StemCell Therapy

BRISBANE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGMO), a genomic medicine company, is hosting an R&D Day today beginning at 8am Eastern Time. During the event, Sangamo executives and scientists plan to provide updates across the Companys clinical and preclinical pipeline, as well as an overview of manufacturing capabilities to support clinical and commercial supply. A live webcast link will be available on the Events and Presentations page of the Sangamo website

The talent, R&D capabilities, manufacturing expertise, and operations infrastructure we have brought to Sangamo have enabled us to advance a genomic medicine pipeline that spans multiple therapeutic areas and now also extends into late-stage development, said Sandy Macrae, CEO of Sangamo. As we make progress in clinical development, we gain insights into the use of our technology and are applying those insights as we advance new programs, such as the gene therapy for PKU and the genome regulation candidates for CNS diseases we are announcing today.

Macrae continued: We will continue to pursue a dual approach of retaining certain programs for our proprietary pipeline while also establishing pharmaceutical partnerships to gain access to therapeutic area expertise and financial, operational, and commercial resources. Strategic collaborations will be a particularly important consideration as we advance programs for diseases affecting large patient populations.

R&D Day updates on clinical and preclinical pipeline programs:

Gene therapy product candidates for hemophilia A, Fabry disease, and PKU

SB-525 is a gene therapy product candidate for hemophilia A being developed by Sangamo and Pfizer under a global development and commercialization collaboration agreement. The transfer of the SB-525 IND to Pfizer is substantially completed. Pfizer is advancing SB-525 into a Phase 3 registrational study in 2020 and has recently begun enrolling patients into a Phase 3 lead-in study.

At R&D Day, Sangamo executives are presenting data from the SB-525 program which were recently announced at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting.

The cassette engineering, AAV engineering and manufacturing expertise which Sangamo used in the development of SB-525 are also being applied to the ST-920 Fabry disease program, which is being evaluated in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial, as well as to the newly announced ST-101 gene therapy program for PKU, which is being evaluated in preclinical studies with a planned IND submission in 2021.

Engineered ex vivo cell therapy candidates for beta thalassemia, kidney transplantation, and preclinical research in multiple sclerosis (MS)

Sangamo is providing an overview of the Companys diversified cell therapy pipeline this morning. Cell therapy incorporates Sangamos experience and core strengths, including cell culture and engineering, gene editing, and AAV manufacturing. At R&D Day, Sangamo scientists today are reviewing the early data presented this month at ASH from the ST-400 beta thalassemia ex vivo gene-edited cell therapy program, which is being developed in partnership with Sanofi.

Sangamo is also providing updates on the companys CAR-TREG clinical and preclinical programs. CAR-TREGS are regulatory T cells equipped with a chimeric antigen receptor. Sangamo is the pioneer in CAR-TREGS, which may have the potential to treat inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. TX200 is being evaluated in the STEADFAST study, the first ever clinical trial evaluating a CAR-TREG cell therapy. Tx200 is being developed for the prevention of immune-mediated organ rejection in patients who have received a kidney transplant, a significant unmet medical need. Results from this trial will provide data on safety and proof of mechanism, building a critical understanding of CAR-TREGS in patients, and may provide a gateway to autoimmune indications such as Crohns disease and multiple sclerosis (MS). Sangamo is also presenting preclinical murine data demonstrating that CAR-TREGS accumulate and proliferate in the CNS and reduce a marker of MS.

In vivo genome editing optimization

Clinical data presented earlier this year provided evidence that Sangamo had successfully edited the genome of patients with mucopolysaccharidosis type II (MPS II) but also suggested that the zinc finger nuclease in vivo gene editing reagents were under-dosed using first-generation technology. Sangamo has identified potential improvements that may enhance the potency of in vivo genome editing, including increasing total AAV vector dose, co-packaging both ZFNs in one AAV vector, and engineering second-generation AAVs, ZFNs, and donor transgenes.

Genome regulation pipeline candidates targeting neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimers and Parkinsons

Sangamo scientists today are presenting data demonstrating that the companys engineered zinc finger protein transcription factors (ZFP-TFs) specifically and powerfully repress key genes involved in brain diseases including Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons, ALS, and Prion diseases. Sangamo is advancing its first two genome regulation programs toward clinical development:

Sangamo scientists are also presenting data demonstrating progress in the development of new AAV serotypes for use in CNS diseases.

Manufacturing capabilities and strategy

Sangamo is nearing completion of its buildout of a GMP manufacturing facility at the new Company headquarters in Brisbane, CA. This facility is expected to become operational in 2020 and to provide clinical and commercial scale manufacturing capacity for cell and gene therapy programs. The Company has also initiated the buildout of a cell therapy manufacturing facility in Valbonne, France. Sangamos manufacturing strategy includes in-house capabilities as well as the use of contract manufacturing organizations, including a long-established relationship with Thermo Fisher Scientific for clinical and large-scale commercial AAV manufacturing capacity.

R&D Day webcast

A live webcast of the R&D Day, including audio and slides, will be available on the Events and Presentations page of the Sangamo website today at 8am Eastern Time. A replay of the event will be archived on the website.

About Sangamo Therapeutics

Sangamo Therapeutics is committed to translating ground-breaking science into genomic medicines with the potential to transform patients lives using gene therapy, ex vivo gene-edited cell therapy, and in vivo genome editing and gene regulation. For more information about Sangamo, visit http://www.sangamo.com.

Sangamo Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of United States securities law. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the therapeutic potential of Sangamos product candidates; the design of clinical trials and expected timing for milestones, such as enrollment and presentation of data, the expected timing of release of additional data, plans to initiate additional studies for product candidates and timing and design of these studies; the expected benefits of Sangamos collaborations; the anticipated capabilities of Sangamos technologies; the research and development of novel gene-based therapies and the application of Sangamos ZFP technology platform to specific human diseases; successful manufacturing of Sangamos product candidates; the potential of Sangamos genome editing technology to safely treat genetic diseases; the potential for ZFNs to be effectively designed to treat diseases through genome editing; the potential for cell therapies to effectively treat diseases; and other statements that are not historical fact. These statements are based upon Sangamos current expectations and speak only as of the date hereof. Sangamos actual results may differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties related to dependence on the success of clinical trials; the uncertain regulatory approval process; the costly research and development process, including the uncertain timing of clinical trials; whether interim, preliminary or initial data from ongoing clinical trials will be representative of the final results from such clinical trials; whether the final results from ongoing clinical trials will validate and support the safety and efficacy of product candidates; the risk that clinical trial data are subject to differing interpretations by regulatory authorities; Sangamos limited experience in conducting later stage clinical trials and the potential inability of Sangamo and its partners to advance product candidates into registrational studies; Sangamos reliance on itself, partners and other third-parties to meet clinical and manufacturing obligations; Sangamos ability to maintain strategic partnerships; competing drugs and product candidates that may be superior to Sangamos product candidates; and the potential for technological developments by Sangamo's competitors that will obviate Sangamo's gene therapy technology. Actual results may differ from those projected in forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties that exist in Sangamos operations. This presentation concerns investigational drugs that are under preclinical and/or clinical investigation and which have not yet been approved for marketing by any regulatory agency. They are currently limited to investigational use, and no representations are made as to their safety or effectiveness for the purposes for which they are being investigated. Any discussions of safety or efficacy are only in reference to the specific results presented here and may not be indicative of an ultimate finding of safety or efficacy by regulatory agencies. These risks and uncertainties are described more fully in Sangamo's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018 as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 1, 2019 and Sangamo's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2019 that it filed on or about November 6, 2019. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation, and we disclaim any intent, to update these statements to reflect actual results.

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Sangamo Highlights Advancements in Genomic Medicine Pipeline and Expanded R&D and Manufacturing Capabilities at R&D Day - Business Wire

Surge Cities, our second annual ranking of choice metro statistical areas for planting and growing companies, is ostensibly about places. But it's really about people.

For entrepreneurs, what matters is whom you know--also how many you know, how well you know them, how willing they are to help you, and how far you have to go to meet for coffee.

Startup founders with high local connectedness--defined as quality relationships with about 25 other founders, eight investors, and 10 experts--double the revenue growth of those with low connectedness, says Startup Genome, the research and policy organization that is Inc.'s Surge Cities partner. The best way to develop those relationships is through "centers of gravity--places people can meet and build meaningful connections and continue to create value from them," says Arnobio Morelix, Startup Genome's chief innovation officer.

Now, cities vying for entrepreneurial parity with San Francisco, New York, and Boston are engineering their own centers of gravity. Commonly labeled innovation districts, these urban campuses pack in startups and mature companies alongside accelerators and co-working facilities; universities and medical centers; coffee shops, food trucks, outdoor spaces--you get the picture. The operating principle is density. Ideally, smart, creative people bounce off one another in serendipitous "creative collisions" that produce new ideas, relationships, and ventures.

There are roughly 20 substantive innovation districts in the U.S. and more than 100 on the rise worldwide, according to the Brookings Institution. To get an idea how they're serving entrepreneurs, Inc. interviewed three dozen founders in 10 districts around the country. Although a few cited tax credits as the chief advantage (many innovation districts are in opportunity zones), the vast majority said their locations have helped them attract talent, forge partnerships, find early customers, and learn from peers. More developed districts like the St. Louis Cortex Innovation Community, the Chattanooga Innovation District in Tennessee, and Wake Forest's Innovation Quarter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, earned more love than smaller districts, but no founders regretted their locations.

"The momentum and collaboration over the past 10 years have been amazing to see," says Heidi Jannenga, co-founder and chief clinical officer of WebPT, which develops office-management software for rehab therapists. WebPT was among the first startups in the PHX Core in Phoenix, which today is home to more than 130 companies and six million square feet of research and academic facilities. Like any relatively new district, PHX Core needs to get denser, says Jannenga, and a few more restaurants and other amenities wouldn't hurt. "But what sets us apart" from places like Silicon Valley, she says, "is the generosity. Everyone here is pulling for one another."

The denser the district, the more likely that even the most prosaic activities--attending a networking event, or just crossing the street to get to one--will yield a new customer or business partner. "In this building, there are drug-discovery startups, a company looking at genetic engineering in agriculture, and another looking at drug-delivery systems," says Edward Weinstein, co-founder and CEO of Canopy Biosciences, located in the St. Louis Cortex. Canopy now sells its research tools to a number of district startups "because we talk to them every day," he says. "My last company was 10 miles away, and for eight years, we never met folks in the startup scene."

Stephen Culp is the co-founder of four businesses and a nonprofit in an art deco building in Chattanooga's Innovation District. One day, he was refueling at nearby coffee roaster Mad Priest when he accidentally smacked into Drew Belz, founder and CEO of Fancy Rhino, a nearby branding and video-editing business. Over Belz's broken mug, conversation ensued. Now Fancy Rhino is working with Delegator, Culp's digital ad agency, on a proposal for a D.C.-based think tank. "The more people run into each other, the more they realize what they have in common," Culp says. "The same is true for companies."

Virtually all entrepreneurs said they'd experienced the kind of informal, peer-to-peer exchanges that provide founders advice and emotional sustenance. That's the collegiality Gabe Cooper missed while launching his first software company in a Phoenix suburb. "We weren't near anyone else doing tech," he says. "So we spent a lot of time flying to Silicon Valley to see other tech entrepreneurs."

Cooper moved to the area that would become the PHX Core in 2012, and two years later launched a second company: donor-management system Virtuous CRM. "Here you can be part of all these conversations--people in the coffee shop are talking about customer acquisition," says Cooper. "One of HubSpot's first employees hangs around here. I can just grab him and say, 'Hey, Dan, how should we comp our sales development reps?' " (That Dan would be HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre.)

This ethos of mutual support is embodied by Venture Caf, a nonprofit that hosts five-hour events every Thursday evening in 10 innovation districts around the world, with more on the way. The events, which attract up to 500 people, are designed to tempt founders from their caves with eclectic programming, product demos, and, most important, conversation with people who may change the course of their companies.

Beyond serendipitous interactions, the other universally cited benefit of innovation districts is access to talent. Every firm we interviewed said the amenities and ambiance in these collaborative cores can make recruiting a breeze.

"There are new buildings. A beautiful park. Food trucks. People riding by on bikes and electric scooters," says Brian Platz, co-founder of Fluree, which makes a blockchain-based data-management platform. The startup, Platz's seventh, is based in the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, a district of more than 170 companies, built around the old R.J. Reynolds Tobacco manufacturing site. "There is so much more creative energy here," he says. "It allows people to imagine themselves hanging out and living here."

As co-founder of a St. Louis design and management consultancy in 2013, Sean Walsh learned that large companies like Monsanto needed outsourced teams of creative, energetic people for software and A.I. projects. Trouble was, he was located in a nondescript, suburban office park, where creative, energetic people didn't want to be caught dead. "I said to my co-founders, 'We're going to start a new company from scratch in the Cortex, because that's where innovative people want to be,' " Walsh says. In 2016, he launched this new company, 1904Labs, in the innovation district, and now it has 85 employees.

Many innovation districts are developed in conjunction with universities or academic medical centers, which act like a virtuous ozone layer, trapping talent and intellectual property so they can't escape the neighborhood. That means abundant interns, but also chances to expand the workforce through collaboration and recruitment. In the Wake Forest district, Jennifer Byrne helped develop a master's program in clinical research at Wake Forest University that she expects to someday supply employees for Javara Research, her platform for improving patient enrollment in clinical trials.

The new Providence Innovation & Design District, in Rhode Island, boasts an unusual variety of academic institutions, including Brown, Johnson & Wales, and the Rhode Island School of Design. "I can hit all of them from here with a baseball," says Adam Alpert, co-founder and CEO of Pangea.app, a platform for matching companies with college students. "I have a little foldable table, and if I have two hours free, I will walk over there and talk with students and hand out stickers." Alpert recently landed a new head of design this way.

One premise of innovation districts is that startup clusters--particularly specialized ones, like autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh and agtech in St. Louis--may lure investors to open offices there, or at least to visit. The University City Science Center, a 55-year-old urban research park at the heart of what is now uCity Square in Philadelphia, nurtures many of the district's most promising life-science and technology companies. That includes hosting office hours for regional investors to meet with startups. Nyron Burke, founder and CEO of Lithero, which uses A.I. to ensure the legal compliance of life-science-product marketing, raised $100,000 just by walking into a session with Philadelphia-based investor Ben Franklin Technology Partners. "The Science Center is doing the Lord's work," says Burke. But it's not enough, he adds. "Entrepreneurs leave Philadelphia, because it is hard to raise money here."

The money may come to more innovation districts if they produce large exits.In uCity Square, the big dog leading the pack is Spark Therapeutics, a gene-therapy company that Philly native Jeffrey Marrazzo co-founded in 2013 with support from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Today, Spark employs more than 440 people and occupies 200,000 square feet across five buildings in the district. Currently, Marrazzo is awaiting government approval of a $4.8 billion acquisition by Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Roche. It would be the city's biggest-ever VC-backed exit.

Such exits are "hugely important" for entrepreneurial ecosystems like innovation districts, says Startup Genome's Morelix. He calls them "triggers," because they attract resources and also deepen the pockets of early hires, who often go on to invest locally.

In the past, Marrazzo says, startups based on intellectual property from Philadelphia's academic institutions "inevitably moved outside to the suburbs or, more often, licensed out their IP and re-formed in another city, like Boston or San Francisco." Marrazzo kept Spark in the innovation district to buck that trend. Lately, he says, more VCs have reached out to him about the area.

"San Francisco funds and Boston funds are coming here on a regular, scheduled basis," Marrazzo says. "With further success, maybe they'll want to open offices here, too."

From the Winter 2019/2020 issue of Inc. Magazine

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Want to Make Your City a Startup Hub? You'll Need to Befriend 25 Founders, 8 Investors, and 10 Experts First - Inc.

XconomySan Diego

Nearly nine years ago Jeanne Loring and her colleagues at Scripps Research debuted a test that leveraged advances in genomics and data science to determine, without testing in animals, whether human stem cells were pluripotent, or able to become any type of cell in the body.

Being able to prove that has become increasingly important as scientists look to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)mature, specialized cells that have been reprogrammed as immature cells, regaining the capability of becoming any type of cellas material for new regenerative medicines.

Now Loring and Andres Bratt-Leal, who joined her lab in 2012 as a post-doctoral researcher, have founded a biotech that combines stem cell biology and genomics know-how to advance a potential cell therapy for Parkinsons disease.

The startup announced Thursday it raised a seed round of $6.5 million to support its work. Aspens lead drug candidate, which is in preclinical testing, is intended to replace neurons in the brains of people with the disease, which causes those cells to become damaged or die.

When people with Parkinsons disease lose neurons, they also lose a chemical messenger the cells produce, called dopamine. Without dopamine, communication between nerve cells falters, which leads to the debilitating motor problems that characterize the disease. Existing Parkinsons drugs aim to alter dopamine levels. Aspen, however, wants to fix the upstream problem that leads to those lowered levels by reconstructing patients damaged neural networks.

The cell therapy would involve harvesting patients own living cells through a skin biopsy, reprogramming them to immature cells, or iPSCs, then further engineering them to become predisposed to mature into neurons. Once enough of those cells have been grown in the lab, those neuron precursor cells would be delivered directly to the brain.

Using a patients own cells avoids the dangerous immune system reactions that can occur when donor cells are used in such therapies, and obviates the need for immunosuppression drugs. Two cell therapies that use genetic engineering have been approved by the FDA, both of which take and tweak patients T cells into treatments for cancer. Stem cell transplants have been used to treat some cancers.

Aspen worked to ensure the company could ably manufacture a so-called autologous replacement cell therapy, or one from a patients one cells, by improving the process of differentiating iPSCs into dopamine neurons, Loring says. And the group developed another predictive genomic-based test, similar to the effort Loring spearheaded nearly a decade ago to determine whether cells were pluripotent, that can detect which iPSCs are destined to become neurons.

(Bratt-Leal) put his biological engineering expertise into coming up with a way that was reproducible, that we would get the same cells no matter who we got the original cells from, she says.

The company plans to test the therapy in patients that they determine, through genomic testing, have the most common form of Parkinsons, which is referred to as sporadic and arises without a clear genetic predisposition. It also has a second treatment in the works that it intends to develop for patients with familial forms of the disease, and uses a gene editing toolyet to be selectedto alter their stem cells during the reprogramming process.

Howard Federoff, who was most recently vice chancellor for health affairs and CEO of the UC Irvine Health system, is Aspens CEO. Federoff says he has come to believe that Parkinsons patients need more than just to stabilize their disease They need to turn the clock back.

Many companies are working on drugs to treat Parkinsons, but most are meant to manage symptoms rather than reverse the disease. Levodopa, which supplants missing dopamine, is used widely, but it can cause side effects, including involuntary movement called dyskinesia; and, as the disease progresses, the drug eventually stops working between doses.

Aspen claims it is the only company working toward an autologous neuron replacement. The company, however, will need to raise a Series A round to move its drug candidates through Phase 2 proof-of-concept trials, Loring says.

The company raised its seed round from a group of investors including Domain Associates, Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, Axon Ventures, OrbiMed, and Section 32. Initially, it was financed through grants from Summit for Stem Cell, a San Diego-based nonprofit.

Sarah de Crescenzo is an Xconomy editor based in San Diego. You can reach her at sdecrescenzo@xconomy.com.

Continued here:
Aspen Neuro Bags $6.5M to Test Parkinson's Disease Stem Cell Therapy - Xconomy

And speaking of both Disney+ and Star Wars, that combination resulted in the most-watched show of any of the streaming services, The Mandalorian. Oh, and then there's Baby Yoda. Which brings us to the most recent reason Iger is having a good year: he was just named Time's Businessperson of the Year. Make no mistake, Baby Yoda is a perfect example of why that honorwas well-earned.

The Time article tells a brief story of how Iger knew immediately Baby Yoda would be an enormous hit with fans. For Disney, by the way, enormous hits are the standard operating procedure. In fact, the entire strategy looks something like this:

Create a story with adorable characters. Mass market both the story and the characters. Manufacture merchandise featuring adorable characters. Stuff more cash than you can imagine into the bank account.

In the case of Baby Yoda, Iger not only knew that the character would lead to huge sales, but also that the best play was radio silence until after the first episode of The Mandalorian streamed, so as not to spoil the reveal.

He wasright, of course.

Look, regardless of what you think of the mysterious green alien that has become the star of the Disney+ service and the mascot of the internet, there's really no arguing that from a business standpoint, Baby Yoda is brilliant. And it's a great lesson for entrepreneurs.

Here's why: Bob Iger isn't a storyteller--at least not in the classic sense of someonewho writesa scriptor directs a film. That isn't his role.But he has one thing that might be even more important--a sense of how stories connect with audiences. I'm not sure anyone would disagree that Iger knows his audience, and knows how to steward both the Disney brand as a whole, as well as the individual stories within it (Star Wars, Marvel, etc.)to make sure they resonate with that audience.

But Iger didn't create The Mandalorian or its most famous character. He didn't invent streaming video. He didn't dream upthe Star Wars universe. He isn't a comic book illustrator.

The puzzle that makes up Disney has an extraordinary number of pieces, none of which originated with its CEO. Instead, Iger's job is to see how all of those pieces fit together, and sell the resulting picture tothe rest of us.

And, just because you aren't running the world's largest media and entertainment company, doesn't mean that you don't have a story to tell.And, it doesn't mean you can't learn from what made Bob Iger so successful this year.

In most of the areas Disney competes, it is the apex predator. It's the biggest player in theme parks. It's the biggest licensor of toy characters. It's the biggest sports broadcaster. It's the biggest animation studio. It's the biggest family-friendlymovie producer.

It is not the biggeststreaming video service. It isn't the biggest player--Netflix has over 150 million subscribers--a number that dwarfs Disney+. But it made a huge bet that owning its own platform to stream its own library of content would pay off in a big way.

So far it has. And the lesson here is that when you align your story with your audience, you will win.

That's one of the most important qualities in any marketer, but also in every entrepreneur. Your primary job, at least at first,is to figure out how to tell the story of your brand, and then tell it to the right audience.

And you don't even need Baby Yoda for that--but it can'thurt.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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Disney's Bob Iger Was Just Named Time's Businessperson of the Year and Baby Yoda Is Exactly the Reason Why - Inc.

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Inspiring coaches go for quantity, not quality, of ideas to build a culture of innovation and ownership. They make ideas-;lots of them-;part of everyones job. They use clarifying questions to determine if and how to best implement the ideas.

Ask your team for the kinds of ideas you need. You may have a focus area for that week, month, or quarter. A good place to start is with the eight areas of waste.

Transport-;Moving people, products, and information

Inventory-;Storing parts, pieces, and documentation ahead of requirements

Motion-;Bending, turning, reaching, lifting

Waiting-;For parts, information, instructions, equipment

Overproduction-;Making more than is immediately required

Over-processing-;Tighter tolerances or higher- grade materials than are needed

Defects-;Rework, scrap, incorrect/incomplete information

Skills-;Underutilizing capabilities, delegating tasks with inadequate training

Involve your team in addressing these areas of waste and other opportunities for improvement to enlist their ownership in the solution.

One of mylong-standing clients, Jeff Jensen, manages a portfolio of successful companies. Jeff has shared a favorite quote from his late father, Ron Jensen, who was an innovative and inspiring leader. He liked to say, The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.

This metaphorical room for improvement can be your business, your teams processes, your teams skills, and most importantly, your own leadership.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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8 Ways to Reduce Waste - Inc.

The acceptance of the microbiome diet as a means of achieving gut health among consumers could pave a path for a shift in attitude towards GM food, according to Michael Miille CEO at Joyn Bio.

Proponents of GM food contend that genetic engineering can help us find sustainable ways to feed people. One proponent is the US start-up Joyn Bio, a joint ag-tech venture between synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks and pharma giant Bayer, which was formed in 2017 with a $100 million Series A round coming from its two parent companies.

Joyn Bio is attempting to engineer microbes that can provide plants with biological nitrogen fertilizer, thus decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture.

By engineering microbes it can eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizers, which have boosted crop yields over the past century but in the process have harmed soil health and caused environmental ills. Runoff from excess nitrogen fertilizer into rivers and oceans has created a dead zone of toxic algae in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey, for example.

Joyn Bio is headquarted in Boston. Its testing facility in California focuses on the genetic modification of the colonies of bacteria that make up crops microbiomes. It can then engineer those microbes to produce specific proteins as possible alternative to chemical fertilizers and other chemicals.

Any product is unlikely to be ready for market before 2020. Neither will any product be offered in Europe, where regulations do not currently permit engineered microbial products as produced by Joyn Bio (its current focus is on offering its solution to growers in the US, Brazil and India).

It believes nevertheless that it offers a potential global solution to the challenges facing the food industry. Its goal is to engineer microbes to reduce the amount of industrial nitrogen fertilizer needed to grow crops like corn, wheat, or rice, to dramatically decrease the water pollution, fossil fuel used and greenhouse gases produced by agriculture today.

"What we were really launched around was nitrogen fixation and recognising the environmental impact both in production and in application of the synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, which is not sustainable, then at the same time trying to come up with a solution,explained Miille.

Growers, he believes, are in desperate need of innovation and additional solutions given all the things they are confronting.Joyn Bio claims it can help farmers increase yield by promoting stronger plants and better nutrient uptake, ultimately contributing to the transformation of agriculture towards a more sustainable future.

How exactly does it all work? Our product would be a microbe that associates with the plant and is delivered as a seed treatment, said Miille.

Image the microbe as a trillion little FedEx trucks running all over the plant delivering cargo, he says. That cargo then takes nitrogen from the air, converts it into the nitrogen that the plant needs, and then gives it to the plant.

Its very similar to what happens in a soy bean plant naturally via evolution, but the soy and wheat plants never did that.

All this can allow a grower to reduce their fertilizer input by 30-40%, thus saving the grower money and allowing them to benefit from an environmental standpoint.

The process could potentially be used to make food more nutritious too. "You could use the microbes to signal the plant to potentially produce more of its nutritious part - there are number of nutrition enhancements that you can engineer. It's not our initial focus because it's a little more challenging but [improved nutrition] is certainly something people are looking at across the whole food spectrum today.

GM foods have something of a toxic legacy with European consumers, however, of which Miille is well aware. His solution to this challenge is simply to be straight with people. The problems of the past came about because companies such as Monsanto failed to be, he said. "Were trying to learn from that. I think its really critical to be transparent with consumers. Well want them to know we have these engineered microbes and here's what they did.

If crops produced via engineered microbes are used to grow something viable then people will accept it, he believes. Take the papaya industry in Hawaii, he noted, which was saved by GMO technology. "The same thing is going to happen with the US chestnut industry. There are going to be more examples of a pest or diseases that will threaten to wipe something out and the solution is biotechnology. And when you can save something when its that dramatic a benefit and you can communicate that to consumers, they get it.

He continued: For those of us on the science, technology and innovation side, the important thing is to understand how critical it is to engage with consumers and be transparent with them. The other side of the equation is to be able to articulate the benefit. If the benefit is that you either have strawberries or you don't, people will get that.

"Another thing in our favour is that peoples opinions and concerns about chemicals are probably at an all-time high.

The growth in popularity of the microbiome diet among consumers is another potential factor in Joyn Bios favour. If consumers now accept that the microbes in our gut play a critical role in overall health, whats not to stop them accepting the importance microbes could potentially have in agriculture?

More people than ever are taking probiotics because it improves gut health, said Miille. The next step is to say to consumers that microbes are part of the solution and all we've really done is taken this microbe and selectively optimised it for its particular purpose. These kind of discussions, he said, will get people to accept that microbes are going to be an integral part of agriculture over the next 20-30 years.

Originally posted here:
Microbes 'set to be an integral part of agriculture over the next 20-30 years': Joyn Bio - FoodNavigator.com

In Cuba there are 26,952 persons infected with the HIV/AIDS virus until the end of November, according to data released this Thursday by the islands National Center for Health Promotion and Education (CNPES).

Among those diagnosed, the most affected are transsexual women, with 19.7%; men who have sex with other men (MSM), 5.6%; and people who practice transactional sex (in exchange for objects, money or privileges), which are 2.8%.

The Cuban provinces that show the highest incidence of contagion are Havana, the central Cienfuegos and the eastern Las Tunas and Guantnamo, said CNPS Deputy Director Otto Pelez, cited by the state-run Agencia Cubana de Noticias (ACN) news agency.

The islands public health authorities highlight the control in maternal-infant transmission in children under 14, in heterosexual people, as well as the early detection of the disease, among the positive results of the Cuban program to prevent the spread of the virus, which is recognized by international organizations.

At the close of 2018, about 25,494 persons with HIV/AIDS had been detected in the Caribbean country, and more than 2,200 of them were new cases.

At that time 80% (20,446) were men and the rest (5,048) women, aged between 15 and 49, 74%, according to data from the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) collected by state media.

Ms de 2,200 nuevos casos de VIH en Cuba en 2018

In 1985, four years after the disease was discovered, the first case of HIV/AIDS was detected in Cuba in a man who had spent two years in Mozambique, Africa. Since then, the number who have contracted the virus is more than 30,000, of which a part died.

In the early days after the onset of the epidemic in the country, the diagnosed persons were admitted to health centers where they received treatment and were kept in isolation, with exceptional outings, in order to avoid the transmission of the virus.

On the island, patients receive a free treatment of five locally produced retrovirals combined with other imported ones. The objective of this therapy is to keep the levels of the AIDS virus low in blood and control its multiplication, which means that the patient has no complications and remains stable, according to the specialists.

Last March, pre-exposure prophylaxis pills (PrEP) started being given out in Cuba to prevent the spread of HIV in healthy people, a relatively new treatment in the Americas that is estimated to reduce the probability of contracting the virus by 90%.

In addition, since 2017 Cuban scientists have been testing the TERAVAC-VIH vaccine, developed at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana and designed to reduce the viral load of patients with the virus and improve the quality of life of the patients.

EFE / OnCuba

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Almost 27000 persons with HIV in Cuba - OnCubaNews

FDA for the first time has approved an experiment that involves temporarily transplanting pig tissue into humans, a move that experts say could lead to further developments in animal-to-human donations, Emily Mullin reports for Medium's "OneZero."

CRISPRand 7 other technologies that could transform health care

Each year in the United States, the waiting list for organ transplants grows and outpaces the number of available donations. And due to strict donor criteria, skin is also difficult to acquire, Mullin reports.

The new FDA-approved trial will focus on skin transplanted from pigs to humans.

Usually, second and third-degree burns are treated with human skin grafts to protect the wounds and help fight off infection. But researchers at biotech company XenoTherapeutics have genetically engineered miniature pigs to allow for use in humans. The skin, called Xeno-Skin, is made from living pig tissue.

So far, the Xeno-Skin has been transplanted to one patient who received a five-by-five centimeter piece of pig skin as well as human skin grafts. Five days after the transplant, doctors removed both skin grafts and replaced them with permanent grafts from the patient's thigh. The donor pig skin healed as well as the human skin graft, according to doctors involved in the trial. The patient also did not experience any adverse reactions to the graft.

Now, as part of the FDA-approved trial, Xeno-Skin will be transplanted as temporary skin grafts to five more burn victims at Massachusetts General Hospital. The grafts will be removed once the patients' skin grows back.

The experiment is the first of its kind to be approved by FDA, Mullin reports.

XenoTherapeutics is also developing nerves in the genetically engineered pigs that could be transplanted into people with nerve damage from accidents. The clinical trial for the new treatment will likely begin next year, Mullin reports.

In the past, donations from animals to humans, also called xenotransplantation, have almost always failed, Mullin writes, with common issues including patients experiencing an immune response to the donation or the transmission of an animal virus to the human recipient. Surgeon Keith Reemtsmain the 1960s transplanted chimpanzee kidneys into humans, but most of the transplants were rejected or became infected within a few weeks. And in 1984, a baby called "Baby Fae," received a heart transplant from a baboon, but died within a month.

After transplants from apes and monkeys failed, doctors started to consider pigs as potential human donrs, Mullin reports. "The reasons are largely practical," Mullin writes. "For one, pigs take only months to grow to a size suitable for organ donation, unlike monkeys, which require 10 to 15 years. Pig organs are also closer in size to human ones."

When it comes to skin transplants, while dead, processed pig skin is already used for wound dressing, living pig tissue had never been used in humans, Mullin reports. To prevent rejection, scientists used genetic engineering to eliminate molecules found in pigs that would trigger an immune system reaction in humans. Researchers also used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to remove a group of viruses found in pigs that are considered an infection risk for human donation recipients.

While temporary pig skin grafts are much more low risk than transplanting major pig organs into humans permanently, the successful skin graft transplant further demonstrates that "the risk" of xenotransplants "is manageable," according to Megan Sykes, director of the Center for Translational Immunology at Columbia University. "The fact that the FDA allowed this [pig skin] trial reflects that thought as well."

While xenotransplants are often used as bridge transplants, or temporary transplants that are designed to keep patients alive for a period of time before they receive a transplant from a human donor, Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of the cardiac transplantation program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has led research on pig transplants, believes that organ xenotransplantation might evolve enough to become a longer term solution. "[O]nce we have an ideal pig available and it survives for a longer period of time, there will not be a need to replace that organ," he said.

But convincing the public that pig transplants are safe might prove to be more difficult, he added. "If you tell someone, 'We want to put a pig heart in you,' there would probably be quite an uproar," Mohiuddin said. "If this trial is successful, that will pave the way for other types of transplantations, like kidneys, hearts, lungs, or livers."

While these types of transplants might not happen for another few decades, Ardehali said the field is getting closer. "Are we about to embark on a new chapter? I don't know the answer to that. This requires a significant leap of faith" (Mullin, "OneZero," Medium, 11/11).

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'A leap of faith': FDA just approved the first pig-to-human tissue transplant - The Daily Briefing

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The central dogma of biology describes the flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to proteins. While RNA was originally believed to be a carrier of genetic information, subsequent work has shown something completely different: RNA is now known to have function independent of proteins, with a rich layer of regulatory networks. In fact, a large amount of the RNA present in a cell does not actually make proteins. This increased appreciation and understanding has led to many fascinating mechanistic insights into RNA and its role as a central player in cellular regulation and human disease.

Helping to facilitate RNA function are a large number of proteins that can bind to and regulate RNA. These RNA-binding proteins, or RBPs, number in the thousands and are made up of many different independent modular segments similar to a childs set of building blocks. In much a similar fashion, these blocks or domains provide nature with a way of mixing and matching different domains to generate new functions. In recent years, researchers have sought to learn from biology and use these building blocks to engineer new proteins with unique functions that are helpful in research and human health. In a recent study published in WIREs RNA, Professor Andrew Berglund and his colleagues describe recent advances and challenges in engineering RBPs.

Engineering [RBPs] is a powerful tool for researchers to probe the mechanisms of RNA processing pathways says Dr. Andrew Berglund, the newly appointed Director of the RNA Institute at the University at Albany. It is also a promising approach for the development of novel therapeutic molecules.

Potential targets for this approach are abundant as many human diseases have a strong RNA or RBP component, including the most common cause of muscular dystrophy and amylotrophic lateral sclerosis. For therapeutic purposes, engineered RBPs can be designed to replace a defective cellular RBP or bind and destroy toxic RNA. RBPs can also be engineered with new functions and/or targets as well as being marked or tagged so that the researcher can follow their progression within the cell, like a GPS tracker for RNA. The modular nature of RBPs makes it possible to add or mix function to suit the goal of almost any researcher.

In their study published in WIREs RNA, the research team highlights two specific types of RBDs domains, PPR and PUF domains, which are the most straightforward choice for protein engineering. Researchers have studied these domains, understand how to design them to bind specific RNA sequences, and even have websites that can be used to design a domain to target your RNA of choice. Not all RBP engineering is this straightforward, with most researchers having to consider other factors such as the type of linker between domains, where in the tissue or the cell that protein must go, and how to attach other domains to give the engineered protein function.

Ultimately, as more functions of RNA are discovered and more diseases are linked to RNA misregulation, the greater the importance will be for designing, engineering, and testing novel RNA binding proteins. Somewhere in a jumble of RBP building blocks may lie the key to unlocking the next big discovery on RNA and potentially the next generation of therapeutics to improve human health.

Kindly contributed by the authors.

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Engineering RNA Binding Proteins to Improve Human Health - Advanced Science News

Geneticist Kat Arney takes a look at the science of de-extinction, asking whether its feasible or even ethical to bring species back from the past.

In 2003, Spanish researchers used cloning techniques to bring back the recently extinct bucardo (a type of mountain goat), only for the first cloned animal to die within minutes of birth.Other scientists are using genetic engineering techniques to stitch together the genomes of extinct species like passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths with their modern-day relatives.

Could these tools ever be used to bring back the biggest animals of them all, the dinosaurs? And is all this effort really worth it, or should we be focusing on conserving the species we already have on Earth?

Arney also investigates the history of one of the most famous diagrams in biology the Tree Of Life which Charles Darwin famously drew in 1837 to illustrate the evolutionary relationships between species.

Todays trees much more complex, bushy thickets, informed by modern genomics. But all this data brings a new challenge: deciding what counts as a species in the first place.

Full transcript, credits and show notes are available here.

Genetics Unzipped is the podcast from the UK Genetics Society, presented by award-winning science communicator and biologist Kat Arneyand produced byFirst Create the Media.Follow Kat on Twitter@Kat_Arney,Genetics Unzipped@geneticsunzip,and the Genetics Society at@GenSocUK

Listen to Genetics Unzipped onApple Podcasts(iTunes)Google Play,Spotify,orwherever you get your podcasts

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Podcast: From Jurassic Park to woolly mammoths is it right to bring back extinct species? - Genetic Literacy Project

"Theres been an enormous collapse in diversity," said Mr Blazey, the founder of gardening business The Diggers Club, which his family donated to the charity Diggers Foundation in 2011. He will also talk about the threat to food security at an event at Camperdown's Pocket City Farms on Sunday.

The number of seeds owned by the public had shrunk since genetic engineering was introduced in the early 1980s, Mr Blazey said.

First grown in 1802, the "lazy housewife" bean was one seed away from being lost forever, when it was propagated by The Diggers Club. The heirloom variety is now sold as a good bean for cooks and gardeners of any gender.

He started rescuing heirloom seeds 25 years ago, including the stringless bean, which was down to its last seed - in Germany - and sent to Australia. Since then, the world had lost about 60 per cent of vegetable varieties while the big companies such as Monsanto sold hybrids, he said.

"Thats a serious problem but most people dont see it. When you are buying a tomato, it is a hybrid and it won't be true to type [if you try to reproduce it]," he said. It also doesn't taste as good.

"If pestilence and climate change force us into disaster, we will have to ask Monsanto [recently taken over by Bayer] if we can grow [its] seeds and collect them.

"It is a disaster scenario, which nobody understands. Most of us don't realise we have lost complete control of seed supply," Mr Blazey said.

Five colour silverbeet, a very old variety, now sold by The Diggers Club.

The Grow It Local Festival and its website were started to encourage people to grow their own food, said co-founder Darryl Nichols, who also started the Garage Sale Trail 10 years ago.

There's also some "crowd farming": connecting locals who know how to garden with those who don't. Hundreds of people have registered their gardens, some running classes, including Composting 101, while others have offered advice and unused garden space.

When one of the site's Perth members offered a "seven-course plant-based patch-to-plate degustation", 14 strangers turned up, Mr Nichols said.

Like the Pocket City Farms, which is encouraging gardens in unused urban spaces, the site's members are growing vegetables wherever they can, horizontally and vertically.

In Bondi Junction, Tina has the beginning of a banana grove, with plans to fill up the nature strip with vegetables and ornamentals. In Killara, Mike is growing chili in his 15-square-metre back-garden. In Randwick, Jess and Andrew are "challenging the concept that you cant grow much in a concreted backyard". A woman is growing herbs on a vertical pallet on the verge to share with her neighbours.

It is a similar concept to The Diggers Club, which sells nearly 700 seed varieties, many heirloom, some brought to Australia by members when they migrated.

Different varieties of potatoes. Credit:David Cavanaro.

They include the pumpkin ironbark, which was down to 10 seeds a few years ago and unavailable anywhere else in the world. Reg, a market gardener, passed on seeds to two old heirloom varieties, red odourless onion and a carrot called "western red" before he died.

The number of vegetable seeds has shrunk to a fraction since 1900, according to this chart by Diggers Club. Credit:Clive Blazey

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Collapse in diversity threatens food security, seed rescuer says - The Age

Just as physics and chemistry have given humans power over the world of the inanimate, biology is giving us the ability to engineer living systems, from viruses and bacteria to animals and people.

Which is why [Wired co-founder Jane] Metcalfe thinksdesigncould be the next big thing in medicine.

Well combat disease and improve human health by designing biological systems from the ground up. We can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans, Metcalfe said.

The ultimate goal is writing whole human genomes from scratch, and [Andrew] Hessel cofounded Genome Project-write (GP-write) to convene the worlds top synthetic biologists to do just that.

There are obviouslybig hurdles that still need clearingincluding software that can make design more accurate and efficient and DNA synthesis tools that assemble longer base-pair sequencesand Hessels group recently published a paper outlining the challenges.

Literally in 10 years weve gone from making proteins synthetically to making a eukaryote, he said. As soon as we can start making whole chromosomes, well, weve only got 23 of them.

Read full, original post: Why Designing Our Own Biology Will Be the Next Big Thing in Medicine

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How synthetic biology will allow us to redesign humans 'from the ground up' - Genetic Literacy Project

A thought-provoking new exhibition by world-renowned artist Bonita Ely has opened at Griffith University Art Museum.

Bonita Ely: Future Tense explores dystopian futures wrought by environmental degradation and genetic engineering.

The major survey exhibition brings together several of Elys major works imagining an impossible future where nature has adapted with the assistance of science, and flourished despite the devastating effects of pollution and climate change.

Shown in Australia for the first time since its debut at documenta14 in 2017, Plastikus Progressus 2017/19 parodies natural history displays. Set in 2054, it features genetically-engineered creatures that consume plastic and, in the process, clean up our mess in the streets, oceans and rivers. The installation includes a new section examining the plastic pollution of the Brisbane River.

We Live to be Surprised 1989/2019 is Elys latest installation of snabbits half snail/half rabbits. Engineered as a food source for an over-populated planet, these creatures have evolved into an ominous feral monoculture.

The exhibition also includes a major 1973 painting by Ely, The Locust People, which shows Elys interest in environmental issues since the earliest years of her practice.

Director of Griffith University Art Museum Angela Goddard, who curated the exhibition, said Ely was a fascinating artist whose practice blurred the lines between art and science.

I like her intuitive way of working and projecting ideas, and how she imagines the future and how we might adapt to it, she said.

Bonita is a major figure in contemporary art and her work has great currency, as evidenced by both installations having recently been shown in EuropePlastikus Progressus in Poland and We Live to be Surprised in the UKwe are fortunate to be able to see these works here in Australia.

Griffith University Art Museum acknowledges the generosity of exhibition partners Lock, Stock and Barrel, Shut the Gate Wines and Solver Paints.

The exhibition runs until 8 February 2020 at Griffith University Art Museum, South Bank.

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Exhibition explores a brave new world - Griffith News

Justice Markandey Katju-

Although the Constitution of India declares India to be a secular country, the ground reality is very different. In recent years, particularly after the Hindu right wing Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) came to power in 2014, Indian society has been considerably polarized on religious lines.

Consider the following facts :

It is clear that in recent years polarization of Indian society on religious basis has witnessed an exponential upsurge. Earlier too there was communal feeling, but it was largely latent, erupting only on occasions. Now under BJP rule from 2014 it has become open, virulent. and continuous. What is the cause?

Some people say that it is because of reaction among Hindus who were earlier suppressed due to appeasement policy of Congress towards Muslims who were treated as a vote bank. Others say that Muslims are inherently fanatics and bigots, who often resort to terrorism, etc. But what is the truth?

The truth is that 99% of all people, whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Parsi or Buddhist are good people. Most Muslims, like most Hindus, are peaceful, upright and law abiding. So it is absurd to say that all, or even most, Muslims are bigots and terrorists.

In fact there was no communal feeling before 1857, as I have explained in my article The Truth about Pakistan published in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation some years back. Before 1857 Hindus and Muslims lived harmoniously, Hindus used to participate in Eid and Muharram, and Muslims in Holi and Diwali.

Communalism was artificially created after suppressing the 1857 Mutiny ( in which Hindus and Muslims fought together against the British ) by the British rulers as part of their divide and rule policy ( see BN Pandes History in the service of Imperialism online ), and this was continued even after Independence, but now it has increased exponentially.

There are two reasons for the recent upsurge in communal polarization in India, one internal, and the other external. Let me explain

Internal causes of polarization

The Congress Party, by its Muslim appeasement policy (to get Muslim votes ) created a strong reaction among many Hindus, who though forming 80% of the Indian population, felt they were being ignored, and all the Congress cared for was the 15% Muslims. This naturally created a backlash, which helped the BJP to come to power in 2014. Of course, the scandalous corruption by most Congress leaders and Modis vikas slogan also helped.

However, now the Indian economy is tanking, with huge dip in GDP, manufacturing sector, IT, real estate etc. on the rapid decline, and record unemployment as admitted by National Sample Survey, a Govt of India organization ( 12 million Indian youth are entering the job market every year but jobs are shrinking ), child malnourishment ( every second Indian child is malnourished, according to Global Hunger Index and UNICEF ), 50% Indian women anaemic, farmers suicides ( already well over 300,000 ) continuing unabated, almost total lack of proper healthcare and good education for the masses, etc.

The present Govt of India has no inkling how to resolve these massive problems, so to divert public attention from them it has to have a scapegoat. This scapegoat is the Muslims, who, like the Jews in the Nazi era, are blamed for all social evils. Muslims are vilified as fanatics, anti-national and terrorists. The Indian media, which has largely been Modified, dutifully obliges by spreading communal hatred.

Propaganda is such a powerful thing that even good peoples minds can be poisoned. For instance, Germans are ordinarily very good people, but during the Nazi era almost the whole German nation went mad, their minds poisoned by Hitler and Goebbels. Similarly, by the communal propaganda and other wicked techniques of the BJP most Hindus have been made Muslim haters in recent years.

Some people deny that BJP is anti-minority, and they refer to Modis statement Sabka saath, sabka vishwas but everyone knows this is hypocrisy and empty rhetoric. BJPs entire politics is based on hatred of minorities, particularly Muslims. BJP is dominated by an organization called the RSS (Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh ), which is rabidly anti minority ( see the book Bunch of Thoughts by the former RSS leader M.S.Golwalkar). Only by spreading and increasing religious hatred can the BJP thrive.

This world really consists of two worlds, the world of the developed, highly industrialized countries ( North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and China ), and the world of the underdeveloped countries ( which includes India ).

The national objective of India must be to transform and uplift itself into the ranks of the developed countries, for then only can it abolish poverty, unemployment and its other massive problems.

However, this transformation will be opposed tooth and nail by the developed countries, which have an unwritten rule that underdeveloped countries must not be allowed to join the ranks of the developed countries. Why this is so needs to be explained.

Cost of labor is a big chunk of the total cost of production. So if the cost of labor is less the cost of production is less, and one can sell his product at a cheaper price and eliminate his business rival by underselling him i.e. by selling the same quality goods at a cheaper price. There is competition in the market, and one businessman eliminates another not with guns, bombs or tanks but by underselling him.

For instance, after the 1949 Revolution, the Chinese leaders built up a massive industrial base in China. That massive industrial base, coupled with the cheap labor available in China, enabled the Chinese to undersell the whole world in consumer goods. Today the supermarkets of Western countries are packed with Chinese goods, which sell at less than half the price of goods made by Western manufacturers (because the Western labor is expensive). Consequently, many Western industries, which could not face the Chinese competition, had to close down.

Now coming to India, the situation in 1947, when India became independent, was that there were then very few industries and very few engineers. This was because of the policy of the British rulers who did not want India to become an industrialized nation, and wanted to keep it backward and feudal. However, after Independence there was a limited degree of industrialization in India, a heavy industrial base (steel plants etc.) were set up, engineering colleges like IITs were established, etc. The result is that today India is very different from the India of 1947. Today it has all that is required to become a highly industrialized nationa huge pool of technical talent (its IT engineers are largely manning Silicon Valley, and American Universities are full of Indian Professors in Engineering, Science and Mathematics) and immense natural resources.

But if India in fact becomes a highly industrialized country then with its cheap labor it will undersell the Western industrial products. Our labor is even cheaper than Chinese labor, so we will even undersell the Chinese if we get highly industrialized. So, if India gets highly industrialized who will buy the expensive products of the industries of the presently developed countries? Will they not have to close down causing massive unemployment?

India is presently the most developed of the underdeveloped countries, and with correct modern minded leadership it can become a highly developed country in 15-20 years (with modern minded leaders after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan took only this much time to transform itself from a feudal to a highly developed country). But if it does, will it not greatly damage the industries of the developed countries with their expensive labor?

So developed countries will strongly oppose Indias joining the ranks of the developed countries. And how do they do that? By supporting and inciting religious and caste conflicts. In other words, by making Indians fight with each other. I strongly suspect their hidden hand behind the increased religious polarization of Indian society.

[Justice Markandey Katju is former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman, Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.

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The religious polarization of India - indica News

(Left to right): M. CANTWELL/SCIENCE; OTICKI/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM; CHRISTOPHERBERNARD/ISTOCK.COM

By Eva FrederickNov. 8, 2019 , 4:20 PM

Caribbean excavation offers intimate look at the lives of enslaved Africans

To an outsider, the archaeological finds from Estate Little Princess in the U.S. Virgin Islandsfish and pig bones from centuries-old meals, buttons that fell off clothing, bits of coarse local potterymight not look like much. But to archaeologists, they are treasures that offer an intimate look into some of the most enigmatic lives in modern history: those of the enslaved Africans who once lived there.

New genetically modified corn produces up to 10% more than similar types

Genetic engineering proponents have long promised the technology will help meet the worlds growing demand for food. But despite the success of genetically modified pest -resistant crops, scientists havent had much success with boosting crop growth. Now, researchers have shown for the first time that they can increase corn yields up to 10% by changing a gene for plant growth.

Bad dog? Think twice before yelling, experts say

Few things are more adorableor destructivethan a new puppy. When they pee on rugs, chew furniture, and get aggressive with other pups, their stressed-out owners usually turn to dog training. Now, a novel study suggests programs that use even relatively mild punishments like yelling and leash-jerking can stress dogs out, making them more pessimistic than dogs that experience reward-based training.

What do you see when you look at these photosanimals or humanmade objects?

Live in the urban jungle long enough, and you might start to see thingsin particular, humanmade objects like cars and furniture. Thats what researchers found when they melded photos of artificial items with images of animals and asked 20 volunteers what they saw. The people, all of whom lived in cities, overwhelmingly noticed the manufactured objects as the animals faded into the background.

Colombian womans genes offer new clues to staving off Alzheimers

In 2016, a 73-year-old woman from Medelln, Colombia, flew to Boston so researchers could scan her brain, analyze her blood, and pore over her genome. She carried a genetic mutation that had caused many in her family to develop dementia in middle age. But for decades, she had avoided the disease. The researchers now report that another rare mutationthis one in the well-known Alzheimers disease risk gene APOEmay have protected her.

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Top stories: The archaeology of slavery, superproductive corn, and how NOT to train your dog - Science Magazine

In the battle against heart disease, more than 400,000 coronary artery bypass grafting surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year.

While veins from a patients leg are often used in the surgical procedure, tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVG), which are grown outside the body using a patients endothelial cells, are proving to be an effective and increasingly popular technique.

The most common reasons for TEVG failure are conditions like blood clots, narrowing of the blood vessels, and atherosclerosis. But what if these grafts could be engineered to detect and even prevent those ailments from occurring?

A team of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences students set out to answer that question for their project in this years International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. The project, dubbed FlowGlo, seeks to use receptors that exist within the walls of human blood vessels to detect shear stress, a warning sign that a blood vessel may be narrowing.

Shear stress is important to detect because it is a marker of a lot of different cardiovascular diseases. When there is narrowing of a blood vessel due to a blood clot, shear stress jumps exponentially, maybe up to 10 times its normal level, said Teagan Stedman, S.B. 22, a bioengineering concentrator. Our idea is to link the activation of these receptors due to some level of shear stress to a modular response.

Shear stress is a function of viscosity and how rapidly different layers of fluid are flowing over each other through a blood vessel. Because the walls of the vessel must move and roll with the strain of blood flow, receptors naturally activate at different levels of shear stress.

For instance, when shear stress rises above 4 Pascals, channels open in one specific protein receptor, Piezo1, and calcium ions enter the cell, signaling the activation. The students engineered Piezo 1 and two other protein receptors to present different colored fluorescent proteins when that activation occurs.

Down the road, instead of using a fluorescent protein, you could possibly swap it out so the cells secrete some kind of clot busting protein to break up the clot and treat it on site, said Patrick Dickinson, A.B. 22, an applied math concentrator. Current clot-busting medication is delivered through an IV, and it is system-wide and much less targeted, so there are greater risks for side effects. We think this could be a more targeted treatment in the long run.

As part of their project, the team gathered feedback from Elena Aikawa, Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Director of the Vascular Biology Program at Brigham and Womens Hospital, who studies tissue-engineered vascular grafts. They also conducted a survey to better understand public perception of genetic engineering ethics, since their technique would require engineered cells to be implanted in the human body.

As they gathered qualitative data, they worked long hours in the lab on intricate experiments. Since beginning the project this summer, the teammates overcame many challenges caused by the difficulty of cloning cells. Relying on the support of their mentor, Timothy Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Pamela Silver at the Harvard Medical School, they brainstormed, troubleshot, and learned volumes about synthetic biology along the way.

I learned that biology is messy, Dickinson said. In a lab setting, there is a lot that is hard to predict. We certainly encountered a lot of frustration and stress along the way, but it was a good window into what research really is.

Now that the competition has concluded, the teams work will be included in the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a repository of genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to build synthetic biology devices and systems.

For Rahel Imru, it is gratifying to know that future iGEM teams and research groups from around the world could someday build off the research she and her peers have done.

While the weeks leading up to the competition were a whirlwind, the experience was well worth the effort, said Imru, A.B. 21, a biomedical engineering concentrator.

This was my first lab experience, so I definitely learned a lot, she said. I look back and see how much weve grown. Maybe we didnt get all the data and results we wanted to by the end, but for the size of our team and the time that we had, seeing what we are able to accomplish is especially rewarding.

The rest is here:
Glowing with the flow - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

We expect to have more than one variety of apple to choose from. Even at the most modestly stocked produce stand, youre likely to see mounds of Galas, McIntoshes and Honeycrisps. When it comes to the banana, though no matter where you shop theres only ever one: The Cavendish.

As far removed as we are from tropical growing regions, youd be forgiven for assuming the fruit we recognize as a cheap and reliable staple is the one true banana. In reality, however, there are over a thousand types, each exhibiting a different flavour profile, texture, shape, colour, ripening pattern and durability. And for the second time in recent history, the very existence of the sole breed we rely on which represents the single most exported fresh fruit on the planet is under threat.

Researchers, seeking a solution, are looking towards a new form of genetic modification. Could specific alterations of the genetic makeup of the Cavendish help stave off the disappearance of such a critical commodity?

In August, Colombia declared a state of emergency when scientists confirmed a banana-killing fungus had reached the Americas for the first time. Known by its common name, Panama disease, the strain of fungus Fusarium oxysporum cubense Tropical Race 4 (TR4) has been a known issue since the early 1990s, but until this year, it was largely contained to Asia. Immune to pesticides, the lethal soil-borne organism, for which there is no known cure, obliterates yields by choking banana trees of essential water and nutrients.

The Cavendishs predecessor as worlds presiding banana was the Gros Michel, a variety that dominated fruit stands in temperate regions until it was decimated by fungal strain Tropical Race 1 in the 1950s. That the extreme monoculture approach replicated with the Cavendish would result in a similar fate should have seemed inevitable.

Cavendish bananas are sterile and breeding them requires a cloning process that creates genetically identical plants. Because of their inherent lack of biodiversity, monocultures such as this banana are especially vulnerable to diseases and pests; when theres a weakness, such as little or no resistance against TR4, it can have sweeping and ruinous effects.

Given the bananas immense importance to producers and consumers, researchers have been attempting a variety of methods to create a resistance to the deadly fungus. According to Nature, James Dale, a biotechnologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, is currently field testing genetically modified bananas in Northern Australia with some success. Dale has added a gene from a wild banana into the Cavendish variety that makes it more resistant to the TR4.

However, even if scientists are able to breed a TR4-immune Cavendish, they wouldnt be permitted to grow or sell them in a significant portion of the world. In Europe, for example, GM crops are restricted. And in Canada, although GMOs have been on the market since the late 1990s, nearly 90 per cent of Canadians believe they should be subject to mandatory labelling.

As a result, researchers like Dale and Leena Tripathi, from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Kenya, have begun experimenting with CRISPR technology. Where GMOs have a foreign gene inserted into the organism, CRISPR allows for the organisms genes to be edited. In the case of Dale, hes discovered a dormant gene in the Cavendish he hopes to activate.

The technique is perhaps best described by Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University. In an interview with Gastropod, she likened DNA to a book and CRISPR to a pen: You can go in and you can edit the letters in a word, or you can change different phrases, or you can edit whole paragraphs at very specific locations.

CRISPR and GMO are further differentiatedin terms of consumer perception. As a December 2018 study published in Global Food Security found, 47 per cent of Canadian respondents were willing to eat both GM and CRISPR foods, but participants across the board (in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the U.S.) were more apt to eat CRISPR than GM food.

Nevertheless, editing the genes of the banana is still in the early stages. Dale told Nature that itll be a couple of years before these get into the field for trials. Can the Cavendish banana wait that long?

In a recent interview with KCRW, Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, said I think the time has come to stop looking at bananas as just one kind of fruit when there are thousands. Just as the range of apples at our fingertips is rich and getting richer, perhaps all the different varieties of bananas will prove ripe for discovery.

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The world's banana crops are under threat from a deadly fungus. Is gene editing the answer? - National Post

PeakPx

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook when he was 19 years old. By 25, his company was valued at over $5 billion. At 28, he took Facebook public. Now, at the age of 35, he is among the top 10 richest people in the world.

When we think of entrepreneurs, we tend to think of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world youthful visionaries who disrupt traditional businesses with a new and better ways of doing things.

New research, however, challenges the view that youth is advantageous to entrepreneurial success. Perhaps a better entrepreneurial archetype is that of Herbert Boyer. Boyer founded Genentech at the age of 40 based on his breakthrough discoveries in genetic engineering. Or, consider the story of David Duffield. Duffield founded Workday, a financial and human capital management software company, in his 60s, after spending a career in application software. Now, Workday has a market capitalization of over $40 billion.

The data is increasingly showing that its never too late to start a business. Below are five research-backed reasons why entrepreneurial success may come quickest to those who wait.

1) The stereotype of the very young and very successful entrepreneur is exactly that a stereotype.

It turns out that the media may be the biggest culprit in perpetuating the belief that entrepreneurship is a young mans game. For example, the website TechCrunch gives annual awards to the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The average age of award recipients from 2008 to 2016 was 31. Inc. magazine and Entrepreneur magazine also publish lists of entrepreneurs to watch. In 2015, the average age of entrepreneurs who made this list was 29. Compare that to the average age of a typical startup founder (42) to see the discrepancy.

2) Not only are older entrepreneurs more common, they are more successful.

42 is the average founder age of all S-corporations, C-corporations, and Partnerships that registered in the United States between 2007 and 2014. Examining the performance of these companies reveals yet another trend: companies with older founders tend to outperform companies with younger founders. Looking at the top 1% of startups (in terms of company performance), the average founder age increases to 43. Looking at the top 0.1%, the founder age increases even more, to 45. Moreover, the average age of startup founders who achieved a successful exit (as defined by an acquisition or an IPO) is 47.

3) Entrepreneurs working in major entrepreneurial hubs are no younger than other entrepreneurs.

Another misconception is that startup founders practicing in the hottest entrepreneurial hubs think Silicon Valley and New York City are younger than in other areas of the country. Again, the data does not show this to be the case. The average age of entrepreneurs in California, Massachusetts, and Silicon Valley is also 42. And, in New York City, the average entrepreneurial age is only one year younger than average (41).

4) The average age of new entrepreneurs entering the market over the past decade has increased.

Given the rise of technology and technology-related entrepreneurship, one might guess that the average entrepreneurial age has fallen in recent decades. Again, the data suggest the opposite. The average founder age has risen from 41.8 in 2007 to 42.5 in 2014.

5) Certain fields attract entrepreneurs that are older than average.

Not surprisingly, there is truth to the idea that technology is a young mans game. However, the age spread is not as wide as one might think. For instance, startup founders operating in the software publishing industry are, on average, 40 years old (two years younger than the overall average). That said, there are other fields that attract older entrepreneurs. For example, the average age of founders in the pipeline transportation of natural gas, basic chemical manufacturing, and paint, coating, and adhesive manufacturing industries are 51, 48, and 48, respectively. Startup founders operating in oil and gas extraction and engine, turbine, and power transmission equipment manufacturing are also significantly older than other types of entrepreneurs.

Conclusion. The novelist George Eliot famously said, Its never too late to be what you might have been. This is sage advice for all aspects of life, but it might be especially relevant in the case of entrepreneurship.

Link:
Five Reasons Why Its Never Too Late To Start A Business - Forbes

A local scientist is sequencing the genomes of Burbanks plums to verify their history and create a genetic roadmap for future plant breeders

Luther Burbank is still a well-known name around Sonoma County it graces the regions largest arts center and a couple of public gardens. Burbank was Americas most famous horticulturalist (that is, someone who specializes in growing fruit, vegetables and flowers). Since he lived in a time when most Americans still made their living from agriculture, his discoveries seemed as vital and important as those of his contemporaries Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, both of whom visited him here in Sonoma County.

Luther Burbank died in 1926, and over the ensuing 93 years, his reputation has faded considerably, but the plants he created live on. An essay in the Journal of Heredity in 2006 estimated that Burbank introduced between 800 and 1,000 new plants to the American horticultural universe, including the Russet-Burbank potato (still the most common potato in America), Shasta Daisies, the Elberta peach and the luscious Santa Rosa plum.

With only a high school education and no scientific training, Burbank was a self-taught genius and a relentless experimenter, who, it turns out, took extremely poor notes. Still, Burbank filled a collection of notebooks with his large, ungainly scrawl, describing in the briefest of terms his plant breeding experiments. Many of these descriptions are accompanied by hatchmarks the meaning of which is still a mystery today and fruit prints, which he made by cutting a fruit in half and pressing it onto the page.

Because Burbank was secretive about his plant breeding methods and iffy with his notetaking the origins of some of his most famous crosses are still mysterious.

THE PLUM DETECTIVE Rachel Spaeth is the garden curator at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa. A fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, she is attempting to establish the identity and ancestry of Luther Burbank plum varieties through genetic sequencing. She is holding one of Burbanks fruit prints.

Enter Rachel Spaeth, the garden curator at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, working in the horticulture and agronomy graduate group.

Spaeth said she is looking at all of the genetic diversity that we can find in Luther Burbank plums, working to unravel their identity and ancestry.

We kind of know what he said they (his hybrid crosses) were, and genetically, I should be able to tell that, she said.

When talking to laymen, Spaeth likes to begin with this clarification: When somebody says the word plum, its a generic term and its kind of a misnomer, because plum actually refers to between 17 and 40 different species of organisms, Spaeth said, depending on which kind of taxonomist youre asking.

Spaeth is looking at 60 living plums within 10 of those species. She is using plant material from living Burbank plum trees to sequence the genomes of Burbanks plum varieties and she ultimately hopes to make use of the roughly century-old DNA in Burbanks fruit prints to confirm these identifications.

Spaeth said her goals are to verify Burbanks claims about his crosses and to establish a genetic collection of characteristics, based on Burbanks discoveries, for plant breeders in the future.

One of the major goals is to just verify his claims, she said, noting that Burbanks breeding claims were often disbelieved. Luther would say that these were the parents of something, but especially with his plum-apricot crosses, people didnt really believe that he crossbred a plum with an apricot until 50 years after his death, when somebody else was able to reproduce a plum-apricot crop.

NOTEWORTHY With only a high school education and no scientific training, Burbank was a self-taught genius and a relentless experimenter, who, it turns out, took extremely poor notes.

Long before genetic engineering was even dreamt of, Burbank took a swashbuckling approach toward plant breeding blithely crossing species boundaries to create fertile hybrids, something youre not supposed to be able to do.

Luther was unique in that he would frequently cross different species, especially ones that people didnt think were possible, Spaeth said. But if he saw that the flower morphology was similar or they had overlapping bloom periods, or if the fruit looked really similar, then he would deduce that, OK, maybe I can cross these and hed just try it sometimes repetitively if he really wanted it to work, and sometimes he would get really good results.

Spaeth said the Santa Rosa plum is probably the prime example of this.

Its a cross between a European plum and the Japanese plum. And in creating that hybridized cross, he created a plum that was partially self-fertile, but then also could be used to pollinize both European and Japanese plums. So the Santa Rosa plum became the universal pollinizer a role she said it still plays today. Even if its not grown commercially for fresh market, theyll always have a couple in the orchard just to make sure that they get a good fruit set on everything else.

The other thing is its really intermediate in bloom time, she said. So whenever youre looking at plant patents for plums, almost all of them will tell you it flowers two weeks before Santa Rosa or two weeks after Santa Rosa. So really its kind of like the gold standard.

Before heading out to the orchards to gather plant material, Spaeth needed to get a comprehensive list of all the plums introduced by Burbank. She used two different source books, W.L. Howards Luther Burbanks Plant Contributions (1945), a near comprehensive guide to everything Burbank introduced, and U.P. Hedricks Plums of New York (1911), a 750-page tome, filled with beautiful watercolor illustrations of plums.

Spaeth hit gold immediately.

When I looked through the Hedrick book, I used an online PDF and searched for the keyword Burbank, and I was able to discover six plums that Howard didnt find, just because of the modern tools that we have available to us. So that was really exciting, she said.

Then using that list as her starting point, she began gathering plant material leaves and fruit from plum trees at three different sites: Luther Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa (where theres a small orchard with 34 varieties of plums grafted onto five trees); the Burbank Experiment Farm in Sebastopol (where some of the plum trees are so old they were planted by Burbank himself); and the USDAs Wolfskill Experimental Orchards in Winters.

If we find a cultivar thats in all three places when we sequence the genome, it should all be identical, Spaeth said. And then we can say this is exactly that plum. Then that becomes the voucher.

To make a definitive identification, You have to corroborate material from three different sources, she said. Two different sources is OK; three is better. So if we have a sample from all three, and it comes back that one of them is different, then we have to do a little bit more legwork with phenotyping: so it would be like really looking at fruit quality, flowering time and all of that information to try to match it to the historic data that we have.

BURBANK The Burbank plum was produced from a plum pit sent to Burbank by a Japanese agent in 1883. It was named in honor of Burbank, who introduced it to the United States.

Fruit prints then and now

Ultimately, she would like to do genetic testing on Burbanks original fruit prints, which will require scraping some of the dried fruit matter off. Some of Burbanks fruit prints are located at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, but many more are located in the Library of Congress.

To figure out the smallest amount of materials she can take to get a good sample, Spaeth has been making her own fruit prints and practicing on those.

The goal is to use my prints to see how little material possible you need to be able to get DNA. Were using techniques that people would use in forensic archaeology, adding different compounds or increasing the amount of time that your reaction has to take place so that you can get good data out of it, said Spaeth, who sometimes jokes that she feels like the Indiana Jones of the plant world.

When shes confident in her sampling method, shell request permission to take samples from Burbanks fruit prints in the Library of Congress.

Creating a genetic list of ingredients, a l Burbank

The ultimate goal of Spaeths genetic research is to pinpoint which sections of a plums genetic code create certain characteristics. This is done through quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis, which is a statistical method that links phenotypic data (measurements of traits such as color, shape, disease resistance, etc.) with genotypic data in order to explain the genetic basis of a specific trait.

The cool thing about Luthers plums is that they have a huge range of not only genetic diversity, but phenotypic diversity. So youre looking at every color under the rainbow of plums, every size, every shape, whether its free stone or cling stone, Spaeth said.

All of those characteristics get scored. And then we compare all of those characteristics to the genome, she said. Youre looking for QTL markers.

In other words, youre looking for the recipe that makes the pointy bottom plum versus the recipe that makes a smooth bottom. And then once you know that recipe, people can use that information in future breeding experiments.

According to Spaeth, the ability to create such a recipe really emphasizes the importance of historic collections, such as those at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens and the Luther Burbank Experiment Farm.

Because we wouldnt have this resource, if we didnt have people that were curating and cataloging these sorts of things, she said.

Bringing the past into the future

Knowing the recipe for a phenotypic trait allows researchers to target specific regions of the genome for genetic engineering as well as traditional breeding.

From a genetic engineering perspective, knowing the recipe for the gene you want allows you to target and edit specific sequences, Spaeth said. This is highly useful if you want to do something like move a disease-resistance gene from cherry into plum without having to shuffle and sort the two genomes through traditional methods.

What would Burbank think of modern genetic engineering?

"It is unfair to impart our 21st century mindset on someone who lived most of his life without electricity or cars, Spaeth said. However, if I had to venture a guess, I would say that Luther would be open to using all of the tools in the kit to further advance his breeding lines.

By cracking the genetic code of Burbanks hybrids and by creating a genetic database of their component parts, Spaeth is giving Luther Burbank a new place in the modern world so that future generations of scientists and plant lovers can benefit once more from his prodigious creativity.

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Unraveling the mystery of Luther Burbank's famous plums - Sonoma West