StemCell Therapy

Google's recent claim that it has achieved quantum computing supremacy apart from being contested by rival tech giants such as IBM is still quite a ways off in terms of real-world applications.

The healthcare industry, for example, will still need to build a new set of applications to take advantage of quantum, and it still won't account for the cost of the hardware and the operating costs to cool the systems and keep them operational.

If healthcare costs were not already high enough, these capabilities don't help in keeping cost burdens low, and because quantum introduces all kinds of potential security risks, data privacy for healthcare patients could be compromised even further.

However, possible applications for artificial intelligence and machine learning to help with data analysis could prove critical further down the road.

Quantum computing could provide unprecedented power and speed of processing as well as novel and fundamentally different algorithmic search and data homogenization strategies.

"The exponential computing speedup offered by quantum computers will enable machine learning algorithms to rapidly identify patterns in healthcare data collected from millions of participating patients," Mario Milicevic, an IEEE member and staff communication systems engineer at MaxLinear, told Healthcare IT News.

He explained medical imaging and pathology would likely be the first to benefit, as quantum computers could be used to train machine learning algorithms with more classifiers to identify diseases in a fraction of the time that it takes today.

Milicevic noted quantum computers could also accelerate DNA sequencing, which would enable the more effective cancer treatment through personalized medicine.

A central challenge that remains is collecting and curating healthcare data uniformly across a multitude of sources in such a way that it can be processed by quantum algorithms.

Nick Hatt, senior developer at digital health company Redox, cautioned that it's going to be important to not buy into the hype too much at such an early stage.

"No one should be putting a down payment on a quantum computer today," he said. "The methods used today in AI/ML are well understood and run reasonably fast on conventional computers."

Hatt explained that what healthcare CIOs need to worry about is cryptography.

"Essentially all of the ways we secure our health data -- from APIs that transmit it, to the actual storage on disk," he said. "The data is at risk of being completely and utterly broken."

From a clinical healthcare perspective alone, the quantum computing technology could lead to "dramatic" accelerations in speed and performance.

"MRIs were basically invented because of our acquired understanding of quantum physics, and getting a true quantum computer will allow us to truly understand the nature of all matter, which means everything from better medicine with less side effects to better diagnostics," Roger Grimes, data-driven defense evangelist at KnowBe4, told HealthcareITNews.

With increased computing available, clinicians could easily review CT scans over time and quickly identify changes and anomalies. Similarly, precision medicine can be accelerated.

Targeted chemotherapy protocols can be identified more quickly, and with more customization, with quantum computing's enhanced data processing abilities.

"All of the above apply to oncology specifically as well," noted Dr. Doug Walled, an IEEE member and an attending physician in diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine.

He explained roving machine learning algorithms crawling across disparate systems could adapt unlike data, and much more rapidly change the treatment landscape for various types of cancer.

The kind of massive processing power and intelligence quantum computing will bring could also change the landscape for AI-based healthcare applications, because clarity will be available much more rapidly.

One tenant of quantum computing is that two "objects" may seem unrelated and, with quantum applied, are realized to be somehow related.

"Extrapolate that idea to healthcare and AI and you can imagine that when AI brings together information and extrapolates parallels in the data that then, science will connect previously unconnectable dots," Mark LaRow, CEO of patient matching services provider Verato, told Healthcare IT News. "Apply this to clinical trials in fields like oncology and pretty soon we cure undiagnosable cancers."

LaRow cautioned one challenge to the adoption and full use of the technology's potential is the limited, incomplete, or inconsistent data sets required to train and be available for mass computational consumption and AI learning.

For example, a chronically ill patient may see more than seven clinicians, and these clinicians document differently, they copy notes from other providers, use shorthand, and think differently.

"This creating inconsistency and incompleteness across the medical record," he said. "Sophisticated solutions like AI and quantum computing will benefit from complete medical records paired with supplementary non-medical information."

Although it may be years even a decade or more before quantum computing becomes a standard part of the healthcare business, LaRow noted these "wickedly futuristic technologies" have, in the last five years, evolved to seem tangible.

"Ultimately, I believe, that these technologies will become so reliable that it will be deemed unethical for a clinician NOT to consult with a powerful AI informed computing system to double check a diagnosis and to recommend a treatment regimen," he said.

Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

Read more:
Quantum computing could turbocharge healthcare analytics, AI - Healthcare IT News

Artificial intelligence has been much discussed of late, but will it really help us solve important problems like how to bring personalized medicine to as many patients as possible? Kate Hilyard, COO of Healx in Cambridge in the UK, believes it can.

Getting a drug to clinical trials currently requires a large investment of both time and money with no guarantee that it will be successful in the long term, or reach the market. Hilyard has a lot of experience of drug development, ranging from big pharma to biotech, and understands this process well.

Recent developments in AI and data mining has led to the founding of a number of companies trying to apply this technology to improving health. Healx is one such company and is seeking to make drug development quicker, easier, and more effective, all factors that attracted Hilyard to join as COO last year.

Ive done drug discovery for 25 years the traditional way. I knew about the massive failure rate, Hilyard told me. The AI approach sounded intriguing and the more I learned about it, the more clever I think it is because it uses information thats already out there.

Hilyard began her career in drug development at Roche, before moving on to work at the established biotech Cambridge Antibody Technology.

I wanted to make a difference to patients lives this was something that really interested me about human biology. Thats why I did biochemistry as a degree. Working in academia was great and I learned a lot, but I just felt it was too distant from really making an impact.

Cambridge Antibody Technology was one of the first companies to produce antibody or biologic drugs. It developed the blockbuster arthritis drug Humira, which helped lead to its acquisition by AstraZeneca for more than 800M in 2006. One of its co-founders, Greg Winter, shared the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2018 for work that led to Humiras development.

It was really exciting to work there because it was a biologics company. We were all working in discovering antibody therapeutics where biologics as drugs werent so accepted in those days It was as if people didnt really believe antibodies as drugs were going to work. Now, biologics are at the heart of many company pipelines.

As well as working for both big pharma and biotech, Hilyard also spent a number of years working for the large contract research organization Charles River.

It was a fantastic learning experience in that I learned how to be a businesswoman. Working at a CRO is all about running a profitable business, so I learned about commercial, legal, financial aspects, cost control, managing change In a pharma company, you work towards your budget, but thats it; youre not seeing the bigger picture.

This experience taught Hilyard that, while they can be effective, traditional drug development techniques have room for improvement. She believes Healxs novel approach can improve the drug development process.

Youre using knowledge thats out there, somewhat like a sustainable drug discovery method. Youre using machine learning to be able to query that information to find new treatments. You make these novel connections between the disease and the drug. Its a completely different approach and I liked the fact that it was different.

Healx is using an approach that collects a vast amount of both public and proprietary data from medical literature and databases such as DrugBank. It then extracts useful information using algorithms that have been developed by the technology team. The data are put to good use by Healxs pharmacology and drug development team, which uses it to search for viable drug candidates.

You need this drug discovery expertise input as you cant let the algorithms do it by themselves. Its just too difficult a problem. The algorithms make predictions and then we have our experts review those predictions and decide which are the best ideas and best hypotheses to take forward to test in the disease models.

There are many advantages to this approach, according to Hilyard. Because the computer is doing all the hard work, it means we can do it a lot more quickly and cheaply than the traditional approach It means we can cover so many more diseases. Weve already got ten active programs and our goal is to have started 100 programs by 2025.

Healx has already had some successes. Its most advanced program is a treatment for fragile X syndrome using a repurposed compound. The drug candidate has reached the point where it can be tested in clinical trials. This process took less than two years instead of the normal five-to-seven years the traditional approach would have taken.

We are planning to start our clinical trial early in 2020. That would be about two-to-three years from project initiation to phase II, which is amazing.

Personalized medicine has developed over the last 10-15 years from being a hope for the future to a practical reality. For example, many modern cancer treatments are designed to treat a specific group of patients or tumors.

Cancers are not just being defined by the tissue or organ they originate in anymore; theyre being defined by the molecular descriptors. We think everybody is going to be working on diseases with small-patient populations eventually because well just understand the disease biology much better.

An approach such as the one adopted by Healx can be instrumental in providing tailored therapies to more people.

Were trying to enhance the success rate of clinical trials. You do that by working out which patient population is the right one to test it in. Obviously, if youre looking for a small effect, you dont want to have a lot of non-responders in the group that mean the small effects are hidden statistically.

While AI can be very useful for developing more effective and personalized therapies, Hilyard emphasizes that it is important to remember that it is only a tool and that tools are only as good as their users.

All the AI does is allow you to process large amounts of data, which you wouldnt normally be able to do. You can also try to find patterns in it and learn new things, but there are patterns that need to be explained. You then need to have experts to look at them.

I think if you have specific questions, thats when it really works and you can process massive amounts of data. Thats the key thing. You can use it to do something that a human cant do.

Coming from a background in biochemistry and traditional drug development, working at Healx has been a different experience for Hilyard. But one she has found very inspiring.

My colleagues do things in a different way and we have different languages and we think differently. Its been great to create this, as I describe it, chimera where youre creating cross-functional teams that combine computer scientists with pharmacologists and were creating great science out of that. I really like the fact that its different.

It does take a bit more energy for everybody, but everybody whos in Healx knows that. They all know that were making this combination to completely change the way drug discovery is done. Everybody is fully into building something new.

Images via E. Resko and Shutterstock

Read the original here:
Channeling the Power of AI into Personalizing... - Labiotech.eu

Finding new medicines is like finding a needle in a haystack. By linking a powerful computational ... [+] approach to advances in chemical manufacturing, this company is making piles of needles.

Finding new drugs is hard. Sometimes we dont even know how a disease works, and drug tests in animals dont always go the same as in humans. Drugs can even behave very differently from person to person. And because companies dont tend to share data with one another about failures, we cant learn from each other and the larger data pool. The whole process is extremely expensive, and the cost is ultimately borne by us, the consumers.

But what if drug discovery could go from finding a needle in a haystack to making small piles of needles?

Thats what Abe Heifets wants to do. Abe is the CEO and co-founder of Atomwise, a 50-person biotech startup based in San Francisco. And he thinks hell find the next blockbuster drug using a technology you carry in your own pocket: neural networks.

Whats a neural network anyway?

If youve ever used Siri or Alexa, or uploaded a photo to Facebook, then youve used neural networks, says Abe. A neural network is a set of computer instructions (algorithms) that resemble human brain function where it comes to recognizing patterns and clusters in data. The data can be images, sound, text, or other information like molecules at the atomic level.

Consider three kinds of data. Speech is one-dimensional data: a single audio signal varying over time. Images are two-dimensional data because the pixel color depends on both the x coordinate and the y coordinate. Atoms are three-dimensional because they have x, y, and z coordinates: height, width, and depth.

Speech-to-text software uses 1D neural networks. The vision systems of self-driving cars use 2D neural networks. Atomwises insight was to develop a 3D neural network that could see and understand molecules in space in the same way a self-driving car sees the world. Instead of red, green, and blue color channels at every grid point, we have carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen channels, he says.

How does it work?

Let's say you're a professor at UC San Francisco, says Abe, and you think that if you can just block protein XYZ, you can cure Alzheimer's That's a great paper you can publish in Nature, but you can't help a patient with that. You actually need the drug.

Thats where Atomwise comes in. You say, Give me a molecule for XYZ. And it can be on Alzheimer's, cancer, malaria, whatever you want Atomwises AI system searches for the best small molecules among millions and millions.

By default, Atomise starts with a chemical library of 10 million small molecules. From this pool, Atomwises algorithms sift through and identify the most promising molecules 7% of 1% of 1%, just a tiny sliver. They then order them inexpensively from a third-party manufacturer and ship them to their customer on a 96-well plate. From there, Atomwises customers can test the molecules and see how they work in their systems.

How big is big? Ultra-economies of scale

For context, big pharma companies typically have 3 to 5 million small molecules in their entire collections. So Atomwise can double that.

A decade or maybe 15 years ago, you and I could buy a million molecules off-the-shelf. Last year, we could buy 300 million. This year its 11 billion molecules that you and I can order for 100 bucks a pop and get shipped to us in six weeks, Abe told me. He thinks next year itll be 100 billion.

Atomises business model is akin to Dell in the 90s: You custom-design your computer from any possible combination of peripherals and memory, enter your credit card info, and press submit. Dell goes out and buys the peripherals and builds only the computers it

Chemistry has undergone the same transformation in the last decade, says Abe, where chemical manufacturers are storing all the building blocks and making chemicals on-demand. What they're selling you is the Cartesian product of how to put those together.

With an important difference in Atomwises case: They are also selling a highly intelligent selection of chemical products, based on customers needs.

This is virtual chemistry, on-demand chemistry, right? Abe says. We've shifted from a world of scarcity in chemistry, to a world of abundance.

Abe likens the space to other neural network we use all the time: Netflix has way more movies than you could ever watch, and YouTube has way more cat videos than you can ever see, right? But how do we get a new cat video, one that you feel like watching right now? These are questions of filtering, matching, searching. These are AI questions.

The origins of a good idea

Abe studied computer science at Cornell, where he worked on the AI system for soccer-playing robots (his team won the RoboCup World Champion in 2001). From there, he worked at an IBM research center in Boston. I worked there on what today we would probably call Big Data, recalls Abe, but at the time, we didn't have that phrase, so we called it high performance data processing.

The work was rewarding, but Abe wanted to do more. And that time, he got interested in medicine (Everyone needs a hobby, he says sheepishly). He started taking chemistry classes at Harvard, where the mixing of chemicals felt very grainy to him compared to computer science.

Abe decided to go back for his PhD and landed in a computational biology group at the University of Toronto. Abes lab shared a coffee pot with the machine learning group of Geoffrey Hinton inventor of deep neural networks. Thats also where he met his Atomwise co-founder and CTO, Izhar Izzy Wallach. Izzy had been writing structural biology algorithms for a small pharma company. Combined with Abes work on big data and the influence of deep neural networks being created in the lab next door, and Atomwise was a natural fusion of it all.

Anything but academic

Applying this thinking is not a mere academic exercise, and investors know it. Atomwise was first selected to join Y Combinators Winter 2015 class. By the end of Y Combinator, several well-known venture capitalists were ready to invest in the promise of applying neural nets to drug discovery, including DCVC (where I am an operating partner), Khosla Ventures, Threshold, and Tim Draper. By March 2018, Atomwise closed its $45 million Series A round.

And the technology is maturing nicely, Atomwise just reported the results of a collaboration with Stanford University and the Mayo Clinic that used Atomwises technology as a kind of AI virtual drug screen to identify a potential treatment for Parkinsons disease. Its also a proof-of-concept for making personalized medicine for this disease quickly and cheaply.

Weve been running the world's largest application of machine learning to drug discovery in history, says Abe. He recently presented those project results to the American Chemical Society. This is a project that we've been running where we have over 250 projects with hundreds of universities in 36 countries, he says. We work on every major disease, we work on every protein class.

Today, Atomwise is working with a number of big and small pharma companies, particularly around cancer treatments. One partnership, with Hansoh Pharma, marks the largest China-US collaboration for AI drug discovery and could amount to $1.5 billion if all milestones are achieved.

What 21st-century pharma companies will look like

As Old Pharma outsources AI drug discovery and more, Abe thinks it will change the face of pharma companies. It probably doesn't look like four brick walls with everything happening inside. It probably looks more like a series of alliances that come together.

If youre a small biotech with some deep insight into biology, are you going to spin up your own mouse testing, sales force, and chemical manufacturing? No, says Abe. You want to partner with Big Pharma, who has those kinds of relationships already in place. And so it's a question of teamwork.

Companies like Atomwise are a great example of how the convergence of tech and bio is creating valuable and important new consumer possibilities that were previously off limits, while also disrupting existing value chains in huge industries like pharma.

If your company could biomanufacture any chemical imaginable, what would it be?

Acknowledgement: Thank you to Kevin Costafor additional research and reporting in this post.

Please note: I am the founder ofSynBioBeta, and some of the companies that I write about, including DCVC, are sponsors of theSynBioBeta conference(click herefor a full list of sponsors).

More:
How Neural Nets Will Personalize Medicine: Meet The Startup Thats Changing How We Find New Drugs - Forbes

Each of us appears to have a unique way of moving, a physical signature that is ours alone, like our face or fingerprints, according to a remarkable new study of people and their muscles. The study, which used machine learning to find one-of-a-kind patterns in peoples muscular contractions, could have implications for our understanding of health, physical performance, personalized medicine and whether and why people can respond so differently to the same exercise.

Intuitively, most of us probably know there is something in the way we move, and that that something defines us. In studies and daily life, most people can pick out their friends and loved ones, based solely on how they walk. At least one surveillance company also claims to be able to identify and track people using their gaits.

But those identifications, whether fond or creepy, rely on external cues about how we look in motion and depend on anatomical features, such as height, limb length or how we swing our arms, which may not be stable. Wear heels, develop sore feet, limp, and you could move differently.

Some scientists have speculated that other subtler, interior movement patterns, such as the ways in which our muscles fire in choreography with one another when we will our body to move, might be particular to each of us and relatively constant. But little research had delved into what our muscles are up to when we move.

So, for the new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, French and Australian researchers decided to turn to algorithms to ferret out whether unique, personal muscle patterns exist.

The scientists began by recruiting 80 healthy men and women of varying physical sizes and fitness and inviting them to a human performance lab.

There, the volunteers sat on stationary bicycles while researchers adjusted the pedals, handlebars and seats so that everyones riding style would be the same. The researchers also attached electrodes to eight of the muscles in the volunteers legs. The electrodes were designed to read and record electrical activity in those muscles while they contracted. Then the volunteers cycled for 90 seconds multiple times at a range of pedaling speeds.

Next, they moved over to treadmills and, still wearing the electrodes, walked barefoot during multiple 90-second strolls.

Several days later, most of the volunteers returned to the lab and repeated the cycling, walking and electrodes routines.

The researchers then fed all of the muscular-activation readouts into a machine-learning software program, which is a type of artificial intelligence. For the first few examples, the program was told which readouts belonged to which person and directed the program to, in effect, learn that persons muscular-activation style, if it existed.

Finally, the programs algorithm was directed to differentiate the movement patterns, without names attached, and assign them to the correct volunteer.

It turned out to be quite adept, accurately recognizing anonymous movement patterns more than 99 percent of the time when using readouts from all eight muscles. Even when it considered activity from only two muscles, it knew the muscles owners more than 80 percent of the time.

Perhaps most important, the algorithm remained correct about 90 percent of the time when analyzing the readouts from peoples second lab visits.

Taken as a whole, these data suggest that people have distinct, detectable and durable ways of using their muscles, says Franois Hug, a professor of movement science at the University of Nantes who led the new study. The individual patterns remained recognizable even from one day to the next.

The findings are important, Dr. Hug says, because understanding how movement is controlled remains one of the main challenges for many scientific fields. Our simplest-seeming moves are bogglingly complex. A 5-year-old child can manipulate objects with superior dexterity to any robot, he says.

So, quantifying the unique ways in which people walk, pedal or hold a glass could enable scientists to improve and refine robotics, prosthetics, physical therapy and personalized exercise programs.

At a more intimate level, understanding movement signatures conceivably could improve sports training, Dr. Hug says, if it turns out that world-class athletes activate their muscles in ways that can be emulated by those of us who are less swift and graceful.

Movement signatures also might serve as coal-mine canaries for disease or injury risk, he says. He and his colleagues already are studying the relationships between certain muscle-activation patterns and Achilles' tendon problems.

But this research is in its infancy. Dr. Hug cautions. Scientists do not yet know how permanent movement signatures are; if and how they alter with age, weight change or lifestyle; or if it ever will be feasible and affordable for most of us to learn our particular movement signature.

But Dr. Hug hopes this study will remind scientists, doctors and us of every persons immutable exceptionalism.

Differences in the way people move and respond to an intervention are often ignored, he says, but they matter for addressing fundamental questions about health, aging and disease.

Read more here:
Something in the Way We Move - The New York Times

In September 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) sent an email announcing that it would no longer cover Auryxia. Auryxia is an FDA approved medicine that treats iron deficiency anemia (anemia) for patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) but who are not on dialysis.

People with CKD have damaged kidneys that no longer filter their blood properly. Currently, 30 million people in the U.S. are living with CKD, and for these patients, anemia is common. If left untreated, anemia increases the risks for cardiovascular disease, end-stage renal disease, and premature death. These patients also have increased hospitalization rates and lower overall quality of life. From a cost perspective, untreated anemia increases the annualized cost of CKD by nearly $29,000 per patient.

Even based on a cold cost-benefit analysis, simple arithmetic argues against dropping coverage of Auryxia. The manufacturers label lists the starting dose for iron deficiency anemia in CKD cases at 1 tablet 3 times per day, while the average dosage in clinical trials was 5 tablets per day. Since a supply of two hundred 210 mg tablets costs around $1,200 according to Drugs.com, the annual cost of Auryxia based on the price offered on drugs.com ranges between $6,570 - $10,950. This does not account for Medicare Part D discounts, which are usually significant, but even without the savings, Medicare would reduce spending by treating anemia with Auryxia compared to the costs associated with untreated anemia.

Alternative anemia treatments are available for Auryxia, so the actual trade-off is not between having a medicine to treat anemia and not having one. However, Auryxia is the only FDA approved oral therapy. All of the other treatments that are approved by the FDA are medicines delivered intravenously and must be administered by a physician in a clinical setting.

Intravenous products are costlier to administer because there are additional infusion administration fees that must be covered. Patients must also take time out of their day to go to the clinic or hospital and sit through the administration of an intravenous (IV) medicine. For most patients, taking a medicine orally at home (or work) is a much more preferred option than being stuck with a needle on a regular basis. Further, IV Infusion also places patients at greater risk of infection and venous injury.

Even though Medicare Part D is denying coverage to Auryxia, Medicare Part B covers the cost of these more expensive infusion drugs that are used to treat anemia. Denying coverage to Auryxia under Medicare Part D effectively pushes people toward using the more expensive infusion drugs that will be paid for by Medicare Part B. Therefore, not only is Medicare denying patients access to a medicine that might be more appropriate for them, it costs the system more money to do so.

Perhaps even more troubling for the quality of the health care system, this decision represents another instance where bureaucrats limit the ability of doctors (in this case nephrologists, or doctors who specialize in kidney care) to prescribe the treatment they deem to be the most appropriate for their patients. Ultimately, health care quality will decline should authority continue to be transferred away from doctors and patients to the health care bureaucracy.

CMS bureaucratic decision is simply illogical from a reimbursement policy perspective, absurd from a patient perspective, and inconsistent with the evaluation of the FDA as well as the medical evidence as reported in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Given that this decision is not justifiable based on the medical evidence, why would CMS decide to cut off coverage?

CMS has not been forthcoming, but as reported in Stat News, it appears that CMS considers Auryxia a mineral, like iodine or vitamin C, which Medicare typically doesnt cover. Therefore by denying coverage to Auryxia, CMS appears to believe that it is simply creating consistency across these products. This conclusion makes no sense, however. Not only has the FDA approved Auryxia as a drug, CMS currently covers it as a drug for the treatment for other complications from kidney disease.

The Auryxia case demonstrates that government bureaucracies run by their own logic, and often this logic conflicts with the interests of patients. The costs of this policy will be compounded should policies like Medicare for All or Medicare for All Who Want It be adopted. And, this problem is sure to worsen in the future as innovations in gene therapies and personalized medicine mean that doctors will need more authority to prescribe the best treatment for an individual patient, not less.

Going forward, both near-term and long-term changes are necessary. In the near-term, it is unconscionable that Medicare patients are being denied a more efficacious treatment that will actually reduce overall health care expenditures. In fact, due to its efficacy, virtually every Medicaid and commercial insurer in America currently covers Auryxia for iron deficiency anemia in CKD patients. Consequently, CMS should restore Medicare Part D coverage for Auryxia.

In the long-term, policymakers need to learn the lessons from this coverage snafu. Health care reforms that expand the governments control over treatments will lead to more and more cases like Auryxia. The best way to control health care costs and improve the quality of care is to empower patients and doctors to decide which treatments are best.

Link:
Medicares Denial Of Coverage To Kidney Patients Could Be Just The Beginning - Forbes

New York, NY /PRNewswire/ - Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world leader in serving science, and Milu Labs., whose mission is to become the leading diagnostic and analysis company focused on cutting edge technologies that address the unmet clinical needs in the Asian market, announced their intent to collaborate on projects to advance the state of clinical research diagnostic technologies with a focus on women's health.

Both parties entered a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the common interest of identifying challenges faced by medical professionals, where there are limited tools for noninvasive risk stratification to predict adverse pregnancy outcomes. The combined teams intend to explore development opportunities that will maximize Thermo Fisher's leading liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) instrumentation, and deploy multiple best in class technologies to enable a new era of personalized medicine.

"Thermo Fisher Scientific's mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer, and our intent to partner with Milu encompasses every aspect of this mission through the evaluation of technologies and clinical research diagnostic assays that are solving real world problems in the China market," said Bradley Hart, senior director, clinical research, chromatography and mass spectrometry, Thermo Fisher Scientific. Under the MOU agreement, a general framework for cooperation has been established to support the development of a clinical mass spectrometry-based proteomics assay, that brings together NX Prenatal's NeXosome platform and Thermo Fisher's analytical technology for the Chinese reproductive health segment. This enables the evaluation of novel pregnancy biomarkers during the gestation period that can correlate with adverse outcomes, such as preterm birth and preeclampsia.

"At Milu, we are committed to developing novel assays and technologies focused in the Women's Health market. Thermo Fisher Scientific shares our vision of accelerating developmental efforts of novel assay platforms with their leading analytical technology to optimize clinical mass spectrometry-based workflows. This will provide the necessary precision for clinical research diagnostic solutions to support personalized medicine strategies. In the near future, we will be expanding to support our efforts into the Oncology vertical," commented Dr. Daniel Chai, Chairman of Milu Labs.

About: Milu LabsMilu Labs is a global diagnostics company that builds, researches, and markets cutting edge technologies to screen and detect major heath conditions. The company focuses on companies in early development as well as those that are already commercialized. Milu Labs is collaborating with global academic institutions and well recognized Healthcare/AI companies to develop the appropriate strategies for regulatory, reimbursement and commercialization in China. http://www.milulabs.com

About Thermo Fisher ScientificThermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with revenues of more than $24 billion and approximately 70,000 employees globally. Our mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We help our customers accelerate life sciences research, solve complex analytical challenges, improve patient diagnostics, deliver medicines to market and increase laboratory productivity. Through our premier brands Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific and Unity Lab Services we offer an unmatched combination of innovative technologies, purchasing convenience and comprehensive services. For more information, please visit http://www.thermofisher.com.

Originally posted here:
Milu Labs And Thermo Fisher Scientific Announce Collaboration MOU To Advance The Expansion Of 'Women's Health Products' In The China Market -...

Medical technologies like smart pills, vaccines personalization, and more are opening newer ways for cancer treatment.

FREMONT, CA: Treatment options for cancer have massively evolved and improved in recent years. Today, care providers continue to explore new possibilities for cancer treatment with the help of advanced technologies. Treatments like radiation therapy, personalization of cancer vaccines, and nano-medicines, experience rapid adoptions by care providers for cancer treatment.

1. Radiation Therapy

Health care providers use radiation therapy, highly effective cancer treatment. This treatment aims accurately and directly at the cancer cells, resulting in the killing or reduction of the tumor-affected cells and tissues in the patients. The high-energy rays prove to be highly effective in reducing the risk of cancer and recurrence of common cancer, such as breast cancer, bowel cancer, and prostate cancer, and helps the surgeons remove or kill the cancer-affected tissues. The latest medical technologies for cancer integrated with radiation therapy are making the treatments more quick, accurate, and effective.

2. Ingestible Sensors and Smart Pills

Ingestible technology in the healthcare field is used to help the patients manage their medications. The new technology allows the care providers to ensure their cancer patients are taking medications as prescribed. Ingestible sensors offer close monitoring of patients' health conditions, which include sensing the growth of tumors and instantly guiding the smart pills towards precise tumor locations and heart rate, activity level, and sleep cycle of the patients. The digital pills enable real-time transmission of health information to a small patch on the patients' skin, which can be connected to a mobile app that both the patients and their doctors can access.

3. Personalized Cancer Vaccines

Developments in personalized cancer vaccines enable the next-generation cancer treatment method. The advanced vaccine is used with the computational pipeline, which can precisely identify tumor-unique mutations and successfully induce immune responses in cancer patients, helping them fight their diseases. The technique follows cell-based immune therapies that provide the patients with tumor-attacking T cells, and the delivered neo-antigens in the patients body create vaccines to stimulate the T cells. The advanced vaccines are given in the form of messenger RNA that produces a particular protein according to the patients physiological requirements.

4. Nano-Medicines

The innovative and promising technology, nano-medicine provides many advantages over conventional cancer therapies and new opportunities for early detection, improved treatment, and diagnosis of cancer. The benefits of nano-medicines for cancer treatment attract care providers, as the unique physical, chemical, mechanical, and optical properties of these medicines are easier to access with more efficiency. The innovative medicine uses nano-carriers to deliver therapeutic molecules, such as drugs, proteins, or nucleic acids. The nano-structures for the cancer treatment can also be exploited to favor the delivery of immune agents and represent therapeutic tool.

Technology leads the cancer treatment sector towards a bright future, where the increasing advantages of innovative cancer treatment solutions can be accessed easily across the world. Nanotechnology, targeted radiation, personalized vaccines are revolutionizing the medical technology industry, promising the possibilities of more solutions that can successfully fight cancer and prevent its reoccurrence. The ever-evolving field of cancer treatments consistently puts effort into exploring innovative diagnostics and treatments, leading to more creative solutions like molecular cancer diagnostics, identify genetic and lifestyle causes of diseases, and perform precision surgery.

Link:
4 Innovative Solutions Fostering Advanced Cancer Treatment - Medical Tech Outlook

A university committee is seeking comments as part of a regular performance review of Vice President for Finance Tim Walsh. Reviews of senior administrators are typically conducted in the fourth year of a five-year term, and the results complied in a confidential report.

This will be the second such review for Walsh, who has served in his current post since 2011.

Executive Vice President Tallman Trask asked Peter Feaver, professor of Political Science, to chair the committee. Other members are: Kerry Abrams (School of Law); Billy Newton (School of Medicine); Scott Greenwood (Duke University Alumni Association); Joanna Rojas (Office of Audit, Risk and Compliance); Beth Sullivan (Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology); and Laura Meyer Wellman (Board of Trustees).

Walsh joined Duke in 2004 as assistant vice president and controller. In 2011, he was promoted to vice president for finance, where he oversees an array of accounting, reporting and financial functions, including the treasury, budgeting, procurement, real estate, stores and licensing, administrative systems, research costing and compliance, auxiliaries finance and controller's functions.

At Duke, Walsh has, among other things, co-chaired efforts to streamline core financial and administrative processes that support the university's international activities; chaired the Research Administration Continuous Improvement (RACI) initiative, which promotes the efficient and effective administration of Duke's $1.1 billion research enterprise; and overseen the implementation of monthly reporting processes that provide greater transparency of the university's comprehensive financial performance to executive administrators and trustees.

An important part of the review process is the gathering of opinions from the universitys many constituencies. Comments on performance and suggestions for the future are important to the committees work. Communication should include the nature of interactions with Walsh and his team so that the committee can best understand the context of the comments.

The committee will discuss responses and a summary will be included in the written report to the executive vice president. The committee will hold all communication in strict confidence.

Comments should be submitted by Nov. 8, 2019. Please send any communications to:

Peter Feaver, Chair

Walsh Review Committee

Box 90204

Durham, North Carolina 27708

admin-review@duke.edu

Go here to read the rest:
Comments Sought in Regular Review of Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Tim Walsh - Duke Today

SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 28, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Myriad Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ: MYGN), a leader in molecular diagnostics and precision medicine, today announced that it will present results from seven studies at the 2019 National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) annual meeting being held Nov. 58, 2019 in Salt Lake City.

"We are excited to present new data from seven studies at this years NSGC meeting," said Susan Manley, MS, CGC, MBA, senior vice president of Medical Services at Myriad Genetics. Our presentations highlight the companys commitment to advancing precision medicine in oncology and womens health.

A list of presentations at 2019 NSGC is below. Please visit Myriad Genetics at booth #711 to learn more about our leading portfolio of precision medicine products. Follow Myriad on Twitter via @myriadgenetics and follow meeting news by using the hashtag #NSGC19.

myRiskHereditaryCancer

ForesightCarrierScreen

AishwaryaArjunan

PrequelTMPrenatalScreen

About Myriad myRisk Hereditary CancerThe Myriad myRisk Hereditary Cancer test uses an extensive number of sophisticated technologies and proprietary algorithms to evaluate 35 clinically significant genes associated with eight hereditary cancer sites including: breast, colon, ovarian, endometrial, pancreatic, prostate and gastric cancers and melanoma.

AboutForesight Carrier ScreenThe Myriad Foresight Carrier Screen is designed to maximize detection of at-risk couples for serious, prevalent, and clinically-actionable conditions. Foresight has a rigorous disease selection that focuses on 175+ conditions that provides meaningful information to patients. Additionally, Foresight offers superior technology with unmatched detection rates for the vast majority of genes on the panel (>99% across ethnicities) which means patients can trust both positive and negative results.

About PrequelTM Prenatal ScreenThe Myriad Prequel Prenatal Screen is a noninvasive prenatal screen that uses cell-free DNA (cfDNA) to determine if a pregnancy is at an increased risk for chromosome abnormalities, such as Down syndrome. Prequel has been shown to be superior to screening methods that use maternal age, ultrasound and serum screening. Additionally, Prequel has a lower false-positive rate and false-negative rate than these other methods. The Prequel Prenatal Screen can be ordered with the Foresight Carrier Screen and offered to all women, including those with high body mass index, and ovum donor or a twin pregnancy.

About Myriad GeneticsMyriad Genetics Inc. is a leading precision medicine company dedicated to being a trusted advisor transforming patient lives worldwide with pioneering molecular diagnostics. Myriad discovers and commercializes molecular diagnostic tests that: determine the risk of developing disease, accurately diagnose disease, assess the risk of disease progression, and guide treatment decisions across six major medical specialties where molecular diagnostics can significantly improve patient care and lower healthcare costs. Myriad is focused on five critical success factors: building upon a solid hereditary cancer foundation, growing new product volume, expanding reimbursement coverage for new products, increasing RNA kit revenue internationally and improving profitability with Elevate 2020. For more information on how Myriad is making a difference, please visit the Company's website: http://www.myriad.com.

Myriad, the Myriad logo, BART, BRACAnalysis, Colaris, Colaris AP, myPath, myRisk, Myriad myRisk, myRisk Hereditary Cancer, myChoice, myPlan, BRACAnalysis CDx, Tumor BRACAnalysis CDx, myChoice HRD, EndoPredict, Vectra, GeneSight, riskScore, Prolaris, Foresight and Prequel are trademarks or registered trademarks of Myriad Genetics, Inc. or its wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States and foreign countries. MYGN-F, MYGN-G.

Safe Harbor StatementThis press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to data being presented for its genetic tests at the 2019 National Society of Genetic Counselors Meeting being held Nov. 58, 2019 in Salt Lake City; and the Company's strategic directives under the caption "About Myriad Genetics." These "forward-looking statements" are based on management's current expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the risk that sales and profit margins of our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services may decline; risks related to our ability to transition from our existing product portfolio to our new tests, including unexpected costs and delays; risks related to decisions or changes in governmental or private insurers reimbursement levels for our tests or our ability to obtain reimbursement for our new tests at comparable levels to our existing tests; risks related to increased competition and the development of new competing tests and services; the risk that we may be unable to develop or achieve commercial success for additional molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services in a timely manner, or at all; the risk that we may not successfully develop new markets for our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services, including our ability to successfully generate revenue outside the United States; the risk that licenses to the technology underlying our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services and any future tests and services are terminated or cannot be maintained on satisfactory terms; risks related to delays or other problems with operating our laboratory testing facilities and our healthcare clinic; risks related to public concern over genetic testing in general or our tests in particular; risks related to regulatory requirements or enforcement in the United States and foreign countries and changes in the structure of the healthcare system or healthcare payment systems; risks related to our ability to obtain new corporate collaborations or licenses and acquire new technologies or businesses on satisfactory terms, if at all; risks related to our ability to successfully integrate and derive benefits from any technologies or businesses that we license or acquire; risks related to our projections about our business, results of operations and financial condition; risks related to the potential market opportunity for our products and services; the risk that we or our licensors may be unable to protect or that third parties will infringe the proprietary technologies underlying our tests; the risk of patent-infringement claims or challenges to the validity of our patents or other intellectual property; risks related to changes in intellectual property laws covering our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services and patents or enforcement in the United States and foreign countries, such as the Supreme Court decision in the lawsuit brought against us by the Association for Molecular Pathology et al; risks of new, changing and competitive technologies and regulations in the United States and internationally; the risk that we may be unable to comply with financial operating covenants under our credit or lending agreements; the risk that we will be unable to pay, when due, amounts due under our credit or lending agreements; and other factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" contained in Item 1A of our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as any updates to those risk factors filed from time to time in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q or Current Reports on Form 8-K. All information in this press release is as of the date of the release, and Myriad undertakes no duty to update this information unless required by law.

Read more here:
Myriad Genetics to Present Seven Studies at the 2019 National Society of Genetic Counselors Annual Meeting - BioSpace

A machine learning-based unenhanced computed tomography (CT) texture analysis may be a useful tool for predicting BRCA1-associated protein I (BAP1) mutations status in patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), according to a recent study.

Previous research has shown that a BAP1 mutation is an unfavorable factor for survival in patients with clear cell RCC; however, existing literature on BAP1 mutation lacks studies that consider the reliability of texture features in their workflow.

This study attempted to conduct texture analysis on samples of RCC. Texture analysis is a quantitative image processing method that identifies repetitive patterns that may not be perceptible with the human eye.

Recognizing molecular genetics of ccRCCs holds promise to classify patients more accurately, offering a better prediction of patient prognosis and personalized treatment strategies, the researchers wrote.

They used texture features with a high interobserver agreement to develop and validate a machine learning-based radiomic model to predict BAP1 mutations status. They analyzed 65 patient samples.

Out of 744 textures features identified, 468 had an excellent interobserver agreement. Using selected features, a random forest plot correctly classified 84.6% of the labelled slices for BAP1 mutation status; the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.897.

For predicting clear cell RCCs with BAP1 mutation, sensitivity was 90.4%, specificity was 78.8%, and precision was 81%. For predicting clear cell RCCs without BAP1 mutation, the sensitivity was 78.8%, specificity 90.4%, and precision 89.1%.

The researchers acknowledged the small number of patients in the study and its retrospective design as potential limitations.

Reference

Kocak B, Durmaz ES, Kaya OK, Kilickesmez O. Machine learning-based unenhanced CT texture analysis for predicting BAP I mutation status of clear cell renal cell carcinomas [published online October 21, 2019]. Acta Radiol. doi: 10.1177/0284185119881742

More here:
Machine-Based CT May Help Identify BAP1 Mutation Status in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma - Cancer Therapy Advisor

Editors note: We are delighted to welcome Otangelo Grasso, a graduate of the Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design, as a contributor.

As journalist Carl Zimmer reported not long ago in the New York Times,Wired Bacteria Form Natures Power Grid: We Have an Electric Planet. Electroactive bacteria were running current through wires long before humans discovered electricity. Now that is worthy of note and analysis. How did they learn this very sophisticated trick?

In a tweet, Zimmer did not hide his amazement, admitting that that the discovery thatmicrobes build electric wires all over the world is mind-blowing. Though an outspoken advocate of unguided Darwinian evolution, Zimmer in his article did not explain how bacteria might have gotten that ability by evolutionary means.

Zimmer isnt the only one to confess his astonishment. Electroactive bacteria were unknown until 1993, when Derek Lovley at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst discovered and describedGeobactermetallireducens. As Lovley told New Scientist in 2010:

They grow biological wires to share energy in the form of electrons. I think its probably one ofthe most surprising things Ive seen working in microbiology. [Emphasis added.]

Some background on respiration may be helpful here. For advanced multicellular organisms, oxygen is essential to life. During aerobic respiration, it is the final acceptor of electrons in the electron transport chain. In anaerobic (non-oxygen breathing) respiration, on the other hand, as in some bacteria, a variety of acceptors other than oxygen exist. Such bacteria thus can survive without oxygen, which is good thing for them. Some bacteria grow in places where there is no oxygen, or too little oxygen for respiration, or where other chemicals that will do the job are more abundant. Indeed oxygen is poisonous to many bacteria. One group ofanaerobic bacteriaare electroactive. Living meters below the Earths surface, and even on the ocean floor, these bacteria are adapted to live in environments inhospitable to most other life forms.

Geobacterbacteria breathe using elements such as iron, sulfur, and uranium. They employ microbial nanowires that conduct electricity (as flowing electrons). Geobacter nanowires are filaments called pili, according to Wikipedia. Pili (plural of pilus) is Latin for hairs. These hairs are thin rod-like appendages, about 1/100,000 the width of a human hair.

Bacteria may have dozensof pili on their surfaces. Bacteria use pili for various functions, including adhesion to surfaces, DNA transfer, locomotion, and gliding. In the most fascinating case, that of electroactive bacteria, they make electrical connections with minerals.

According to another 2010 article in New Scientist:

Some researchers believe that bacteria in ocean sediments are connected by a network of microbial nanowires. These fine protein filaments could shuttle electrons back and forth, allowing communities of bacteria to act as one super-organism. Now Lars Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University in Denmark and his team have found tantalising evidence to support this controversial theory.The discovery has been almost magic,says Nielsen. It goes against everything we have learned so far.Microorganisms can live in electric symbiosis across great distances.Our understanding of what their life is like, what they can and cant do these are all things we have to think of in a different way now.

Specialized pili of the bacteriumGeobacter sulfurreducensconduct electrons from inside the cell to the iron external to the cell. The metal functions as the terminal electron acceptor for respiration. This, again, is in contrast to humans (and most animals, fungi, and plants) where the terminal electron acceptor is oxygen. In our case, during respiration, electrons are removed from oxidized fuels, such as hydrocarbons, or glucose, inside cells. Oxidation entails the loss of electrons. These electrons are then combined with oxygen, from the air you breathe. The oxygen is reduced to water, since reduction is the gain of electrons. Without a terminal electron acceptor, the flow of electrons stops. This means respiration stops, along with the supply of energy from fuels.

If the terminal electron acceptor is solid, like iron, then it cannot be easily imported into the cell. The solution is to leave it outside the cell and to send the electrons to it. The specialized pili conduct electrons from the respiratory system that is, the electron transport system required to make ATP, the energy currency in the cell to the final electron acceptor. Nanowires are among the smallest known electrical wires. And remember, they were doing their job long before humans discovered electricity.

The architecture involved in nanowires is anultracomplex, microtechnological marvel.Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Virginia made a significant advance in unraveling nanowire structure.Nanowires, it turns out, have a core of precisely stacked, ordered, and spaced metal-containing hemes (the active part of hemoglobin in red blood cells). These line up to create a continuous path along which electrons travel:

The technology [to understand nanowires] didnt exist until about five years ago, when advances in cryo-electron microscopy allowed high resolution, said [Edward H.] Egelman, of UVAs Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. We have one of these instruments here at UVA, and, therefore, the ability to actually understand at the atomic level the structure of these filaments. According to the report of his research, Scientists had believedGeobacter sulfurreducensconducted electricity through common, hair-like appendages called pili. Instead, a researcher at the School of Medicine and his collaborators have determined that the bacteria transmit electricity throughimmaculately ordered fibersmade of an entirely different protein. These proteins surround a core of metal-containing molecules, much like an electric cord contains metal wires. This nanowire, however, is 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

So Geobacter used highly specialized pili, rather than ordinary pili, to conduct electricity.

The UVA scientists published their results in the journal Cell. The technical details give a sense of the complexity involved:

G.sulfurreducensnanowires are assembled bymicrometer-longpolymerization of thehexahemecytochromeOmcS, with hemes packed within 3.56 [ 1 = 1010m] of each other. The inter-subunit interfaces show unique structural elements such as inter-subunit parallel-stacked hemes andaxial coordination of hemeby histidines fromneighboringsubunits. Wild-type OmcS filaments show100-fold greater conductivitythan other filaments from a DomcS strain, highlighting the importance of OmcS to conductivity in these nanowires. This structure explains theremarkable capacity of soil bacteria to transport electronsto remote electron acceptors for respiration and energy sharing.

Facing daunting technical problems, nature comes up with solutions that are in most cases far more advanced than those in equivalent devices made by man.For example, the journal Environmental Science, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, reports that some microbes can link with each other to form longer, living electrical cables that allow them to penetrate even deeper into oxygen-free areas. As researchers came to appreciate such ingenious innovations, biomimetics has become a growing field of scientific investigation. Nanowires, among the other wonders of biology, have much to teach us. As Derek Lovleyhas explained:

Microbial nanowires are arevolutionary electronic material with substantial advantages over man-made materials.Chemically synthesizing nanowires in the lab requires toxic chemicals, high temperatures and/or expensive metals. The energy requirements are enormous. By contrast,natural microbial nanowires can be mass-produced at room temperature from inexpensive renewable feedstocks in bioreactors with much lower energy inputs.And the final product is free of toxic components.

How electrons in this context are transported across long distances was unknown until the 1990s, after many physiological, biochemical, and electrochemical experiments. For electron transfer to work, the architecture ofG. sulfurreducenspili must be precisely arranged. As in other living systems, this order is only functional once it is fully set up. How unguided evolutionary mechanisms could produce such a system remains very unclear. One of the few papers to address the origin of electron-conductive pili makes the following claim:

The results suggest that e-pili ofGeobacter sulfurreducensand Geobacter metallireducens, and presumably close relatives, are a relatively recent evolutionary development.

But considerable nanotechnology is required to assemble these marvelous wires. The claim above is not accompanied by any detailed or convincing explanation of how this evolutionary development was accomplished.

Somehow,G.sulfurreducens know how to assemble molecules in their pili in an exact sequential and functional order. The steps involved require the assistance of many elements, including assembly chaperones.Whether these amazing pili can be explained by evolution, without recourse to intelligent design, is of course the key question. The irreducible precision of their construction, though, strongly suggests design. The wires require their several parts to be arranged in just the right way, ordered and stacked in the right sequence, to be able to conduct electrons. Several experiments have demonstrated that if this arrangement of the filaments is not exactly right, electron transfer is not possible.

So, where did nanowires come from? How did they arise? That is a question worth putting to Carl Zimmer.

Image: Nanowires, by Asw-hamburg [CC BY-SA 4.0],via Wikimedia Commons.

Read more here:
Electroactive Bacteria: A Mind-Blowing Case of Intelligent Design - Discovery Institute

OPINION: Recently, there has been a shift in society's view of genetic modification and its potential applications in the fight against climate change. This has led to a call for changes in our current policies from farmers and MPs alike.However, due to the Green Party's current stance on this topic, New Zealand is unable to utilise genetic modification for anything that is not laboratory-based.

I am a member of the Emerging Scientists for Climate Action society, which involves students from universities all over New Zealand. We are writing an open letter to the Greens to encourage them to review their stance on genetic modification and the current laws and regulations around genetic engineering. Our overarching goal to tackle climate change aligns with the Greens, and they are in a position to make positive change. We have 155signatures from emerging scientists (aged under 30) in support.

Genetic modification is a controversial topic, and there is much misunderstandingabout its techniques and applications.Genetic modification (aka genetic engineering) uses gene editing technologies and knowledge of genetics to make changes in an organism for a specific outcome. For example, a plant could be genetically modified to grow bigger to produce a higher yield. There are many gene-editing techniques that can be utilised, which further adds to the misconceptions around its applications. There is warranted concern over the long-term impacts of manipulating organisms at the molecular level, however, does this mean that we should disregard genetic modification altogether?

READ MORE:* New Zealand's anti-science GMO laws need to change to tackle climate change* Gene-editing risks are still too great to warrant a change in the law* Time for a grown-up conversation about gene editing

Our laws and regulations around genetic modification were established in 2001 and fall under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. That lawregulates research and release of all living things that do not already exist in New Zealand, including those that are genetically modified. However, these regulations have not accounted for the rapid advances in gene editing technology over the last decade, leaving New Zealand behind in the biotechnological sector. The calls for law changes come from all over New Zealand, including government agents such as Professor Juliet Gerrard, the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor. Current legal and regulatory frameworks are struggling to keep up with current technologies.

The focus on genetic modification has largely been on food production, such as pesticide-resistant crops and increased growth for higher crop yields. But the scope of genetic engineering expands far beyond this. Genetic engineering techniques have many benefits,including to mitigate the effects of climate change. For example, there has been research into genetically modifying plants to sequester more carbon from the environment, which would assist with lowering rising temperatures.

SUPPLIED

Deborah PaullPostgraduate student - Masters of Science in Microbiology, at the University of Canterbury.

I have been working on projects involving genetic modification, specifically, around genetically modifying milk proteins to reduce the allergenicity. The goal is to produce these proteins through a cellular-agriculture based system that can produce milk products in a more sustainable fashion in comparison to current methods. When discussing this project with people within the dairy industry, the overall remark is that it's a great idea but it will never be produced in New Zealand. It is disheartening to see that the potential benefits of using technology such as this to address climate change hasn't been considered due to our laws.

But it is now 2019, and we have advanced our technology and understanding of genetics in ways we couldn't have imagined. A new generation of emerging scientists has new values and ethical drives, especially focused on preserving our planet for future generations. To mitigate the effects of climate change, we need new and optimised technologies, such as genetic engineering. This is a practical action that could be implemented through highly controlled policy.

It is time to reframe the conversation around genetic modificationIf we hope to reach the carbon neutral targets set in the UN by 2050 while meeting the demands of the increasing population in a sustainable fashion, this is a conversation that we need to have now. The Royal Society has started this discussion, identifying the cultural values involved with using genetic engineering technologies but emphasisinghow New Zealand needs to shift its current view of this technology.

The goal is not to be carelessly modifying organisms for the benefit of a few -it is to utilise knowledge and technology so that as a country we can take a step forward. New Zealand is a world leader in green agricultural technologies. As a forward-thinking country, let's break the stigma surrounding genetic modification and create a better future for ourselves and the generations to come.

DeborahPaullis studying for aMasters of Science in Microbiologyat the University of Canterbury.

Read this article:
Time to break the stigma on genetic modification, for the sake of the climate - Stuff.co.nz

Scientists at theHudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnologyhave pinpointed epigenetic differences in the way lupus affects black women compared to other lupus patients, revealing important mechanics of the puzzling disease. Epidemiologists have identified that lupus impacts black women with greater frequency and severity than other populations. Scientists inDevin Absher's Labat HudsonAlpha published findings in August showing that increased risk and harm to lupus patients can be linked to epigenetic differences--essentially, the degree to which certain genes are functioning.

The finding, published inArthritis & Rheumatology, helps create a more complete understanding of an often misunderstood disease, revealing some of the mechanisms that contribute to it. It also reveals a gap in genetic research, highlighting the lack of information scientists have regarding racial differences on the genetic level.

Devastating Disease

Lupus is an autoimmune disorder, meaning that the immune system attacks healthy cells in the body. It causes symptoms that are often difficult to quantify, including fatigue and extreme joint pain.

Lupus is one of the most historically chronicled diseases, having first been documented by Socrates in 400 BC. The disease gets its name from a common rash that forms on the face which is said to resemble the markings of wolves, hence the latin name "lupus" meaning wolf.

There are more than 200,000 cases of lupus in the US every year, yet there is no universally accepted cause or cure. The disease is chronic, meaning it can last for years or even an entire lifetime.

Megan Breitbach, PhD, is the lead author on the paper. She notes, "The diagnostic process can also prove long and tedious, because the symptoms come and go and often can only be observed through patient description."

"On average," she adds, "it takes six years to diagnose someone with lupus."

While treatment can help manage lupus, the condition cannot be cured. Instead, patients and their physicians try to address symptoms and take the edge off flare-ups.

Molecular Differences

While the disease on the whole remains a mystery, scientists hope to find some answers in the ways that the condition affects different populations. In the United States, lupus has a much higher prevalence in non-white populations. In fact, lupus is the 5th leading cause of death for black women ages 15-24.

Ancestry can dramatically impact disease genetics, so understanding why the disease affects populations differently could go a long way toward telling us what genetic factors play a part in developing the condition.

In the case of lupus, the body's immune B cells function distinctive epigenetic signatures of the disease are found in B cells, which are part of the immune system. The analysis performed by the Absher Lab revealed lupus-specific differences in methylation throughout B cell development between black and white women.

Methylation changes can alter the degree to which a stretch of DNA functions without changing the genetic code itself. This research shows the most significant changes in methylation occur around genes related to Interferons, which are proteins that regulate immune response.

These differences in B cell development could help explain the more severe symptoms and earlier age of onset for lupus in black women.

"What we found," explains Devin Absher, PhD, "was that there are a number of methylation changes we can link to lupus. When you isolate them, you see that the changes are far greater in black women. The population differences could be key to a more complete understanding of the disease on the whole."

Gaps in Understanding

The genetic gap between these two groups of patients with lupus illustrates a broader gap in knowledge. One key limitation of genetics stems from a lack of diverse data, which hurts all populations.

Disease genetics frequently relies on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to link genes with various health conditions. However the most recent aggregations of GWAS show nearly 88% of participants come from European ancestry. These eurocentric results can make it harder to identify genetic components of diseases that disproportionately affect underrepresented populations.

A lack of diversity in genetic research slows progress across the board. The unique genetic factories of all kinds of ancestry can help us better understand the human genome and even find potential ways to share the benefits of natural resistance. For example, Americans of African descent were found to have mutations on their PCSK9 genes which led to lower levels of cholesterol in their bloodstream. With that information, researchers developed PCSK9 inhibitors to lower cholesterol and heart disease risk across ancestries.

This lupus research from the Devin Absher Lab further illustrates the importance of understanding racial diversity when examining genetic components for diseases.

Absher is involved in a number of efforts to drive greater diversity in genetic research, including the Alabama Genomic Health Initiative, which aims to bring the value of genetic sequencing to diverse populations across the state.

The Way Forward

This lupus research helps open the door for future exploration of methylation around Interferon sites as it relates to the disease. However, the finding is only possible because of an active consideration of the value of diversity in genetic research. HudsonAlpha remains dedicated to bringing the value of genomics to all, as a diverse approach to research opens doors that would otherwise remain closed.

2018 NatureWorldNews.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Read the rest here:
Lupus Study Illustrates the Importance of Diversity in Genetic Research - Nature World News

MPST gene expression (which leads to hydrogen sulphide production) was higher in postmortem brains from people with schizophrenia than in those from unaffected people. MPST protein levels in these brains also correlated well with the severity of premortem symptoms. Credit: RIKEN

Working with model mice, post-mortem human brains, and people with schizophrenia, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan have discovered that a subtype of schizophrenia is related to abnormally high levels hydrogen sulfide in the brain. Experiments showed that this abnormality likely results from a DNA-modifying reaction during development that lasts throughout life. In addition to providing a new direction for research into drug therapies, higher than normal levels of the hydrogen sulfide-producing enzyme can act as a biomarker for this type of schizophrenia.

Diagnosing disorders of thought is easier when a reliable and objective marker can be found. In the case of schizophrenia, we have known for more than 30 years that it is associated with an abnormal startle response. Normally, we are not startled as much by a burst of noise if a smaller burstcalled a prepulsecomes a little bit earlier. This phenomenon is called prepulse inhibition (PPI) because the early pulse inhibits the startle response. In people with schizophrenia, PPI is lowed, meaning that their startle response is not dampened as much as it should be after the prepulse.

The PPI test is a good behavioral marker, and although it cannot directly help us understand the biology behind schizophrenia, it was the starting point that led to current discoveries.

The researchers at RIKEN CBS began first looked for differences in protein expression between strains of mice that exhibit extremely low or extremely high PPI. Ultimately, they found that the enzyme Mpst was expressed much more in the brains of the mouse strain with low PPI than in the strain with high PPI. Knowing that this enzyme helps produce hydrogen sulfide, the team then measured hydrogen sulfide levels and found that they were higher in the low-PPI mice.

Nobody has ever thought about a causal link between hydrogen sulfide and schizophrenia, says team leader Takeo Toshikawa. Once we discovered this, we had to figure out how it happens and if these findings in mice would hold true for people with schizophrenia.

First, to be sure that Mpst was the culprit, the researchers created an Mpst knockout version of the low-PPI mice and showed that their PPI was higher than that in regular low-PPI mice. Thus, reducing the amount of Mpst helped the mice become more normal. Next, they found that MPST gene expression was indeed higher in postmortem brains from people with schizophrenia than in those from unaffected people. MPST protein levels in these brains also correlated well with the severity of premortem symptoms.

Now the team had enough information to look at MPST expression as a biomarker for schizophrenia. They examined hair follicles from more than 150 people with schizophrenia and found that expression of MPST mRNA was much higher than people without schizophrenia. Even though the results were not perfectindicating that sulfide stress does not account for all cases of schizophreniaMPST levels in hair could be a good biomarker for schizophrenia before other symptoms appear.

Whether a person develops schizophrenia is related to both their genetics and the environment. Testing in mice and postmortem brains indicated that high MPST levels were associated with changes in DNA that lead to permanently altered gene expression. So, the next step was for the team to search for environmental factors that could result in permanently increased MPST production.

Because hydrogen sulfide can actually protect against inflammatory stress, the group hypothesized that inflammatory stress during early development might be the root cause. We found that anti-oxidative markersincluding the production of hydrogen sulfidethat compensate against oxidative stress and neuroinflammation during brain development were correlated with MPST levels in the brains of people with schizophrenia, says Yoshikawa.

He proposes that once excess hydrogen sulfide production is primed, it persists throughout life due to permanent epigenetic changes to DNA, leading to sulfide stress induced schizophrenia.

Current treatments for schizophrenia focus on the dopamine and serotonin system in the brain. Because these drugs are not very effective and have side effects, Yoshikawa says that pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the development of new drugs. A new paradigm is needed for the development of novel drugs, he explains. Currently, about 30% of patients with schizophrenia are resistant to dopamine D2-receptor antagonist therapy. Our results provide a new principle or paradigm for designing drugs, and we are currently testing whether inhibiting the synthesis of hydrogen sulfide can alleviate symptoms in mouse models of schizophrenia.

###

This study was published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine today, October 28, 2019.

Reference: Excess hydrogen sulfide and polysulfides production underlies a schizophrenia pathophysiology by Masayuki Ide, Tetsuo Ohnishi, Manabu Toyoshima, Shabeesh Balan, Motoko Maekawa, Chie Shimamoto-Mitsuyama, Yoshimi Iwayama, Hisako Ohba, Akiko Watanabe, Takashi Ishii, Norihiro Shibuya, Yuka Kimura, Yasuko Hisano, Yui Murata, Tomonori Hara, Momo Morikawa, Kenji Hashimoto, Yayoi Nozaki, Tomoko Toyota, Yuina Wada, Yosuke Tanaka, Tadafumi Kato, Akinori Nishi, Shigeyoshi Fujisawa, Hideyuki Okano, Masanari Itokawa, Nobutaka Hirokawa, Yasuto Kunii, Akiyoshi Kakita, Hirooki Yabe, Kazuya Iwamoto, Kohji Meno, Takuya Katagiri, Brian Dean, Kazuhiko Uchida, Hideo Kimura and Takeo Yoshikawa, 28 October 2019, EMBO Molecular Medicine.DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201910695

Read the original here:
Discovery Leads to Schizophrenia Biomarker and New Insights on Cause and Treatment - SciTechDaily

Imagine youre a smiley-faced, feathery-gilled Mexican salamander called an axolotl. Youve just been born, along with hundreds of brothers and sisters. But salamanders like you live in the wild only in one lake near Mexico City, and that habitat isnt big enough for all of you. Theres not enough food. Only the strongest can survive. What do you do?

If youre an axolotl, you have two choiceseat your siblings arms, or have your arms eaten.

But even if you are the unfortunate victim of this sibling violence, not all hope is lost. In a few months, youll grow a whole new armbones, muscle, skin, nerves and all.

Its pretty gruesome, but cannibalism is a possible reason why they grow their arms back, says associate biology professor James Monaghan. His lab studies regeneration in axolotls, a peculiar species that can grow back limbs and other organs to various degrees.

When an injury occurs, some cues are released in that animal that tells cells near the injury to go from a resting state into a regenerative state, Monaghan says.

His lab is trying to figure out what those cues are, and how we might induce that response in humans, who have very limited regenerative abilities.

Humans are notoriously bad at regenerating, Monaghan says. After were done growing, the genes that tell our cells to grow new organs are turned off.

Thats a good thing because otherwise itd be chaos, he says. No one wants to spontaneously grow an extra finger.

Axolotls can turn back on those genes that we turn off permanently, Monaghan says.

Understanding the specific mechanisms that induce regenerative responses in axolotls is no small task since axolotls have the largest genome ever sequenced.

So far, the lab has identified one molecule, neuregulin-1, which is essential for regeneration of limbs, lungs, and possibly hearts.

When we removed it, regeneration stopped. And when we added it back in, it induced the regenerative response, Monaghan says. Im not saying its a golden bullet for inducing regeneration in humans, too, but it could be part of the puzzle.

A lot of researchers study limb regeneration in axolotls. But Monaghans lab is interested in extending this research to other organs, as well.

When you think of the human condition, most of our issues with disease are with internal organs, Monaghan says.

Take retina regeneration, for example. Monaghan says we can either learn the process axolotls undergo that allows their specialized cells to return back to developmental cells, and then mimic that process in human eyes. Or, we can learn which elements of the axolotl enable their cells to behave this way, and then add those elements to human stem cell therapy.

To test the latter, Monaghan has teamed up with a Northeastern associate professor of chemical engineering, Rebecca Carrier, and her lab to figure out the best way to transplant mammalian retinal cells using molecules found in the axolotl.

In the experiment, Monaghan and Carrier used pig eyes, which are similar to human eyes. When they transplanted stem cells from the retina of one pig into the retina of another, 99 percent of the transplanted cells died. Somethings missing, Monaghan says. The cells dont have the right cues.

But when Carrier and Monaghan injected those same pig stem cells into the axolotl eye, fewer cells died. They were much happier, Monaghan says. Theres something in the axolotl retina that the mammalian cells like.

One reason axolotls are so good at receiving transplants is because, unlike humans, they dont have a learned immune system, meaning they cant distinguish between themselves and foreign entities.

Its really easy to do grafts between animals because the axolotls cant tell that the new tissue isnt theirs, he says. They dont reject it like we might.

An obvious example of this can be seen in axolotls that are genetically modified with a green fluorescent protein found in jellyfish. These naturally white axolotls glow neon green in certain lighting.

With this we can ask really basic questions, like do cells change their fate when they participate in regeneration? Monaghan says.

For example, if Monaghan grafts muscle tissue from a green fluorescent animal onto a white axolotl and then that axolotl regenerates, does the axolotl grow green muscle? Do its bones glow green, too? What about its skin?

Researchers have found, however, that cells dont actually change. Green muscle yields green muscle only.

The axolotl isnt the only animal that can regrow organs. Starfish, worms, frogs, and other species of salamanders can also regenerate. But axolotls are special because, unlike other animals, they can regrow organs that are just as robust as the originals, no matter how old they get.

For example, tadpoles can regenerate limbs. But once they undergo metamorphosis and become frogs, they can only regrow a spike, Monaghan says. They lose the ability to grow back their digits.

The axolotls ability to fully regrow organs, even as it ages, could be partially due to its perpetual juvenile state. Axolotls, unlike most other amphibians, dont undergo metamorphosis naturally, which means they never technically reach adulthood, even though they can reproduce. This condition is called neoteny.

Axolotls come from a species that used to walk on land, Monaghan says. They do have legs, after all. But some mutation occurred that keeps them in the lake and from reaching adulthood.

To test whether their neotenic state is responsible for their ability to regenerate, Monaghan took a group of axolotl siblings and induced metamorphosis in one half by exposing them to thyroid hormones, a chemical that flips on the maturity switch in these amphibians. The other half was kept in the juvenile state.

In the experiment, the juveniles regenerated normally, but all of their adult siblings regenerated slower than usual, and had deformities in their regrown limbs.

There is some association with neoteny and the ability to regenerate, Monaghan says. But its not the main factor.

That main factor is yet to be discovered. But even though some of this might sound like science fiction, you already made an arm once, Monaghan says. If we could just learn how to turn back on those programs, our bodies might do the rest of the work.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

Read the rest here:
Meet the axolotl: A cannibalistic salamander that regenerates its limbs and might help us better understand human stem cell therapy -...

A new antiviral drug that induces mutations in the genetic material of influenza virus is highly effective in treating influenza infection in animals and human airway tissue and could be a groundbreaking advance in influenza therapy, according to a study by theInstitute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

The antiviral drug blocks RNA polymerase, the enzyme that plays a central role in replicating the genome of influenza virus, causing mutations in the viral genome. If enough mutations occur, the genome becomes nonfunctional and the virus cannot replicate. The findings were published online on Oct. 23 inScience Translational Medicine.

The compound is highly efficacious against influenza, said Dr. Richard Plemper, senior author of the study and a professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences. Its orally available, its broad spectrum against all influenza virus strains tested, and most important it establishes a high barrier against viral escape from inhibition.

Influenza, caused by a contagious respiratory virus, is characterized by fever, cough, headache, muscle and joint pain, severe malaise, sore throat and sometimes gastrointestinal symptoms. Patients in higher risk groups, such as older adults and individuals with compromised immune systems, frequently require hospitalization. Each year, seasonal influenza results in 30,000 to 80,000 fatalities in the United States. The seasonal flu vaccine is only moderately effective, and licensed antivirals are compromised by rapidly emerging viral resistance to the drugs.

In the study, the new antiviral drug was tested in ferrets, the most informative animal model for human influenza disease, against various strains that include seasonal and pandemic viruses, such as the swine-origin influenza virus responsible for a 2009 pandemic. The researchers found that the antiviral drug efficiently inhibited replication of all of these strains. Virus burden dropped rapidly after treatment, and the duration of fever was significantly shorter in treated ferrets than in control animals that did not receive the drug.

We think that the next generation of influenza antiviral drugs must not only be efficacious and safe, but also address the resistance problem, said Dr. Mart Toots, first author of the study and a research assistant professor associated with Dr. Plempers lab in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences.

That is where the new drug comes in. Through a combination of conventional and ultra-deep sequencing, Toots has demonstrated in collaboration with Dr. Alex Greninger at the University of Washington that it is very challenging for the virus to find a viable way to avoid the compound.

We have not identified specific resistance mutations yet and are confident to say that the genetic barrier against viral resistance is high, Plemper said. We believe that this compound has high clinical potential as a next-generation influenza drug that combines key antiviral features.

Reference: Toots, et al. (2019) Characterization of orally efficacious influenza drug with high resistance barrier in ferrets and human airway epithelia. Science Translational Medicine DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.aax5866

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Read the rest here:
Drug Induces Mutations in Genetic Material of the Influenza Virus - Technology Networks

At mbg, we're no strangers to the benefits of functional medicine. Nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress levels, relationships, and genetics are all major contributors to chronic disease, and sometimes piling medication upon medication just won't cut it.

While we're not suggesting you skip out on your routine checkups, it's becoming increasingly popularcrucial, evenfor people to start thinking about the ways lifestyle factors can influence and help treat disease.

In fact, there's a new study (the first ofits kind, no less!) to actually show how a functional medicine model can provide unique health benefits for patients. What researchers found was that functional medicine can yield a greater quality of life compared to the standard, primary care model of medicine.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, analyzed two groups of patients for two years: 1,595 patients treated at Cleveland Clinic's Center for Functional Medicine and 5,657 patients treated at a primary care health center. To assess each patient's quality of life, researchers used the PROMIS questionnaire, a validated measure by the NIH. This questionnaire assesses patients' global physical and mental health through factors such as fatigue, physical function, pain, gastrointestinal issues, and emotional well-being.

In as little as six months, they saw around 31% of functional medicine patients improve their PROMIS global physical health scores by 5 points or more, an improvement that has a very noticeable effect on daily life, according to the study. Only 22% of primary care patients were able to raise their scores this high.

There are a variety of reasons why functional medicine could have helped raise these patients' scores. Researchers believe that in addition to the holistic, functional medicine model itself, the types of patients seeking functional medicine and whether or not they believe in this model of care could have contributed to these global physical health improvements. While future research is needed to address these concerns, it's exciting that people are now starting to recognize functional medicine as deserving of these evidence-based experiments.

"This is a first-of-its-kind study to evaluate the impact of functional medicine model of care on patients' health-related quality of life," leader of the study Michelle Beidelschies, Ph.D., agrees. "In the past, evidence to support the model has been primarily anecdotal, published as case reports."

What's even more interesting about this study is that the sample of primary care patients actually had a higher median income than the functional medicine group. It speaks to the significant benefits of the functional medicine model that despite these patients' higher financial status, they still had a lower quality of life than the Cleveland Clinic group.

Perhaps these results can inspire even the most traditional of physicians to include integrative medicine into their practiceor, at the very least, allow them to regard functional medicine as a legitimate health care model.

"Functional medicine practitioners have suggested that their patients are improving with a systems-based approach to chronic disease,"Beidelschies says. "Now, they have evidence that their approach is associated with improved quality of life."

With respect to Beidelschies and this new study, it looks like holistic healing is truly becoming a practical measure for patient care. In this case, soul really is meeting science.

Here is the original post:
Functional Medicine Linked To A Higher Quality Of Life, New Study Finds - mindbodygreen.com

The fundraising goal for the University of Arizona Foundation was reached yet again this year, making it the second year in a row to break the record for philanthropic donations to the university.

The foundation, in support of the UA, raised $334.6 million during the 2019 fiscal year, according to a university press release. This is an increase of over $17 million from last years total of $317 million.

John-Paul Roczniak, the president and CEO of the UA Foundation as well as the vice president of development at the UA, said he is very grateful for all the support from alumni and friends.

We have a very dedicated group of donors who care about the institution, Roczniak said. We have a president who is inspiring people to give more.

Two large donations were made by Dr. Andrew Weil and James Wyant, esteemed UA faculty members who have established positions at the university in integrative medicine and optical sciences.

Weil contributed $15 million as well as a $5 million gift for the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and established the Andrew Weil Endowed Chair for Research in Integrative Medicine.

David Hahn, dean of the College of Engineering, recognized how integral endowed chairs are in keeping top-notch faculty members working at the university.

What chairs allow you to do is attract and retain the best, absolutely world-class faculty, Hahn said.

Hahn stated that the endowed chairs provide resources to faculty members to invest in research and education, while also adding a level of prestige.

Wyant and his family committed $20 million for a minimum of 10 endowed chairs to recruit more distinguished faculty members. James Wyant is the founding dean and professor emeritus of the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences.

The number of donors was a record year for us, Roczniak said. People gave at every level.

The foundations board members laid out a specific plan laid so that alumni and other donors can get a better idea of what exactly their money will go toward.

The strategic plan has laid out a vision that people are excited about, Roczniak said. Weve been able to make some really good things happen.

David Hahn agreed that the focused vision of the university has allowed people to see a clearer picture of the future.

People want to invest in a plan and a vision to make the University of Arizona better, Hahn said.

The scope of what the UA Foundation works to beneift is very wide, with multiple different areas receiving funding. Roczniak said that the endowment funds scholarships, faculty chairs, programs and capital projects.

Pick a corner of the institution and I can guarantee you theres gifts that support it, Roczniak said.

The endowment not only goes toward improvements on campus and faculty, but also keeping the UA Foundation stocked with the best representatives.

Weve been able to hire more development officers to meet with alumni, parents and friends to see if theyre interested in giving, Roczniak said.

Within the past year, the UA was commended for their fundraising with an Educational Fundraising Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Specific colleges such as the College of Engineering plan to use some of the grant money for improving their program. Starting with the students helps the university be hands-on in their giving.

For engineering, what were really going to do with these resources is bring the concept of engineering design throughout our entire program, Hahn said.

The record number of scholarships and renovations made to the Albert B. Weaver Science-Engineering Library are certainly noticeable to students, and the university hopes to keep making these improvements to benefit the campus.

The goal is always to do more, Roczniak said. One of the big pushes for this year is pillar one of the strategic plan, which is all about the wildcat journey and student success.

The UA Foundation will host an event on Nov. 1 on campus about a new program being launched to support students through finding scholarships and affordable housing. Creating new opportunities to help students find the resources they need is immensely important to the foundation.

Helping students directly through the endowment will not only make noticeable improvements, but also encourage others to donate more in the future.

We are really going to focus on the student aspect of fundraising next year, Roczniak said. We are forever grateful to our donors and whoever gives back to our university.

Follow Sydney Jones on Twitter

Read the original here:
UA Foundation beats their fundraising record - Arizona Daily Wildcat

True Food Kitchen has opened its first Miami-area restaurant at the Falls.

The health-driven restaurant has replaced the former T.G.I.Friday's and occupies more than 10,000 square feet with an indoor dining room, a patio, and a bar.

"At True Food Kitchen, we believe that every ingredient matters in everything we serve," True Food Kitchen brand chef Robert McCormick says.

True Food Kitchen was bornin Phoenix, Arizona, in 2008 when cofounder Dr. Andrew Weil didnt want to sacrifice flavor for the sake of healthy eating. The Harvard-trained Weil made a name for himself by embracing alternative medicine techniques. The doctor and author is known for books such as The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. The prolific doctor also hosts a podcast and sells skincare products and wild-caught seafood on drweil.com.

The integrative medicine doctor wanted to create a restaurant that served food people could enjoy and not regret eating.Eleven years later, there are 28 locations in 17 states, including New York, Louisiana, Colorado, and California. The Falls outpost marks the seventh True Food Kitchen in Florida, with other locations in Boca Raton, West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Tampa, Naples, and Jacksonville.

The entire menuis based on Weil's anti-inflammatory food pyramid, which stresses eating more fruits and vegetables and minimizing the consumption of processed foods. The menu offers dishesfilled with whole grains, lean proteins, healthy fats, and limited carbohydrates. "Anti-inflammatory is a lifestyle," says Christine Ferris, senior marketing brand manager for True Food Kitchen.

Each menu item avoids causing the fatigue, bloating, and loss of energy that certain meals create, Ferris says. Even the higher-calorie items on True Food's menu, such as desserts and alcoholic beverages, should be enjoyed without any guilt, according to Ferris.

The menu also changes with the seasons."We change our menu quarterly because it allows us to showcase seasonal ingredients that are nutrient-dense and at the peak of their freshness and flavor, McCormick says. Most items are vegetarian, although chicken, seafood, and even steak are offered. All dishes can also be made gluten-free and can be customized for a particular diet.

True Food Kitchen has incorporated sea buckthorn an orange-red berry into its fall menu. The plant is used in some of the bar's drinks, from the antioxidant mimosa, infused with the berry, cava, honey, and pomegranate, to a ginger margarita ($12), made with ginger liqueur, organic reposado tequila, and honey.

"From nutrient-dense staples and carefully sourced proteins to little-known superfoods, we use the most responsible, creative, in-season ingredients we can find," McCormick says.

The menu includes permanent dishes too. The ancient grain bowl ($14) reflects each level of the anti-inflammatory pyramid by including miso-glazed sweet potato, house-made cilantro paste, turmeric, grilled portobello mushrooms, avocado, and hemp seed. Edamame dumplings, made with dashi and white truffle oil, are another staple on the menu.

The bar also serves organic, biodynamic, and sustainable wines, along with a wide selection of beers.

Ferris says the restaurant localizes its bright and approachable atmosphere by adding local artwork to embody Miamis culture. You will feel the energy when you walk in."

True Food Kitchen is an exciting addition to the shopping center, says the Falls' manager, Dailen Rodriguez. "The community is very wellness-aware, making the restaurant a great fit for our customers."

True Food Kitchen at the Falls. 8888 SW 136th St., Miami; truefoodkitchen.com.Monday through Saturday10 a.m. to 9 p.m.,Sundaynoon to 7 p.m.

Here is the original post:
Dr. Andrew Weil's True Food Kitchen Opening in Miami at the Falls Mall in South Miami-Dade - Miami New Times

TahoeLand: Bad News, Bears

In summer 2019, CapRadio examined the impact of climate change on one of Northern Californias geographical gems: Lake Tahoe. In the podcast TahoeLand, reporter Ezra David Romero explores how climate change will affect Tahoes color, snowpack, fire season and wildlife.

Episode 4 takes a look at how the changing climate will impact bears. Bears in Tahoe are also hibernating less if at all. Its not just black bears feeling the impact of climate change polar bears, grizzlies and other bears around the world are at risk.

This episode will also look at the ways humans do, or do not, keep bears out of our garbage. Peoples leftovers and waste lead to more human-bear interactions, which is ultimately bad news for bears.

When a few wild animals were injured in California wildfires, it was a chance for doctors to take an innovative approach to recovery and pain management. To help heal the paws of two bears and a mountain lion cub, veterinarians turned to another animal: tilapia.

Dr. Jamie Peyton is the associate director at the UC Davis Center for Advancing Pain Relief and Chief of Integrative Medicine Service at the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. She and her team designed biologic bandages using fish skin, honey, oils and beeswax. She partnered with Dr. Deanna Clifford, a senior wildlife veterinarian for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Investigations Lab, to pioneer this technique and track its success.

Both veterinary doctors joined Insight in January 2018 to discuss this innovative therapy.

Engineering Eden is the title of a book by Northern California writer Jordan Fisher Smith that takes a deep dive into the United States history of attempting to manage nature.

The book centers on the story of Harry Walker, a man who was killed by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park as the park celebrated its centennial anniversary. That was in 1972 and, as Smith discovered in his research, a 1975 civil trial in Los Angeles followed. That trial became a proxy for the larger issue of wilderness management and the conflicting approaches at the time.

The author examines the process of people moving into the vast territory of wild animals, the new science that would be needed for the management of the land and the tragic details of Harry Walkers death.

Smith joined Insight in September 2016 to discuss and highlight parts of that book. Engineering Eden is now out in paperback.

Read more from the original source:
Bears of Tahoe / Bears with Bandages / Yellowstone Bears - Capital Public Radio News