StemCell Therapy

Last week, we published a story about a team of German researchers who claimed to have identified an existing drug with potential to treat coronavirus Covid-19. Now, U.S. scientists from Greffex, aHouston, Texas-based genetic engineering company said it has completed a vaccine targeting the current outbreak of the coronavirus that the World Health Organization calls COVID-19. The company said it intends to give away its vaccine for free to nations affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, John Price, president and CEO, said.

Price told the Houston Business Journal that Greffexs scientists completed the coronavirus vaccine this week. The company said the vaccine will now move to animal testing by the necessary government agencies in the U.S., thats the Food and Drug Administration. Countries impacted by the outbreak, like China and Vietnam, have their own agencies with their own clinical testing regulations.

To ensure safety, Greffex did not use a living or killed virus for its vaccine, Price said. Greffexs treatments use adenovirus-based vector vaccines, which are used to target various kinds of infectious diseases and cancers, according to research published in the peer reviewed journal Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics. In September 2019, Greffex received an $18.9 million contract from the National Institute of Healths National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop new treatments for infectious threats, according to a press release.

Greffex intends to give away its vaccine for free to nations affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, Price said. Hes traveling to Vietnam Feb. 20.There are certain things which should not be sold. We have a health crisis in Asia, Price said. For certain governments, we will give them the vaccine and not charge them for it.

Greffex has previously developed vaccines for notable infectious diseases including Avian Influenza (bird flu), Ebola, Zika and MERS, Price said. Greffexs current coronavirus vaccine is similar to its vaccine for MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus.

The firms technology allows Greffex to develop new vaccines quickly usually in about a month, Price said. Following months of animal studies and abbreviated human clinical trials, Price said he could see the coronavirus vaccines being deployed into impacted nations as soon as early summer.

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U.S. scientists at Texas genetic engineering company Greffex have created a coronavirus vaccine, plans to give away the vaccine for free -...

Roasted soybeans are a common ingredient in the diets of dairy cows because they are a great source of fat and protein, including protein that escapes the rumen, according to researchers with The Pennsylvania State University.

Farm-grown and locally available soybeans and on-farm or local roasting make soybeans an economical ingredient in many situations, Penn State said in an announcement.

Until recently, farmers had to decide only how to process soybeans and how much to feed, but now they also have the opportunity to choose high-oleic acid soybeans that bring additional advantages in dairy rations, according to Kevin Harvatine, associate professor of nutritional physiology in the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences.

Harvatine said soybeans contain about 20% fat, and normal soybean fat is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are less stable and, therefore, prone to becoming rancid more quickly.

For many years, soybean oil was hydrogenated to make margarine, shortening and frying oils, but more than a decade ago, we realized the trans fats in these were very bad for us and increased heart disease, among other things, he said. Oleic acid is an unsaturated fatty acid and is much more stable when frying and storing, which sparked interest in breeding soybeans high in oleic acid and low in polyunsaturated fat.

There is a long history of selecting plants to increase oleic acid concentration. The best known is canola, which is rapeseed that was selected for high oleic acid levels to improve the healthfulness of the fat, Harvatine noted. Normal plant-breeding methods were also very successful in increasing oleic acid in sunflower and safflower oil, with some varieties containing more than 80% oleic acid.

However, normal plant breeding methods failed to create a high-oleic soybean, Harvatine pointed out, so high-oleic varieties that contain about 75% oleic acid and less than 10% polyunsaturated fat were created using genetic engineering approaches. The brand names are Plenish from Pioneer and Vistive Gold from Bayer.

High-oleic acid soybeans have been grown for a number of years but only recently have been widely available to grow outside of contracts, he said. The seed sells for a comparable price to normal seed and does not differ in yield or protein and fat concentration, so the cost of production is comparable.

Roasted high-oleic acid soybeans have benefits for dairy cows, Harvatine explained, adding that polyunsaturated fatty acids are toxic to rumen microbes and disrupt normal rumen function, leading to production of bioactive fatty acids that cause milk fat depression. We expect oleic acid to be lower risk, and recent studies both at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that high-oleic acid soybeans were lower risk for causing diet-induced milk fat depression, he said.

A recent study conducted by Harvatine at Penn State, funded by the Pennsylvania Soybean Board, compared feeding dairy cows normal versus high-oleic acid roasted soybeans at 5% and 10% of the diet. Soybean type and level had no effect on milk yield, but high-oleic acid soybeans resulted in 0.17 units higher milk fat concentration and 0.2 lb. higher milk fat yield.

This increase was explained by a decrease in diet-induced milk fat depression, and increasing the level of roasted soybeans from 5% to 10% of the cows diet increased milk fat 0.2 units, Harvatine said, likely because the diet contained a low level of fat relative to the production level of the cows.

Research on the benefits of high-oleic acid soybeans in dairy cow diets at Penn State is continuing. Harvatines research group currently is conducting additional experiments funded by the Pennsylvania Soybean Board to determine the optimal level of high-oleic soybeans. It is clear that high-oleic acid soybeans decrease the risk of diet-induced milk fat depression, he said.

We would expect to see the largest effect in herds with lower milk fat. However, some cows in every herd have lower milk fat and would be expected to benefit, he said. In addition, feeding high-oleic acid soybeans may allow increased use of other economical byproducts that are higher in polyunsaturated fat, such as distillers grains.

High-oleic acid soybeans are one of the new ingredients available to farmers interested in designing a diet that is energy-dense while minimizing risk for rumen disruptions and diet-induced milk fat depression, Harvatine said, adding, Because price, agronomics, fat and protein concentration are equivalent, there are few downsides to growing or feeding high-oleic acid soybeans. As a new variety, they are not available everywhere, but it is likely that farmers will see them soon, if they have not already.

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High-oleic acid soybeans offer benefits to dairy cows - Feedstuffs

Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times Published 4:43 p.m. ET March 18, 2020

What to read while you're self-isolating to avoid the coronavirus? How about books about all the various plagues humankind has survived before?

There are classics like Giovanni Boccaccio's 1353 classic "The Decameron," about Italian aristocrats who flee the bubonic plague in Florence, or Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel "A Journal of the Plague Year," an account of the Black Death in London half a century before.

There are many more recent works about pandemics, some nonfiction, some historical fiction, some speculative fiction. On March 8, Stephen King resisted comparisons of the current crisis to his 1978 novel "The Stand," set in a world where a pandemic has killed 99% of the population.

King tweeted, "No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND. It's not anywhere near as serious. It's eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions." Despite King's protestations, readers often look to books to help explain real-world phenomena, especially in bewildering times like these.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.(Photo: Penguin Random House, TNS)

Here are a few more plague books to consider.

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (1939) by Katherine Ann Porter is a short novel set during the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed five times as many Americans as did World War I. Its main character, Miranda, is a young reporter who falls in love with a soldier; the book's fever-dream style captures the experience of the disease.

"The Andromeda Strain" (1969) by Michael Crichton is a bestselling techno-thriller that begins when a military satellite crashes to earth and releases an extraterrestrial organism that kills almost everyone in a nearby small town. Then things get bad.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the great Colombian author's beguiling tale of a 50-year courtship, in which lovesickness is as debilitating and stubborn as disease.

"The MaddAddam Trilogy" by Margaret Atwood, which includes "Oryx and Crake" (2003), "The Year of the Flood" (2009) and "MaddAddam" (2013), is a masterwork of speculative fiction by the author of "The Handmaid's Tale." Set in a near future in which genetic engineering causes a plague that almost destroys humanity, it's savagely satirical, thrilling and moving.

"The Road" (2006) by Cormac McCarthy is a bleak, beautifully written, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set after an unspecified extinction event has wiped out most of humanity. An unnamed man and boy travel on foot toward a southern sea, fending off cannibals and despair.

"Nemesis" (2010) by Philip Roth is the author's 31st and last novel, a sorrowful story set in Newark, N.J., in 1944, as the United States is in the grip of the polio epidemic that killed and disabled thousands of children.

"Station Eleven" (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel is a bestselling novel about a group of actors and musicians traveling through the Great Lakes region in future years after a mysterious pandemic called the Georgian flu has killed almost everyone.

"The Old Drift" (2019) by Namwalli Serpell is a dazzling debut novel set in Zambia, spanning a century but focusing in part on the disaster wrought in that country by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Nonfiction

"The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance" (1995) by Laurie Garrett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter's clear-eyed look at how rapidly the modern world has changed the nature of disease, how important preparedness is and how endangered we are without it.

"Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic" (2013) by David Quammen is the great science writer's fascinating look at zoonotic diseases, such as AIDS and Ebola (and now coronavirus), that jump from animal species to ours.

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Books about pandemics to read in the time of coronavirus - The Detroit News

In 2010, Craig Venters lab embedded text and images into the DNA of a bacterium. Would a future investigator be able to tell? It would take special tools to see the insertion, but the difference should be detectable. What if bioengineers invent new genes that use the cells translation machinery to build non-natural proteins? This is already coming to pass with CRISPR/Cas9 methods. If the insertion were made in an embryo, all the adult cells would inherit the change. The line between natural and artificial is getting more blurry.

In a sense, the new bioengineering developments are similar in principle to longstanding cases of artificial interference in nature, as in agriculture, camouflage, or construction of simple dwellings with available materials like grass or fallen branches. The Design Filter takes into account what chance and natural law can do. There will always be difficult cases; ID errs on the side of non-intelligent causes when the degree of specified complexity is borderline. But now, specified complexity exists in both natural DNA and DNA altered by human intelligence. There should be ways to distinguish between human intelligent causes and non-human intelligent causes, whether those be space aliens, spirit beings, or a transcendent Creator.

In their epilogue to the book The Mystery of Lifes Origin (newly updated and expanded by Discovery Institute Press), Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen considered five sources for a more satisfactory theory of origins. These included: new natural laws, panspermia, directed panspermia, special creation by a creator within the cosmos, and special creation by a creator outside the cosmos. The last four involve intentional, mind-directed activity; only #5 necessarily involves the supernatural. To the investigator, though, the output of the Design Filter would be the same. It boils down to natural versus artificial: unguided, or mind-directed. But what happens when the mind-directed interference of bioengineers gets so good, it looks natural? It becomes a case of the perfect crime, leaving the investigator baffled. Todays Mars rovers are easily distinguished from the rocky, dusty environment of Mars. But what if future designers made them look like rocks, functioning when they roll over in the wind?

This is a growing challenge for ID as bioengineering progresses. News from ETH Zurich says:

Every living creature on earth has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on representing an unbroken line of ancestry all the way back to the very first organisms that lived here billions of years ago. Soon we will have life forms that have no such direct lineage. The first of these organisms will be bacteria. Bioengineers will use computers to develop such bacteria and specifically tailor them for applications in medicine, industry or agriculture. With the help of DNA synthesisers, they will build these bacterias genomes from the ground up to produce artificial life forms. [Emphasis added.]

This implies that an investigator will have to search the ancestry of an organism to make a design inference.

I dont mean organisms in which only individual genes have been altered a technique that has been applied in biotechnology and crop breeding for decades, and that todays CRISPR gene scissors have made very simple. No, I mean organisms for which bioengineers have literally developed the genome from scratch so that they can synthesise it in the lab.

The author, Dr. Beat Christen of ETH, says this is not science fiction. The tools to do this are already in place. I am convinced that they will soon be a reality, he says. It may not require designing every molecular machine de novo.

Digital databases store over 200,000 genome sequences from a broad range of organisms providing us access to a wealth of molecular building plans. By cleverly combining or modifying known genetic functions, bioengineers can develop microorganisms with new and useful characteristics.

How would an investigator in such cases be able to differentiate a synthetic organism from known examples of mosaic organisms or natural organisms containing orphan genes? On ID the Future recently, Paul Nelson acknowledged from his trip to the Galpagos Islands that Darwin got something right: organisms have a history. There can be some natural modification in a lineage over time, as in the case of flightless cormorants, he said, and ID advocates need to build that into their theory of design. With bioengineering entering the mix, they will also have to distinguish natural history from artificial history in the codes of life.

This is an extension of what they must do in distinguishing the artificial history of cultivated crops and animal breeds. The dachshund looks very different from the wolf from which domestic dogs descended. The ears of corn we buy in supermarkets differ substantially from the maize or teosinte from which farmers selectively bred them. But now that bioengineers can selectively edit the genes, they will have to discern the history in the genotype as well as the phenotype. The ability to do this could become very important.

Another challenge will arise as human history progresses. Right now, we have more clues to trace genetic editing to particular labs. But as the number of gene editing labs grows over time, and editing becomes routine maybe even to individuals it may become impossible to trace the edits to their source. This happens with artificial breeding as well; unless particular breeders documented their work, historians and archaeologists can only gain indirect clues to the time and place of origin for a particular breed. It could have started in ancient Babylon, Egypt, or Rome. Its not IDs job to identify the agent, the books explain (e.g., The Design Revolution, Chapter 26); the investigator should be able to detect design from its effects alone. Genetic tinkering will make that inference more difficult, if genetic engineers continue to blur the line between natural genetic information and edited genetic information. Moreover, not all gene editors publish their work. As in the case of bioweapons, the source may intentionally try to conceal its designs.

In Nature, three scientists wrote a review titled, The coming of age of de novo protein design. The opening sentence of the article by Huang, Boyken, and Baker makes a point that Douglas Axe and Ann Gauger would agree with: functional space is dwarfed by sequence space.

There are 20200 possible amino-acid sequences for a 200-residue protein, of which the natural evolutionary process has sampled only an infinitesimal subset. De novo protein design explores the full sequence space, guided by the physical principles that underlie protein folding. Computational methodology has advanced to the point that a wide range of structures can be designed from scratch with atomic-level accuracy. Almost all protein engineering so far has involved the modification of naturally occurring proteins; it should now be possible to design new functional proteins from the ground up to tackle current challenges in biomedicine and nanotechnology.

The summary on Phys.org has the title, Scientists can now design new proteins from scratch with specific functions. One of the techniques of de novo protein design involves evolutionary algorithms, in which the intelligent agent provides the selective pressure to find the fittest protein for the chosen goal. If engineers succeed in taking an amino acid sequence that folds in silico and then can reverse engineer the genetic code for it so that it can be translated by a natural bacteriums cellular machinery, does it become indistinguishable from an orphan gene? In both instances, the Design Filter would register a positive, but should ID advocates be able to tell the difference? Does it matter?

Another blurring of lines between the natural and the artificial occurs in cases of guiding organisms to do unnatural things. At the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), biotechnicians have turned a bacterial cell into a biological computer.

In recent decades, the barriers between engineering and life sciences have been falling, and from the encounter between the two different disciplines, a new science synthetic biology was born. Synthetic biology introduces engineering into biology, makes it possible to design and build biological systems that dont exist in nature, and supplies an innovative toolbox for reprogramming the genetic code in living creatures, including humans.

We built a kind of biological computer in the living cells. In this computer, as in regular computers, circuits carry out complicated calculations, said Barger. Only here, these circuits are genetic, not electronic, and information are [sic] carried by proteins and not electrons.

Once again, telling the difference will require a robust design inference. This type of tinkering might be compared to animal training. Shown two wolves, one trained to respond to human words and one in its wild state, could the investigator tell them apart by their behavior alone? Probably, but discriminating biological computers from wild bacteria could be a lot tougher, tractable only to molecular biologists.

These examples in the news present both challenges and opportunities. As lines blur between the natural and the synthetic in the 21st century, the design inference must be tightened accordingly. The specified-complexity criterion is robust against false positives (This is designed when its not), but not against false negatives (This isnt designed when it is; see William Dembski, No Free Lunch, pp. 22-28). To avoid a growing number of false negatives, the investigator must now become aware of the history of the genotype as well as the phenotype.

Its well and good to lump all instances of complex specified information into the designed category, whether a gene was edited by humans or designed by a transcendent entity. But these rapidly growing capabilities for bioengineering raise additional challenges for the ID community. Fortunately, with the challenges come opportunities. The very act of genetic engineering must surely be raising awareness in the scientific community of the degree of specified complexity in natural organisms, and the extremely limited tolerances for success. Nature confesses:

It is useful to begin by considering the fraction of protein sequence space that is occupied by naturally occurring proteins [1012 out of 20200]Evidently, evolution has explored only a tiny region of the sequence space that is accessible to proteins.

The design inference is not changing in principle; it only needs clarification to fit more challenging cases. It also affords opportunities to communicate design principles to those still clinging to the hope that blind, unguided processes are capable of navigating endless fields of haystacks for a tiny number of needles.

Photo: Topiary animals, by Doko Jozef Kotuli / CC BY.

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Blurring the Line Between Natural and Artificial - Discovery Institute

For the first time ever, CRISPR has been used to edit DNA inside a living human being. Scientists have also tapped the gene-editing tool to accelerate DNA sequencing in hopes of customizing cancer treatments. Plant-based burger startup Beyond Meat blasts critics who claim its products are ultra-processed. Genetic engineering may save the worlds favorite banana from extinction. But how does the public feel about all this genetic tinkering?

On this episode of Science Facts & Fallacies, plant geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP editor Cameron English go beyond the headlines to break down the latest developments from the world of genetics and biotechnology.

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Can CRISPR gene editing save the Cavendish banana from extinction?

The Cavendish bananathat delicious, yellow tropical fruit currently populating the produce sections of our grocery storesmay not be available for much longer. A fungal disease known as Tropical Race 4 (TR-4) is wreaking havoc on banana plantations across South America, threatening to wipe out the Cavendish for good. TR-4 spreads rapidly and isnt easily controlled with pesticide applications. Thats why scientists are working feverishly to immunize the banana by cutting a segment of DNA out of its genome that makes it susceptible to TR-4.

More precise cancer treatments may be possible by pairing CRISPR with genetic sequencing

Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have used CRISPR to rapidly sequence particular genes involved in the development of breast cancer, eliminating the DNA replication process usually required for genome sequencing. The development could enable the selection of customized cancer drugs that treat the disease based on the genetic makeup of individual patients.

Beyond Meat goes on the offensive, blasting critics who claim plant-based burgers are ultra-processed

Plant-based burgers have been a hit with consumers so far, achieving nearly a $1 billion in sales in 2019. This development has made the meat industry nervous, and theyve launched expensive marketing campaigns to dissuade the public from chowing down on the beef-free alternatives. The industrys biggest criticism: plant-based meats are ultra-processed, and presumably less nutritious than traditional burgers.

Beyond Meat, maker of the wildly popular Beyond Burger, is having none of this. The company announced in early March it was going on the offensive to counter the marketing assault on its products, arguing that plant-based foods may actually be healthier than meat in some cases.

Targeting blindness with CRISPR: Doctors attempt first editing of genes inside a human body

Gene editing has yielded dozens of important medical treatments for deadly diseases, including cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Typically, doctors extract immune cells from a patient, edit their DNA, then infuse them back into the persons body to attack the disease. Scientists have now taken this approach a step further by injecting a virus carrying the instructions to produce CRISPR-Cas9 directly into a patients eye, where it is expected to edit out a mutation involved in Leber congenital amaurosis, a genetic condition that causes blindness. Will this groundbreaking procedure work? Is it safe?

Infographic: What the US public thinks about tinkering with human genetics

As all this genetic engineering work begins reshaping intimate aspects of our lives, scientists and policy makers are eager to find out how consumers feel about the technology. Is the public on board, or do they fear a loss of human control? Both.

A majority of people surveyed by Pew (60%) said genetic engineering should be used to prevent serious diseases and produce organs for people who need them (57%), but they were also concerned about using the technology to enhance human performance. 69 percent, for example, said implanting brain chips to improve memory and information processing would be a step too far.

Kevin M. Folta is a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the GLPs senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

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Podcast: Treating blindness with CRISPR; customized cancer drugs; Beyond Meat takes on critics; and saving bananas from extinction - Genetic Literacy...

WASHINGTON, DC, US The US Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture launched a $7.5 million consumer education initiative focused on highlighting the science behind genetically modified organisms.

The goal of the effort, called Feed Your Mind, is to answer the most common questions consumers have about GMOs, including how they are regulated and whether they are safe and healthy.

Less than a dozen genetically modified crops are grown in the United States, but they often make up an overwhelming majority of the crop grown. More than 90% of soybeans, corn and sugar beets planted in 2018 were genetically modified.

Genetic engineering has created new plants that are resistant to insects and diseases, led to products with improved nutritional profiles, as well as certain produce that dont brown or bruise as easily, said Stephen M. Hahn, MD, commissioner of the FDA.

One educational video from the FDA points out that genetically modified soybeans have healthier oils that may be used to replace oils that contain trans fats. Other materials highlight how reduced bruising and browning may help combat food waste.

Consumers, however, remain uncertain. Concerns that GMOs are unhealthy and harmful are widespread. The number of shoppers avoiding GMOs tripled over the past decade, according to The Hartman Group. Close to half of consumers surveyed last year said they avoid bioengineered ingredients, compared to 15% in 2007.

A study published last year in Nature Human Behavior found more than 90% of participants had some level of opposition to GMO foods. It also found that consumers with the strongest opposition to GMO foods thought they were more knowledgeable about the topic than other participants, despite scoring lower on an actual knowledge test.

While foods from genetically engineered plants have been available to consumers since the early 1990s and are a common part of todays food supply, there are a lot of misconceptions about them, Hahn said. This initiative is intended to help people better understand what these products are and how they are made.

The Feed Your Mind initiative will launch in phases. Materials already released include a new website, fact sheets, infographics and videos. Supplementary science curriculum for high schools, resources for health professionals and additional consumer materials will be released later this year and in 2021.

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US agencies launch initiative to boost understanding of GMOs - World Grain

A Texas-based genetic engineering company claims to have created a vaccine to prevent the coronavirus (COVID-19) and is hoping to have the drug approved and available to the public by the end of the year.

John Price, the CEO of Greffex, told Fox News Monday that he was completely confident in his companys new vaccine.

Were confident in the vaccine, the quality of the vaccine completely. The end result will be what the government wants to do in terms of testing, Price said.

The company had previously created a vaccine to combat MERS and that research helped them develop the new vaccine. MERS has a tremendous number of similarities to the coronavirus, Price explained.

The vaccine is still in the testing stage, and if approved, could be available to the public by years end, he said.

When asked whether there was a way to fast track the approval process, Price answered that it would be a policy decision for the government.

Thats always the $100 million question. The earliest that we think would be the end of the year. The latest would be 18 months. But we think that we could depending on the approval process of the government get something in 2020, he said.

Yesterday was the first time I heard people say its a pandemic, Price added. If its truly a pandemic, then you can pretty much do whatever you want. The process is roughly four weeks for the first animal testing and then you go into human trials. And thats the part that will be determined by the government.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and his team, meanwhile, are working on a separate vaccine which could take up to 18 months to prove safety and effectiveness. The FDA has granted approval for the National Institutes of Health to begin the first stage of clinical testing in that vaccine.

Media-driven panic about the virus has contributed to a jittery and unnerved stock market in recent days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,500 points in early trading, Monday.

As of Monday morning, there were approximately 600 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and 22 deaths. There are now 111,362 cases worldwide, according to the John Hopkins tracking map.

By comparison, the CDC estimates that 35.5 million people got sick with seasonal influenza in the United States during the 20182019 season, with an estimated 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness. According to the CDC, there have been 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza, this season.

Unfortunately, the global death rate for COVID-19 is 3.4 percent, which is much higher than the common flu, according to the World Health Organization.

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Genetic Engineering Co. Says Its COVID-19 Vaccine Could Be Approved By End of the Year - American Greatness

It sometimes feels like society is permanently at loggerheads, divided over any number of issues, from genetic engineering and vaccines to euthanasia and religion, and unable to engage in productive exchanges across ideological divides.

Consequently, if education is to develop the next generation, it must nurture children as future citizens with the capacity to have productive conversations across these barriers of opinion and discipline.

We are often faced with big questions. But beyond the eternal questions concerning how life came into being and its purpose, there are more immediate concerns about which there will need to be decisions from citizens and leaders both now and in the future. How should we respond to climate change? Should government be allowed to quarantine people to prevent the spread of disease? Should euthanasia of terminally ill children be allowed?

Responses to questions such as these can be informed by science, as well as by ethics, philosophy and religion. But how can we generate a well reasoned argument using a range of diverse and often contradictory sources? And how can we develop childrens ability to do so, too? Children, after all, are the future.

First, children need to explore what an argument is, and what a good argument looks like within the subject they are studying. Put simply, an argument is a claim or set of claims supported by evidence and reasons, while a good argument is one justified by strong reasons and evidence that are relevant to the claim. But how do these arguments differ when it comes to the study of science and religious education (RE) in school?

The teaching and learning of arguments in science subjects has been extensively researched over the past 20 years. Academic textbooks and practical resources for teaching have been produced to support it.

But while RE curriculum documents often cite the need for students to produce well reasoned arguments, there has been far less research on and fewer resources for the teaching and learning of arguments within the subject.

One distinguishing feature between arguments in different subject areas is what is considered to be an acceptable reason. In the case of arguments in RE, what counts as a reason can be less defined and evidence-based than in the sciences, particularly when the focus may be on providing a safe space for expressing beliefs and respecting diversity, rather than on constructing persuasive arguments.

So what can be done about this and how can we ensure that children studying the two subject areas can better argue with one another? The Oxford Argumentation in Religion and Science (OARS) project brings the expertise of working science and RE teachers together, in collaboration with academic researchers. The project is exploring potential approaches for cross-curricular work across these disciplines, producing resources to support the teaching and learning of argument and reasoning in schools.

Our project team suggests that there are at least three good reasons to engage in cross-curricular teaching of argument and reasoning.

First, the subject groups can learn useful lessons from each other. Science teachers can draw on the skills of RE teachers for whom discussion, debate and dialogue are core features of their curriculum and daily work. RE teachers, on the other hand, could benefit by drawing on the well established resources and structure for teaching scientific arguments. They may also draw upon science teachers expertise when exploring scientific ideas and worldviews in RE.

Second, for the range of issues that might draw on both scientific and religious arguments for example, abortion, end-of-life decisions, evolution cross-curricular teaching could help develop a students capacity to discern the difference between those based on scientific evidence and those based more on faith and belief. It could also further their ability to accept and learn from other worldviews.

Finally, this work could extend across the whole school curriculum and bring greater coherence between school subjects. Learning about arguments in different subjects can make clear what is distinctive about each subject area (for example, highlighting the features of scientific arguments that make them distinctly scientific, as compared to other subjects). It can also highlight what features of arguments are common across specialities, showing how different subjects across the curriculum are related.

There is no single way that this cross-curricular collaboration could be rolled out in schools. Indeed, our participating teachers are innovative in finding approaches that work within the bounds of their busy, and often different, school lives.

In one example, an RE teacher and a science teacher are exploring the same question in their separate subject lessons: Why should we act on climate change? Students are asked to construct arguments using information that they have been learning in each subject, before combining these separate arguments from religion and science to present a convincing and coherent answer that draws on both disciplines.

We do not have all the answers and our work is ongoing. But we are convinced of the importance of learning how to argue and how to engage with others arguments for the sake of better scientific literacy, better religious literacy, and to create better citizens. Ultimately, it is about having productive discussions about what often appear to be unbridgeable divides and unanswerable dilemmas and to bring people together in the process.

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How children can learn to balance science and religion - The Conversation UK

The initiative aims to educate consumers about GMOs, including their production processes, their health information and other safety-related questions.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), have launched a new initiative to help consumers better understand foods created through genetic engineering, commonly called GMOs or genetically modified organisms.

The initiative, Feed Your Mind, aims to answer the most common questions that consumers have about GMOs, including what GMOs are, how and why they are made, how they are regulated and to address health and safety questions that consumers may have about these products.

While foods from genetically engineered plants have been available to consumers since the early 1990s and are a common part of todays food supply, there are a lot of misconceptions about them, said FDA Commissioner, Stephen M. Hahn, M.D. This initiative is intended to help people better understand what these products are and how they are made. Genetic engineering has created new plants that are resistant to insects and diseases, led to products with improved nutritional profiles, as well as certain produce that dont brown or bruise as easily.

Farmers and ranchers are committed to producing foods in ways that meet or exceed consumer expectations for freshness, nutritional content, safety, sustainability and more. I look forward to partnering with FDA and EPA to ensure that consumers understand the value of tools like genetic engineering in meeting those expectations, said Greg Ibach, Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs at USDA.

As EPA celebrates its 50th anniversary, we are proud to partner with FDA and USDA to push agricultural innovation forward so that Americans can continue to enjoy a protected environment and a safe, abundant and affordable food supply, said EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Assistant Administrator, Alexandra Dapolito Dunn.

The Feed Your Mind GMO initiative is launching in phases. The current materials released include a new website, as well as a selection of fact sheets, infographics and videos. Additional materials including a supplementary science curriculum for schools, resources for health professionals and additional consumer materials will be released later in 2020 and 2021.

To guide development of the Feed Your Mind initiative, the three government agencies formed a steering committee and several working groups consisting of agency leaders and subject matter experts; sought input from stakeholders through two public meetings; opened a docket to receive public comments; examined the latest science and research related to consumer understanding of genetically engineered foods; and conducted extensive formative research. Funding for Feed Your Mind was provided by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 as the Agricultural Biotechnology Education and Outreach Initiative.

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FDA, EPA and USDA launch GMO education initiative - New Food

While Beyond Meat debuted in the frozen aisle with beef crumbles and chicken strips (the latter have been dropped), the brand took off after launching refrigerated burgers and sausages designed to sit in the [animal] meat case, with sales in its fresh platform growing 275% in 2019 vs 11.8% growth in frozen.

If the refrigerated plant-based meat category is growing significantly faster, however, the frozen aisle is still the largest section in grocery for plant-based meat and still represents a sizeable opportunity, chief growth officer Chuck Muth told FoodNavigator-USA. Plus, our breakfast sausage patty cooks better from frozen.

The patties (MSRP $4.99 for six) contain 11g protein per serving, with 50% less total fat, 35% less saturated fat and sodium, 33% fewer calories, and 35% less sodium than the leading brand of pork sausage patties, with a base of pea protein and brown rice protein.

Asked about pricing in the plant-based meat segment following rival Impossible Foods move to cut prices to foodservice distributors by 15%, Muth said:

Impossible is quite a bit smaller than us; they are just starting to scale and as they are scaling, they are finding efficiencies and, I assume, bringing their price down accordingly. However their frontline pricing is still significantly higher than ours, so they still have a bit to go, and our pricing is more attractive.

He added:One of our goals is to reduce our pricing, so as we are able to develop more production efficiencies and [increase] capacity, and as we engineer products, we are very much focused on bringing our prices down.

Weve made it our stated goal that at least one of our items will be as cheap or cheaper than animal meat within the next four years or so, and thats the long term goal, to be priced competitively, not just with other plant based meats but with animal meats as well.

So is Beyond Meat sustaining or growing sales velocities in high-profile restaurant chains after the initial excitement or marketing budget wears off?

I think the encouraging thing for us is seeing product expansions in existing chains where we have partnerships, because theyre seeing good results coming in, said Muth, citing the example of Carls Jr and Hardees now offering Beyond Sausage breakfast burritos and egg and cheese biscuits as well as burgers.

He also noted that Dunkin which is rolling out Beyond Sausage sandwiches nationwide after a successful trial had attracted new guests and increased check sizes in part because plant-based products are premium items, but also because customers have proved more likely to pair them with higher-priced beverages such as lattes and cold brew. Its bringing in bigger register rings.

While some big names in QSR have not yet introduced plant-based entrees or breakfast options, they are all monitoring the space closely, he said.

Its more a timing issue than anything, plus they also want something thats unique to them since they are not going to be first to market, so they are thinking about what will differentiate them from the competition. But long term if they see their competitors being successful in this space they are going to have to take a very serious look.

Asked if Beyond Meat were in a position to be able to say yes to every account thats interested, or whether supply constraints were holding the company back, Muth said the firm was expanding in-house extrusion capabilities in the near future and adding more co-packers to its network in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia for downstream patty/sausage formation and packaging.

His comments came as CEO Ethan Brown told analysts last month that Beyond Meat began the year with around $700m in gross revenue capacity, with plans to scale to over a billion by the end of the year.

On the ingredient sourcing front, while Beyond Meat has recently expanded its pea protein sourcing capabilities,it is also exploring multiple other plant-based protein sources for sensory reasons (adding new flavors), nutritional reasons (to balance out amino acid profiles), and supply chain reasons (to diversify), said Muth, who noted that the Beyond Sausage uses a small amount of faba bean protein, while Beyond Beef and Beyond Burgers utilize mung bean and rice protein as well as peas.

As for the innovation pipeline, right now, Beyond Meat is focused on beef, poultry, and pork alternatives including plant-based bacon, said Muth. But down the road wed potentially look at other things.

Quizzed about the brands decision to go on the offensivethis year to tackle the narrative that plant-based meats are highly processed and unhealthy, he said:

We believe in the category and the space and were very positive, you wont hear us bad mouth other plant-based products or brands, but there are a lot of false narratives out there about whats in our products, so we think we have an obligation to talk about whats in our foods, so to understand that things like methyl cellulose [which isused in most plant-based meat products] are in many foods, things like ice cream and baked goods.

We want to make sure that consumers are well informed and to remind people that most foods we eat are processed.

Asked whether it was disingenuous to make a virtue of Beyond Meats all-natural non-GMO credentials [which distinguish it from rival Impossible Foods] given its commitment to science-based messaging and consumer education, he said:

Its not about what we believe, its what our consumers, our shoppers, believe, so were not saying theres anything bad about it [genetic engineering in food production].

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Beyond Meat rolls out frozen breakfast sausage patties, addresses pricing in plant-based meat sector - FoodNavigator-USA.com

New research from the University of NebraskaLincoln has led to the discovery of a novel gene that improves drought adaptation in wheat a breakthrough that could contribute to increased world food security.

In new research published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, Harkamal Walia, associate professor and Heuermann Chair of Agronomy and Horticulture at Nebraska, and colleagues describe a novel form of a gene obtained from wild wheat that has the potential to improve drought tolerance in cultivated wheat. Introducing this gene into cultivated wheat improved the plant root structure so that it continued to grow in search of water under dry soil conditions.

Wheat is the most widely grown crop in the world and, together with rice, provides more than 50% of the caloric intake of humans globally. Like other crops, wheat is exposed to a wide range of environmental limitations, such as high temperature, disease pressure and drought.

The scavenging nature of wheat root systems during times of drought may have been lost when wild wheats were adopted for agriculture by early humans or as cultivated wheat was bred for improved responsiveness to irrigation and fertilizers during the mid-1900s. This improved responsiveness was key to feeding a booming world population during the 1960s.

As todays producers strive for more crop per drop to feed a world population that is again in the midst of a boom and is expected to grow from about 7.5 billion today to more than 9.6 billion by 2050, it is evident that future crops will need greater drought resilience. The discovery by Walia and his colleagues could represent an important new genetic resource, enabling breeders to recapture this natural survival trait in cultivated wheat. UNL has secured a patent on the discovery via NUtech Ventures, enabling future commercialization of this technology.

The potential impact of the discovery grew substantially when the team found that adding the wild root gene also resulted in plants with larger grains in the absence of drought. Walia and his team were not expecting this, as introducing tolerance to a stress can sometimes result in lost productivity when the stress is absent.

This particular trait may have the opposite effect, which is a benefit in both conditions, Walia said. We are now working to understand the reason behind this surprising finding.

The genetic engineering of wheat plants was performed at Nebraskas Center for Biotechnology.

Walia is one of many researchers worldwide helping to develop a catalog of genes that will contribute to creating more robust plants for the future. Drought response is a complicated trait, Walia said, which involves many genes contributing to survival and productivity when water is limited. He hopes that research in this area will continue to discover new genetic resources that plant breeders and geneticists can use to develop more drought-tolerant crops.

From a genetic improvement perspective, it takes a community to make a crop more adaptive, Walia said. This finding is one piece of a very large puzzle.

The research was spearheaded by doctoral students Dante Placido and Jaspreet Sandhu in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture. The work was supported by the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.

Continue reading here:
UNL team links wild wheat gene to drought tolerance in cultivated wheat - Grand Island Independent

Dublin, March 10, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Cell Therapy - Technologies, Markets and Companies" report from Jain PharmaBiotech has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The cell-based markets was analyzed for 2018, and projected to 2028. The markets are analyzed according to therapeutic categories, technologies and geographical areas. The largest expansion will be in diseases of the central nervous system, cancer and cardiovascular disorders. Skin and soft tissue repair as well as diabetes mellitus will be other major markets.

The number of companies involved in cell therapy has increased remarkably during the past few years. More than 500 companies have been identified to be involved in cell therapy and 309 of these are profiled in part II of the report along with tabulation of 302 alliances. Of these companies, 170 are involved in stem cells.

Profiles of 72 academic institutions in the US involved in cell therapy are also included in part II along with their commercial collaborations. The text is supplemented with 67 Tables and 25 Figures. The bibliography contains 1,200 selected references, which are cited in the text.

This report contains information on the following:

The report describes and evaluates cell therapy technologies and methods, which have already started to play an important role in the practice of medicine. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is replacing the old fashioned bone marrow transplants. Role of cells in drug discovery is also described. Cell therapy is bound to become a part of medical practice.

Stem cells are discussed in detail in one chapter. Some light is thrown on the current controversy of embryonic sources of stem cells and comparison with adult sources. Other sources of stem cells such as the placenta, cord blood and fat removed by liposuction are also discussed. Stem cells can also be genetically modified prior to transplantation.

Cell therapy technologies overlap with those of gene therapy, cancer vaccines, drug delivery, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Pharmaceutical applications of stem cells including those in drug discovery are also described. Various types of cells used, methods of preparation and culture, encapsulation and genetic engineering of cells are discussed. Sources of cells, both human and animal (xenotransplantation) are discussed. Methods of delivery of cell therapy range from injections to surgical implantation using special devices.

Cell therapy has applications in a large number of disorders. The most important are diseases of the nervous system and cancer which are the topics for separate chapters. Other applications include cardiac disorders (myocardial infarction and heart failure), diabetes mellitus, diseases of bones and joints, genetic disorders, and wounds of the skin and soft tissues.

Regulatory and ethical issues involving cell therapy are important and are discussed. Current political debate on the use of stem cells from embryonic sources (hESCs) is also presented. Safety is an essential consideration of any new therapy and regulations for cell therapy are those for biological preparations.

Key Topics Covered

Part I: Technologies, Ethics & RegulationsExecutive Summary 1. Introduction to Cell Therapy2. Cell Therapy Technologies3. Stem Cells4. Clinical Applications of Cell Therapy5. Cell Therapy for Cardiovascular Disorders6. Cell Therapy for Cancer7. Cell Therapy for Neurological Disorders8. Ethical, Legal and Political Aspects of Cell therapy9. Safety and Regulatory Aspects of Cell Therapy

Part II: Markets, Companies & Academic Institutions10. Markets and Future Prospects for Cell Therapy11. Companies Involved in Cell Therapy12. Academic Institutions13. References

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/bzimne

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Cell Therapy Insights Report, 2018-2028: Markets, Technologies, Ethics, Regulations, Companies & Academic Institutions - Benzinga

Study lead author Laura Rivera Tarazona, a biomedical engineering doctoral student, worked with Dr. Taylor Ware (left) and Dr. Zachary Campbell on her research that incorporated plant DNA into yeast to give it light-responsive traits.

Combining the powers of the living and the inanimate, an interdisciplinary team from The University of Texas at Dallas has embedded genetically modified yeast into a synthetic gel to create a novel, shape-changing material designed to grow under specific biochemical or physical conditions.

This is definitely a case where the product is more than the sum of its parts, said Dr. Taylor Ware, assistant professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and corresponding author of a paper published in January in Science Advances, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences open-access journal.

The idea to use the reproductive growth of cells to drive shape change within an inanimate container began with an old, reliable standby: bakers yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Yeast was the first eukaryotic organism to have its genome totally sequenced, Ware said. Wonderful tools exist already to modify it genetically. The cells have stiff cell walls, unlike mammalian cells, which make them better for pushing outward on the gel to change its shape.

By genetically modifying the yeast in different ways, the research team created composites that responded to various stimuli.

In proof-of-concept experiments, biomedical engineering doctoral student Laura Rivera Tarazona, lead author of the paper, incorporated plant DNA into yeast to give it light-responsive traits. When the resulting yeast-hydrogel composite was exposed to light, the entire object changed shape as the growing yeast pushed outward on the boundaries of the gel.

The research team also modified the yeast to respond to biochemical stimuli, including amino acids, which are building blocks of proteins.

This combination of animate with inanimate lends itself to interacting with the body in a particularly useful way using cellular mechanisms to drive shape change, Ware said. Given the flexibility of yeast, this composite could be designed to respond to any of countless conditions.

Dr. Zachary Campbell, assistant professor of biological sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and a co-author of the study, said the awesome power of yeast genetics made the project possible.

Weve had the ability to make yeast do amazing biological things for a long time, but its only in the past few years that we have had the ability to create strains where gene activity is precisely controlled by light, Campbell said.

Theres a beauty to taking something thats ordinarily so static and endowing it with this capability to transform into other things.

Dr. Zachary Campbell, assistant professor of biological sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

The researchers believe the shape-changing response has potential applications as a type of reporter both inside and outside the body.

Where I think this research eventually goes is indicating disease states via detection of proteins and other biomolecules, Ware said.

Ware said shape change could also be used to perform mechanical work to open a container or uncover an adhesive, for example.

Our results are in the very early stage, but the fact that were taking a series of molecular events and transducing them into something mechanical is already exciting in itself, Ware said.

Rivera Tarazona uses a microscope as one of the successful projects is displayed on the monitor in the background.

Campbell added that, although the physical transformations in the composite materials are very slow, capitalizing on genetic manipulations to drive minuscule devices could have additional applications, such as releasing drugs from a capsule in response to a precise biological trigger.

Theoretically, you could use these to detect anything you can detect in nature by combining an existing genetic circuit from another cell type with the yeast, he said. This allows access to a dazzling array of physiological cues.

Theres a beauty to taking something thats ordinarily so static and endowing it with this capability to transform into other things.

Other authors of the research included biomedical engineer Hyun Kim PhD19 and Vandita Bhat, a molecular biology doctoral student graduating this spring.

The work was supported by a grant (R01NS100788) from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, and is partially based on work supported by the National Science Foundation.

More:
Team Creates Shape-Changing Material That Pushes Biological Boundaries - University of Texas at Dallas

The year 2020 marks a milestone in the march of robots into popular culture: the 100th anniversary of the birth of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov coined the word 'robotics', invented the much-quoted Three Laws governing robot behavior, and passed on many myths and misconceptions that affect the way we feel about robots today.

A compulsive writer and homebodypossibly, an agoraphobicAsimov hated to travel: ironically, for a writer who specialized in fantastic tales often set on distant worlds, he hadn't been in an airplane since being flown home from Hawaii by the US Army after being released from service just before a test blast of the atomic bomb on the Bikini Atoll. (Asimov once grimly observed that this stroke of luck probably saved his life by preventing him from getting leukemia, one of the side effects that afflicted many servicemen who were close to the blast.)

By 1956, Asimov had completed most of the stories that cemented his reputation as the grand master of science fiction, and set the ground rules for a new field of study called "robotics," a word he made up. Researchers like Marvin Minsky of MIT and William Shockley of Bell Labs had been doing pioneering work into Artificial Intelligence and Robotics since the early 1950s, but they were not well-known outside of the scientific and business communities. Asimov, on the other hand, was famous, his books so commercially successful that he quit his job as a tenured chemistry professor at Boston College to write full-time. Asimov's 1950 short story collection, I, Robot, put forward a vision of the robot as humanity's friend and protector, at a time when many humans were wondering if their own species could be trusted not to self-destruct.

Born in January 1920, or possibly October 1919the exact date was uncertain because birth records weren't kept in the little Russian village where he came fromAsimov emigrated to Brooklyn in 1922 with his parents. Making a go of life in America turned out to be tougher than they expected, until his father scraped together enough money to buy a candy store. That decision would have a seismic impact on Isaac's future, and on robotics research and the narratives we tell ourselves about human-robot relationships to this day.

As a kid, Isaac worked long hours in the store where he became interested in two attractions that pulled in customers: a slot machine that frequently needed to be dismantled for repairs; and pulp fiction magazines featuring death rays and alien worlds. Soon after the first rocket launches in the mid-1920s, scientists announced that space travel was feasible, opening the door to exciting tales of adventure in outer space. Atomic energythe source of the death rayswas also coming into public consciousness as a potential "super weapon." But both atomic bombs and space travel were still very much in the realm of fiction; few people actually believed they'd see either breakthrough within their lifetimes.

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The genre of the stories in the pulps wasn't new. Fantastical tales inspired by science and technology went back to the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818, which speculated about the use of a revolutionary new energy source, electricity, to reanimate life. Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all wrote novels touching on everything from time travel, to atomic-powered vehicles, to what we now call genetic engineering. But the actual term, "science fiction," wasn't coined by any of them: that distinction goes to Hugo Gernsbeck, editor of the technical journal, Modern Electrics, whose name would eventually be given to the HUGO, the annual award for the best science fiction writing.13

Gernsbeck's interest in the genre started with a field that was still fairly new in his time: electrical engineering. Even in 1911, the nature of electricity was not fully understood, and random electrocutions were not uncommon; electricians weren't just tradesmen, but daredevils, taking their lives in their hands every time they wired a house or lit up a city street.14 Gernsbeck, perhaps gripped by the same restless derring-do as his readers, wasn't satisfied with writing articles about induction coils. In 1911, he penned a short story set in the twenty-third century and serialized it over several issues of Modern Electrics, a decision that must have baffled some of the electricians who made up his subscribers. At first, Gernsbeck called his mash-up of science and fiction "scientifiction," mercifully changing that mouthful to "science fiction." He went on to publish a string of popular magazines, including Science Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, Science, and Astounding. (Gernsbeck's rich imagination didn't stretch far enough to come up with more original titles.)

Asimov's father stocked Gernsbeck's magazines in the candy store because they sold like hotcakes, but he considered them out-and-out junk. Young Isaac was forbidden to waste time reading about things that didn't exist and never would, like space travel and atomic weapons.

Despite (or possibly because of) his father's objections, Isaac began secretly reading every pulp science fiction magazine that appeared in the store, handling each one so carefully that Asimov Senior never knew they had been opened. Isaac finally managed to convince his father that one of Gernsbeck's magazines, Science Wonder Stories, had educational valueafter all, the word "science" was in the title, wasn't it?15

Isaac sold his first short story when he was still an eighteen-year-old high school student, naively showing up at the offices of Amazing Stories to personally deliver it to the editor, John W. Campbell. Campbell rejected the story (eventually published by a rival Gernsbeck publication, Astounding) but encouraged Isaac to send him more. Over time, Campbell published a slew of stories that established Isaac, while still a university student, as a handsomely paid writer of science fiction.

When you read those early stories today, Asimov's weaknesses as a writer are painfully glaring. With almost no experience of the world outside of his school, the candy store, and his Brooklyn neighborhood and no exposure to contemporary writers of his time like Hemingway or FitzgeraldIsaac fell back on the flat, stereotypical characters and clichd plots of pulp fiction. Isaac did have one big thing going for him, though: a science education.

By the early 1940s, Asimov was a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University, as well as a member of the many science fiction fan clubs springing up all over Brooklyn whose members' obsession with the minutiae of fantastical worlds would be familiar to any ComicCon fan in a Klingon costume today. Asimov wrote stories that appealed to this newly emerging geeky readership, staying close enough to the boundaries of science to be plausible, while still instinctively understanding how to create wondrous fictional worlds.

The working relationship between Asimov and his editor, Campbell, turned into a highly profitable one for both publisher and author. But as Asimov improved his writing and tackled more complex themes, he ran into a roadblock: Campbell insisted that he would only publish human- centered stories. Aliens could appear as stock villains but humans always had to come out on top. Campbell didn't just believe that people were superior to aliens, but that some peoplewhite Anglo-Saxons were superior to everyone else. Still a relatively young writer and unwilling to walk away from his lucrative gig with Campbell, Asimov looked for ways to work around his editor's prejudices. The answer: write about robots. Asimov's mechanical beings were created by humans, in their own image; as sidekicks, helpers, proxies, and, eventually, replacements. Endowed with what Asimov dubbed "positronic brains," his imaginary robots were even more cleverly constructed than the slot machine in the candy store.

Never a hands-on guy himself, Asimov was nonetheless interested in how mechanisms worked. Whenever the store's one-armed bandit had to be serviced, Isaac would watch the repairman open the machine and expose its secrets. The slot machine helped him imagine the mechanical beings in his stories.

Although Asimov can be credited with kick-starting a generation's love affair with robots, he was far from their inventor. (Even I, Robot borrowed its title from a 1939 comic book of the same name written by a pair of brothers who called themselves Eando Binder, the name eventually bestowed on the beer-swilling, cigar-smoking robot star of the TV show, Futurama.) But in writing his very first robot story, Asimov was both jumping on a new obsession of the 1920s, and mining old, deep myths going back to ancient Jewish tales of the golem, which was a man made of mud and magically brought to life, as well as stories as diverse as Pygmalion, Pinocchio, and engineering wonders like the eighteenth century, chess-playing Mechanical Turk, and other automatons.

Robots have an ancient history and a surprisingly whimsical one. Automatons have been frog marching, spinet playing, and minuet dancing their way out of the human imagination for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but it wasn't until the machine age of the early twentieth century that robots appeared as thinking, reasoning substitute humans. The word robotCzech for "mechanical worker"wasn't coined in a patent office or on a technical blueprint, but as the title of a fantastical play by Karel Capek, Rossum's Universal Robots, which was first performed in 1920, the reputed year of Isaac Asimov's birth. In adopting robots as his main characters, and the challenges and ethics of human life in a robotic world as one of his central themes, Asimov found his voice as a writer. His robots are more sympathetic and three-dimensional than his human characters. In exploring the dynamics of human-robot partnershipsas Asimov would do particularly well in detective/robot "buddy" stories, such as his 1954 novel Caves of Steel he invented a subgenre within the broader world of science fiction.

Asimov's humanoid robots were governed by the Three Laws of Robotics. More whimsical than scientific, they established ground rules for an imaginary world where humans and mechanical beings coexisted. Eventually, the Three Laws were quoted by researchers in two academic fields that were still unnamed in the 1940s: artificial intelligence and robotics.

First published by Astounding magazine in 1942 as part of Asimov's fourth robot story "Runaround", the Three Laws stated that:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

According to Asimov's biographer Michael Wilson in Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction (New York, Carrol & Graff, 2005), "Asimov was flattered that he had established a set of pseudoscientific laws. Despite the fact that in the early 1940s the science of robotics was a purely fictional thing, he somehow knew that one day they would provide the foundation for a real set of laws."

The Three Laws would continue to appear not only in the world of robot-driven books and filmslike Aliens (1986), where the laws are synopsized by the synthetic human Bishop when trying to reassure the robot-phobic heroine Ellen Ripleybut by some real-world roboticists and AI researchers, who are now considering how to develop a moral code for machines that may one day have to make independent, life-or-death decisions.

Read more from the original source:
Isaac Asimov, the candy store kid who dreamed up robots - Salon

The "Gene Therapy Market by Vector Type, Gene Type and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2019-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global gene therapy market was valued at $393.35 million in 2018, and is estimated to reach $6,205.85 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of 34.8% from 2019 to 2026.

Gene therapy is a technique that involves the delivery of nucleic acid polymers into a patient's cells as a drug to treat diseases. It fixes a genetic problem at its source. The process involves modifying the protein either to change the genetic expression or to correct a mutation. The emergence of this technology meets the rise in needs for better diagnostics and targeted therapy tools. For instance, genetic engineering can be used to modify physical appearance, metabolism, physical capabilities, and mental abilities such as memory and intelligence. In addition, it is also used for infertility treatment. Gene therapy offers a ray of hope for patients, who either have no treatment options or show no benefits with drugs currently available. The ongoing success has strongly supported upcoming researches and has carved ways for enhancement of gene therapy.

Recently, a new technique has been developed, where new genes are introduced into the body to help fight against cancer cells. Gene therapies are regarded as a potential revolution in the health sciences and pharmaceutical fields. The number of clinical trials investigating gene therapies is on an increase, despite the limited number of products that have successfully reached the market. In addition, benefits of gene therapy over conventional cancer therapies and increase in government support fuel the growth of the gene therapy market.

The gene therapy market is a widely expanding field in the pharmaceutical industry with new opportunities. This has piqued the interests of venture capitalists to explore this market and its commercial potential. Major factors that drive the growth of this market include high demands for DNA vaccines to treat genetic diseases, targeted drug delivery, and high incidence of genetic disorders. However, the stringent regulatory approval process for gene therapy and the high costs of gene therapy drugs are expected to hinder the growth of the market. On the contrary, increase in the pipeline developments for gene therapy market are expected to provide lucrative opportunity during the forecast period.

Key MARKET BENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS

Key Findings of the Gene Therapy Market:

Key Topics Covered:

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1. Report Description

1.2. Key Benefits

1.3. Key Market Segments

1.4. Research Methodology

Chapter 2: Executive Summary

2.1. CXO Perspective

Chapter 3: Market Overview

3.1. Market Definition And Scope

3.2. Key Findings

3.3. Top Player Positioning, 2018

3.4. Porter's Five Forces Analysis

3.5. Market Dynamics

Chapter 4: Gene Therapy Market, By Vector Type

4.1. Overview

4.2. Viral Vectors

4.3. Non-Viral Techniques

Chapter 5: Gene Therapy Market, By Gene Type

5.1. Overview

5.2. Antigen

5.3. Cytokine

5.4. Tumor Suppressor

5.5. Suicide Gene

5.6. Deficiency

5.7. Growth Factors

5.8. Receptors

5.9. Others

Chapter 6: Gene Therapy Market, By Application

6.1. Overview

6.2. Oncological Disorders

6.3. Rare Diseases

6.4. Cardiovascular Diseases

6.5. Neurological Disorders

6.6. Infectious Diseases

6.7. Other Diseases

Chapter 7: Gene Therapy Market, By Region

7.1. Overview

7.2. North America

7.3. Europe

7.4. Asia-Pacific

7.5. LAMEA

Chapter 8: Company Profile

8.1. Adaptimmune Therapeutics Plc.

8.2. Anchiano Therapeutics Ltd.

8.3. Achieve Life Sciences, Inc.

8.4. Adverum Biotechnologies, Inc.

8.5. Abeona Therapeutics Inc.

8.6. Applied Genetic Technologies Corporation

8.7. Arbutus Biopharma Corporation

8.8. Audentes Therapeutics Inc.

8.9. Avexis Inc.

8.10. Bluebird Bio, Inc.

8.11. Celgene Corporation

8.12. Crispr Therapeutics Ag

8.13. Editas Medicine, Inc.

8.14. Gilead Sciences, Inc.

8.15. Glaxosmithkline Plc

8.16. Intellia Therapeutics Inc.

8.17. Merck & Co., Inc.

8.18. Novartis Ag

8.19. Regenxbio, Inc.

8.20. Spark Therapeutics, Inc.

8.21. Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc.

8.22. Uniqure N. V.

8.23. Voyager Therapeutics, Inc.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/yt2y68

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200225005742/en/

Contacts

ResearchAndMarkets.comLaura Wood, Senior Press Managerpress@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T. Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

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Global Gene Therapy Market Projected to Grow with a CAGR of 34.8% During the Forecast Period, 2019-2026 - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Yahoo Finance

HOUSTON A Houston-based genetic engineering company said it has a vaccine aimed at the deadly coronavirus outbreak, according to a report by the Houston Business Journal.

The genetic engineering firm, Greffex Inc. has one of its laboratories based in Aurora, Colorado.

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John Price, president and CEO of Greffex Inc., told KHOU, our sister station in Houston, that Greffex's scientists completed the coronavirus vaccine this week.

The trick in making a vaccine is can you scale the vaccine that youve made to be able to make a certain number of doses, can you test the vaccine quickly and efficiently and then can you get it into patients and thats where we have an edge as well on the other companies that are out there," said Price. "And that has to do with speed and essential uniformity of how we make vaccines, so that drops the cost down.

Price said the vaccine will now move into a testing phase with the Food and Drug Administration.

The Houston Business Journal reported, in September 2019 Greffex received an $18.9 million contract from the National Institute of Health's National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop new treatments for infectious threats.

If the vaccine gets government approval, Price said his company plans to give it away for free to nations hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak.

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Genetic engineering company says they have created a coronavirus vaccine - 9News.com KUSA

New pet food companies are springing up to meet what they say is growing demand for plant-based, sustainable alternatives to Fancy Feast and Kibbles N Bits.

By making products from fermented fungus and experimenting with lab-grown food from animal cells and microbes, alternative pet food makers are hoping to carve out a share of the $30 billion U.S. pet food market.

And multibillion-dollar pet food companies, like Mars Petcare and Nestl-owned Purina, are starting to take notice.

Our mission is almost the exact same as Impossible Foods, which is [to] reduce or eliminate factory farming, which has this giant environmental footprint, said Josh Errett, CFO of Because Animals, one of the companies developing new pet foods. I mean, calling it a footprint is too nice, its an environmental disaster.

The other mission is to make a profit. These companies are catering to pet owners who value their ecological footprint and have the income to pay for an alternative product that tends to be more expensive than a can of Pedigree.

Pulling away from factory farming

A UCLA study from 2017 by Professor Gregory Okin estimated that dog and cat food accounts for the release of millions of tons of the greenhouse gases methane and CO2 and constitutes about 25%30% of the environmental impacts from animal production in terms of the use of land, water, fossil fuel, phosphate and biocides.

Like plant-based market leaders Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, alternative pet food companies say their product will reduce the amount of land and energy used for conventional meat production.

Industrial animal farming, or concentrated animal feed operations, produce large amounts of byproducts and off-cuts like organs and bone meal which are not usually used in human food, but are re-purposed for pet food production.

The goal is to cut factory farming out of the supply chain completely without a market for the unused parts, the meat industry would collapse due to lost revenue, Errett said.

But many large pet food companies defend their use of animal byproducts.

One might argue that this is actually a super sustainable source, because were using materials that most of us wouldnt consume and would be wasted, said Richard Butterwick, global nutrition advisor at the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, a research center for Mars Petcare.

Because Animals along with another company, Wild Earth are using cellular technology to culture real meat from animal cells biopsied from living creatures. The cells are encouraged to proliferate and reproduce in a bioreactor, creating muscle protein without the need to slaughter animals. This process is also being used by more than 30 companies worldwide to develop clean or lab-grown meat for human consumption.

Next year, both Because Animals and Wild Earth hope to release their first cell-grown cat foods, made of cultured mouse meat.

Were getting back to what the cats system was built to digest, Errett said. You dont have to add taurine or anything back, you can make an ancestral diet.

A cat owner himself, Errett wanted to address the ultra-processed nature of a lot of the conventional cat food, or as he calls it biological waste. Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they need to eat meat to get the 11 essential amino acids they require or they could have serious health problems like blindness or even death.

By culturing animal meat in a lab, these companies can genetically control what nutrients present in the food. They can also eliminate potentially dangerous substances that have made their way into some conventional pet foods. Some popular pet foods companies have had to recall their products in recent years due to toxic levels of Vitamin D and even the euthanasia drug sodium pentobarbital.

Will pet owners buy lab-grown mouse meat for their cats?

Beyond Meat increased its revenues by 250% between 2018 and 2019; consumers are taking an interest in the health and environmental benefits promoted by plant-based foods. Pet owners are showing that they will pay more for luxury and premium pet foods.

Wild Earth is making dog food from cultured fungi proteins and, according to CEO Ryan Bethencourt, revenue is growing steadily even though production is still relatively small.

This plant-based type of cultured pet food, already on the market, is much more expensive than the conventional options. A 18-pound bag of Wild Earth dog food sells for $49 on its website; whereas the website Chewy sells a 18.5-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow for $11.99.

Bethencourt said the potential for cultured protein could be 10% of the total pet food market within the next 10 years. He is using the success of plant-based proteins for humans as evidence for the market potential of alternative pet foods.

Research backs his point; according to one study from 2019, it is clear that an association exists between the diet a pet owner has chosen to follow and the diet they choose to feed their pet.

Culturing microbes into pet food

Another alternative pet food company, Bond Pet Foods, is taking a slightly different approach to cultured pet food. Bond is experimenting with genetically engineering microbes, like yeast.

Theres a lot more that isnt known about growing mice cells to create meat. Theres just a lot more technical challenges that they have to figure out how to ramp up and replicate that kind of meat production, said Rich Kelleman, CEO of Bond Pet Foods.

Bond is using the same approach to genetic engineering used to synthetically produce rennet for cheese production or insulin for diabetics.

What were doing is isolating a skeletal muscle protein so the building blocks of meat and inserting the DNA from that into a microbe, and then using the machinery of the microbe to produce identical animal proteins that you get on a farm and field, drying it down and then using that in a broader recipe to provide high quality nutrition, Kelleman said.

The major pet food companies are also looking for environmentally friendly, alternative proteins that could be inexpensive to scale up as a replacement for conventionally raised meat.

One area were currently exploring is looking at insects as a potential protein source, said Richard Butterwick at the Waltham Institute. They are potentially much more sustainable than traditional mammalian sources of protein and potentially very nutritious, as well.

Venture capital funds are eyeing the potential of cultured alternatives

Last year, Bond completed a $1.2 million seed round of funding and won a $10,000 innovation award from Purina.

Because Animals won this years innovation award and Wild Earth received a $200,000 investment from Mars Petcare during its 2018 investment round. So far, Wild Earth has raised over $16 million from various venture capital funds to pay for its continued growth.

These are relatively small amounts on the scale of the industry, but there is a sense of momentum.

All the big pet food manufacturers are looking at their supply chain and they see challenges with the growth of the pet food market and the population overall, more people means more pets, Kelleman said. Theyre looking for ways that they could mitigate the risk.

Richard Butterwick said that the main concern is that a pets nutritional needs are understood by their owners. He said consumer trends and the humanization of pets should not compromise pet needs, just because there is a trend towards more sustainable eating for humans.

A 2015 study in the Journal of Animal Science looked at the changing attitudes of pet owners choice in food for their companions. The study said it was paramount that sustainability be weighed against animals nutritional demands.

That means conscientious pet owners need to be wary of compromising a pets health just because eating kogi fungus, cricket treats, or lab-grown meats is trending for humans.

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Pet food makers look to tap the alternative meat market - Marketplace

University of Birmingham Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir David Eastwood with representatives of partner organisations at the signing ceremony in Delhi.

Experts at the University of Birmingham will work with partners in India across education, healthcare, genetic engineering and sports science.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir David Eastwood signed a range of Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with the Universitys partners at a special signing ceremony in Delhi.

The agreements form a key part of the Universitys strategic vision to continue building meaningful education and research partnerships in India.

Professor Sir David Eastwood signed MoUs with:

The University of Birminghams collaborative research output with India partners has almost doubled over the last five years. We currently have over 40 joint research projects of outstanding quality, commented Professor Sir David Eastwood.

We are a global university with a civic heart and a long, illustrious relationship with India. Signing these exciting new agreements with partners in areas such as health, transport and environment gives us a great opportunity to further contribute to Indian society as we continue to forge meaningful research and education partnerships in India.

The University and ICGEB plan to work together on multidisciplinary research including immunity and infection, as well as projects tackling human diseases, compound screening for identifying autophagy modulators, and exchanges of students and staffs across relevant projects.

Working in partnership with CIPLA, University experts will develop healthcare Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programmes.

Researchers at PDPU and Birmingham will continue working on the joint India-H2O project, which is developing, designing and demonstrating high-recovery, low-cost water treatment systems for saline groundwater, as well as domestic and industrial wastewaters. The partners will also identify new research opportunities.

The agreement with Technofin will see the partners working together on a bid to provide rail research and consultancy to the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd., to support the establishment of a Heavy Haul Research Institute. They will also develop other infrastructure-related research.

Manipal engineering students will be able to join Birmingham courses in Civil Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics Engineering - after completing two years of study in India, graduating with degrees from both universities.

University experts will work with Inspire Institute of Sport to develop bespoke distance-learning and blended CPD programmes for the development of the Institutes staff, as well as developing scholarships for postgraduate study in sports science. The MoU is an outcome of the India-UK Sports Alliance set up by the UK Governments Department for International Trade to drive collaboration in sports between the two countries.

Crispin Simon, Her Majestys Trade Commissioner for South Asia, UKs Department of International Trade and British Deputy High Commissioner, Mumbai and West of India, said: I am delighted that the University of Birmingham is strengthening its presence in India across education, healthcare, genetic engineering and sports science. The UK government has played an instrumental role in establishing their partnership with Inspire Institute of Sport, and we will continue to support their work in India.

I am also glad that Professor Tim Cable from the University of Birmingham has made significant contributions to the Indian-UK Sports Alliance organised by the UK government, to bring together influential individuals in both countries to help drive collaboration. I look forward to his continued participation.

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University of Birmingham signs up for strategic research vision in India - University of Birmingham

Agriculture is responsible for the production of a quarter of the total human-generated greenhouse gases. Growing food also uses about 70 percent of the water available to us. Moreover, agriculture (especially meat production) is the single most significant driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. Food production is detrimental to the health of the planetbut it doesnt end there. Once the food reaches plates, poor-quality diets cause malnutrition, claiming more lives than tobacco, drug and alcohol combined.

Search for malnutrition online and you will see pictures of frail and sick children. But along with stunting, wasting, vitamin and mineral deficiency, malnutrition also includes overweight, obesity and other diet-related illnesses. Yes, 1 in 9 people around the world go to sleep hungry, but nearly 2 billion adults are also overweight or obese. As such, more than one-third of the world population suffers from at least one form of malnutrition.

With the climate and biodiversity crises, and the global public-health crisis in the form of malnutrition, we must find a healthy and environmentally sustainable diet to feed the growing population. In 2019, the EAT-Lancet Commission brought together leading experts in nutrition, health, sustainability and policy to recommend ways to transform the global food system to achieve a healthy and sustainable diet.

The EAT-Lancet report recommends that planetary health diets to feed 10 billion people by 2050 requires cutting down meat consumption by half and eating twice as much as fruits, vegetables, beans and nuts. Despite recognizing the need to make healthy food affordable for the poor, the EAT-Lancet Commission didnt review the cost and affordability of the ideal diet. Therefore, in a recent global study, scientists reviewed prices for nearly 750 food items to calculate the value of healthy and sustainable diets in 159 countries.

The research, published in Lancet Global Health, shows that many people in low and lower-middle-income countries are too poor to afford EAT-Lancets ideal diet. EAT-Lancet says that we would need to eat twice as much as many fruits and vegetables, and get more protein and fats from plant-source foods. However, the new study found that fruits, vegetables, beans and nuts are the most expensive items of the ideal diet accounting for half of its total price.

Shifting foodsystems

A key challenge of the 21st-century is to change our food system to produce a healthy diet that is both economically and environmentally sustainable. As EAT-Lancets ideal diet isnt affordable for much of the worlds low-income population, authorities must make several parallel interventions to tackle global food inequality.

Lower food prices and higher earnings would give poor people more purchasing power. We must also find cheaper, nutritious food alternatives that are affordable and accessible to people living in low-income areas. I believe that biotechnology has the power to lower the cost of locally and globally grown food, making the ideal diet economically viable to those that need it the most.

One problem is the lack of available, affordable options, which partly stems from decreasing agrobiodiversity. Just three crops (rice, wheat and corn) provide over half of the plant-derived calories worldwide. Shifting calories away from the starchy staple foods towards more nutritious fruits, vegetables and other protein-sourced food remains a significant challenge in meeting EAT-Lancet targets. Grand challenges require great technological solutions, and genetic engineering technology is among the most powerful tools at our disposal.

Power of biotechnology

Biotechnology can improve agrobiodiversity and provide more locally-grown food options for people in low-income areas. One way to do this would be to make inedible plants into a good source of nutrition and calories. Take cottonseed, for example, which has the potential to be a cheaper alternative to nuts. Cottonseeds are highly nutritious, containing oils and proteins in abundance, but many low-income cotton farmers cant eat cottonseeds because they produce toxins called gossypol.

Now, scientists have engineered cotton plants to remove the toxin, making cottonseeds safe for us to eat. And recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved genetically modified (GM) cottonseed for human consumption. Biotech cottonseed can act as an excellent alternative dietary source in low-income regions, where people struggle to meet the costs of the ideal diet recommended by EAT-Lancet.

Genetic engineering can also enable widespread cultivation of local plants. The groundcherry plant in its native form has a wild, sprawling growth habit which causes its fruits to drop to the ground while still small. Difficulties in cultivating the wildcherry mean its an orphan plant. However, scientists used genetic engineering to improve wildcherrys undesirable traits, including the plants weedy shape, flower production and fruit size. Now there are hopes for large-scale cultivation of genetically engineered groundcherry, which is native to Central and South America.

Millions of children and adults around the world suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, and biotechnology can also help fortify current crops to improve their vitamin and micronutrient contents. For example, scientists have recently developed biofortified cassava, which has higher zinc and iron contents than regular cassava. The biofortified cassava may one day prevent illnesses related to iron and zinc deficiencies.

Golden Rice is perhaps the prime example of a biofortified cropconventional rice that is genetically engineered to produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene. Golden Rice, acting as a source of vitamin A, can address vitamin A deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year. After a rigorous biosafety assessment in the Philippines, the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Plant Industry found Golden Rice to be safe as conventional rice. Golden Rice regulation application is under review in Bangladesh, as well. This biofortified crop can provide much-needed micronutrients, taking the everyday staple food further to meet peoples dietary requirements in the poorest regions of the world.

Economic benefits

Improved agrobiodiversity and availability of local food varieties, enabled by biotechnology, will bring down the cost of the ideal diet, reducing food inequality. But GM technology also has the power to lift people out of poverty and increase the spending power of the low-income communities in developing regions.

Higher farm productivity, especially in low-income areas, can lower food prices. A meta-analysis of studies published after 1995 found that adopting GM technology has widespread benefits, including economic gains for farmers that grow GM crops. The meta-analysis found that GM technology increases crop yields by 21 percent. Some GM crops are engineered to be more resistant to pest damage, which helps achieve higher yields, for example.

The meta-study also found that GM crops require 37 percent less pesticide, which reduces pesticide costs by 39 percent and helps spare the environment. Even though GM seeds are more expensive than non-GM seeds, savings in pest control and pesticide use mean that farmers adopting GM crops enjoy 68 percent more profit. Therefore, GM crops can increase farmers spending power, which is excellent news for the quarter of the worlds working population employed in agriculture . More importantly, the yield and profit from GM crops are higher in developing countries than in developed countries.

If adopted widely, genetic engineering technology will bring us closer to meeting the EAT-Lancet dietary targets, which will help us protect the environment, public health, and reduce inequality.

Rupesh Paudyal holds a PhD in plant science and covers agriculture and the environment as a freelance writer. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @TalkPlant

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Viewpoint: We can sustainably feed 10 billion people. Here's how CRISPR and GMO crops can help - Genetic Literacy Project

The bioindustry will require more cell and gene therapy plants, says an expert, who says the facilities of the future must be automated, scalable, and flexible.

The number of cell and gene therapies entering clinical development has increased significantly in recent years. According to the Alliance for Regenerative Medicines (ARM) there are 1,066 such therapies in trials at present1, which is a 32% increase on the number of studies in 2014. But the surge in clinical activity has not been matched by an increase in production capacity says Darren Dasburg, a cell and gene therapy-focused consultant.

Hundreds of facilities will be needed to manufacture the treatments that are in play now, he said, adding that if you factor in the plants needed to make viral vectors that could exceed a thousand facilities.

The good news, Dasburg says, is that these facilities are more like labs than traditional large biopharmaceutical plants.

Viral vector capacity is critical to the cell and gene therapy sector. Vectors are hollow viruses used to insert genetic material into cells, both cells used in protein expression and cells used therapeutically. Various organisations have voiced concerns about industry capacity to make vectors. In 2018, for example, the Alliance for Advanced Biomedical Engineering said the scarcity of viral vectors could hamper expansion2. Since then the situation has improved, but it has not been resolved3. While viral vector production capacity in the contract services sector has increased, the expansion is still falling short of demand.

Partly this is because of the complexity of making the vectors, according to Dasburg.

Most viral vectors are produced using adherent manufacturing technologies which are expensive to operate, he explains. A vial of just 20 million cells can cost $2030K because it is so challenging to make.

To bring down costs, vector capacity still needs to increase, continues Dasburg, who predicted that biopharma will continue to rely on CDMOs for the foreseeable future.

Cell and gene therapy manufacturing is still a young industry. Biopharma is still figuring out what the ideal production facility should look like.

Building for flexibility and multipurpose manufacturing is important, Dasburg says, noting that explaining CDMOs and IP holders need to understand they are attacking rare genetic diseases and ailments where the therapy might be a third-line treatment. The numbers are often quite lower, and the treatments can be one and done. All meaning the companies of the future will be attacking many more areas of need.

In terms of technology, all cell and gene therapy facilities should feature sufficient isolator capacity, Dasburg says. Isolators are probably the number one investment to make. Too many people are trying to work five people in full dress in a small room attempting to manufacture in a hands-on traditional way when isolation and automation could help immensely.

Dasburg pointed to benchtop platforms capable of processing a single CAR-T patients treatment as an example of an innovative approach being used. These can be arranged in an array within a single ballroom-like facility providing 100% containment going from leukapheresis bag to treatment bag without any human intervention.

References1. alliancerm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CBX-Meeting-7-Feb-2020-FINAL.pdf2. aabme.asme.org/posts/virus-shortage-for-cell-therapies-creates-engineering-opportunity3. http://www.genengnews.com/insights/gene-therapy-dollar-is-waiting-on-viral-vector-dime/

Link:
More Cell and Gene Therapy Facilities in the Hundreds are Needed - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News