because of the contextual database that helped Lilly scientists move beyond purely retrospective studies to study the mechanism of toxicity.

He added that Lilly is unique in focusing much of its toxicogenomics work on in vitro studies, in which gene signatures are used to predict outcomes in animal studies. By addressing toxicology at the hit-to-lead stage, scientists can look across the structure/activity relationship to consider multiple chemical scaffolds.

“Researchers, historically, haven’t considered drug safety at this early stage because the tools were lacking,” he emphasized. The result was often a drug candidate optimized around one scaffold without any toxicology assessment.

“It’s still the early days,” he cautioned, and so the outcomes in long-term toxicology studies of molecules prioritized using genomics in the early preclinical studies remain to be seen. That said, that approach has contributed to a growing pipeline that currently features an all-time high of 50 distinct compounds in clinical development.

The biopharma industry as a whole, however, has experienced less success with predictive toxicogenomics. Only a few validated markers have emerged from this research.

Mark Fielden, Ph.D., senior scientist, Roche, pointed out that the problem reported by the broad industry is that “the biomarkers that have been identified haven’t been robust enough,” for this to be used predictively. But the issue may be with the models used. Roche has experienced success here, said Dr. Fielden, and this remains a ripe area of research.

Other issues outlined by Russell S. Thomas, Ph.D., director of the Center for Genomic Biology and senior investigator at the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, included questions of reproducibility, how to interpret the data, and how to build a profile to allow it to become clinically useful.

Mechanistic Actions

“Predictive toxicogenomics is taking longer to materialize than mechanistic applications but has promise,” according to Dr. Thomas. “It may take five to seven years to be broadly applied and accepted by the FDA, which has a consortium looking at this.”

More companies have focused upon toxicogenomics as a way to better understand mechanism of action than to predict toxicity. “Application of toxicogenomics has provided insights into mechanisms driving particular target organ toxicities and has provided viable hypotheses for further testing,” Dr. Afshari explained. “We have also found that genomic analyses provide useful information around discrimination compounds to support decisions for ranking molecules” to advance through lead optimization.

Novartis is using known toxic compounds to develop the techniques to understand the mechanistic actions of toxicity. Such screening led to the recent validation of biomarkers for kidney toxicity. “There is a lot of demand,” Dr. Chibout said, particularly for kidney, liver, heart, and vascular systems.

Novartis has developed an internal database to identify toxicity that is used routinely. Such information allows a more accurate risk/benefit analysis, helping companies determine the relative value of advancing compounds through the developmental pipeline.

Its strength, Dr. Fielden said, is as a hypothesis generator. When used to screen particular drugs, the technology generates thousands of expression changes at a time, allowing many hypotheses to be tested. Cell-based assays, in contrast, generate perhaps a half-dozen endpoints at most when multiplexed, and thus can test a smaller number of hypotheses. Roche therefore uses toxicogenomics to generate hypotheses when trying to understand mechanisms of toxicity, which then are tested more thoroughly using other assays.

Challenges

“One of the challenges for scientists in toxicology is that sometimes genomics that are not fully sequenced and/or annotated are used,” said Dr. Afshari, which “presents a challenge to network and pathway analyses.” For example, a study undertaken by the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute found that although pathway analyses were consistent among labs and platforms, gene-to-gene comparisons were more problematic.

Consortiums currently are addressing that issue by cross-validating many of the biomarkers that have been linked to various diseases. “There’s a decade of literature,” Dr. Fielden noted, “but a majority of the information is not well-understood.”

The C-Path Predictive Safety Testing Consortium (PSTC) is trying to leverage that work by identifying promising biomarkers from the literature and therefore allow testing on smaller arrays or on individual genes that provide results comparable to or better than those of larger arrays, he said.

The Microarray Quality Consortium, on the other hand, is working to standardize microarrays to “give researchers confidence that the assay they are running is both accurate and precise,” said Dr. Fielden. That has the benefit of allowing researchers to better compare results in the literature and among labs, and thereby access a larger, more relevant body of data. That group also is establishing a set of best practices for the derivation and validation of multiple gene biomarkers or signatures.

Work also is under way to develop a database of carcinogenic chemicals and their specific effects in rats. Dr. Fielden and the PSTC are examining published toxicogenomics signatures and trying to validate those signatures across laboratories.

Results, he noted are “fairly robust and show promise” for predictive or rodent carcinogenicity. Other work is under way to rederive the carcinogenicity signature on a real-time PCR platform containing 20–30 genes in order to standardize the measurement platform.

Interest in toxicogenomics is predicated upon the ability to more accurately and more quickly identify toxic compounds to select the best drug candidate. “By doing so, you save a lot of money, as well as time,” said Dr. Chibout.

Future

“The field is still maturing, so lessons from use and applications are still emerging,” explained Dr. Afshari. Toxicogenomics has the potential to revolutionize the way drugs are developed if it is integrated with other disciplines, including pathology, molecular biology, physiology, bioinformatics, and clinical development. “If you do that, it is successful,” Dr. Chibout asserted. If not, it’s just more data.

It’s important to augment toxicogenomic data with other information for decision-making such as histopathology researchers agree. “Sometimes the inference from the information can be used as a guide to understand drug effect,” noted Dr. Afshari. Any inference or key hypothesis directly resulting from toxicogenomics, however, should be followed up with other analyses to help bridge the gap between preclinical models and humans.

Right now, the information isn’t fully integrated with other disciplines. “For example,” added Dr. Chibout, “currently, we look at the gene. In the future, we are likely to look at proteins, and metabolites and epigenetics.” That broadening will come sooner rather than later, he predicted, as data is emerging from those fields to make them more amenable to toxicogenomics.

The key to the successful deployment of toxicogenomics is to understand when to use it, and when to use something else. “Gene-expression profiling is just another tool in the toolbox,” emphasized Dr. Fielden. “Pick the right tool for the right problem.”

Can An Ant Be Employee Of The Month?

2008-11-19T13:52:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Ants specializing on one job such as snatching food from a picnic are no more efficient than "Jane-of-all-trade" ants, according to new research.

The finding casts doubt on the idea that the world-wide success of ants stems from job specialization within the colony. Ants are found on every continent besides Antarctica.

"The question is, why is job specialization a good thing?" said Anna Dornhaus of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "We thought that the fact that ants have specialists was one of the things that made them so successful and live all over the world in all habitats in great numbers.
"It turns out that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job."

Dornhaus studied the rock ant, known by scientists as Temnothorax albipennis, that lives in cracks in rocks in Europe. In ant colonies, all the workers are females.

She videotaped individual ants as they performed four typical ant tasks: brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for animal protein and nest building. The videotape allowed her to compare how long it took each ant to do a particular task.

Dornhaus, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, is publishing her paper, "Specialization Does Not Predict Individual Efficiency in an Ant," in the Nov. 18 issue of the online journal PLoS Biology. The German Science Foundation (DFG) funded some of the research.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote in 1776 that specialized labor provided benefits to human industry.

Dornhaus, who studies social insects, wanted to see if this applied to ants because efficiency in ants had rarely been tested.

The workers of rock ants, like those of most ant species, all look the same and do not appear physically specialized for any particular task. Nevertheless, they do specialize.

She expected rock ants that specialized would work more efficiently, but that's not what she found.

To identify the individual workers, which are half the size of a grain of rice, Dornhaus color-coded them with model airplane paint in colors such as rally green and racing red using hair-thin wires as paintbrushes.

She crafted nests for the ants by sandwiching cardboard squares between two glass slides. A tiny tunnel in the cardboard let the ants leave the nest.

Dornhaus tested 1,142 workers from 11 colonies that ranged in size from 27 to 233 workers.

To watch ants in action, Dornhaus put individual colonies in a square arena that was 22 centimeters (about eight-and-half inches) on a side and recorded workers' job performance with two video cameras.

For example, in the brood transport test, she placed a colony and an empty nest 10 centimeters (4 inches) apart. Then she took the roof off the colony's nest by taking off the top slide. Once their nest was destroyed, Dornhaus recorded how long the ants took to find the empty nest and move the eggs and larvae to it.

She measured how often and how readily an individual ant performed each task and considered an ant more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one task.

Dornhaus said some go-getter ants eagerly worked in all of the tasks, but other ants seemed lazy. Although the specialists were not more efficient, they put in more hours of work.

It's not known why ants choose the jobs they do, or why some are slow to begin work.

She said it might be explained by how quickly an individual detects work to be done, like noticing dirty dishes in the sink.

A person with a lower threshold will notice and wash the dishes as soon as there are one or two in the sink. However, a person with a higher threshold doesn't notice the dishes until there are at least 10 piled up. The dishes will still be washed, just not as frequently.

"You get division of labor that way just because they have differences in their sensory systems or somehow in the way they interpret the world without consciously wanting to divide labor," Dornhaus said.

The ability to sense work also varies in ants, she suspects.

Dornhaus found that specialists and generalists work equally fast, but the question of employee of the month is still unanswered.

Even though putting in longer hours might seem like the way to success, it wastes colony resources.

"Speed does matter because every minute they spend outside is dangerous and energy costly," she said. "They burn fuel, and they risk dying."

Her next step is investigating "switching costs," such as the time it takes to walk from one side of the nest to the other or the break in concentration when switching between tasks. Dornhaus suggests specialization might minimize such costs.

"I do science because I think it's cool to find out how the world works, specifically how social insects works," Dornhaus said. "Isn't it cool to know that there are little societies underground everywhere you walk?"

Potential 'Green Collar' Job Growth In US

2008-11-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama proposed an economic plan that would create 5 million jobs in environmental industries. These so-called "green collar" jobs do, in fact, present the next frontier for U.S. manufacturing, says a new report from Duke University.

Highlighting the direct linkages between low-carbon technologies and U.S. jobs, Duke researchers say U.S. manufacturing is poised to grow in a low-carbon economy. Their report, "Manufacturing Climate Solutions," provides a detailed look at the manufacturing jobs that already exist and would be created when the U.S. takes action to limit global-warming pollution.
"Until now, there was no tangible evidence of what the jobs are, how they are created and what it means for U.S. workers. We are providing that here," said Gary Gereffi, a Duke professor of sociology and lead author of the report. "We don't guess where the jobs are; we name them. Our report uses value chains to show that clean technology jobs are also real economy jobs."

Led by Gereffi, researchers at Duke's Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness (CGGC) assess five carbon-reducing technologies with potential for future green job creation: LED lighting, high-performance windows, auxiliary power units for long-haul trucks, concentrating solar power, and Super Soil Systems (a new method for treating hog wastes).
They conclude that hidden economic opportunities exist within the supply chains that provide parts and labor for these five industries. The report includes a snapshot of the opportunities for U.S. manufacturing jobs, with a detailed breakdown of the supply chains and maps highlighting the location of companies positioned to support green jobs. States that stand to benefit most from jobs in these sectors include Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.

"Meeting the challenge of climate change will ramp up the supply chains that wind their way through the heart of American manufacturing," said Jackie Roberts, director of sustainable technology at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), one of the report's sponsors. "It's concrete evidence of the link between U.S. jobs and climate solutions."

"While some seek to pit the environment against economic growth, we see economic opportunity in the solutions to the climate crisis," added Bob Baugh, executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council, another one of the report's sponsors. "But, to succeed it means making certain that, from production to construction, these green investments are made in the U.S. That is the best way to assure that their positive ripple effects are felt throughout the entire economy."

"This report shows that each climate solution creates significant positive ripple effects throughout the economy in the labor and materials needed to supply low carbon technologies and products," said Abraham Breehey, director of legislative affairs for the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, also a report co-sponsor. "It demonstrates the real economic opportunity in the solutions to the climate crisis."

A copy of the study is available at http://www.cggc.duke.edu/environment/climatesolutions/.

The report was sponsored by Environmental Defense Fund, the Building and Construction Trades Department (AFL-CIO), Industrial Union Council (AFL-CIO), International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters.

DFMO May Affect Barrett's Esophagus

2008-11-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily ] - "While there was a suggestion that DFMO may influence the extent of Barrett's dysplasia, this finding is very preliminary and further study of this agent in a larger number of patients is needed," said Frank A. Sinicrope, M.D., professor of medicine and oncology at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.

Sinicrope presented his findings at the American Association for Cancer Research's Seventh Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research.

The single-arm study included 10 patients with Barrett's esophagus and low-grade dysplasia. The patients received 0.5 g/m2/d of DFMO for six months. Using an endoscope, the researchers examined esophageal biopsies at enrollment and at three, six and 12 months (where available). A gastrointestinal pathologist who was blinded to the clinical/biomarker data graded the dysplasia.

Sinicrope conducted this study while at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. He collaborated with colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, and the Arizona Cancer Center, Tucson.

After six months of DFMO treatment, one patient's dysplasia regressed, one patient's progressed, and eight patients had stable disease. At six months, two patients in the stable group who started with extensive low-grade abnormal cells had only limited or focal dysplasia based on four or more biopsies. These improvements remained at 12 months.

DFMO lowered the level of the polyamine putrescine, a target of the drug and a possible cancer risk marker. The agent works by inhibiting an enzyme in polyamine synthesis called ornithine decarboxylase (ODC). "ODC activity in Barrett's mucosa has been shown to be significantly higher in Barrett's than in normal adjacent mucosa from the same patients," Sinicrope said.

"Since DFMO inhibits polyamine synthesis, the fact that putrescine levels were decreased at six months and later returned to baseline after being off the drug for six months suggests that the drug is affecting its target."

Interestingly, DFMO also reduced expression of Kruppel-like factor 5 (KLF5) gene, an important marker of abnormal cell proliferation in the esophagus that may represent a novel drug target.

"The results are encouraging because they identify KLF5 as a potential target of DFMO, which suggests a potential mechanism contributing to the chemopreventive effects of DFMO," Sinicrope said. "KLF5 has been shown to regulate proliferation, apoptosis and invasion in esophageal cancer cells."

Generally, DFMO was well tolerated. One patient had hearing loss and balance-related problems related to treatment.

"DFMO warrants further evaluation as a chemopreventive agent in patients with Barrett's esophagus and mucosal dysplasia," Sinicrope said. Currently, the Mayo Clinic researcher and his colleagues are planning a placebo-controlled chemoprevention trial in this patient population.

Science Foundation Arizona Invests to Increase Regional Biomedical Capacity

2008-11-19T13:45:00.001-07:00

[Source: SFAz] - Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz), an Arizona nonprofit, private/public partnership helping strengthen the state's research infrastructure to spur new technology sector growth, awarded a $9 million investment grant to the Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a Tucson-based nonprofit coalition that works to streamline and accelerate the development of crucial drug therapies for major diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

C-Path was formed as part of the FDA's Critical Path Initiative of 2004 calling for safer and more rapid U.S. drug development. The organization is seeking to reduce the high failure rate of bringing lifesaving new drugs to market along with the billions in excess dollars spent each year in the current bottleneck process. Today, only 5 percent of new medicines entering clinical testing ever succeed; C-Path plans to lift that success rate to 95 percent saving significant dollars and lives.

Globally, the need for efficiently introducing new pharmaceuticals is urgent. "Without breakthroughs, we face a medical tsunami of healthcare costs posing immense economic and social threats," stated Dr. Raymond L. Woosley, C-Path's president and CEO. "In the United States alone, the cost of coping with one debilitating disease, Alzheimer's, is $170 billion and is projected in the near future to reach $1 trillion or 8 percent of today's total U.S. economy. C-Path acts as the neutral third party between the FDA, private industry and the public resulting in decreased time, costs, and failure rates in pharmaceutical product development."

In southern Arizona, the SFAz grant is expected to have a continued impact on the state's rise as a center for medical and pharmaceutical sector growth as industry collaborators are slated to match an additional $18 million over four years. Three of the fifteen companies that C-Path has partnered in this consortium including Roche Ventana, Sanofi-aventis and Merck - through its affiliate High Throughput Genomics - now have major research facilities in southern Arizona. In addition, C-Path has formed alliances that include nearly all the major drug corporations in the United States and Europe.

"This initiative is the first of its kind in the U.S. and represents a major strategic move in positioning Arizona to be highly competitive and of interest to the pharmaceutical community. With C-Path's success, the Tucson area, in particular, has potential to increase substantially its biomedical capacity with innovation, spin-off companies and a growing base of knowledge workers," added Dr. William C. Harris, president and CEO of SFAz."

(SFAz), established in 2006, supports communications technology, sustainable systems including renewable energies, and biomedical infrastructure development to capitalize on the state's growing research base by spurring business opportunities, attracting investment, and creating new technology sector growth.

Tim Bee, Arizona State Senate President summarized the impact of the grant, "C-Path is providing the infrastructure and scientific expertise to provide a faster and less expensive pathway to market for crucially important drugs. And, this benefits not only Arizonans and the state's economic diversity, but helps a lot of people in combating diseases around the world."

Potential in Malaysia's optics industry: Expert

2008-11-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

[Source: By Rupa Damodaran, Business Times] - DR Robert P. Breault, an expert on the science of optics or light, is convinced of Malaysia's potential in the sophisticated high-end technology.
However, the country must prepare its workforce and address what is lacking at learning institutions. And this must be done fast as other countries around the world are also aiming at the same economic pie.

Malaysia wants to focus on light-emitting diodes (LED) and solar photovoltaic, the technology of changing solar energy into electricity, as two potential key industries in Malaysia.

LED lights are 10 times more efficient that the normal incandescent light. Both LED and solar energy are likely to be lucrative markets as the world turns to ways to save energy and to increase the use of cleaner energy.

Breault is chairman of Breault Research Organisation Inc, an international optical engineering firm. He was in Malaysia for a week at the invitation of the Malaysian Industrial Development Authority (Mida) to help Malaysians build competitiveness in photonics, LED and solar clusters.
Penang could turn out to be an LED Valley for Malaysia, he said, in the same mould as what Silicon Valley has done for the US IT industry.

"Malaysia is gaining prominence as a centre of gravity for LEDs, especially in Penang which has the attributes of an LED Valley."

There are plans to turn Kulim High Tech Park into a hub for solar panels besides its current speciality in wafer fabrication.

First Solar Inc is the first US solar module maker to invest in the park with an initial investment of RM2.2 billion. Two other American multinationals may also invest in Kedah.

Malaysia also has a significant number of highly educated people, who are vastly under utilised, he said.

"They are proven high-tech researchers who can start new companies. In Penang they are doing this in the geophysics technology although it does not seem to feature on Mida's radar screen.

"My feeling is that Malaysia and the industry have taken a modest pace when these programmes could be executed much faster. The government should get serious about education and work with the industry to tailor specific programmes to fill their engineering and technician level needs."

Breault has suggested that Mida sponsors a multi-technology award ceremony at local universities like Universiti Sains Malaysia and Universiti Malaya, highlighting their successful spin-offs in any technological field.

"What Malaysia does not have is state-of-the-art LED/semiconductor equipment in the universities. This will be worth investing in. Give tax write-offs for companies that give near state-of-the art equipment to universities."

Breault, who is also chairman of the Arizona Optics Industry Association, is keen to link the Malaysian optics industry to the US.

"Malaysia is building a solar manufacturing industry while the Arizona governor Janet Napolitano wants to make Arizona the solar state in the US."

Lighting in the US represents 27 per cent of the US consumption of energy.

Shared interests in nanotechnology and bioscience between Arizona and Malaysia will also enable Malaysia to create jobs through optics clusters.

A University of Arizona study showed that the total number of employees in the Arizona optics and nanotechnology clusters grew from 2,555 employees in 1996 to 25,635 employees in 2006.
Breault, who recently joined the Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee under the US Dept of Commerce, is also helping to build clusters in many countries including Mexico, South Korea and Africa.

In South Korea, there are now close to 300 small optics companies in the cluster which is making about US$1 billion (RM3.59 billion).

UA Researchers Studying Little-Known Genetic Sequences

2008-11-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

[Source University Arizona Communications] - University of Arizona researchers are among a group of scientists who have discovered a source of previously scarce small RNA molecules. Their finding, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a valuable new tool for better understanding how plants grow and develop.

All living things contain small RNA molecules, said Vicki Chandler, a UA Regents' Professor and director of the UA's BIO5 Institute. Some small RNA molecules help the genes in cells carry out their instructions, others silence genes and prevent them from acting. In plants, two types of small RNA molecules have been studied, one of them 21 nucleotides long, the other 24 nucleotides long. Nucleotides are the atomic "building blocks" of all genetic material.

Working with a mutant strain of maize, Chandler and her colleagues have honed in on a distinct class of small RNA molecule that is 22 nucleotides long. The 21- and 22-nucleotide RNAs are scarce in most plants, including wild maize, but in the mutant strain, the researchers discovered that they were common because the 24-nucleotide RNAs are dramatically reduced.

Having a reliable source of the 21- and 22-nucleotide RNA means plant biologists can now study these molecules in depth, and work out the pathways they follow to regulate plant genes. "We don't yet know exactly what it (the 22-nucleotide RNA) is doing in the cells, so there'll be a whole new line of experiments as we try to figure it out," Chandler said.

She also said that there may well be other understudied small RNA molecules waiting to be looked at as well. "I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with these small regulatory RNAs. There's still a lot to learn, and that's exciting."

The information that results from studying "new" small RNAs will become doubly valuable as other plant biologists, including BIO5 member Rod Wing, finish refining the genetic sequence of maize. "The two together (the small RNA molecules and the sequenced maize genome) will provide a lot of new tools for better understanding plant growth and function," Chandler said.

That work could ultimately have implications for everything from environmental and ecological issues to agriculture and medicine. "Gene regulation is fundamental to so many issues," Chandler said. The 22-nucleotide RNA molecule, she said "is one example of a pathway that – once it's worked out – could be targeted to address them."

World Diabetes Day means a lot to UA scientist

2008-11-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

[Source: Anthony Cabrera, KVOA Tucson] - November 14 is World Diabetes Day. It's a day meant to bring awareness to the alarming rise in this disease, which some say is an epidemic.

Researchers continue to find new treatments for diabetes, including here in Tucson.
At the University of Arizona's College of Medicine there is one scientist who has an emotional connection to her research. Betsy Dokken is a principal investigator in diabetes research.

She's working on a treatment that will one day help diabetes patients who also have heart problems. Reaching that goal means a lot to Betsy because last year she lost her mother who battled the same condition.

"She had a history of heart problems related to her diabetes, so yeah, that provides me with a lot of ammunition," says Dokken.

Armed with that ammunition Betsy is ready to fight the disease that led to her mother's death and affects many more.

"Patients with diabetes are two to five times more likely to have a heart attack than patients without diabetes. And when they do have a heart attack, their heart attacks are worse," she says.

Through her research, Betsy hopes to decrease the heart damage that's done. But heart disease is just one aspect of the complex epidemic of diabetes that has many scientists looking for answers.

"So some of us are working on diabetes prevention, some of us are working on treatment for diabetes, some of us are working on trying to figure out exactly what causes the different defects in diabetes," says Dokken.

And they're all on the 4th floor at the medical research building.

"This concept of an open lab really promotes more collaboration. I think we would collaborate anyway, but it makes it easier to collaborate when our labs are right next door to each other," says Dokken.

A strategic set-up for a complicated disease.

"We know that diabetes is an epidemic and it is a worldwide epidemic. It's not just here in the United States. And to have the United Nations set aside a day to increase awareness of diabetes around the world, is important to us, of course," she says.

Because even Betsy, a diabetes researcher, has been touched by it and knows it could be in her future.

"We already have defects in our muscle metabolism and there are other defects that can be detected, even in someone like me, right now, because I have a family history of type 2 diabetes, so it does hit home for me," says Betsy.

Diabetes is the sixth-deadliest disease in the country according to the Diabetes Research Institute. Nearly 8 percent of Americans have diabetes.

Arizona Non-Profits Engouraged to Apply for Susan B. Komen STEP Grants

2008-11-17T15:11:00.001-07:00

[Source: EVliving] - The Phoenix Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure® continues to accept applications from Arizona non-profit organizations for its annual STEP (Screening, Treatment, Education Programs) Grants Program through next week. The application deadline is Friday, Nov. 21.

Earlier this year, the Komen Phoenix Affiliate was proud to award 30 community STEP grants totaling more than $1.8 million to support breast cancer screening, treatment and education programs in central and northern Arizona. These grants are in addition to the more than $519,000 funded for the national Komen Research Grants and Awards Program, bringing the total of its 2008-2009 grants to nearly $2.4 million. Since its beginnings in 1993, the Phoenix Affiliate has raised and granted more than $13.4 million to fight breast cancer.

“The collaboration between the Phoenix affiliate and the organizations to which we grant funds is critical to meeting the goal of eradicating breast cancer forever.” says Candyce Lindsay, Grants Director for the Komen Phoenix Affiliate. “These organizations reach women in rural and urban areas alike, helping to raise awareness and provide valuable services to thousands of people throughout the state. They play a huge role in helping us carry out our mission.”
Funding raised during the 2008-2009 fiscal year - from events such as the Komen Phoenix Race for the Cure® - will be used to award grants for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. The grant cycle will run from April 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010.

Applications are being accepted from tax-exempt non-profit organizations for innovative projects in the areas of breast health and/or breast cancer education and outreach, screening, treatment support and treatment to the medically underserved and/or underinsured or uninsured populations. All grant applications must be located in and/or provide services in the Komen Phoenix Affiliate service area, which includes Apache, Coconino, Gila, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pinal and Yavapai Counties. The actual number of awards will depend on the amount of funds available.

For more information about applying for a STEP Grant, call (602)544-2873 or visit http://www.komenphoenix.org/.

UA Pharmacy Researcher To Study the Adverse Effects of Street Drug 'Ecstasy'

2008-11-17T15:05:00.001-07:00

[Source : Karin Lorentzen, UA School of Pharmacy] - The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded a researcher at The University of Arizona College of Pharmacy $1.7 million for a nearly five-year study of the long-term adverse effects of the street drug ecstasy, also known as the “hug drug.

Terrence J. Monks, PhD, head of the college’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and a BIO5 member, is a specialist in the study of drug toxicology, or the “bad” effects of drugs. He will be the principal investigator on the ecstasy project.

“Most research on ecstasy focuses on the pharmacological, or nontoxic effects of the drug,” says Monks. “My interest lies in learning how the drug negatively affects the brain.”

Classified as a Schedule I substance, ecstasy has been controlled in the United States since 1985. Ecstasy (also known as MDMA, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is a synthetic, psychoactive drug that is chemically similar to the stimulant methamphetamine. It produces an energizing effect as well as feelings of euphoria, emotional warmth, and distortions in time perception and tactile experiences.

These effects of MDMA have contributed to its popularity as a “party drug” among adolescents and young adults who frequent weekend-long “raves” or “techo-parties.” However, the drug has a serious down side.

“A number of adverse effects are associated with the use of MDMA,” says Monks. “MDMA use and abuse therefore has the potential to give rise to a major public health problem.”

According to the U.S. Department of State, the short-term negative effects of ecstasy can be nausea, dilated pupils, dry mouth and throat, and lower jaw tension. Use of the drug often leads to dramatic increases in body temperature exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which in turn can lead to muscle breakdown and kidney and cardiovascular system failure. This hyperthermic response can therefore result in fatal blood clotting, heart attacks and strokes.

Scientific studies have found that ecstasy use also produces long-term damage to the brain’s ability to release serotonin, which regulates mood, body temperature and memory.

“Ecstasy may be the only amphetamine-based drug that attacks the serotonin system,” says Monks. “There is little doubt that it has the potential to be toxic to the human nervous system. The question is how.”

Monks’ research will focus on the process by which ecstasy is metabolized by the body. When the drug enters the body orally in pill form (the manner in which it is usually taken), enzymes in the body convert it either to harmless metabolites or into toxic metabolites. Predicting which people process ecstasy into toxic metabolites more readily than other people is the challenge.

“Individuals metabolize ecstasy differently,” says Monks. “If 100 people take ecstasy, perhaps five will metabolize the drug very efficiently, whereas five others will metabolize the drug poorly. Since metabolism of ecstasy is required for it to produce neurotoxicity, the individual who efficiently metabolizes the drug will likely be more susceptible to the long-term adverse effects.”

The UA professor is believed to be the only researcher in the U.S. studying the role of metabolism in the neurotoxicity of the drug.

The results of Monks’ research will help people understand which individuals are more likely to suffer long-term negative effects of ecstasy.

“The multitude of adverse effects resulting from the misuse of ecstasy necessitates a complete understanding of the neuropharmacology and neurotoxicology of this unusual amphetamine derivative,” says Monks. “We hope to help define important factors that contribute to individual susceptibility to the long-term adverse effects of this drug.”

ThirdBiotech rebuffed in merger effort

2008-11-14T14:29:00.001-07:00

[Source: Angela Gonzales, Phoenix Business Journal] - A relatively new biotechnology networking group is proposing a merger with the Arizona BioIndustry Association, but so far it hasn’t gained any ground.

ThirdBiotech has been offering networking events for the past year, and last summer it created a research group to help biotech startups build their businesses. Founder Jeff Morhet wants to broaden the scope of the organization and merge with the Arizona BioIndustry Association.

“In this type of market and this type of economy, this is the way to be able to put together a movement that ensures the public and private sectors are working together and are focused on job growth and fueling the life sciences economy,” said Morhet, who also is president and CEO of InNexus Biotechnology Inc.

He has been corresponding in person and by e-mail and phone with AZBio President and CEO Bob Eaton as well as board members, but so far the association hasn’t expressed any interest in merging.

Because ThirdBiotech has not submitted a proposal in writing, the association won’t consider the merger, Eaton said.

“As always, AZBio remains open to collaborating with ThirdBiotech or any other organization if such a collaboration would advance the interests of our member companies,” Eaton said.
AZBio has about 120 dues-paying member organizations, while ThirdBiotech has about 300, charging $49 a year for individual membership dues.

AZBio charges annual membership dues based on the number of employees, ranging from $100 for a biotech company with one employee to $2,500 for a company with 200. The range for institutional members, such as universities and nonprofit organizations, is $100 for those with one employee to $1,000 for those with 50. Associate members — for-profit, nonbioscience companies — pay up to $3,000.

ThirdBiotech is beginning to offer annual sponsorships rather than membership packages to corporations, ranging from $500 to $10,000. Tiered sponsorships would include admission to a certain number of ThirdBiotech events, recognition on the organization’s Web site and other benefits.

“We have not received any specific proposals for any kinds of collaborations or anything else,” Eaton said. “If we do, our board will review it and decide how they want to deal with it.”

Morhet said he is frustrated because he has sent numerous e-mails outlining his proposal, and has sat down with board members to discuss the matter.

“I still keep that hope open,” Morhet said. “Given what’s happening in our economy, there’s no better time for people to think outside their own organizations and find ways to collaborate and move our overall movement forward.”

In an e-mail response to one of Morhet’s requests, Mike Mobley, chairman of AZBio and associate director of The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, wrote: “AZBio has always been open to collaborations that will advance the interests of our more than 120 member organizations. However, recognizing the disparity between the resources, membership and affiliations of AZBio and ThirdBiotech, the AZBio board would not be inclined to consider the integration of AZBio into ThirdBiotech at this time.”

Mobley’s e-mail went on to invite ThirdBiotech to become a dues-paying member of AZBio.

When Mobley was contacted for comment on this story, Eaton responded on behalf of the board.

Despite the association leadership’s desire to remain separate organizations,
AZBio board member and Flinn Foundation Vice President Saundra Johnson said she applauds ThirdBiotech’s commitment to the state’s biotech industry.

“The group brings diverse talents and resources to the table that can make a difference,” she said.

AZBio was created in 1997 as the Arizona Bioindustry Cluster. It changed its name in November 2003, and in July 2005 it secured a three-year grant from The Flinn Foundation to support its statewide educational outreach efforts.

Johnson said Flinn is considering a second round of financing for AZBio.

Its first president and CEO, Jon McGarity, who declined to comment, left the association in May 2007 to run a biotech company. Eaton took his place in October 2007.

In February, the association merged with the Bioindustry Organization of Southern Arizona in Tucson, creating a statewide association. The group offers mixers, workshops and advocacy, as well as purchasing power via its affiliation with the national Biotechnology Industry Organization.

Morhet said the state’s growing biotech industry could benefit from merging the two organizations, rather than duplicating services.

ThirdBiotech’s research group is working with venture capital groups to connect them with biotech companies in Arizona.

“Companies need to be fueled with investments,” Morhet said. “We want to find ways to connect Arizona-based companies with investors.”

Arizona BioIndustry AssociationFounded: 1997 (as Arizona Bioindustry Cluster)President and CEO: Bob EatonHQ: PhoenixMission: Seeks to unify, empower and advance its member organizations, which collectively form Arizona’s bioscience communityMembers: 120 companiesdues: Range from $100 to $3,000 a year, depending on the size and scope of the businessWeb: www.azbio.org

ThirdBiotechFounded: 2007President and CEO: Jeff MorhetHQ: ScottsdaleMission: Started as a networking group; now includes ThirdBiotech Research Group, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the development of science, technology and intellectual property to drive the formation, advancement and growth of Arizona-based biotech companiesIndividual Members: 300Annual dues: $49Corporate sponsors: 12Web: www.thirdbiotech.com

TGen's Dr. Von Hoff is named Arizona's Community Service Leader of the Year

2008-11-14T14:27:00.001-07:00

[Source: TGen] - Dr. Daniel Von Hoff, a world-renowned cancer scientist and Physician-In-Chief of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), was named Arizona's Community Service Leader of the Year today at the 2008 Governor’s Celebration of Innovation.

Dr. Von Hoff, who also is Chief Scientific Officer of TGen Clinical Research Services at Scottsdale Healthcare, won the William F. McWhortor Community Service Leader of the Year award, presented annually to an individual or organization from industry, government or academia that contributes to Arizona's technology industry through relentless community involvement, leadership, visibility and excellence in economic development activity.

"Dr. Von Hoff has devoted a lifetime toward advancing the understanding and treatment of cancer. He shared the vision for the establishment of (TGen) a premier center for the application of the understanding of the human genome to the treatment of diseases," according to the presentation made by the Arizona Technology Council in partnership with the Arizona Department of Commerce and the Honorable Janet Napolitano, Governor of Arizona.

"The quality and diversity of this year's award recipients is a positive indication that technological innovation in both large established and emerging small companies is thriving in Arizona," said Steven G. Zylstra, president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council.

The prestigious awards ceremony, celebrating excellence in innovative technological advancement, was emceed at the Dodge Theatre by author Jane Poynter, one of eight people who lived sealed for two years in the early 1990s inside the artificial environment near Tucson known as Biosphere 2. She now is President of Paragon Space Development Corp., which develops technologies for extreme environments, such as space, under water and hyper-efficient buildings.

Other winners included:

-- Paolo Soleri – Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his many contributions in addressing environmental sustainability. Soleri is an internationally recognized Paradise Valley architect, artist and philosopher, and creator of the innovative city Arcosanti.

-- Jeff Morhet – Ed Denison Business Leader of the Year Award. Morhet is President and Chief Executive Officer of InNexus Biotechnology Inc., a drug development company at the Mayo Clinic Collaborative Research Building in Scottsdale.

-- Rep. Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale, "Representative of the Year."
-- Sen. Barbara Leff, R-Paradise Valley, "Senator of the Year."
*
In addition to his work at TGen, Dr. Von Hoff is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona, and a member of the Mayo Clinic's Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Von Hoff is a founder of TGen, a founder of the non-profit International Genomics Consortium based in Phoenix, and has helped bring countless other jobs to this community. His commitment was instrumental in helping establish the Scottsdale Clinical Research Institute, a hospital-based research institute that serves as a bridge between cure and care. It is one of the finest programs in the nation in its ability to help patients with advanced cancer. It is emblematic of the translation of discoveries in genomic science to specific treatments for individual patients.

Dr. Von Hoff earned his medical degree at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1973. Following an internship and residency at the University of California, San Francisco, he spent four years at the prestigious National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md.

After experience at the forefront of cancer research at NCI, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas in San Antonio, where during the next 20 years he expanded the knowledge of cancer biology and tumor growth factors.

Dr. Von Hoff moved to Arizona in 1999, serving as Director of the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, and as Professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, before joining TGen.

In addition to his other duties, Dr. Von Hoff is serving a six-year presidential appointment (June 2004-March 2010) on the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Advisory Board. He also is past president of the American Association for Cancer Research, which with more than 28,000 members is the world's largest cancer research organization. He has published more than 540 scientific papers, more than 130 book chapters, and nearly 950 scientific abstracts. He is the holder of a dozen patents for new anti-cancer agents and medical devices.

For more than 35 years, Dr. Von Hoff has been devoted to advancing the understanding and treatment of cancer. His programs have two main goals:

-- Applying new knowledge to identify the best new targeted anti-cancer agents to treat individual cancer patients.
-- Curing pancreatic cancer.

The William F. McWhortor Community Service Leader of the Year award is named in honor of the late co-founder of the Arizona Innovation Network and its successor professional groups in Arizona, including the Arizona Technology Council, which have supported creative technological thinking. McWhortor, a Fountain Hills resident who died in 1997, patented a pattern recognition device in 1989 to help stop counterfeit checks.

Past winners of the McWhortor award include:

-- Ira A. Fulton, chairman and chief executive officer of Tempe-based Fulton Homes Inc.
-- Former Arizona State University President Lattie Coor.
-- Richard Mallery, partner and founding director of the Phoenix law firm Snell & Wilmer, for his successful efforts to bring the Translational Genomics Research Institute to Arizona.

First Alana’s Champs 5K to fund TGen brain cancer efforts

2008-11-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

[Source: TGen] - The first Alana's Champs 5K, a run and walk to benefit brain cancer research at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), is set for Dec. 6 at Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza.

The event is named for Alana Lysholm-Bernacchi, a TGen neurogenomics researcher who studied hearing loss, Down syndrome and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease. She died as the result of a brain tumor on Dec. 3, 2007.

Alana's Champs 5K is coordinated by the TGen Foundation, Arizona Road Racers and by Brett Bernacchi, a TGen volunteer and the husband of Alana.
If you go

Where: Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, just east of the Arizona State Capitol, 1700 W. Washington St., Phoenix.

When: Dec. 6. Event-day registration starts at 7 a.m.; the 5-kilometer run starts at 8 a.m.; the 5K walk at 8:10 a.m.; and the 1-mile run/walk at 8:45 a.m., followed by a kids dash and raffle.
Participation Fees:-- Ages 13 and up: $20 if pre-registered by Nov. 16; $25 from Nov. 16-Dec. 5; and $30 on Dec. 6.-- Ages 5-12: $5 if pre-registered by Nov. 16; $10 from Nov. 15-Dec. 6.-- Children ages 4 and younger are free.

Details: Please visit the TGen Foundation at www.helptgen.org or call Erin Massey, assistant director of development, at 602-343-8470.

Survey Highlights Support For Nanotech In Health Fields But Disapproval Elsewhere

2008-11-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - A landmark national survey on the use of nanotechnology for "human enhancement" shows widespread public support for applications of the new technology related to improving human health. However, the survey also shows broad disapproval for nanotech human enhancement research in areas without health benefits. A team of researchers at North Carolina State University and Arizona State University (ASU) conducted the study, which could influence the direction of future nanotechnology research efforts.

The "Public Awareness of Nanotechnology Study" is the first nationally representative survey to examine public opinion on the use of nanotechnology for human enhancement. The survey found significant support for enhancements that promise to improve human health. For example, 88 percent of participants were in favor of research for a video-to-brain link that would amount to artificial eyesight for the blind. However, there was little support for non-health research endeavors. For example, only 30 percent of participants approved of research into implants that could improve performance of soldiers on the battlefield.

Nanotechnology is generally defined as technology that uses substances having a size of 100 nanometers or less (tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair), and is expected to have widespread uses in medicine, consumer products and industrial processes. Human enhancement is a sweeping term that applies to the use of such technologies to alter human capabilities.

NC State's Dr. Michael Cobb, one of the leaders of the study, says the survey's findings are important because "what the public wants could drive the direction of future research." Cobb, an associate professor of political science, explains, "The public should have input into where the government invests its research funding." Dr. Clark Miller, an associate professor of political science at ASU and another leader of the survey, adds, "One of the most important findings is the difference in support for different applications of human enhancement. Research and public policies will need to reflect this differentiated view, recognizing that there are some applications the public supports and some that the public is quite skeptical of."

While the survey shows strong public support for research into nanotechnology applications in the health field, those findings are tempered by a similar concern from the public about the scope of that research. The study found that 55 percent of participants felt that researchers should "avoid playing God with new technologies." Similarly, the public expressed little confidence in the government and mass media to inform people about potential risks from new technologies. Rather, participants said they had the greatest confidence in university scientists and environmental groups to protect the public.

Leaders of the study were NC State's Cobb, ASU's Miller, Sean Hays, doctoral student in political science at ASU, and Dr. David Guston, professor of political science and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS). The study was funded by CNS under a cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation to conduct research, training and outreach on the societal aspects of nanotechnology. The study's findings complement earlier findings of the CNS National Citizens' Technology Forum, organized by Cobb and NC State researcher Dr. Patrick Hamlett in April 2008.

The survey was conducted between July and October of 2008. The survey included 556 participants, had a 28 percent response rate, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percent.

Light-speed computer connection will slash the time it takes TGen-ASU to transfer huge amounts of genetic data

2008-11-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

[Source: TGen] - Hot on the heels of a new supercomputer, plans for a new light-speed data line between the Translational Genomics Research Institute and Arizona State University could slash the time is takes to transfer genetic information.

Accelerating the flow of information could help speed discoveries that eventually could help produce treatments and cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's, autism, diabetes and various cancers.

Because of the huge amounts of data generated by TGen's experiments, it now take as long as 12 days using conventional cables to transmit 7 terabytes of information from a typical experiment 10 miles between TGen's downtown Phoenix labs and ASU's new Saguaro 2 supercomputer in Tempe.

But through a partnership between ASU and Obsidian Strategics Inc., an Edmonton, Alberta-based defense-intelligence contractor, the same voluminous data – the equivalent of 3.5 million iPod songs – soon could be transmitted in as short as 1 hour.

The difference is something called "dark fiber," unused fiber optic cables installed years ago throughout the nation in anticipation of future growth and development.

"The primary advantage of a link like this is it will allow us to move data faster from the instruments at TGen to the computation and storage at ASU," said Dan Stanzione, director of the High Performance Computing Initiative at ASU's Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.
"This particularly applies to the next-gen sequencers," said Stanzione, referring to TGen's deployment of ever-faster tools for analyzing DNA in its quest to discover the causes, treatments and possible cures of various diseases.

Dr. Edward Suh, TGen's Chief Information Officer, said such capabilities will help expedite the translation of biomedical research from TGen labs into clinical drug treatments.
"The proposed high-speed data communication link, using Obsidian's network, will significantly reduce the time it takes to run complex data analyses and systems simulations on TGen's supercomputer systems," Suh said.

James Lowey, TGen's Director of High-Performance Biocomputing, said, "The high-speed link between TGen and ASU will enable TGen scientists to transfer data between their labs and the computational resources at ASU at an unprecedented rate, accelerating the pace of discovery.

"With the ever-increasing amount of data being generated by both proteomics and next-generation sequencing, it is critical to have state-of-the-art communications networks between locations where data is generated, and where it is analyzed," Lowey said. "Having this very high-speed link helps position TGen as being a leader in biomedical data analysis."

Stanzione said ASU still is looking for a partner to provide the fiber optic cable, but that a planned pilot dark-fiber link would be between ASU and TGen.

A single experimental run from DNA sequencers can generate 7 terabytes, or 7,000 gigabytes, of data, Stanzione said. Existing ASU-TGen connections can move about 30 gigabytes an hour, he said, meaning the transfer of scientific experimental information can take more than a week.
The proposed system using Obsidian Strategics technology is expected to hit 8,000 gigabytes per hour, or about 8 terabytes, reducing the time it takes to move data between TGen scientific instruments and the ASU supercomputer to as little as 1 hour, Stanzione said.

Reducing transmission time will be come more critical in the future, with TGen’s next generation sequencers easily producing as much as 30 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of an iPod with 15 million songs.

Obsidian Strategics is the leading developer of InfiniBand range extension, routing and encryption technology. ASU and Obsidian will join with others in a venture supported by the Canadian Consulate-Phoenix to advance the capabilities of the optical network, linking higher education facilities in Arizona, as well as in adjacent states.

Obsidian's Longbow technology leverages existing optical networks, and originally was designed to meet the demands of the U.S. Department of Defense’s next generation large data communications architecture.

Saguaro 2, the TGen-ASU supercomputer dedicated Oct. 3 at ASU's Barry M. Goldwater Center for Science and Engineering, is capable of 50 trillion mathematical operations per second.

Science Foundation Arizona Invests to Increase Arizona Biomedical Capacity

2008-11-12T15:24:00.001-07:00

[Source: BUSINESS WIRE] - The Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a Tucson-based nonprofit that works with the FDA and the biomedical industry to streamline the development of crucial new medicines, has been awarded a $9 million investment grant from Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz). These funds will result in better testing methods that accelerate the development of therapies for major diseases, including lung cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

C-Path was formed as part of the FDA's 2004 Critical Path Initiative that called for safer and more rapid U.S. medical product development. The organization is seeking to reduce the high failure rate in bringing lifesaving new drugs to market by improving the current slow and often unreliable process, thereby saving lives and billions of dollars each year. Today, even after extensive laboratory research, only 5 percent of new medicines that enter human testing ever reach the market. C-Path plans to lift that success rate to 95 percent and shorten the process to less than three years.

Globally, the need for efficiently introducing new pharmaceuticals is urgent. "Without breakthroughs, we face a medical tsunami of healthcare costs posing immense economic and social threats," stated Dr. Raymond L. Woosley, C-Path's president and CEO. "In the United States alone, the annual cost of caring for patients with just one disease, Alzheimer's, is $150 billion, a staggering figure that is projected to reach $1 trillion, or 8 percent of today's total U.S. economy. C-Path, acting as a neutral third party between the FDA and private industry, enables the sharing of knowledge that can decrease time, costs, and failure rates in pharmaceutical product development."

The SFAz grant is expected to have a continued impact on the state's rise as a center for biomedical and pharmaceutical sector growth. C-Path has formed partnerships that include nearly all the major drug corporations in the United States and Europe. Three of the 18 companies that C-Path is working with -- Roche's Ventana Medical Systems, sanofi-aventis and Merck (through its affiliate High Throughput Genomics) -- now have major research facilities in southern Arizona.

"C-Path is the first initiative of its kind, and represents a major strategic move in positioning Arizona to be highly competitive and of interest to the global pharmaceutical community. With C-Path's success, the Tucson area has the potential to increase substantially its biomedical capacity with innovation, spin-off companies and a growing base of knowledge workers," added Dr. William C. Harris,president and CEO of SFAz.

Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz) is a public/private partnership established in 2006 that supports communications technology, sustainable systems including renewable energies, and biomedical infrastructure development to capitalize on the state's growing research base by spurring business opportunities, attracting investment and creating new technology sector growth.

Critical Path Institute (C-Path), headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, was established in 2005 as a publicly funded, nonprofit research and education institute to enable and lead collaborations among scientists from the FDA, industry and academia. C-Path's mission is to help implement the FDA's Critical Path Initiative by developing faster, safer and smarter pathways to new medical products.

New Regulatory Mechanism Discovered For Cell Identity And Behavior In Forming Organs

2008-11-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Two proteins interact in a previously unknown molecular mechanism that may have broad implications in future studies looking for the causes of defective organs in fetuses, metastatic cancers and other diseases, according to researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

Reporting their work in the Oct. 15 Genes & Development, the researchers said the mechanism coordinates cell identity and behavior in the forming organs of embryos.

"Our study helps address the current challenge of finding out where cell specificity comes from, how cells do what they do in the context of disease and development, and how these activities are regulated," said Aaron Zorn, Ph.D., a researcher in the division of Developmental Biology at Cincinnati Children's and the study's corresponding author. "This helps inform research into how we tell early stem cells what to become. If someone has diabetes, for example, how do we tell a cell to become a pancreas cell so it will produce insulin?"

The study involved embryos of Xenopus frogs, a species indigenous to Africa often used in early biomedical studies. The scientists discovered a signaling protein very common in developmental biology, Wnt11 (Wingless), has to be inhibited by the modulating protein Sfrp5 (Secreted Frizzled Related Protein), a known antagonist of Wnt. Without this restriction, Wnt signaling runs amok and the frog's foregut, liver and pancreas form improperly from a cascade of disorganized cell growth.

"We point out that Wnt has two key roles here – one controlling the cell expression pathway to tell cells what they are supposed to be, and the other controlling the pathway for cell movement, behavior and adhesion," said Dr. Zorn, also associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine. "Without Sfrp5 controlling what Wnt does in both pathways, things go horribly wrong in the developing foregut and its organs."

The Wnt signaling pathway is a complex network of proteins best known for their role in stimlating cell behavior during embryo development and in cancer. They also are involved in normal physiological processes in adult animals. Parts of the Wnt pathway have been conserved between species during the long course of evolution, all the way from simple roundworms to humans.

Previous research in Xenopus has established that a low level of activity from a molecule called B-catenin – which promotes cell-to-cell adhesion and is part of the Wnt pathway – is necessary to maintain accurate foregut formation and initiate liver and pancreas development. Unknown before the study by Dr. Zorn's team was which Wnt genes are involved and how Wnt and B-catenin activity are regulated along the frog's developing anterior-posterior body axis.

During the very early phases of embryo development – when the organism is still essentially flattened layers of cells called an endoderm – Dr. Zorn's team found Wnt's stimulation of B-catenin must be restricted in the anterior region so the tissue of forming foregut organs maintain its integrity. Their experiments showed that Sfrp5 steps in at the right time and place to repress Wnt signaling, allowing the cells to form an epithelial sheet, or lining – an essential step in organ development.

In one experiment, when researchers removed the Sfrp5 protein, the resulting Sfrp5-depleted Xenopus embryos had smaller foregut cavities filled with unorganized early-stage endoderm cells, which were incapable of properly forming liver and pancreatic organs.

Dr. Zorn and colleagues said their results have possible implications in metastatic cancer. For one, Sfrp proteins are already known to be tumor suppressors that are genetically inactivated in some cancers as they progress to aggressive carcinomas. Carcinomas typically originate in epithelial cells – which form linings surrounding the surfaces and cavities of many body structures – then spread into surrounding organs and tissues.

In cancer development, the research team is suggesting a loss of Sfrp function may unleash Wnt to trigger elevated B-catenin expression, allowing its stimulation of cell-to-cell adhesion to proliferate quickly. Rapid cell proliferation and adhesion are common in cancerous and pre-cancerous conditions. It could also let Wnt send improper signals that cause a loss of structural integrity in epithelial cells, allowing cancer to spread, or metastasize.

"We talked about this mechanism in the context of cancer because the control of cell specificity, and of movement and behavior, also occurs in cancer," Dr. Zorn said. "Cells will start to proliferate out of control and then, when a cancer starts to go metastatic, they will also start to change behavior. They become motile, moving spontaneously and actively, and they become invasive."

The early stage nature of the study means it would be premature to suggest the Wnt11-Sfrp5 mechanism might become the basis of diagnostic or therapeutic strategies for patients, Dr. Zorn said. The next step is to use these results as a basis for future studies, probably involving mice, to verify the mechanism's applicability to mammalian embryo development and see how it affects disease, he said.

Participating in the study were the Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation; Department of Pediatrics, UC College of Medicine; Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, University of Arizona Health Sciences Center and the State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Kunming, China. Other researchers include lead author, Yan Li, and Scott A. Rankin, Debora Sinner, Alan P. Kenney and Paul A. Kreig.
Funding support came from the National Institutes of Health.

DNA Chunks, Chimps And Humans: Marks Of Differences Between Human And Chimp Genomes

2008-11-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - Researchers have carried out the largest study of differences between human and chimpanzee genomes, identifying regions that have been duplicated or lost during evolution of the two lineages. The study, published in Genome Research, is the first to compare many human and chimpanzee genomes in the same fashion.

The team show that particular types of genes - such as those involved in the inflammatory response and in control of cell proliferation - are more commonly involved in gain or loss. They also provide new evidence for a gene that has been associated with susceptibility to infection by HIV.

"This is the first study of this scale, comparing directly the genomes of many humans and chimpanzees," says Dr Richard Redon, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a leading author of the study. "By looking at only one 'reference' sequence for human or chimpanzee, as has been done previously, it is not possible to tell which differences occur only among individual chimpanzees or humans and which are differences between the two species.

"This is our first view of those two important legacies of evolution."

Rather than examining single-letter differences in the genomes (so-called SNPs), the researchers looked at copy number variation (CNV) - the gain or loss of regions of DNA. CNVs can affect many genes at once and their significance has only been fully appreciated within the last two years. The team looked at genomes of 30 chimpanzees and 30 humans: a direct comparison of this scale or type has not been carried out before.

The comparison uncovered CNVs that are present in both species as well as copy number differences (CNDs) between the two species. CNDs are likely to include genes that have influenced evolution of each species since humans and chimpanzees diverged some six million years ago.

"Broadly, the two genomes have similar patterns and levels of CNVs - around 70-80 in each individual - of which nearly half occur in the same regions of the two species' genomes," continues Dr Redon. "But beyond that similarity we were able to find intriguing evidence for key sets of genes that differ between us and our nearest relative."

One of the genes affected by CNVs is CCL3L1, for which lower copy numbers in humans have been associated with increased susceptibility to HIV infection. Remarkably, the study of 60 human and chimpanzee genomes found no evidence for fixed CNDs between human and chimp and no within-chimp CNV. Rather, they found that a nearby gene called TBC1D3 was reduced in number in chimpanzee compared to human: typically, there were eight copies in human, but apparently only one in all chimpanzees.

The authors suggest that it might be evolutionary selection of CNDs in TBC1D3 that have driven the population differences. Consistent with this novel observation, TBC1D3 is involved in cell proliferation (favoured category) and is on a core region for duplication - a focal point for large regions of duplication in human genome.

"It is evident that there has been striking turnover in gene content between humans and chimpanzees, and some of these changes may have resulted from exceptional selection pressures," explains Dr George Perry from Arizona State University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, another leading author of the study. "For example, a surprisingly high number of genes involved in the inflammatory response - APOL1, APOL4, CARD18, IL1F7, IL1F8 - are completely deleted from chimp genome. In humans, APOL1 is involved in resistance to the parasite that causes sleeping sickness, while IL1F7 and CARD18 play a role in regulating inflammation: therefore, there must be different regulations of these processes in chimpanzees.
"We already know that inactivation of an immune system gene from the human genome is being positively selected: now we have an example of similar consequences in the chimpanzee."

CNVs in humans and chimpanzees often occur in equivalent genomic locations: most lie in regions of the genomes, called segmental duplications, that are particularly 'fragile'. However, one in four of the 355 CNDs that the team found do not overlap with CNVs within either species - suggesting that they are variants that are 'fixed' in each species and might mark significant differences between human and chimpanzee genomes.

DNA Samples and analysis

The project used DNA samples from 30 chimpanzees (29 from W Africa, one from E Africa): the chimpanzee reference was produced using DNA from Clint, the chimpanzee whose DNA was used for the genome sequence.

Human DNA samples were obtained from following participants: ten Yoruba (Ibadan, Nigeria), ten Biaka rainforest hunter-gatherers (Central African Republic) and ten Mbuti rainforest hunter-gatherers (Democratic Republic of Congo). The human reference is a European-American male from the HapMap Project (NA10852).

CNVs and CNDs were detected using a whole-genome tilepath of DNA clones spanning the human genome used previously to map human CNVs: this platform can reveal structural variants greater than around 10,000 base-pairs in size.

This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the LSB Leakey Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Institutes of Health, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette-New Iberia Research Center and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The authors thank the Human Genome Diversity Project, the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, the Integrated Primate Biomaterials and Information Resource, New Iberia Research Center, and the Primate Foundation of Arizona for samples.

Time Magazine recognizes ASU inventions

2008-11-10T10:53:00.001-07:00

[Source: ASU News] - Research at Arizona State University has been listed among the top 50 inventions for 2008 by Time Magazine.

In its Best Inventions of 2008, Time editors acknowledged the research of professor Milton Sommerfeld, and assistant professor Qiang Hu, both of ASU Polytechnic, for their work on developing algae based biofuel. The work is “raising algae to turn it into a biofuel that would be virtually identical to gasoline,” the magazine stated. Other benefits of Sommerfeld and Hu’s work is that it would be carbon neutral, because algae consume carbon dioxide as they grow, and algae can’t be eaten, like corn or sugarcane, two other sources for biofuels, so using it for fuel doesn’t cut into food supplies.

Time Magazine also recognized NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as a top 50 invention this year. A key component of that project is being developed by Mark Robinson, an ASU professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration. Robinson is constructing and integrating the wide-angle camera for the orbiter, which will be launched in February of 2009 and will aid lunar landing site identification and certification.

Article source:Time Magazine

Article:http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1852747,00.html

Being flexible is key to making display truly mobile

2008-11-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

[SOurce: Skip Derra, ASU News]- Building flexibility into information displays has always been the goal of the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University. But building flexible displays has also meant being flexible in organization as well as technology. I

n its first five years of operation, FDC has advanced flexible display technology but maybe one its greatest accomplishments is getting the key players to the table, according to FDC Director Gregory Raupp. With funding from the U.S. Army and a mandate to drive the technology towards commercialization, the FDC has become an engineering and R&D hub for advancing all that is needed to manufacture flexible displays.

“We have developed a dynamic partnership model that is not found anywhere else as far as technology development, implementation and transition through a university led organization,” Raupp said of the center’s industry engagement.

“Our partners are critically important to what we are trying to do,” he added. “They have worked with us to co-develop and deploy several key technologies.”

The Flexible Display Center was established in February 2004 with a 10-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and $43.7 million in funding for the first five years. The Army’s interest in flexible displays is as an enabling technology that can improve performance of its people on the ground by providing instantaneous information to even the most remote of locations.

But developing flexible displays has meant reworking them from the ground up. In order to make flexible displays – flexible enough to be body contouring or even folded or rolled up – FDC researchers and their industrial partners have developed new display designs, worked with new materials for the displays and associated electronics, and re-worked existing manufacturing methods.

Glass ceiling

A major step towards flexible displays is to get the glass out. Today, all conventional displays – from cell phones to desktop computers – are manufactured on thin glass. It’s the reason why the displays are so vivid and reliable. It’s also the reason why they are rigid and fragile.

Because flexible displays are so different from traditional displays, entirely new methods of manufacture (and modifications to present semiconductor methods) are needed to build them. With the goal to deliver rollable displays, the electronics behind the display must be flexible too so they need to be manufactured on plastic or thin metal foil substrates with new thin film transistor technologies.

The first displays developed by the FDC incorporate “electronic ink,” which uses an electric field to move negatively charged black particles and positively charged white particles. This technology produces reflective displays that have the look and feel of paper, and require extremely low power to operate.

FDC has successfully produced four-inch flexible screens with this technology that have QVGA (quarter video graphics array) resolution and 16 shades of grey, Raupp said. Some of these displays already have been integrated into Army technology demonstrators, like the Future Force Warrior Soldier Flex-PDA and the General Dynamics Mission Briefer.

Future technology generations, Raupp added, will have larger screens and will incorporate color, as well as video capabilities. A greater focus in the future will be on emissive display technology through integration of organic light emitting diodes.

FDC also has developed enabling manufacturing advances critical to commercial success of flexible displays in collaboration with its industrial partners. Examples include a large area thin film coater with industrial partner EV Group, a high quality performance plastic substrate with DuPont Teijin Films and a low temperature planarizing thin film material with Honeywell Electronic Materials.

“Critical path technology” advances include materials, tools and processes for flexible systems, state of the art thin film transistors, and flexible displays that are rugged, conformal, bendable and rollable.

“In our first five years, we covered considerable technical ground in development of flexible displays and integrating them into Army technology demonstrators,” Raupp said. “For the next five years we want to create technology demonstrators that have even greater performance capabilities, including displays up to 15 inches diagonal, higher resolution, full color and possessing greater on substrate functionality, which means including more flexible electronics, like solar power, sensors and communications capabilities.”

These all are attainable goals, Raupp added, because of the powerful capabilities of the FDC – including its pilot line, simulation and design model packages, and assembly and test capabilities. But they also are attainable because the FDC has assembled a great team of industry partners and ASU researchers, engineers and technical specialists who can make the revolutionary displays a reality.

FDC industry members include (* indicates FDC charter members):• Principal members – EV Group,* Universal Display Corp.* and Flextech Alliance (formerly USDC).*• Associate members – E Ink Corp.,* LG Display, Hewlett Packard, DuPont Teijin Films, Kent Displays Inc.,* Honeywell,* AKT (Applied Materials), Ito America,* SSI, Etched in Time Inc., Litrex, Plextronics and Particle Measuring Systems.• Technology user members – General Dynamics C4S,* Raytheon,* L3 Communications and Boeing.

Biomedical exec starts niche firm

2008-11-10T10:15:00.001-07:00

[Source: Phoenix Business Journal] - Kevin Weber worked in the biomedical industry for years before launching Weber Advantage Consulting this past summer. Weber is self-financing the Scottsdale-based company, which focuses on marketing and launching biomedical and technical tools and products.
“I have been very involved in Arizona biosciences for years and felt there was really a need for someone with so much commercial experience,” he said.

A former executive with Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp., Weber is active in the Arizona Technology Council and the Arizona BioIndustry Association. He said he’s using his experience and connections to build his business.

“We help develop product launches, marketing and overall business strategies, and help organize companies around therapeutic areas,” he said.

MRI reveals relationship between depression and pain

2008-11-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

[Source: EurekAlert] - The brains of individuals with major depressive disorder appear to react more strongly when anticipating pain and also display altered functioning of the neural network that modifies pain sensitivity, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

"Chronic pain and depression are common and often overlapping syndromes," the authors write as background information in the article. Recurring or chronic pain occurs in more than 75 percent of patients with depression, and between 30 percent and 60 percent of patients with chronic pain report symptoms of depression "Understanding the neurobiological basis of this relationship is important because the presence of comorbid pain contributes significantly to poorer outcomes and increased cost of treatment in major depressive disorder."

Irina A. Strigo, Ph.D., of the University of California San Diego, La Jolla, and colleagues studied 15 young adults with major depressive disorder (average age 24.5) who were not taking medication and 15 individuals who were the same age (average 24.3 years) and had the same education level but did not have depression. Patients with depression completed a questionnaire that evaluated their tendencies to magnify, ruminate over or feel helpless in the face of pain. All participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while their arms were exposed to a thermal device heated to painful levels (an average of 46.4 degrees to 46.9 degrees Celsius, or about 115 degrees to 116 degrees Fahrenheit) and also to non-painful temperatures. Visual cues (a green shape for non-painful warmth and a red shape for painful warmth) were presented before the heat was applied.

Compared with the controls, patients with depression showed increased activation in certain areas of their brain—including the right amygdala—during the anticipation of painful stimuli. They also displayed increased activation in the right amygdala and decreased activation in other areas, including those responsible for pain modulation (adjusting sensitivity to pain), during the painful experience.

To examine whether the activation of the amygdala was associated with passive coping styles, the researchers compared the percentage change in the activations of the amygdala with the helplessness, rumination and ramification reported by the participants with depression.

"Significant positive correlations were observed in the major depressive disorder group between greater helplessness scores and greater activity in the right amygdala during the anticipation of pain," the authors write.

"The anticipatory brain response may indicate hypervigilance to impending threat, which may lead to increased helplessness and maladaptative modulation during the experience of heat pain," the authors write. "This mechanism could in part explain the high comorbidity of pain and depression when these conditions become chronic."

"Future studies that directly examine whether maladaptive response to pain in major depressive disorder is due to emotional allodynia [a pain response to a non-painful stimulus], maladaptive control responses, lack of resilience and/or ineffectual recruitment of positive energy resources will further our understanding of pain-depression comorbidity," they conclude.
###

(Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65[11]:1275-1284. Available pre-embargo to the media at www.jamamedia.org.)

Editor's Note: This study was supported by Barrow Neurological Foundation, grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Association for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression and the University of California San Diego Center of Excellence for Stress and Mental Health. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

Phoenix to get Parkinson's center, named after Ali

2008-11-10T10:09:00.001-07:00

[Source: KTAR.Com] - St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center has announced plans for one of the most comprehensive Parkinson's centers in the country, named after former boxing champion Muhammad Ali and his wife, Lonnie.

The Alis were on hand Tuesday for the announcement about the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center.

"To see the beginning of this beautiful new center is truly a dream come true for Muhammad and me," said Lonnie Ali. "We are so grateful to all of you -- to Dr. Abe Lieberman, the Celebrity Fight Night Foundation and other supporters.

The new center is expected to open in late 2009. It will include 10 basic exam rooms, a tremor exam room, a botox treatment room, a tilt room to help evaluate patients with orthostatic hypertension and a balance lab.

The pavilion also will contain treatment areas for physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy and a multi-purpose room for educaton and recreational classes.

The National Institutes of Health says at least 500,000 people in the United States suffer from Parkinson's disease and approximately 50,000 new cases are reported annually. The incidence is expected to increase as baby boomers age.

St. Joseph's Hospital and its Barrow Neurological Institute are working to improve services for people with Parkinson's, Huntington's disease and Tourette syndrome.

"We're on our way to ecoming a world-class center for the growing number of people that are affected by these chronic illnesses," said Lieberman.

He added, "The Alis know that Muhammad Ali is going to get excellent care because he's Muhammad Ali, but they want everyone to get that same type of care."

UA genomics lab tackles Holocaust puzzle

2008-11-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

[Source: Tom Beal, Arizona Daily Star] - Genetic technology developed to identify the remains of those killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be enhanced in a University of Arizona genomics laboratory to solve a more complex puzzle — identification of families separated for generations after the Holocaust.

In addition to possibly reuniting families, the DNA Shoah Project will collect a database that will aid identification of remains yet to be discovered and will develop forensic tools for use in other acts of genocide.

The project, an effort of the UA's Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory, is also creating an educational component that will allow the story of the Holocaust to be taught in scientific curricula.

It's not possible today to match relatives three generations apart, but that doesn't deter UA researchers, who say they'll solve that puzzle once the data are collected.

In the meantime, the DNA Shoah Project is racing to spread the word to Holocaust survivors, whose numbers dwindle by the day.

Tucson survivor Bill Kugelman, 83, said he intends to give a simple oral swab sample of his DNA to the project, though he expects no benefit from it. Kugelman, a survivor of three Nazi concentration camps, lost most of the European branch of his family in the Holocaust.

"All of the family I have, I have," said Kugelman. "Whoever is gone, is gone."

Matches of living relatives are a long shot, said Matt Kaplan, research director for the DNA Shoah Project, but he's confident some will be made and says the project will have many other benefits.

In addition, it represents an intriguing scientific puzzle for Kaplan and the lab he runs in the University of Arizona's Bio5 Institute.

He calls the technology developed for remains-testing at Ground Zero "high quality work" but also says "it was easy. It matched you to you. We're trying to do this for the Holocaust — 6,000 people a day killed, 9 million overall."

In addition to the numbers, the passage of time makes the task more difficult.

"Your DNA is a shuffled deck of cards you get from your mom and your dad."

With each succeeding generation, that shuffling makes identification of similarities more difficult.

Most of our DNA is identical, said Kaplan. "That's what makes a wildebeest a wildebeest. Or a human being a human being."

What the computers are looking for are those random mutations that not only identify "you as you," but you as the son or daughter of your particular parents. That gets tougher with each successive generation because you're losing half of the original material each time your DNA deck is shuffled.

"The more markers we can identify, the deeper in time we're going to be able to go back," said Kaplan.

Kaplan says he'll need a fairly large group of DNA, at least 10,000 samples, to begin looking for markers and matches.

He can't do that today, but he's getting close, Kaplan said. "Most of the things I do today were impossible three or four years ago."

It's made simpler by the infrastructure built by Arizona Research Labs at the UA's Bio5 Institute, where the Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory installed the technology to handle large-scale genotyping after it signed on to do the sampling from 260,000 people who have so far participated in the Genographics Project, run by IBM and National Geographic.

"In 2000, we did 300 samples," said Kaplan. "Now it's 1,500 to 4,000 a day."

His lab and his collaborators at the Genomic Analysis and Technology Core and the Biotechnology Computing Facility, now offer large-scale DNA testing for the entire UA campus, in addition to the outside projects.

The first step for the DNA Shoah Project is not testing, but collecting samples. Holocaust survivors, the first target of the campaign, are dying.

"It's a numbers game," said Lynn Davis, information specialist for the project. "We need to get around the world and build the biggest database we can to make it possible."

Right now, the DNA Shoah Project has fewer than 1,000 participants. Its outreach is going first to Jewish congregations and Holocaust survivors groups.

Next, said Syd Mandelbaum, the project's founder, they'll concentrate on second- and third-generation descendants of those orphaned, killed or displaced.

Mandelbaum, who now runs a nonprofit organization to feed the hungry in New York, was a geneticist earlier in his career. He is also the son of two Holocaust survivors, who always wondered if some members of the families they thought were wiped out might have been displaced and are still living somewhere in the world.

He began searching for a scientific way to answer his parents' questions after reading accounts of a mass grave that had been disturbed in the excavation for an airport expansion in Stuttgart, Germany.

He discovered there was no genetic database for comparing those remains.

A former colleague directed him to Kaplan's boss, UA geneticist Michael Hammer. He visited and was impressed with the UA's setup.

Then, Mandelbaum had a call from another former colleague, James Watson, whose theoretical work with Francis Crick on the structure of DNA led to a Nobel Prize in 1953.

Watson directed him to Howard Cash, of Gene Code Forensics, who had developed the genetic matching system that identified Ground Zero victims during the excavation of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Cash became a part of the project and donated his company's software to it.

For Kugelman, the Tucson Holocaust survivor, the odds of anyone finding lost family seem high but not impossible.

"Who says no? You don't know. You never know. My extended family in Poland was more than 100 people. After the war there was a handful left, except for the family we had in America."

He is also certain there are mass graves yet to be discovered. He was forced to dig graves in a camp near Dachau in Bavarian Germany during the war — the camp where his brother perished.

Kugelman began speaking out about his experiences long after the war. "It took me about 30 years to open my mouth. For 30 years, you try to erase from your memory the horrible things."

To Mandelbaum, the genetic history he is helping to record is part of that total history that should never be forgotten. "It's another way to keep the memory alive."

He thinks the project's potential impact on the young is the most important part of it.

"They read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' right now, but how about a DNA lesson in a science class to talk about the Holocaust?"

Davis said the project has already developed the first module of a curriculum that will harness the current interest in forensic science to interest students in both science and the history of the Holocaust.

ABI, Asuragen to Collaborate with Critical Path Institute on Drug Toxicity Biomarkers

2008-11-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

[November 6, 2008]
[Source: a GenomeWeb staff reporter, GenomeWeb News] – Applied Biosystems and Asuragen are collaborating with the Critical Path Institute’s Predictive Safety Testing Consortium to develop a predictive gene signature panel that pharmaceutical companies can use to screen pre-clinical therapeutics for toxicity, ABI announced today.

The Critical Path Institute, or C-Path, is a publicly funded non-profit research and education institute established in 2005 to help create and nurture industry, academic, and government collaborations that support the FDA’s 2004 Critical Path Initiative. Under the new collaboration, the institute plans to work with ABI and Asuragen to develop a panel of assays with gene targets associated with carcinogenicity in laboratory rats.

Researchers intend to develop a new biomarker panel based on ABI’s TaqMan Gene Signature Array and real-time PCR technology using ABI assays for risk assessment and determining and differentiating genotoxic and non-genotoxic modes of action for candidate drugs.

ABI will provide PSTC scientists with RNA expression assays, which the researchers plan to use to develop a biomarker panel that allows them to screen pre-clinical samples for carcinogenicity. Asuragen will contribute laboratory services, pharmacogenomic expertise, and bioinformatics capabilities to the PSTC project.

Drug toxicity is the leading cause of pre-clinical drug failures and costs the pharmaceutical industry billions of dollars each year. That, combined with calls from the US Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory bodies to bring better drugs to the market more quickly, has spurred efforts to come up with tools for avoiding drug toxicity.

C-Path established its PSTC as a means for bringing together pharmaceutical companies to improve drug safety and speed up their development. The PSTC currently has 16 members as well as scientists from the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and academic experts.

Ethnic differences in arthritis due to obesity

2008-11-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

[Source: Reuters Health] - Older African-American, Native American and non-white Hispanic women are more likely to develop arthritis than their white counterparts, and the larger prevalence of obesity among these ethnic groups may help explain why, new research shows.

Among 146,494 women participating in the Women's Health Initiative -- an ongoing study of an ethnically diverse group of healthy postmenopausal women -- 44 percent had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis (degeneration of the joints), the most common form of arthritis.

These women were older and less active than their arthritis-free peers, and were also less educated, poorer, and heavier, Nicole C. Wright and colleagues from the University of Arizona in Tucson Wright report in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

As expected, women in their 70s were at greater risk of osteoarthritis than women in their 50s, while the risk for women in their 60s fell in between.

Overall, the researchers found, osteoarthritis risk was slightly increased for Native American and African American women compared to non-Hispanic white women, while Asian women were at lower risk than whites.

Risk factors for osteoarthritis were more common among black, Native American and Hispanic women than whites; 57.9 percent of African Americans were obese, for example, compared to 51 percent of American Indian women, 41.9 percent of Hispanic women, and 32.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

Prevalence of physical inactivity followed the same pattern, with 30.1 percent of black women falling into the lowest activity group, compared to 19.5 percent of whites.

Osteoarthritis prevalence among the youngest women participating in the study also varied by ethnicity, with 39.3 percent of Hispanic women in their 50s reporting arthritis, 36.4 percent of Native Americans, 33.8 percent of black women, 25.8 percent of Asians and 22.6 percent of whites.

The researchers hypothesize that excess weight could contribute to arthritis in two ways: by increasing physical stress on joints, and also by increasing bone mineral density, which may increase bone stiffness and thus contribute to the breakdown of cartilage.

The findings, along with other studies showing that black and Hispanic women suffer more pain and disability from osteoarthritis than do whites, offer "strong evidence that body weight and BMI may be large contributing factor to the number and severity of osteoarthritis symptoms, further elaborating the importance of postmenopausal women, especially African-American, Hispanic, and American-Indian women, maintaining a healthy weight," Wright and her team wrote.

Turbocharged Nanomotors

2008-11-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

[Source: PhysOrg.com] -- Nanorobots that are introduced into the body to eradicate tumor cells or clean out clogged arteries are not just science fiction; they are a realistic vision of the technological possibilities of the not-so-distant future. Efficient nanomotors will be needed to drive these nanomachines.

A team of scientists from University of California, San Diego (USA) and Arizona State University (Tempe, USA) has now developed nanorods that swim extremely fast. “These nanorods travel about 75 times their own length in one second,” report Joseph Wang and his co-workers in the journal Angewandte Chemie. “We are approaching the speed of the most efficient biological nanomotors, including flagellated bacteria.”

The first simple applications for nanomotors could include rapid transportation of pharmaceutical agents to specific target areas, or the passage of specimen molecules through the tiny channels of diagnostic systems on a microchip. However, forward motion through a liquid is not as trivial as one would like to think. One method for the construction of nanomotors that can achieve this is the fuel-driven catalytic nanowire. These are tiny nanoscopic rods whose ends are made of two different metals. Unlike macroscopic motors, they do not have a fuel tank; instead they move through a medium that contains the fuel they need.

The “classic” example of such a system is a gold–platinum nanotube that can travel at speeds of 10 to 20 µm per second with hydrogen peroxide as its fuel. Wang and his team have now dramatically accelerated these nanorod motors: they have achieved speeds of over 150 µm per second by replacing the gold portion with an alloy of silver and gold.

How does the nanomotor work? The platinum segment catalyzes the splitting of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) into oxygen (O2) and protons (H+). It absorbs the excess electrons. These are transferred to the silver/gold segment, where they speed up the reduction reaction of H2O2 and protons to make water. The release of oxygen and water produces a small current, which drives the nanorod through the fluid, platinum side first. “The silver/gold alloy causes the electrons to be transferred more quickly,” explains Wang. “This increases the fuel decomposition rate and the nanorod is accelerated faster.” The speed of the nanorods can be tailored by changing the proportion of silver in the alloy. “Fuel additives or variations of the platinum segment will make these rods even faster,” predicts Wang.

SenesTech, Inc. Initiates Research Field Trials for ContraPest(R) in Indonesia

2008-11-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

[Source: PRNewswire] - SenesTech, Inc. has initiatedfield trials of its platform technology on the Indonesian island of Java incontinuing research collaboration with international partners.

After meeting with Dr. Grant Singleton of the International RiceResearch Institute in Manila, Philippines, Drs. Loretta Mayer and CherylDyer of SenesTech, Inc. will join Dr. Lyn Hinds of the AustralianCommonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) andDr. Sudarmaji of the Indonesian Rice Research Council (IRRC) at the fieldtesting site of the IRRC in Sukamundi, Java. The group will initiate thefirst field trials of the active ingredient in ContraPest(R). This 21stcentury alternative to rat poison will be used to cause permanentreproductive failure in female rice field rats (Rattus argentiventer).

The environmentally neutral active ingredient in ContraPest(R) targetsthe ovaries of female rats, and selectively destroys early-stage egg cells.When these cells become inactive after exposure to ContraPest(R), theycannot mature, the animal can no longer ovulate, and the effect on rodentpest populations can be dramatic. These rodent pests can eat or damage upto 50% of a rice crop in Southeast Asia. Just a 10% increase in crop yielddue to less rodent damage will result in feeding up to 380 million morepeople per year.

"Field testing in the agricultural environment where ContraPest(R) willbe applied is a significant step forward in our product developmentprocess," said Everett Hale, CEO of SenesTech, Inc. "Collecting data fromthe rice fields on our first target species gives us the right informationto design the best product possible."

Field trials with the rice fields on Java coincide with the annual riceplanting and harvesting cycles. SenesTech, Inc. and its partners areplanning more field testing in March and April 2009.

For additional information contact Everett Hale at ehale@senestech.comor visit http://www.SenesTech.com. ContraPest(TM) is projected to beavailable for commercial use in the spring of 2010.

Chronic Headaches? 'Medication Overuse Headaches' Surprisingly Common

2008-11-03T15:48:00.001-07:00

[Source: ScienceDaily] - There is a critical need to review current treatment strategies for the increasingly common problem of medication overuse headaches (MOH), according to a series of international papers in the November issue of Cephalalgia.

“MOH is associated with severe disability, unmet treatment need and little clinical data to support current management strategies” says neurology expert Professor David W Dodick from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Arizona, USA.

His overview also highlights the need for greater research into the condition - in particular the role that migraine medication can play in the withdrawal process. It is accompanied by papers on how the condition is tackled in Denmark, Germany, Moldova, Japan, Spain, Canada, India and Taiwan.

MOH, previously known as rebound headache, drug-induced headache or drug-misuse headache, is a headache that occurs at least 15 days a month when patients overuse medication.
“Tolerance to the analgesic effect of the acute medication develops over time, consumption may increase and patients may show withdrawal symptoms when they stop the overused mediation” explains Professor Dodick. “We estimate that the condition affects one in every 100 adults and one in every 200 adolescents worldwide, which is a considerable number.

“For example, in the USA 60 per cent of people with chronic daily headaches attending
headache clinics have MOH. Data from a physician study suggests that it may be the third most frequent type of headache after migraines and tension-type headaches. And a Norwegian study found that people were seven times more likely to suffer from chronic headaches if they used analgesics daily or almost daily for more than a month.”

Despite being very common, there are no standardised treatment guidelines for MOH, partly due to the small number of controlled clinical trials that have addressed the treatment of this condition.

However, recent research suggests that the traditional approach of not providing new treatment strategies until patients have been through detoxification may not be the best clinical option.
“Data from recent trials indicate that treatments developed to prevent migraine may prove effective if they are used in patients with MOH before the overused medicine is withdrawn” says Professor Dodick.

“This points to the need for clinical trials to re-evaluate current strategies and find the best way forward.”

The international papers that accompany Dr Dodick’s overview show that MOH is a common problem, but the incidence, causes and treatment vary from country to country.

•Just under a quarter of the MOH cases seen at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan are caused by people overusing cold cure preparations. Dr Shuu-Jiun Wang points out that 100 brands are currently available in Taiwan and he and his colleagues frequently see patients who have taken the whole 60ml bottle rather than the 10ml recommended dose. The problem is more common in people with lower education levels. Other common causes of MOH, which affect one in 100 Taiwanese people, include analgesics, with or without caffeine.

•Dr Zaza Katsarava from the University of Essen in Germany reports that new rules that enable healthcare plans to sign contracts with headache centres to provide day care centre withdrawal programmes have reduced MOH relapse rates in the country. He says that studies lasting from three to five years have indicated that relapse rates range from 34 to 48 per cent.

•Medication overuse is a major clinical problem and a significant source of headache-related disability in Canada, according to Professor Werner J Becker from the University of Calgary. He believes that it will take a concerted effort by the public, health professionals and healthcare funders to provide better prevention and treatment for MOH. But he points out: “It can at times be difficult for patients to find a physician who will expend the time, energy and skill to help them escape from the prison of medication overuse.”

•MOH is a serious problem in Spain, especially among middle-aged women, says Professor Julio Pascual from the University Hospital at Salamanca. He advocates an active detection and treatment approach, pointing out that in his experience this can lead to long-term improvements in more than half of MOH cases. However he adds that patients with primary headache can often be biologically, and possibly genetically, predisposed to developing chronic daily headaches regardless of analgesic use, making the drugs the consequence, not the cause of daily headaches.

•Dr Rigmor Jensen from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says that MOH has become a greater problem in Scandinavia over the last decade and is now the third most prevalent form of headache after tension type headaches and migraine. “A long-standing tradition of restrictive use of painkillers is changing and in general the use of simple analgesics and combination drugs has steadily increased in Denmark” she says.

The drugs that cause MOH may vary from country to country says Dr Rie Kanki from Kitasato University in Kanagawa, Japan, as their market availability may differ and people’s attitudes can be greatly affected by cultural attitudes. For example codeine and barbiturates, which are used in combination analgesics in the USA and Europe, are not available in Japan. Dr Kanki says that patient education is essential and that the growing number of headache specialists in Japan is making it easier to seek expert advice.

People living in Moldova often face psychological, cultural and religious barriers to drug use, according to Dr Ion Moldovanu from the State Medical and Pharmaceutical University in Chisinau. He reports that a clinical study of chronic migraine patients found that the two-thirds who did not have MOH expressed significantly greater phobias about the effects of drugs. Because of this they used fewer drugs than the third of patients who did have MOH.

Limited clinical data suggests that MOH is not as prevalent in India as it is in Europe and the US, reports Dr K Ravishankar from the Lilavati Hospital and Research Centre in Mumbai. He suggests this could be because people tend to use pain balms, delay medication and use alternative medicine. However, he says that more population-based studies are needed in the country, where access to healthcare is difficult and costly and headaches are not a priority compared with AIDS, Malaria and TB.

“It is clear from the papers in this issue of Cephalalgia that MOH is a common universal problem and that many countries face unique challenges due to the drugs that are available, patient and physician attitudes and the different health care delivery systems” says Dr Dodick, who will take over as Editor-in-Chief of Cephalalgia in January 2009.

“However, the overwhelming consensus is that MOH is a growing problem that has a major negative impact on health-related quality of life. It is important to identify patients with a high frequency of headaches, who are at high risk of MOH, as early as possible and initiate measures to reduce the consumption of acute pain medication.

“This is an important series of papers as it illustrates the global public health burden imposed by MOH and identifies the unique underlying factors that contribute to MOH in different countries, as well as country-specific barriers to treatment.

“The expert authors have also highlighted the need for systematic and concerted research efforts to better understand the mechanisms and most effective treatment strategies for MOH, stressing that this is a major priority in the field of headache medicine.”