#The genomics of the sniffles: Nature News Genome sequences of the cold virus could reveal new secrets behind its prowess.
could be used to design new therapies against colds or to determine, for example, why one strain can cause more severe symptoms than another."
colds in children can cause middle-ear infections or increase the likelihood of developing asthma.
Asthma sufferers, in turn, can find that catching a cold worsens their symptoms.""From that perspective, rhinovirus deserves to be attacked with the modern tools we have available to us,
"says Stephen Liggett, director of cardiopulmonary genomics at the University of Maryland Medical center in Baltimore,
What's more, a newly discovered class of rhinoviruses called HRV-C can cause serious, flu-like lung infections."
along with 10 additional viruses isolated from patients with upper respiratory infections. They compared these sequences
more symptomatic infections.""To date, there has been a lack of understanding as to which rhinovirus gives you a more complex cold,
says Caroline Tapparel, a virologist at the University Hospital of Geneva in Switzerland, but she cautions that with the exception of the troublesome HRV-C viruses,
and leukaemia after receiving a stem-cell transplant from a donor who is genetically resistant to HIV.
and prepared to perform a transplant. But haematologist Gero H tter of the Charit Universit tsmedizin in Berlin took the search for a donor one step further.
but when he realized that his patient would need a transplant, he remembered a paper he had read more than a decade earlier about HIV resistance in people who carry a specific genetic mutation.
his patient might be less susceptible to HIV infection. The patient had 80 matches in the bone-marrow registries of the German Bone marrow Donor Center,
and in February 2007, the transplant was performed. Even though the technique has only been applied in one patient
if you can make the majority of your cells resistant to infection, you can really stop the virus. Meanwhile,
The virus could be lurking in cells that doctors have not been able to test such as cells in the brain or heart.
The risks involved with a bone-marrow transplant far outweigh those that come with years of antiretroviral drug therapy
Before receiving the transplant, recipients are conditioned with drugs and radiation to destroy their own blood-producing stem cells.
The procedure leaves them vulnerable to infection, and there is also the possibility that their bodies will eventually reject the transplant.
You could. One CCR5 inhibitor, called maraviroc, is made by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and is approved for use in the United states and Europe.
#What causes schizophrenia?:Nature News Findings from a'brain training'study challenge theory. Researchers in Sweden have revealed a surprising change in brain biochemistry that occurs during the training of working memory,
The discovery may have implications for understanding disorders in which working memory is deficient such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.
Torkel Klingberg, a neurologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and his colleagues studied what happened to D1 receptors in the brains of healthy young men during such training1.
"The density of neurotransmitter receptors is known to change in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, and this has been considered a cause of the diseases,
"says Klingberg.""But now we see that cognitive activity also affects receptor density.""In the future, researchers will need to consider
or part of the disease process itself, he says. Calming effect?""This is an important consideration that applies to many findings of purported brain changes in mental disease,"comments Sol Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns hopkins university in Baltimore, Maryland."
and evolved to fight disease. Despite previous reports that the German group's Neanderthal samples may have been contaminated with DNA from modern humans1,
chemical and toxicological properties of nanomaterials they make or import in quantities greater than one kilogram.
now that air pollution is a serious health risk, "says Wang.""But attempts, such as China's, to regulate air quality have not yet borne fruit."
#RNA fragments may yield rapid, accurate cancer diagnosis An article by Scientific American. Fragments of RNA that cells eject in fatty droplets may point the way to a new era of cancer diagnosis,
potentially eliminating the need for invasive tests in certain cases. Cancer tumor cells shed microvesicles containing proteins and RNA fragments, called exosomes, into cerebral spinal fluid, blood, and urine.
Within these exosomes is genetic information that can be analyzed to determine the cancer s molecular composition and state of progression.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells in 2008
however exosomes have not seen widespread clinical testing as a means of cancer diagnosis until now.""We have never really been able to detect the genetic components of a tumor by blood
or spinal fluid, says Harvard university neurologist Fred Hochberg.""This is really a new strategy. He says exosome diagnostic tests could potentially detect
and monitor the progression of a wide variety of cancers. He is one of the lead researchers in a multicenter clinical study using new exosomal diagnostic tests developed by New york city-based Exosome Diagnostics to identify a genetic mutation found exclusively in glioma, the most common form of brain cancer.
When treating other forms of cancer, surgeons are able to biopsy tumors to diagnose and monitor the state of the disease.
For brain cancers like glioma, however, multiple biopsies can be life threatening. Bob Carter head of neurosurgery at the University of California, San diego, says well-preserved RNA in blood
and spinal fluid enables researchers to test and monitor for these genetic changes noninvasively. He says study researchers separate exosomes from bio-fluids with a diagnostic kit
and then extract the relevant genomic information. Once the specific cancer mutation is identified, clinicians will periodically draw additional bio-fluids to monitor the mutation levels to determine
whether a patient is responding to therapy. Whereas Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful tool, tumors only show up on imaging scans once they are at least one millimeter in diameter
and comprise about 100, 000 tumor cells. By that time, it may be too late for an early intervention.
On the flip side, MRIS can also yield false positives. Hochberg says individuals who have been treated with conventional radiation therapy often have benign residual tissue from dying tumor cells that have been killed by the treatment but
which the body has eliminated not yet. This tissue is mistaken often for tumor growth on a MRI scan."
"You would identify to the patient that the drug is not working when in reality it is doing well,
Hochberg says.""On the other hand, having an easily accessible biomarker for glioma would give you a clear response.
There are 18 U s. hospitals participating in the clinical trial, sponsored by the Accelerated Brain Cancer Cure Foundation.
Hochberg says study researchers have recruited 41 of 120 patients so far. Preliminary results will be presented in April at the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles Symposium in Boston.
From a technical standpoint I don t believe there is a barrier, Carter says.""This test can certainly be used now,
what we are trying to finalize is the sensitivity and specificity of the test. Exosomes may be a reliable method of screening for prostate cancer as well.
A PSA test is currently the most common, noninvasive means to screen for prostate cancer in the U s. PSA testing measures for elevated levels of prostate specific-antigen antigen,
a protein produced by the prostate gland that is used to liquefy semen in men. The higher a man s PSA level, the more likely it is that he has prostate cancer,
says James Mckiernan, director of urologic oncology at Columbia University Medical center. There are additional reasons, however, for high PSA levels
-and some men with prostate cancer do not always have elevated PSA, he added. In addition, for many cases of prostate cancer, new research published in May 2012 in The New england Journal of Medicine shows that treatment does not actually extend the life of the patient."
"Honestly PSA is not cancer-specific, says Sudhir Srivastava, head of the National Cancer Institute s Cancer Biomarkers Research Group."
"Exosomes could be very much more cancer specific. PSA might give you one specific biomarker for cancer identification,
but exosomes can give you an entire disease specific profile so you would know whether or not it is a form of prostate cancer that necessitates treatment.
Researchers at Exosome have developed a diagnostic kit for prostate cancer with a diagnostic accuracy of around 75 percent-a rate comparable with that of actually taking a tissue biopsy,
says Wayne Comper, a renal physiologist and chief science officer at Exosome. He says the first diagnostic kit could be available commercially by the end of 2013.
Researchers use the kit to look for the genetic biomarker TMPRSS2: ERG or T: E in exosomes taken from a urine sample.
Comper says levels of T: E are nine times higher in a cancerous prostate versus a healthy one.
Mckiernan says researchers found these exosomal diagnostic tests gave better predictive results for cancer than current prescreening methods, such as PSA.
PSA levels are measured via a blood draw but also require a visit to a doctor s office for a digital rectal exam,
something that isn t necessary with an exosomal diagnostic test.""Our study got enough interest to put together a series of sites for investigation to lead to potential FDA approval of this particular kit,
he says.""That is ongoing right now and the last time I checked there were about 1, 000 patients who have been enrolled in the study.
More from Scientific American. Srivastava says Exosome's prostate kit could prove to be extremely relevant in cancer treatment
if it survives the U s. Food and Drug Administration s grueling approval process. He says it is a precursor to
what he hopes will be a series of multiple-gene-signature cancer tests.""We are looking for something with about 90 percent accuracy before it can be used by itself for clinical diagnosis,
he says.""NCI has done two prostate trials with exosomes to date and is looking into creating standard isolation procedures to make the tests more specific.
In the meantime Srivastava says exosomal tests could be used in conjunction with current methods of diagnosis like PSA to help physicians better determine
if the nature of a prostate tumor is severe enough to warrant radical treatment or removal without ever performing a biopsy."
"If someone has high PSA and also has biomarkers which are positive in exosomes that would be a great test,
he says.""Exosomes have the potential to really further the detection of cancer and help analyze things that would have otherwise not been detected noninvasively y
#'Asian Nobels'will bring prize-giving up to date Taiwanese tycoon Samuel Yin stunned the world on 28 january with the announcement of the Tang Prizes:
awards that will offer bigger winnings than the Nobel prizes. Yin contributed 3 billion Taiwanese dollars, the equivalent of roughly US$100 million,
to set up the Tang Prize Foundation. The prizes are named after the Chinese Tang Dynasty (ad 618-907.
I wanted to found a prize to reflect the new challenges faced by humanity#such as climate change, energy shortages, emerging diseases, clashes of cultures and ideas,
#Overharvesting leaves Himalayan Viagra fungus feeling short Yarsagumba, the world s most expensive medicinal fungus, is in serious decline in Nepal because of over-harvesting,
and Tibetan medicine for a wide range of conditions including impotence, asthma and cancer. The peculiar life cycle of the fungus has earned also it the names'winter worm, summer grass'and'caterpillar fungus'.
But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken#with the fungus taking the advantage.
The disease is so universal that it"is not going to be eradicated; or the only way to eradicate the disease in practice is to eradicate all of the coffee,
says Mccook. By 1970, the fungus had been detected in Brazil, and severe outbreaks were seen in Costa rica in 1989
#But changes to management practices had brought the disease mostly under control.""Coffee rust was considered a solved problem by most of the coffee growers
"People didn t fear the disease. The outbreak may have taken hold because of patchy use and effectiveness of fungicides.
and to find molecular markers that distinguish between different strains of the pathogen and that could be used to develop tailored strategies for its control.
as well as from Kenya, India, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, to screen for resistant coffee plants and to analyse varieties of the pathogen."
"Scientists need to continuously develop resistant varieties in order to keep coffee leaf rust disease at bay, Phiri says."
where it is required to provide local solutions to the epidemics, he says d
#High-flying bacteria spark interest in possible climate effects Ravaged by arid winds and ultraviolet rays,
2012), has long been negotiating with the government for facilities to link basic research at the Center for Developmental biology in Kobe, where he works, with clinics and industry.
Another#700#million will pay to create a cell-processing centre at the Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation in Kobe,
in a clinical study set to start this year on the eye condition known as macular degeneration. Other ministries have jumped also on the ips-cell bandwagon.
#Leprosy bug turns adult cells into stem cells Leprosy bacteria can reprogram cells to revert to a stem-cell-like state,
while researching the way leprosy spreads around the body. The mechanism of the hijacking is unclear,
but reproducing it could lead to new stem-cell-based therapeutic strategies. The initial target of the leprosy bacterium#Mycobacterium leprae#is Schwann cells,
which are part of the peripheral nervous system. Like rubber around an electric wire, the cells wrap around nerves to insulate the electric signals passing through.
and regenerate after an injury.)""This is a very sophisticated mechanism#it seems that the bacterium knows the mechanistic interaction of the Schwann cell better than we do,
but they suspect that the mechanism could exist in other infectious diseases.""Cellular plasticity may represent an underlying mechanism of disease,
as other cellular reprogramming events have been shown in cancers and metabolic diseases, says Sheng Ding, a stem-cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, California.
A greater understanding of these precise mechanisms could improve treatment and earlier diagnosis of leprosy itself.
Before this experiment, scientists did not know how the bacteria spread through the body. The latest findings could provide clues about how to catch the disease before it does so.
In the future, bacteria could be used to change adult tissue cells into stem cells in the laboratory
potentially leading to new regenerative treatments for diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer s z
#Nanomaterial rivals hardness of diamond An article by Scientific American. It s only a matter of time before a movie villain pulling off the crime of the century needs a cutting tool that is harder than anything else On earth.
Perhaps it s a burglary that involves cutting into a case made of diamond#which,
say#for cell therapy. Although the number of published papers from ips-cell research has not yet caught up with that of ES-cell work (see Inducing a juggernaut),
however, have a head start in the clinic. Former heads of the biotech company Geron, based in Menlo Park, California,
which precursors of neural support cells grown from human ES cells were injected into people with spinal-cord injuries.
the spinal-cord trial would double the number of companies sponsoring human clinical trials for ES-cell therapies.
these are showing early evidence that a product made from human ES cells can help to rebuild the layer of cells that support photoreceptors in the eyes of people with certain types of blindness.
But ips cells are edging towards the clinic too. Advanced Cell Technology says that it will begin talking to the US Food
and Japan is setting up a stem-cell bank of some 75 ips-cell lines intended for future therapies.
As recently as 2010, the biomedical sector was responsible for US$48#million of $67#million in total quantum dot revenues, according to BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
#Vaccine switch urged for polio endgame By sunrise on a warm December morning, Janila Shulu s team are out in the dirt roads and alleyways of Ungwan Rimi, a poor neighbourhood in a predominantly Muslim section of Kaduna city in northern Nigeria.
Three female health workers, accompanied by a community leader, dart from house to house, squeezing a few drops of polio vaccine into the mouths of all the young children they can find,
but this month the World health organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, proposed a shift in vaccination strategy from oral vaccines to injected ones that may have to be administered in clinics.
which have poor access to health care. The new policy is an important step towards eradication,
says Nicholas Grassly, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, but implementing it will be difficult.""There are some big ifs as to
Jonas Salk is credited with developing the first polio vaccine in 1955, an injected vaccine containing killed virus,
but the oral live vaccine devised a little later by his competitor Albert Sabin is the workhorse of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
This public-private effort, started in 1988 and coordinated by THE WHO, has cost about US$8#billion so far.
But the live viruses in the Sabin vaccine can revert to disease-causing forms especially in populations where immunity is not widespread.
Northern Nigeria has been battling such vaccine-derived outbreaks since 2005, and one emerged last year in Pakistan (see Nature 485,563;
) In a 4 january announcement, THE WHO called for oral polio vaccine containing the polio strain type 2, one of the Sabin vaccine strains,
but vaccine-derived forms of the strain still circulate in Nigeria and neighbouring countries. Oral polio vaccination will continue,
but it will use a vaccine that protects against just the two other types of polio virus that are still circulating in their wild form in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile the policy also calls for the introduction, as quickly as possible, of the oral vaccine s old competitor:
the inactivated Salk vaccine. That costs more than ten times as much as the oral vaccine and requires trained health workers to administer it,
says Roland Sutter, a vaccinologist at THE WHO. But it carries no risk of causing polio.
By giving children an inactivated vaccine that protects against all three subtypes of polio, health workers hope to gradually stamp out vaccine-derived outbreaks."
"You have to have a transition period in which both oral and inactivated vaccines are used,
"because if you stop cold turkey you re going to have outbreaks, says Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University in New york city.
THE WHO will phase out all oral polio vaccines. The high cost of the inactivated polio vaccine remains a significant hurdle for the plan,
which depends on a reduction in cost to less than 50 cents per dose from the current cost of more than $2,
and delivering the vaccine under the skin instead of into muscle, could help to lower the dose required and cut costs,
as could new kinds of vaccine, he says. Health infrastructure poses another big hurdle, says Grassly.
Delivering the vaccine in clinics instead of door to door will pose a challenge for Nigeria,
Less than 50%of children receive a complete schedule of childhood vaccinations, and in parts of northern Nigeria that figure is around 10%."
and a member of THE WHO committee that issued the new vaccination policy. He sees the eventual switch to inactivated vaccines as an opportunity to align polio eradication with routine immunization."
"We should have done this a lot earlier, he says
#The time? About a quarter past a kilogram Physicists have created an atomic clock that relies on a fundamental link between time and mass.
Although remedial courses have been available for physicians for more than a decade#with many returning to medicine to forge successful careers#Dubois says that Repair is the first such programme for researchers.
which holds the promise of treatments for a variety of diseases, but which depends on the destruction of days-old human embryos.
But the lead plaintiff on the case, James Sherley of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute in Watertown, Massachusetts, says that the decision will not end his efforts"to emancipate human embryos from research slavery sponsored by the NIH.
from leftover embryos at fertility clinics that would have been thrown away. The NIH does not fund the derivation of the lines, only the subsequent research.
saying that work on embryonic-stem-cell lines could lead to therapies for Parkinson s disease, diabetes and other ailments."
"What a great day for science, says Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research in WASHINGTON DC, an umbrella group of organizations that advocate for the research.
Researchers stumbled on the grisly cataloguing technique while studying a form of anthrax that kills chimpanzees in C# te d'Ivoire.
whether the insects could harbour the anthrax bacterium after feasting on infected bodies, but soon realized"that detecting mammal DNA from flies could also be an extremely cool tool for assessing biodiversity,
when Todd Sacktor at the SUNY Downstate Medical center in New york city wiped out established spatial memories in rats.
an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United states. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.
But other scientists who work on neural implants are sceptical. Lee Miller, a physiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that Nicolelis s team has made many important contributions to neural interfaces,
Nicolelis s team developed implants that can send and receive signals from the brain, allowing monkeys to control robotic
whether he could use these implants to couple the brains of two separate animals. His colleague Miguel Pais-Vieira started by training one rat#the encoder#to press one of two levers,
An implant recorded neural activity in the rat's motor cortex (the area that controls its movements), compared it to earlier recordings,
and implants linked their somatosensory cortices, the regions involved in touch. This link worked even
from creating organic computers to uniting different parts of the same brain that have been cut off by damage or disease.
parallel universe of unexplored RNAS, says Nikolaus Rajewsky, the lead author of one of the studies and a systems biologist at the Max Delbr#ck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
Mir-7 targets have been linked to cancer and Parkinson s disease. Hansen s team found that expression of the circular RNA blocked the blockers.
Later, he learned that other patients were being treated aggressively by doctors chasing stringent LDL targets.
called ATP IV, has been drawn up by an expert panel of 15#cardiologists appointed by the institute.
while shifting focus to prevention in patients at risk of a heart attack.""We can t just assume that modifying the risk factor is modifying risk,
says Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale university in New haven, Connecticut.""We ve been burned so many times in the past decade by that assumption.
when ATP III called on doctors to push LDL levels below set targets, the concept of low cholesterol has become synonymous with heart health.
and some hospitals reward doctors when patients hit cholesterol targets. In 2011, US doctors wrote nearly 250#million prescriptions for cholesterol-lowering drugs,
creating a US$18. 5-billion market, according to IMS Health, a health-care technology and information company based in Danbury,
says Joseph Drozda, a cardiologist and director of outcomes research at Mercy Health in Chesterfield, Missouri."
ATP III reflected a growing consensus among physicians that sharply lowering cholesterol would lessen the likelihood of heart attacks
and strokes, says Richard Cooper, an epidemiologist at the Loyola University of Chicago Stritch School of medicine in Illinois,
says committee chairman Neil Stone, a cardiologist at Northwestern University School of medicine in Chicago. If so, Krumholz argues,
Clinical trials have shown repeatedly that statins reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, but lowering LDL with other medications does not work as well.
including fighting inflammation, another risk factor for heart disease. Krumholz s scepticism is rooted in experience. In 2008 and 2010, the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) clinical trial challenged dogma
when it reported that lowering blood pressure or blood sugar to prespecified targets did not reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke.
In the case of blood sugar, the risks were worsened. The trial demonstrated the folly of assuming that risk factors must have a causal role in disease,
says Robert Vogel, a cardiologist at the University of Colorado, Denver.""Short people have a higher risk of heart disease,
he says.""But wearing high heels does not lower your risk. Jay Cohn, a cardiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical school in Minneapolis, also worries that the focus on LDL levels offers up the wrong patients for statin therapy.
Most of those who have a heart attack do not have high LDL, he notes. Cohn advocates treating patients with statins based on the state of health of their arteries,
as revealed by noninvasive tests such as ultrasound.""If your arteries and heart are healthy, I don t care
what your LDL or blood pressure is, he says.""We can t just assume that modifying the risk factor is modifying risk.
Not all cardiologists want to abolish LDL targets. Indeed, Seth Martin, a fellow in cardiology at Johns hopkins university School of medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, believes that ATP IV should reduce LDL targets further.
The simplicity of targets has helped to deliver an important public-health message, he says, and motivated many patients to get the statin therapy that he believes they need."
"Just to throw that out the window doesn t seem like the ideal scenario. Whatever the decision, the pharmaceutical industry will be watching closely,
but has not yet been shown to reduce heart attacks or strokes. Francis expects the new guidelines to relax the targets.
but instead encourage doctors to prescribe a moderate dose of statin when otherwise healthy patients have high LDL cholesterol.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011