Synopsis: Health:

#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;

2012). ) In a 4 january announcement, THE WHO called for oral polio vaccine containing the polio strain type 2, one of the Sabin vaccine strains,

to be phased out###perhaps in as little as two years. The wild form of type 2 has been stamped out globally,

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,

which has one of the lowest rates of routine immunization in the world. Less than 50%of children receive a complete schedule of childhood vaccinations,

and in parts of northern Nigeria that figure is around 10%."%"We as a global community have to do a much better job of integrating polio

and routine immunization, says Zulfiqar Bhutta, an immunization expert at Aga khan University in Karachi, Pakistan,

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.

the researchers played soft voices to premature babies while they were asleep in their incubators a few days after birth,

including premature babies. The team's results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

all therapeutic molecules face a deadly foe#the immune system. Its macrophages are designed to spot any intruding molecules in the blood

but without that carrier's toxic side effects. Neil Barclay of the University of Oxford, UK, was part of the team that worked out the CD47 structure that inspired Discher s work2."

#FDA Approves First Retinal Implant An article by Scientific American. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United states. The FDA s green light for Second sight s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis

System gives hope to those blinded by a rare genetic eye condition called advanced retinitis pigmentosa, which damages the light-sensitive cells that line the retina.

For Second sight, FDA approval follows more than 20 years of development, two clinical trials and more than $200 million in funding#half from the National Eye Institute, the Department of energy and the National Science Foundation

Retinitis pigmentosa#which affects about one in 4, 000 people in the US and about 1. 5 million people worldwide#kills the retina s photoreceptors,

Second sight plans to adapt its technology to someday assist people afflicted with age-related macular degeneration, a similar but more common disease.

cultivate a network of surgeons who can implant the device and recruit hospitals to offer it.

The Argus II is not the only retinal implant under development. Retina Implant AG takes a slightly different approach by making a prosthetic inserted beneath a portion of the retina.

The company s technology is a three-by three-millimeter microelectronic chip (0. 1-millimeter thick) containing about 1, 500 light-sensitive photodiodes,

amplifiers and electrodes surgically inserted beneath the fovea (which contains the cone cells) in the retina s macula region.

In May the company announced the first UK patients participating its latest trial had received successfully implants.

To date surgeons have implanted Retina Implant prosthetics in 36 patients through two clinical trials over six years.

Stanford university researchers are in the early stages of developing self-powered retinal implants where each pixel in the device is fitted with silicon photodiodes.

When influenza hit early and hard in the United states this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim:

but not substitute for, traditional epidemiological surveillance networks.""It is hard to think today that one can provide disease surveillance without existing systems,

says Alain-Jacques Valleron, an epidemiologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris,

and founder of France s Sentinelles monitoring network.""The new systems depend too much on old existing ones to be able to live without them,

It is also causing more serious illness and deaths than usual, particularly among the elderly,

Traditional flu monitoring depends in part on national networks of physicians who report cases of patients with influenza-like illness (ILI)##a diffuse set of symptoms

including high fever, that is used as a proxy for flu. That estimate is refined then by testing a subset of people with these symptoms to determine how many have flu and not some other infection.

With its creation of the Sentinelles network in 1984, France was the first country to computerize its surveillance.

overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, includes some 2,

and has been extended to include surveillance for a second disease, dengue. Sources: Google Flu Trends (www. google. org/flutrends;

Its estimate for the Christmas national peak of flu is almost double the CDC s (see Fever peaks),

In 2009, Flu Trends had to tweak its algorithms after its models badly underestimated ILI in the United states at the start of the H1n1 (swine flu) pandemic###a glitch attributed to changes in people s search behaviour as a result of the exceptional nature of the pandemic (S. Cook et al.

says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts.""You need to recalibrate them every year.

Flu Near You, a system run by the Healthmap initiative co-founded by Brownstein at Boston Children s Hospital,

SLIDESHOW France's Sentinelles'network of doctors reporting cases of influenza-like illness has produced a clear picture of how the 2012-13#flu season has evolved.

#Small-molecule drug drives cancer cells to suicide Cancer researchers have pinned down a molecule that can kick-start the body s own tumour-destroying systems,

which has long been a target for cancer researchers looking for drugs that would avoid the debilitating effects of conventional therapies."

so boosting this will not be as toxic as chemotherapy, says Wafik El-Deiry, an oncologist at Pennsylvania State university in Hershey and lead author of the study,

which is published today in Science Translational Medicine1. Experiments showed that TIC10 had potent effects against a variety of tumours,

Mice with glioblastomas that were treated with TIC10 in combination with bevacizumab#a drug used against diseases including brain tumours

This is by no means the only mechanism thought to trigger cell death in cancer. In particular, cancer researchers have been developing a number of drugs,

including TRAIL-based therapeutics, that work by activating the cellular messenger tumour protein 53 (p53).

But p53-based methods are not always effective, says El-Deiry. Most tumours have dysfunctional p53,

so in order to develop new therapeutics for cancer, one needs them to be effective in tumours with mutated p53,

The potential for TRAIL to usher in a new age in cancer therapy was identified first in the mid-1990s3.

although early clinical trials for TRAIL-based therapies showed little toxicity, they were not very successful at treating cancer,

says Andrew Thorburn, an oncologist at the University of Colorado Denver, who co-authored a review on the subject last year4."

"All the large clinical trials found no significant survival benefit to adding TRAIL-based therapeutics to standard treatments, he ads.

Many large biomedical research groups have shelved their TRAIL-based drugs L

#Europe bets on drug discovery Two sites shuttered by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, one in Scotland and one in The netherlands, will soon be humming again with the work of drug discovery.

But the hum will not be business as usual. It will be the sound of a public-private consortium placing a high-stakes wager:

is sponsored by the Europe s Innovative Medicine Initiative. The European commission s Seventh Framework Programme is contributing##80#million to the venture,

The scheme hopes to become self-sustaining by requiring milestone payments as drugs move from laboratory to clinic and from additional partnerships and screening services."

whose work at the Scripps Research Institute Molecular Screening Center in La jolla, California, led to a compound now in clinical trials for multiple sclerosis.

which some drug companies contribute both chemical analysis and screening support, but all data are publicly available.

A more immediate benefit of 3-D printing embryonic stem cells might be the ability to make tissue samples that could be used to accurately test drug compounds for toxicity in humans, without the need for animal testing, according to the researchers c

#Synthetic vaccine could prevent future outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease Virologists have devised a way to create an entirely synthetic vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease.

The vaccine could prevent future outbreaks of the disease, and potentially lead to new treatments for polio and other human diseases.

Bryan Charleston, head of the Livestock Viral Diseases Programme at the Pirbright Institute in Woking, UK,

and his colleagues used computer simulations to create a model of the protein shell of the virus that causes the disease,

then reconstructed it from synthetic protein components. The synthetic shell contains no genetic material and so it cannot infect the animals.

But it will spur the immune system to produce antibodies that would protect them from the real virus. In 2001,

and spurred a decision to protect against future outbreaks with vaccination rather than mass slaughter.

however a vaccine made from inactivated virus caused another UK outbreak. The authors say that there is absolutely no chance that their new vaccine could revert into an infectious virus

because it contains no viral genes. Also being entirely synthetic, it cannot be contaminated with live virus during manufacturing.

It will be 6-8 years before the vaccine is available to farmers, they estimate. But if the method used to create the vaccine proves successful when scaled to commercial production,

it could also be used to create vaccines for human diseases that are caused by viruses of the same family, such as hand, foot and mouth disease,

which is ubiquitous in Southeast asia, and polio, which still blights the lives of millions of people in the developing world."

But if we could use this to move away from inactivated polio viruses in the vaccines,

because we are so close to ending this disease. JEFF J MITCHELL/REUTERSA 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease led to the slaughter of huge numbers of sheep and cows.

Earlier attempts to produce a synthetic vaccine for foot and mouth disease were thwarted often by peculiarities of viral geometry.

The team got around the problem by engineering the vaccine to have disulphide bonds cross-linking the protein triangles together.

says John Oxford, a virologist at St bartholomew s and the Royal London Hospital.""This really is an ace paper#they've truly given the entire issue a whole new dimension,

and Charleston that the new vaccine is unable to cause an infection or outbreak. Marvin Grubman, an animal-disease researcher at the US Department of agriculture in Orient Point, New york, says that the new vaccine"is a good piece of work,

but certainly not very novel, pointing to a foot-and-mouth vaccine his team devised that uses adenovirus to deliver empty viral shells.

That vaccine, he says, has been approved for use in the United states for cases of emergency. The authors however point out that their vaccine does not require the injection of live viruses

and that it would be suitable for preventive vaccination as well as in cases of severe outbreaks o

#Scientists map protein that creates antibiotic resistance Japanese researchers have determined the detailed molecular structure of a protein that rids cells of toxins,

but can also reduce the effectiveness of some antibiotics and cancer drugs by kicking them out of the cells they are targeting.

one of a class known as multidrug and toxic compound extrusion transporters (MATES) that are found in cell membranes.

The discovery suggests new approaches to combat antibiotic resistance and boost the power of cancer therapies,

Geoffrey Chang, a structural biologist at the University of California, San diego, says that the findings are very similar to those for the MATE protein from Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera.

and represent the latest success for a'fringe'therapy in which a type of immune cell called T cells are extracted from a patient, genetically modified,

says Michel Sadelain, a researcher at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New york and an author of the study.

whether it could take on the faster-growing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a tenacious disease that kills more than 60%of those afflicted.#

#Carl June, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a pioneer in engineering T cells to fight cancer, says that he is surprised that the method worked so well against such a swift-growing cancer.

is to move the technique out of the boutique academic cancer centres that developed it and into multicentre clinical trials."

"What needs to be done is to convince oncologists and cancer biologists that this new kind of immunotherapy can work,

he says. Oncologist Renier Brentjens, also at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, remembers the day that he had to tell one of the patients in the trial that the weeks of high-dose chemotherapy the 58-year-old man had endured had worked not after all."

"It was painful to have that conversation, says Brentjens.""He tells me now it was the worst news he has heard ever in his life.

Another month in the hospital on intensive chemotherapy drugs did nothing to help. By the time the man started the trial,

and engineered them to express a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, that would target cells expressing a protein called CD19.

The treatment had driven his cancer into remission#as it did for the other four patients in the trial

#so he became eligible for a bone-marrow transplant. A hundred days later, he is doing well,

Four of the five patients were well enough to receive transplants; the remaining patient relapsed and was ineligible.

and faces an untested path to regulatory approval, says Steven Rosenberg, head of the tumour immunology section at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

And Sadelein says that he is an investigator on a trial with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston

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