#MERS Not Given Same Vaccine Attention as Ebola, Other Viruses A MERS outbreak has infected about 150 people in South korea,
after a businessman apparently brought the virus back from the Middle east. Authorities are scrambling to control the spread of the illness, known fully as the Middle east Respiratory Syndrome.
But a vaccine is not among their tools since it doesn yet exist, and is probably not close to being developed.
The coronavirus, similar to the SARS virus which killed hundreds in Asia a decade ago,
has no vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. MERS was discovered only in 2012 in Saudi arabia.
The country has been battling an ongoing outbreak in the years since with more than 1, 000 infected,
MERS is considered more deadly than SARS, according to a Reuters report. However, fewer companies have worked on vaccines and drugs for the MERS virus, according to Reuters. Small biotech companies such as Greffex,
Inovio and Novavax have done all some investigation on vaccines for the sickness but the research is still all preclinical,
the news service reported. Other diseases have appeared to take precedence in the research pipeline in recent years.
Ebola research, including vaccines and treatments, dominated headlines worldwide in the wake of the outbreak of the virus in multiple West african nations last year.
Johnson and Johnson announced in January it was administering 400 000 doses of its Phase I trial vaccine in Africa.
However, other viruses were also acingfor deployment amid the panicked fears as that outbreak spread.
One has made it beyond the Phase I trials and is being readied for the next potential outbreak,
The SARS vaccine work proceeded for years but since the virus mostly disappeared, there are not enough live examples of disease to effectively test it, according to multiple reports.
Such investment of resources was made never for MERS, according to Reuters. Saudi arabia secretive response to the outbreak is partly to blame,
since details of the virus are only beginning to be known as it spreads beyond the Middle east.
Medical experts have said the virus may have originated in bats, that cases have been linked to camels, and that it is communicable between people.
Severe fever, coughing and shortness of breath are among the symptoms of MERS, which can ultimately result in pneumonia and kidney failure, according to the CDC.
So far, 16 have died in the South korea outbreak
#Newfound Groups of Bacteria are Mixing Up the Tree of Life University of California, Berkeley,
scientists have identified more than 35 new groups of bacteria, clarifying a mysterious branch of the tree of life that has been hazy
and include the smallest life forms On earth, microbes a mere 400 nanometers across. The number of new bacterial phyla is known equal to all the animal phyla On earth.
said lead author Jill Banfield, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management. hese new groups of bacteria and Archaea are changing our understanding of the number and arrangement of branches on the tree of life.
Graduate student Christopher Brown Banfield and their colleagues reported the discovery online (Monday, June 15) in the journal Nature.
The UC Berkeley team realized that the only way to clarify such vague classifications was to sequence the genomes of these organisms,
and they decided to collect samples from groundwater at a remediation site in Rifle, Colorado..
Colleagues at the Department of energy Joint Genome Institute shotgun-sequenced the DNA of all the microbes in the filtered sample,
a technique known as metagenomic analysis. Banfield team then assembled the millions of DNA pieces into eight complete bacterial genomes from four new and one previously studied phyla,
and draft genomes most of them more than 90 percent complete for 789 other bacteria. They are lumping the 35-plus phyla into a cluster they call the andidate phyla radiationbecause of their similarities to one another
and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. o one had been able to put all the pieces together before.
and small genomes, may be the reason they can be grown in lab culture: they are stripped-down life forms with the barebones requirement of genes,
lacking the ability to make key building blocks, and probably dependent on other forms of life for help.
because some organisms detected widely in the environment fail to grow in culture like other bacteria.
The new discovery allowed the team not only to define about a third of all bacterial phyla but, thanks to the nearly complete genomes
to characterize their lifestyles. eople have seen these bacteria in surveys of many different environments all over the planet,
The recognizable genes suggest that most of the bacteria use a simple process of fermentation to make the energy they need,
the multi-protein machines that translate genetic instructions into proteins. he unusual ribosomes, the small genomes between 600 and 1,
probing not only the acidic pools in abandoned mines and the contaminated groundwater at the Superfund cleanup site in Colorado,
There is a lot of biology that we haven been able to understand from our current methods, Brown said.
most after award-winning microbiologists but one Berkelbacteria after UC Berkeley. The work is supported by the Department of energy.
Source: University of California Berkeley y
#Protein Plays Unexpected Role in Embryonic Stem Cells What if you found out that pieces of your front door were occasionally flying off the door frame to carry out chores around the house?
That the kind of surprise scientists at the Salk Institute experienced with their recent discovery that nucleoporinsroteins that act as cellular oorwaysto help manage
what goes in and out of a cell nucleusre actually much bigger players in expressing genes than previously thought.
This discovery gives a new understanding to genetic diseases that are caused by mutations in these proteins.
a professor in Salk Molecular and Cell biology Laboratory and senior author of the new paper. hope people start to accept
In the new work Hetzer and his colleagues focused on one particular nucleoporin called Nup153,
Hetzer suspects that other nucleoporins also have roles in gene expression control, but cautions that the roles could be very differentach nucleoporin,
Mutations in many nucleoporin genes has been linked to human diseases and developmental disorders, including some forms of leukemia and inherited heart problems.
Until now, Hetzer said, researchers have assumed the mutations led to disease by altering the transport of proteins in and out of a cell nucleus. ow,
wee realizing this is probably not the only explanation, he said. any of those diseases and developmental disorders might actually be caused by the ability of these genes to regulate gene expression programs.
His lab is planning to follow up with studies on Nup153, and exactly how it recruited to genes,
as well as investigating the developmental roles of other nucleoporins. The work and the researchers involved were supported by grants from the National institutes of health and the National Cancer Institute
#Smart Insulin Patch Could Replace Painful Injections for Diabetes Painful insulin injections could become a thing of the past for the millions of Americans who suffer from diabetes, thanks to a new invention from researchers at the University of North carolina
and NC State, who have created a mart insulin patchthat can detect increases in blood sugar levels
painless patch could lower blood glucose in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes for up to nine hours.
More preclinical tests and subsequent clinical trials in humans will be required before the patch can be administered to patients,
but the approach shows great promise. e have designed a patch for diabetes that works fast,
biocompatible materials, said co-senior author Zhen Gu, Ph d.,a professor in the Joint UNC/NC State department of Biomedical engineering.
Gu also holds appointments in the UNC School of medicine the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and the UNC Diabetes Care Center. he whole system can be personalized to account for a diabetic weight and sensitivity to insulin,
he added, o we could make the smart patch even smarter. Diabetes affects more than 387 million people worldwide,
and that number is expected to grow to 592 million by the year 2035. Patients with type 1 and advanced type 2 diabetes try to keep their blood sugar levels under control with regular finger pricks and repeated insulin shots, a process that is painful and imprecise.
John Buse M d.,Ph d.,co-senior author of the PNAS paper and the director of the UNC Diabetes Care Center, said,
njecting the wrong amount of medication can lead to significant complications like blindness and limb amputations,
or even more disastrous consequences such as diabetic comas and death. Researchers have tried to remove the potential for human error by creating losed-loop systemsthat directly connect the devices that track blood sugar
and administer insulin. However, these approaches involve mechanical sensors and pumps, with needle-tipped catheters that have to be stuck under the skin
and replaced every few days. Instead of inventing another completely manmade system Gu and his colleagues chose to emulate the body natural insulin generators known as beta cells.
These versatile cells act both as factories and warehouses, making and storing insulin in tiny sacs called vesicles.
They also behave like alarm call centers, sensing increases in blood sugar levels and signaling the release of insulin into the bloodstream. e constructed artificial vesicles to perform these same functions by using two materials that could easily be found in nature,
said PNAS first author Jiching Yu, a Ph d. student in Gu lab. The first material was hyaluronic acid or HA,
a natural substance that is an ingredient of many cosmetics. The second was 2-nitroimidazole or NI,
the researchers inserted a core of solid insulin and enzymes specially designed to sense glucose.
Once the researchers designed these ntelligent insulin nanoparticles, they had to figure out a way to administer them to patients with diabetes.
Rather than rely on the large needles or catheters that had beleaguered previous approaches, they decided to incorporate these balls of sugar-sensing,
insulin-releasing material into an array of tiny needles. Gu created these icroneedlesusing the same hyaluronic acid that was a chief ingredient of the nanoparticles,
only in a more rigid form so the tiny needles were stiff enough to pierce the skin.
The researchers tested the ability of this approach to control blood sugar levels in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes.
They gave one set of mice a standard injection of insulin and measured the blood glucose levels,
They also found that the patch did not pose the hazards that insulin injections do.
Injections can send blood sugar plummeting to dangerously low levels when administered too frequently. he hard part of diabetes care is not the insulin shots,
or the blood sugar checks, or the diet but the fact that you have to do them all several times a day every day for the rest of your life,
the director of the North carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC Tracs) Institute and past president of the American Diabetes Association. f we can get these patches to work in people,
The research was funded by a pilot grant from the NC Tracs Institute and a athway to Stop Diabetesresearch Award from the American Diabetes Association.
University of North carolina Chapel Hil s
#Eavesdropping on the Body: New Device Tracks Chemical Signals Within Cells Biomedical engineers at the University of Toronto have invented a new device that more quickly
and accurately"listens in on the chemical messages that tell our cells how to multiply. The tool improves our understanding of how cancerous growth begins,
and could identify new targets for cancer medications. Throughout the human body, certain signalling chemicals--known as hormones--tell various cells
leading to cancer. To look into the responses of different cells, the U of T team harnessed the emerging power of digital microfluidics,
which involves shuttling tiny drops of water around on a series of small electrodes that looks like a miniature checkerboard.
we can create electric fields that attract and move around droplets containing any chemical solution, "said first author Alphonsus Ng who recently graduated with a Phd from the U of T Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical engineering (IBBME) and Donnelly Centre,
and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Professor Aaron Wheeler. Ng and his team's method allows the scientists to deliver a quick-fire sequence of chemicals to small groups of cells stuck to the surface of the board.
For example, the first drop might contain a hormone that tells cells to grow faster. Within seconds
They then deliver a third drop containing fluorescent antibodies that stick only to the proteins modified in the cascade.
Looking at the antibodies in a microscope provides a snapshot of what has changed and what hasn't. By building up a series of snapshots at different time intervals,
scientists can see how the cascade progresses.""It's like a flipboard; each snapshot gives us a static image,
or action,"said Dean Chamberlain, a postdoctoral researcher at IBBME, the Donnelly Centre and the Department of chemistry.
or proteins that could be targeted by drugs, eventually leading to new medicines to fight cancer.
University of Toront t
#Specific Roles of Adult Neural stem cells May be determined Before Birth Adult neural stem cells, which are thought commonly of as having the ability to develop into many type of brain cells,
according to a study led by UC San francisco researchers. his work fundamentally changes the way we think about stem cells,
said principal investigator Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, Ph d.,UCSF professor of neurological surgery, Heather and Melanie Muss Endowed Chair and a principal investigator in the UCSF Brain tumor Research center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research. t may be unwelcome
news for those who thought of adult neural stem cells as having a wide potential for neural repair.
In mouse brains, as in human brains, adult neural stem cells reside on the walls of cavities called ventricles,
which are filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Using sophisticated DNA tagging techniques, Alvarez-Buylla and his team traced the development of mouse adult neural stem cells back to their embryonic progenitors.
They found that most neural stem cells are produced when the mouse embryo is between 13 and 15 days old,
uite early in embryonic brain development, said Alvarez-Buylla, and then remain quiescent until reactivated later in life.
the scientists found that the mouse adult neural stem cells they studied are derived from embryonic neural stem cells that produce neurons in entirely different parts of the brain. his means that, somehow,
the implications for human biology are indirect at best. owever, mouse brains have long been accepted as excellent basic research models for the human brain,
he said. Alvarez-Buylla also noted that the paper has possible implications for the success of human stem cell therapy in the brain
and nervous system. ne implication for humans has to do with the fact that so many different progenitor cells are needed to make the different types of neurons,
this work tells us that if we don understand the embryology of the brain, going back to the origins of specific nerve cell types,
the likelihood of our being able to use stem cell therapy to repair brain injury is very low.
who was on the staff of the Alvarez-Buylla laboratory at the time of the study.
The study was supported by funds from the National institutes of health, the John G. Bowes Research Fund and the Howard hughes medical institute s
#Major Step for Implantable Drug Delivery Device An implantable, microchip-based device may soon replace the injections
and pills now needed to treat chronic diseases: Earlier this month, MIT spinout Microchips Biotech partnered with a pharmaceutical giant to commercialize its wirelessly controlled, implantable,
microchip-based devices that store and release drugs inside the body over many years. Invented by Microchips Biotech cofounders Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering,
and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, the microchips consist of hundreds of pinhead-sized reservoirs,
each capped with a metal membrane, that store tiny doses of therapeutics or chemicals. An electric current delivered by the device removes the membrane,
releasing a single dose. The device can be programmed wirelessly to release individual doses for up to 16 years to treat
for example, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and osteoporosis. Now Microchips Biotech will begin co-developing microchips with Teva Pharmaceutical, the world largest producer of generic drugs,
to treat specific diseases, with licensing potential for other products. Teva paid $35 million up front, with additional milestone payments as the device goes through clinical trials before it hits the shelves. bviously,
this is a huge validation of the technology, Cima said. major pharmaceutical company sees how this technology can further their efforts to help patients.
Apart from providing convenience, Microchips Biotech said these microchips could also improve medication-prescription adherence a surprisingly costly issue in the United states. A 2012 report published in the Annals of Internal medicine estimated that Americans who don stick to prescriptions rack up $100 billion
to $289 billion annually in unnecessary health care costs from additional hospital visits and other issues.
Failure to follow prescriptions, the study also found, causes around 125,000 deaths annually and up to 10 percent of all hospitalizations.
While its first partnership is for treating chronic diseases, Microchips Biotech will continue work on its flagship product, a birth-control microchip, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
that releases contraceptives and can be turned on and off wirelessly. Cima, who now serves on the Microchips Biotech board of directors with Langer,
sees this hormone-releasing microchip as one of the first implantable rtificial organsbecause it acts as a gland. lot of the therapies are trying to chemically trick the endocrine systems Cima said. e are doing that with this artificial organ we created.
Wild ideas Inspiration for the microchips came in the late 1990s, when Langer watched a documentary on mass-producing microchips. thought to myself,
ouldn this be a great way to make a drug-delivery system??Langer said. He brought this idea to Cima,
a chip-making expert who was taken aback by its novelty. ut being out-of-this-world is not something that needs to stop anybody at MIT,
Cima adds. n fact, that should be the criterion. So in 1999, Langer, Cima, and then-graduate student John Santini Phd 9 co-founded Microchips,
and invented a prototype for their microchip that was described in a paper published that year in Nature.
This entrepreneurial collaboration was the first of many for Cima and Langer over the next decade.
This dime-sized prototype contained only 34 reservoirs, each controlled by an individual wire connected to an external power source.
At the time, they considered a broad range of practical, and somewhat fantastical, applications beyond drug delivery, including disease diagnostics
and jewelry that could emit scents. e were trying to find the killer application. We thought,
have a hammer, what the right nail to hit??Cima said. For years, the technology underwent rigorous research and development at Microchips Biotech.
But in 2011, Langer and Cima, and researchers from Microchips, conducted the microchipsfirst human trials to treat osteoporosis this time with wireless capabilities.
In that study, published in a 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine, microchips were implanted into seven elderly women,
delivering teriparatide to strengthen bones. Results indicated that the chips delivered doses comparable to injections and did so more consistently with no adverse side effects.
After that, the Gates Foundation took interest. t wasn just a pie-in-the-sky idea anymore wee really treating patients
Cima said. hat really captures people imaginations. That study, combined with ongoing efforts in contraceptive-delivery microchips,
led Cima to believe the microchips could someday, essentially, be considered the first artificial glands that could regulate potent hormones inside the body.
This may sound like a wild idea but Cima doesn think so. Consider the thousands of people living today with pacemakers,
he said. acemakers are delivering an electrical signal, fixing the pace of a heart, or detecting if the heart is not beating correctly,
The chip ends an endocrine or chemical signal instead of an electrical signal. MEMS innovations Microchips Biotech made several innovations in the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing process to ensure the microchips could be commercialized.
A major innovation was enabling final assembly of the microchips at room temperature with hermetic seals. Any intense heat during final assembly, with hermetic sealing, could destroy the drugs already loaded into the reservoirs
which meant common methods of welding and soldering were off-limits. To do so, Microchips Biotech modified a cold-welding ongue and grooveprocess.
This meant depositing a soft, gold alloy in patterns on the top of the chip to create tongues, and grooves on the base.
By pressing the top and base pieces together, the tongues fit into the grooves, and plastically deforms to weld the metal together. ach one of these reservoirs,
until you open it, must be sealed completely from any contaminant in the environment, Cima said. here was no precedent for that.
The company has also found ways to integrate electronics into the microchips to shrink down the device.
Moving forward, Langer adds, the company could refine the microchips to be even smaller, yet carry the same volume of drugs. his means making the drugs take up more volume than the electrical and other components,
he said. hat the next major challenge. k
#SAPH-ire Helps Scientists Prioritize Protein Modification Research Researchers have developed a new informatics technology that analyzes existing data repositories of protein modifications
and 3d protein structures to help scientists identify and target research on"hotspots"most likely to be important for biological function.
Known as SAPH-ire (Structural Analysis of PTM Hotspots), the tool could accelerate the search for potential new drug targets on protein structures,
"SAPH-ire predicts positions on proteins that are likely to be important for biological function based on how many times those parts of the proteins have been found in a chemically-modified state
"explained Matthew Torres, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of technology.""SAPH-ire is a tool for discovery,
"The tool and its proof-of-concept testing were reported June 12 in the journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics.
The research was supported by the National institutes of health's National Institute of General Medical sciences (NIGMS) and Georgia Tech.
Through modern mass spectrometry proteomics techniques, scientists have identified more than 300,000 post-translational modifications (PTMS) in different families of proteins across numerous species. These PTMS come in many forms, resulting
which we can understand what they do, from a classical biochemical approach. You have so much information that you don't know where to begin."
SAPH-ire collects non-redundant and experimentally verified PTM data across all known members of a protein family.
"The PTM hotspots are projected onto 3d protein structures available in the Protein Data Bank (PDB),
"Each PTM hotspot can then be ranked in order of highest to lowest potential for having significant biological function."
what might be considered the meta-data that exists in the public domain, collected all the PTMS and all the structures,
Because of their importance to therapeutics, these proteins have been studied extensively over a period of 50 years or so.
and developed by him and graduate student Henry Dewhurst, while experimental validation of the tool was accomplished by graduate student Shilpa Choudhury.
Their next step is to develop collaborations with scientists who will try it out on the protein families they study.
The Georgia Tech researchers are also creating a database that other protein scientists can query to help them identify
and they expect to see their program become part of informatics systems used to analyze large volumes of proteomics data emerging from labs around the world."
and context to all the data that is being produced about PTMS, "Torres said.""Connecting SAPH-ire to other programs that convert mass spec data into actual PTM data could provide immediate biological relevance and prioritization for biochemists and others.
It is likely to expose many new and unsuspected relationships between protein modification, protein structure and function."
"This research was supported by the National institutes of health, National Institute of General Medical sciences (NIGMS. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors
#New Single-use Harvesting Technology for High Cell Density Cultures Sartorius Stedim Biotech (SSB), a leading international supplier for the biopharmaceutical industry, has introduced Sartoclear Dynamics,
Continuous improvements in growth media and cell lines have elevated biomass concentrations in bioprocesses. Therefore, these increasingly higher concentrations place growing challenges on the purification process.
Sartorius Stedim Biotech has developed now this robust technology for biotech applications. Specially designed for cgmp processing
With a new quick-connect adapter for dust-free powder transfer, DE can be mixed directly into the cell culture fluid.
As the system maintains a constant ratio of biomass and filter aid, users will benefit from continuous maximum filter performance.
Consistent results, ease of use, tremendous speed and linear scalability are the key characteristics of the technology.
Nowadays, 2, 000 L is a standard size for single-use bioreactors, but a centrifuge is required still for removing cells from such volumes.
It also eliminates considerable capital investments, which is attractive for newcomers from emerging biotech markets.
The ready-to-use clarification system enables harvesting of high cell density cultures up to 2, 000 liters 0
how we develop the next generation of medications for chronic painhich is by far the most prevalent human health conditionnd the way we execute basic biomedical research using mice. esearch has demonstrated that men
. E. P. Taylor Professor of Pain Studies at Mcgill University and Director of the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain. he realization that the biological basis for pain between men and women
The research was conducted by teams from Mcgill University, The Hospital for Sick Children (Sickkids), and Duke university
and looked at the longstanding theory that pain is transmitted from the site of injury or inflammation through the nervous system using an immune system cell called microglia.
said Michael Salter, M d.,Ph d.,Head and Senior Scientist, Neuroscience & Mental health at Sickkids and Professor at The University of Toronto,
Including female mice The discovery comes as there is increased attention to the inclusion of female animals and cells in preclinical research.
and cell lines in preclinical research . or the past 15 years scientists have thought that microglia controlled the volume knob on pain,
This work was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Louise and Alan Edwards Foundation
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