Stem Cells and Everything you need to know

Dear Friends and Readers.

I've received several emails asking the blog to cover Stem Cells and it's uses and purposes. Over next few weeks, we'll be dedicating this section to All things Stem Cells related.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank you for your support on this blog and post taking it over in November 2011, I promise to take it to new levels and continue it's purpose of sharing and collaborating information regarding Synthetic Biology and Gene Synthesis.

Wishing everyone a Very very happy NEW YEAR!!

Thank You,
Morgan.

Hillary Clinton warns of gene assembly's ability to create bioweapons

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently warned that gene assembly technology research could potentially be used by terrorists to create biological weapons. If this is 'a' possible future or not, only time will tell, however it is indeed a scary thought.

The threat from bioweapons has drawn little attention in recent years, as governments focused more on the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation to countries such as Iran and North Korea.
But experts have warned that the increasing ease with which bioweapons can be created might be used by terror groups to develop and spread new diseases that could mimic the effects of the fictional global epidemic portrayed in the Hollywood thriller "Contagion."

Many have been calling on the elimination of current viruses and diseases that, if in the wrong hands, could be a powerful weapon. The U.S. announced plans to destroy their smallpox stockpile in May 2011, despite protests from the public. The government feared that terrorists could use the virus to unleash a devastating attack. The disease, which killed one-third of those who were infected, was last seen in 1978.
As late as 2010, a congressional mandated panel reported that the U.S. would not be prepared for a bioweapon attack. The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation said the Obama administration failed in its efforts to prepare for and respond to a biological attack, such as the release of deadly viruses or bacteria. After that report, Obama announced during his State of the Union speech that the country would be making strides to make sure it was prepared for a biological terrorist attack scenario.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been pushing for countries to eliminate their stockpiles since 2006. However, at the WHO's annual meeting, it was decided that nations' could keep their smallpox stockpiles for at least another three more years in order to develop vaccines and anti-virals, according to Reuters.

"The emerging gene synthesis industry is making genetic material more widely available," she said. "This has many benefits for research, but it could also potentially be used to assemble the components of a deadly organism."

This probably reminds people about the Anthrax attacks almost a decade ago. Washington has urged countries to increase transparency in their effort to lower the threat of bioweapons, but U.S. officials have shied away from calling for a formal international verification system, citing the complications that would be involved in monitoring the vast number of labs that would have to be monitored.

Genes Predict Mesothelioma Treatment Response

Mesothelioma is a fast-growing cancer triggered by exposure to asbestos.  It is often treated with multiple modalities, including chemotherapy.  As more is understood about the impact of genetics on medication response, chemotherapy for cancers like mesothelioma is moving away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to a more tailored approach based on individual cellular characteristics. 

University of Chicago researchers have released the results of genetic studies they hope will shed some light on why some mesothelioma patients respond well to pemetrexed (Alimta) while others do not.

This is a copyrighted article hence cannot publish the entire thing here. But for more information on this you can visit the site at http://www.survivingmesothelioma.com/

 

Stem cell cure for hearing loss in aged

In a first of its kind study, a team of scientists in the UK have tried to "grow" new stem cells in the ear that get damaged with age, a finding they say could help combat hearing loss associated with old-age.

Researchers at Keele University found that in some cases hearing begins to decline when fibrocytes - cells in the inner ear - start to degenerate with age.

Once these cells die and don't function correctly, other parts of the inner ear can become permanently damaged, leading to increased loss of hearing and possible deafness, said the researchers. Dr Dave Furness and his team have begun research which will explore whether replacement fibrocytes and fibrocyte stem cells can be successfully grown and implanted into the ear.

If successful, the research could pave the way towards the prevention of age related hearing loss, Furness said. "We set out to explore why deafness occurs as a result of aging and what we discovered was that fibrocytes, the part of the ear involved in managing fluid composition in the cochlea, do degrade due to old age," Furness said.

Once this happens, he said, it causes hearing sensitivity to decrease. 

breaking news at times of india. 

Today's lifestyles, tomorrow's cancers: trends in lifestyle risk factors for cancer in low- and middle-income countries

Abstract

Background: The global burden of cancer is projected to increase from 13.3 to 21.4 million incident cases between 2010 and 2030 due to demographic changes alone, dominated by a growing burden in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Lifestyle risk factors for cancer are also changing in these countries and may further influence this burden.

Design: We consider examples of changes already occurring in population-level distributions of tobacco and alcohol consumption, body weight, and reproductive lives of women to gauge the magnitude of their projected impact on cancer incidence in future decades.

Results: Trends in lifestyle factors vary greatly between settings and by sex. Some common trends point to considerable increases in cancers of the (i) lung in men due to tobacco smoking; (ii) upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) due to increasing tobacco and alcohol consumption, worse in men; (iii) colon from increasing body mass index, and alcohol and tobacco consumption; and (iv) in women, breast due particularly to consistent international trends of younger age at menarche, smaller family size, and, at postmenopausal ages, increasing body weight.

Conclusions: In many LMICs, the future cancer burden will be worsened by changing lifestyles. Affected common cancer sites likely to experience the largest increases are lung, colon, UADT, and breast.

read the full article here

even better

DOWNLOAD THE PDF HERE

Existing Technique Can Detect Fetal Genetic Abnormalities in Maternal Blood

Non-invasive procedure could make prenatal testing easier, but it comes with ethical problems.

Until last week, scrutinizing a fetus's DNA for indications of genetic abnormalities meant tapping into the mother's womb with a needle. Now there's a test that can do it using a small sample of the mother's blood. MaterniT21, a Down's syndrome test that Sequenom of San Diego, California, launched in major centres across the United States on 17 October, is the first of several such tests expected on the market in the next year. It signals the arrival of a long-anticipated era of non-invasive prenatal genetic screening, with its attendant benefits and ethical complications.

With the technology in place to sequence the fetal DNA carried in a pregnant woman's bloodstream, geneticists predict the list of conditions that can be detected by non-invasive means will grow rapidly. Another company, Gene Security Network of Redwood City, California, says its forthcoming test will also check for other genetic abnormalities, and Sequenom is studying the feasibility of expanding its test.

"There's every reason to think that in the future you'll be able to extract an enormous amount of information from that sequencing data," says Peter Benn, director of the Diagnostic Human Genetics Laboratories at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.

Sequenom's test sequences 36-base-pair fragments of DNA to identify sections from chromosome 21. Normally, the chromosome contributes 1.35% of the total maternal and fetal DNA in the mother's blood. An overabundance of this material indicates the genetic abnormality that marks Down's syndrome.

Sequenom is marketing its test as an add-on to current screening methods, which estimate the chance that a woman is carrying a fetus with Down's syndrome from ultrasound results and protein markers in the blood. Such non-genetic screening can detect 90–95% of Down's syndrome cases, but falsely indicates that up to 5% of women are carrying a baby affected by the condition. Sequenom's test could be taken after a positive screening result to help a woman decide whether to undergo amniocentesis, a test that extracts amniotic fluid with a needle and carries a small risk of miscarriage. A study published this month, and paid for by Sequenom, found that the company's test has a false positive rate of 0.2% (G. E. Palomaki et al. Genet. Med. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/GIM.0b013e3182368a0e; 2011).

It could spare some women from having amniocentesis after a false-positive screening result. But Benn says that the test will also pose difficulties. For instance, because it would take 8–10 days to get the results of Sequenom's test, if a woman did still opt for amniocentesis, and the result confirms that the baby has Down's syndrome, there would be little time left to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy. And some women who test positive on MaterniT21 will probably choose to terminate pregnancies immediately rather than have amniocentesis.

"Inserting this new test in the way that Sequenom is proposing is very difficult, from the patient perspective, and difficult for physicians and counsellors to manage," Benn says.

Ethicists also caution that using such easy screening methods ever earlier in pregnancy might worsen the gender imbalance seen in countries such as China and India. And if it becomes routine to check for many different kinds of genetic abnormalities, ethicists predict that more couples may face the quandary of whether to carry an 'unhealthy' fetus to term.

"The idea that couples have choices about whether to continue their pregnancies may become strained because parents may be seen as irresponsible for allowing 'defective' pregnancies to go to term," says Mildred Cho, an ethicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Other ethicists worry that fears of eugenics will be raised if testing can be done for less-serious conditions.

Sequenom is solely focused on developing tests for conditions that are already part of prenatal screening programmes, says Mathias Ehrich, the company's senior director for research and development diagnostics. "We do not want to invent new applications. Our focus is on making existing clinical applications safer," he says. "I don't think that we are in a position to say that we should determine what hair colour the baby has."

Cell therapy fights leukaemia

It vindicates the cancer researchers who believe that cells are very smart drugs.


Two weeks after receiving an experimental treatment for his cancer, David Porter's 65-year-old leukaemia patient seemed to take a turn for the worse. Fatigue and fever drove the patient back to hospital, where his temperature surged to more than 39º C and he began to shake, his body racked with nausea and diarrhoea.

But rather than being a clinical failure, the patient's return to hospital heralded the treatment's success. His symptoms were the dying scream of more than a kilogram of leukaemia cells under attack by genetically engineered immune cells called T cells that Porter, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia, and his colleagues had infused two weeks earlier. As the T cells destroyed their targets, the sheer volume of cellular debris temporarily overwhelmed the patient's body.

Cells may be smart, but researchers have struggled to harness that intelligence to fight cancer. Early attempts to engineer T cells with chimeric antigen receptors failed to coax the cells to proliferate in the body. As a result, the modified cells soon died off, leaving little impact on the disease.

Porter's group is one the first to report results from a generation of chimeric receptors that include both an antibody to target the cancer and part of a receptor that amplifies the T-cell response. This time, the doctored T cells proliferated more than 1,000-fold in the body, and were still present at high levels six months after the treatment.

June credits this expansion and persistence for the study's dramatic results: two patients in complete remission and a third showing a partial response. The treatment kills off normal antibody-producing B cells too, but patients can be given regular infusions of antibodies to compensate for this, Porter says.

"I was sure the war was on," the patient, who has asked to remain anonymous, wrote in a statement released to reporters. "It was another week later that I got the news that my bone marrow was completely free of detectable disease."

• References

  1. Porter, D. L. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. doi:10.1056/nejmoa1103849 (2011).
  2. Kalos, M. et al. Sci. Transl. Med. 3, 95ra73 (2011).
  3. Morgan, R. A. et al. Mol. Ther. 18, 843-851 (2010). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
  4. Brentjens, R., Yeh, R., Bernal, Y., Riviere, I. & Sadelain, M. et al. Mol. Ther. 18, 666-668 (2010). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
  5. Kochenderfer, J. N. et al. Blood 116, 4099-4102 (2010). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

You can read the entire article here

Gene therapy offers hope for Parkinson's disease

An experimental gene-therapy treatment for Parkinson's disease has eased the movement problems of a small number of patients and raised no major safety concerns. The study, reported in The Lancet Neurology¹, is the first double-blind clinical trial to show a benefit of gene therapy to patients with the neurodegenerative condition.

Parkinson's disease is characterized by tremors, slowness and cognitive problems, and is caused by the death of neurons in brain circuits that makes dopamine. The effects cascade through interconnected brain regions involved in movement, with some areas becoming overactive.

Many patients are treated with the drug levadopa (L-DOPA), a chemical precursor of dopamine, and regain control of their movements. Over time, however, patients become less sensitive to L-DOPA and burdened by its side effects, which include psychological and physical problems.

Long-term fix

Gene therapy could offer a longer-lasting solution, says Andrew Feigin, a neurologist at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, who led the trial along with Michael Kaplitt, at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Matthew During, at Ohio State University in Columbus. This involved 45 patients aged between 30 and 75 years old, and was funded by Neurologix of Fort Lee, New Jersey, which holds the patent for the therapy.

Half of the patients received an infusion of a virus engineered to deliver a gene called glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) into a brain centre that is overactive in Parkinson's disease — the subthalamic nucleus. GAD encodes a neurotransmitter called GABA, which quiets neurons in this area. Another treatment for Parkinson's, deep brain stimulation (DBS), uses electricity to silence neurons in the same region.

The remaining patients underwent brain surgery, but did not receive the gene therapy.

Six months after these surgeries, Feigin's team measured improvements in both sets of patients using a standardized assessment of Parkinson's disease that looks at factors such as gait, posture, and hand and finger movements. Patients who had received the gene therapy exhibited a 23.1% improvement on this scale, compared with a 12.7% boost for patients who had undergone the placebo surgery. However, patients given the gene therapy did not, as a whole, see any more quality-of-life benefits than the other group.

Feigin's team excluded six patients who may not have received the gene therapy because of problems in its delivery. He says that this is justifiable in a small trial intended to test whether or not a treatment works. "If you included people who didn't get the therapy it could easily wash out the benefit you might see," he says.

In safe hands

One patient who received the gene therapy required treatment for a bowel obstruction 4 months after surgery, but Feigin says this was not related to the therapy.

"I'm very excited to see that it's safe," says Stéphane Palfi, a neurosurgeon at Henri Mondor Hospital in Creteil, France who was not involved in the trial.

However, he notes that DBS typically offers much more benefit to patients with Parkinson's disease. And, he adds, unlike gene therapy, DBS can be tuned up or down depending on a patient's current condition.

Despite this, Palfi remains enthusiastic that gene therapy could provide another tool with which to manage Parkinson's disease. He is involved in an early-stage safety trial for delivering genes involved in making dopamine to the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease. Palfi says that, so far, nine people have received the treatment.

Other scientists are testing gene therapies that prevent neuron from dying in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Marc Panoff, chief financial officer at Neurologix, says that the company will seek permission from the US Food and Drug Administration later this year to conduct a larger clinical trial.

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110317/full/news.2011.167.html

‘Humanized' mice is latest MIT medical breakthrough

A team led by Sangeeta Bhatia, a biomedical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, made 20-millimetre-long artificial human livers and implanted them into otherwise normal mice. The researchers report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the mice showed metabolism characteristic of the human liver for weeks after implantation.

Although scientists commonly use mice for biomedical research, they are not always helpful for pharmaceutical testing. Because mouse livers react to drugs differently than human livers, they often can't be used to predict whether a potential drug will be toxic to people. That means that a drug that harms the liver could make it all the way to human clinical trials before researchers discover its risks.

"What's exciting to researchers is this idea that if we can create these mice with human livers, we can basically create a slew of human-like patients to do drug-development screens, or to ... develop new therapies," says Alice Chen, an author on the study who works in the lab of Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of HST and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

"The key technique is that we make stable liver implants in the laboratory first," says biomedical engineer Chen The researchers combined human liver cells (hepatocytes) that carry out the liver's metabolic functions, with mouse fibroblast cells and human liver endothelial cells, which provide chemical signals the hepatocytes need to function. They encased the cell packages in a plastic scaffold and implanted them into mice.

When they gave the mice drugs that humans and mice break down differently, the mice produced the same breakdown products (metabolites) and showed the same metabolic interactions between drugs as a human would. The authors hope that the new technology will make drug development safer and less costly, by spotting toxicities before a drug gets to clinical trials.


You can read more of this fascinating story here and here

Gene therapy offers hope for Parkinson's disease

An experimental gene-therapy treatment for Parkinson's disease has eased the movement problems of a small number of patients and raised no major safety concerns. The study, reported in The Lancet Neurology¹, is the first double-blind clinical trial to show a benefit of gene therapy to patients with the neurodegenerative condition.

Parkinson's disease is characterized by tremors, slowness and cognitive problems, and is caused by the death of neurons in brain circuits that makes dopamine. The effects cascade through interconnected brain regions involved in movement, with some areas becoming overactive.

Many patients are treated with the drug levadopa (L-DOPA), a chemical precursor of dopamine, and regain control of their movements. Over time, however, patients become less sensitive to L-DOPA and burdened by its side effects, which include psychological and physical problems.

Long-term fix

Gene therapy could offer a longer-lasting solution, says Andrew Feigin, a neurologist at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, who led the trial along with Michael Kaplitt, at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Matthew During, at Ohio State University in Columbus. This involved 45 patients aged between 30 and 75 years old, and was funded by Neurologix of Fort Lee, New Jersey, which holds the patent for the therapy.

Half of the patients received an infusion of a virus engineered to deliver a gene called glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) into a brain centre that is overactive in Parkinson's disease — the subthalamic nucleus. GAD encodes a neurotransmitter called GABA, which quiets neurons in this area. Another treatment for Parkinson's, deep brain stimulation (DBS), uses electricity to silence neurons in the same region.

The remaining patients underwent brain surgery, but did not receive the gene therapy.

Six months after these surgeries, Feigin's team measured improvements in both sets of patients using a standardized assessment of Parkinson's disease that looks at factors such as gait, posture, and hand and finger movements. Patients who had received the gene therapy exhibited a 23.1% improvement on this scale, compared with a 12.7% boost for patients who had undergone the placebo surgery. However, patients given the gene therapy did not, as a whole, see any more quality-of-life benefits than the other group.

Feigin's team excluded six patients who may not have received the gene therapy because of problems in its delivery. He says that this is justifiable in a small trial intended to test whether or not a treatment works. "If you included people who didn't get the therapy it could easily wash out the benefit you might see," he says.

In safe hands

One patient who received the gene therapy required treatment for a bowel obstruction 4 months after surgery, but Feigin says this was not related to the therapy.

"I'm very excited to see that it's safe," says Stéphane Palfi, a neurosurgeon at Henri Mondor Hospital in Creteil, France who was not involved in the trial.

However, he notes that DBS typically offers much more benefit to patients with Parkinson's disease. And, he adds, unlike gene therapy, DBS can be tuned up or down depending on a patient's current condition.

Despite this, Palfi remains enthusiastic that gene therapy could provide another tool with which to manage Parkinson's disease. He is involved in an early-stage safety trial for delivering genes involved in making dopamine to the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease. Palfi says that, so far, nine people have received the treatment.

Other scientists are testing gene therapies that prevent neuron from dying in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Marc Panoff, chief financial officer at Neurologix, says that the company will seek permission from the US Food and Drug Administration later this year to conduct a larger clinical trial.

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110317/full/news.2011.167.html

China, Australia to collaborate on genetic research

Australian and Chinese researchers have agreed to collaborate on a new genetic research project to find a link between genes and diseases.

They will use the information gathered to develop new medicines that can help people according to their specific genetic make-up.

Liver disease and obesity are just two conditions that can benefit from a better understanding of human genes and personally-targeted drug treatments.

The director of the China-Australia Centre for Phenomics Research, Dr Ed Bertram, has told Radio Australia's Connect Asia program, the project will be fast-tracking research by many years.

He says they are teaming up with the Beijing Genomics Institute, a world leader in genome sequencing technology for more than 10 years.

"One of the key projects that we will be working with is to build a large-scale library of some 10,000 unique fully-sequenced genetic mice with mutations of every gene in the genome," he said.

"Researchers can then access to study or validate genes from the human genome sequences for finding cause and mutations that are involved in disease."

Dr Bertram says the information will allow them to develop new therapies and drugs, as well as look at current drugs and treatments and their suitability for patients.

The China-Australia Centre, located at the Australian National University in Canberra, was one of four joint research centres set up with the support of the Australian and Chinese governments in 2008.

Dr Bertram says the new initiative is the start of a long-term partnership.

"It's really the latest technology development that will allow us to rapidly increase that output," he said.

"And we've found working with China to be a very good collaboration, particularly in this area."

 

source: Radio Australia News