Monthly Archives: March 2012

Your child’s milk tooth can save her life

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Is your child about to lose her milk tooth? Instead of throwing it away, you can now opt to use it to harvest stem cells in a dental stem cell bank for future use in the face of serious ailments. Now thats a tooth fairy story coming to life.

Still relatively new in India, dental stem cell banking is fast gaining popularity as a more viable option over umbilical cord blood banking.

Stem cell therapy involves a kind of intervention strategy in which healthy, new cells are introduced into a damaged tissue to treat a disease or an injury.

The umbilical cord is a good source for blood-related cells, or hemaotopoietic cells, which can be used for blood-related diseases, like leukaemia (blood cancer). Having said that, blood-related disorders constitute only four percent of all diseases, Shailesh Gadre, founder and managing director of the company Stemade Biotech, said.

For the rest of the 96 percent tissue-related diseases, the tooth is a good source of mesenchymal (tissue-related) stem cells. These cells have potential application in all other tissues of the body, for instance, the brain, in case of diseases like Alzheimers and Parkinsons; the eye (corneal reconstruction), liver (cirrhosis), pancreas (diabetes), bone (fractures, reconstruction), skin and the like, he said.

Mesenchymal cells can also be used to regenerate cardiac cells.

Dental stem cell banking also has an advantage when it comes to the process of obtaining stem cells.

Obtaining stem cells from the tooth is a non-invasive procedure that requires no surgery, with little or no pain. A child, in the age group of 5-12, is any way going to lose his milk tooth. So when its a little shaky, it can be collected with hardly any discomfort, Savita Menon, a pedodontist, said.

Moreover, in a number of cases, when an adolescent needs braces, the doctor recommends that his pre-molars be removed. These can also be used as a source for stem cells. And over and above that, an adults wisdom tooth can also be used for the same purpose, Gadre added.

Therefore, unlike umbilical cord blood banking which gives one just one chance - during birth - the window of opportunity in dental stem cell banking is much bigger.

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Your child’s milk tooth can save her life

Destruction Anniversary Tour Features Warbringer, Vital Remains, and Pathology Recap

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The trek will run from May 8th to June 3rd, and after that, Warbringer will appear at various high-profile Summer festival appearances in Europe.

Vocalist John Kevill checked in to comment about these upcoming shows: "Hey all! Checking in at the end of the Iced Earth and Symphony X tour. We had a great time with those guys, there was a slew of incredible shows with awesome heavy metal fans in abundance, and a bunch of good times with both of those fine bands! Shame to say goodbye to them, but we're on our way home now to recuperate Before beginning out next tour with German thrash metal legends Destruction, on their 30th anniversary tour! We never rest long, the war rages on! We'll see you guys out on the road again in May, prepare to be annihilated! - more on this story

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Destruction Anniversary Tour Features Warbringer, Vital Remains, and Pathology Recap

Kilgore College nutrition students hosting event

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Posted: Saturday, March 31, 2012 4:00 am | Updated: 6:02 am, Sat Mar 31, 2012.

Several students studying nutrition at Kilgore College will take their expertise on the road today, hosting a family fun day for residents at Longview nursing home The Clairmont.

The event runs from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The students will serve picnic-type lunches and host activities during the event.

The students are members of Deborah Elliotts nutrition class.

This is a great way for KC students to give back to the community, said Patty Bell, service learning irector at Kilgore College. We are always looking for ways to give our students opportunities to create valuable learning experiences outside of the classroom.

Bell said the Kilgore College Service Learning Program is a teaching and learning strategy in which students perform public services to benefit the community in order to achieve the course learning objectives and fulfill personal goals.

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Kilgore College nutrition students hosting event

Ghana to scale up interventions to improve nutrition

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Health News of Friday, 30 March 2012

Source: GNA

Ms Wilhelmina Okwabi, Deputy Director, Nutrition Department of Ghana Health Service, on Friday noted that Ghana has not done well in terms of scaling up interventions to improve upon the nutritional status of the citizenry.

She however admitted that, there have been pockets of success in various areas of interventions.

Ms Okwabi said, there are evidence of the increasing rate of malnutrition and obesity particularly among children as well as other nutritional related illnesses such as diabetes among the younger population.

Ms Okwabi, who was addressing a West African Health Organisation (WAHO) Peer Reviewing Meeting in Accra on Strengthening National Nutrition in West Africa, called for stakeholder support and political commitment towards the implementation of nutritional policies and programmes, to reduce malnutrition rates among the populace.

She said, challenges such as effective implementation and sustained impact backed by political commitment and fair share of the national budget remained elusive.

Ms Okwabi noted that, although nutrition was a critical item in the development status of a country, it had remained trapped in a low priority cycle in most sub Saharan African countries including Ghana.

She emphasised that, malnutritions complex determinants and its low visibility, as well as lack of political commitment and weak institutional and operational capacities at all levels of government were some of the biggest constraints.

Ms Okwabi explained that, the South-South Peer Review initiative which was sponsored by the World Bank and led by the WAHO of ECOWAS is aimed at enhancing policies and programmes through South-South exchange and learning.

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Ghana to scale up interventions to improve nutrition

WCCC professor develops smart phone app for classroom education

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WASHINGTON A Warren County Community College adjunct Microbioliology faculty member has developed a powerful new smart phone application that integrates the college's microbiology course into a handy, downloadable "app."

Pauletta Ader, who developed the application, is helping pioneer this innovative approach to integrating technology in ways that make learning convenient and effective for WCCC students. This brand new WCCC Microbiology App is now available for download on iTunes.

Once they have downloaded the app, WCCC students can use their smart phones to gain access to all the necessary course materials right in the palm of their hand. "It's really an idea whose time has come," said Ader. "The WCCC Microbiology App is the latest innovation for a school that has been the go to for the science student or busy professional who wants to further their education."

In an effort spearheaded by Ader, the college plans to expand its offerings of smart phone apps in the coming months.

"This is an important step for Warren County Community College as we forge into the future," said Dr. Will Austin, president of the school. "We all realize that with the times changing rapidly, particularly in technology, and it is key that we stay one step ahead of the curve."

To find out more information about the new WCCC app, contact Ader at pader@warren.edu. The WCCC Microbiology App uses the Study By App platform. To learn more, visit their website at http://www.studybyapp.com. For more information about WCCC and its degree and non-degree programs, go to http://www.warren.edu

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WCCC professor develops smart phone app for classroom education

The Kind of Stress That Doesn't Kill You, but Makes You Stronger

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Digging into an eight-decade landmark study on longevity, the author finds that stress brought on by hard work can keep you happy and healthy.

Phatic-Photography/Shutterstock

More than a half century after Dr. Terman collected his data on work and occupational success, we looked into the long-term consequences on health and longevity. Would Paul's easygoing, free-flowing approach to his career as a bookstore manager be a benefit or a curse? Would John's dedication to physics lead to a stressful but long life like that of fellow physicist Norris Bradbury, or was Bradbury's very long life an anomaly -- an exception to the rule?

We gathered together our research assistants, filling our computer programs with a whole host of relevant information, including the personality indexes we had constructed and validated earlier. We recorded how much alcohol they drank, the participants' reports of their ambition, and even their parents' reports. Most importantly, we used the death certificates to see how long they lived.

The results were very clear: Those with the most career success were the least likely to die young. In fact, on average the most successful men lived five years longer than the least successful.

Especially convincing about this finding is that the men who were independently rated by Dr. Terman as most successful more than a half century ago were the ones least likely to die at any given age in the decades that followed. Some studies in this field of research might be inadvertently biased by the classifications or judgments used by the epidemiologists, but in this case, we did not have to do any job classifications or make any judgments -- we simply relied on those careful categorizations Terman and his associates had made decades ago.

WHY THE SUCCESSFUL LIVE LONGER

Conscientiousness, as we have established, is a strong predictor of longevity, and it turns out that the professionally successful Terman subjects were indeed more conscientious than their peers. But conscientiousness didn't explain everything: those with a successful career lived much longer even after taking their conscientiousness into account.

Unsurprisingly, ambition predicted career success. More to the point, ambition, coupled with perseverance, impulse control, and high motivation, was not only good for achievement but was part of the package of a resilient work life. It is not a coincidence that Edward Dmytryk was a prominent director and lived a long life or that Norris Bradbury headed a powerful agency and lived a long life. Symphony conductors, company presidents, and bosses of all sorts tend to live longer than their subordinates.

Complementing our own analyses, the sociologist Glen Elder and his colleagues looked at career changes between 1940 and 1960 and found evidence that the Terman participants who moved among various jobs without a clear progression were less likely to live long lives than those with steadily increasing responsibilities in their field. Usually this increasing responsibility brings more challenges and a heavier workload, but paradoxically this is helpful to long-term health.

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The Kind of Stress That Doesn't Kill You, but Makes You Stronger

DNA Matches Close Sexual Assault Cases

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WASHINGTON - Six years after D.C. police began looking for DNA in hundreds of backlogged sexual assault cases, the work is paying off.

Suspects have been identified through matches in the national DNA databank and arrests have been made.

Just this week police arrested a D.C. man for the 2006 rape of a teenage girl.

Without the DNA, the cases would likely have gone unsolved.

For much of the last decade, evidence in sexual assault cases sat untouched in storage in part because the district didn't have its own crime lab and the FBI was overwhelmed with cases related to terror.

A dilemma eventually solved with the help of grant money and several different labs.

Case in point.

Michael Anthony Davies, 31, was arrested Wednesday and charged with first degree sexual abuse--accused of raping a young girl inside a southwest Washington apartment building in April of 2006.

According to the charging document, detectives were unable to identify a suspect until Davies DNA profile matched the evidence in a "cold hit."

According to the charging document the 17-year-old said she had just returned from the store, it was just after eight o'clock at night and she was riding the elevator to the fifth floor in the apartment complex where she lived. She says as she got out of the elevator, a man who was in the elevator with her followed, he grabbed her by the arm said I want to get to know you better. She resisted, but he grabbed her by the waist and dragged her into a stairwell where she was raped.

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DNA Matches Close Sexual Assault Cases

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Foods in the Year 2000

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A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work.

Matt Mansell--Synthetic Biology in Space

I am fascinated by these proposals, and other proposals large and small for how biological engineering might someday impact the way that we produce, process, and prepare our food. The way we eat and the way we imagine the food of the future is really complicated, and has a long and interesting history tied not only to our culinary cultures and the science of nutrition, but often to the hot new science and technology of the day.

In the 1890s, that technology was synthetic chemistry, making it possible to generate organic chemicals from inorganic starting materials. New industries were springing up that replaced old agricultural methods with chemical ones, in particular the production of synthetic dyes and flavors. This led some chemists to speculate on how this technology would be used a hundred years in the future, extrapolating the current industrial transformations into nearly every organic arena. This speculative application of synthetic chemistry to food production is detailed in an 1894 article in McClures Magazine by Henry J.W. Dam titled Foods in the Year 2000: Professor Berthelots Theory that Chemistry Will Displace Agriculture. By 2000, Marcellin Berthelot, considered to be one of the greatest chemists of all time, believed that we would no longer have agriculture, that instead:

The epicure of the future is to dine upon artificial meat, artificial flour, and artificial vegetablesWheat fields and corn fields are to disappear from the face of the earth, because flour and meal will no longer be grown, but madeCoal will no longer be dug, except perhaps with the object of transforming it into bread or meat. The engines of the great food factories will be driven, not by artificial combustion, but by the underlying heat of the globe.

What would this food synthesized from coal with geothermal power look like? What would it taste like?

We shall give you the same identical food, however, chemically, digestively, and nutritively speaking. Its form will differ, because it will probably be a tablet. But it will be a tablet of any color and shape that is desired, and will, I think, entirely satisfy the epicurean senses of the future.

Food pills are a common theme in science fiction, especially for space travel where astronauts have to travel light, and its interesting to see how that has transformed, with NASA now thinking beyond synthetic chemistry to synthetic biology. But its the scientific language of Professor Berthelot thats particularly interesting to me:

In order to clearly conceive these impending changes, it must be remembered that milk, eggs, flour, meat, and indeed, all edibles, consist almost entirely (the percentage of other elements is very small) of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogenThese four elements, universally existing, are destined to furnish all the food now grown by nature, through the rapid and steady advance of synthetic chemistry.

Synthetic chemistry is the special science which takes the elements of a given compound, and induces them to combine and form that compound. It is the reverse of analytic chemistry, which takes a given compound, and dissociates and isolates its elements. Analytic chemistry would separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, and synthetic chemistry would take oxygen and hydrogen, mix them, put a match to the mixture, and thus form water. For many years past synthetic chemistry has had an eager eye upon food-making.

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Foods in the Year 2000

Bristol Evening Post published Prominent doctor fails to overturn his ban on contacting former…

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A FORMER Bristol Medical School lecturer and renowned researcher has failed to get a restraining order against him lifted.

Cardiac physiology specialist Dr Allan Levi is banned from making any contact with his ex-wife Dr Jackie Addison, who practises as a GP in Shirehampton.

A court heard the pair, who have three grown-up children, had an acrimonious divorce in 2001 after Dr Addison had an affair with their gardener, Gordon Strong. Following a number of offensive letters sent by Dr Levi to Dr Addison, her parents, sisters and work colleagues, a restraining order was imposed in May 2004.

Yesterday, Dr Levi represented himself as he made an application at North Somerset Magistrates' Court to lift or vary the order.

It bans him from any contact with his ex-wife except through solicitors for matrimonial matters and from going anywhere she resides or works. One aspect, "clause C", makes it an offence for Dr Levi to send any correspondence or documents concerning his relationship with Dr Addison or his relationship with his children to any person or organisation apart from his parents, sister or legal advisors. Since, 2004, he has also been banned from contacting Mr Strong in any way, and he also applied to lift that condition yesterday.

Dr Addison, of Easton-in-Gordano, told the court: "I feel the current restraining order, as it is, is sufficient to protect me from having to go through what I went through in 2003 and 2007 and I feel that if it was dismissed, something would happen again."

Asked by Paul Ricketts, on behalf of CPS, what her specific fears were, she added: "That he'll start again basically, which will cause huge distress to me and my family, and particularly the children."

Much of Dr Levi's argument focused on clause C, which he believes is severely damaging his medical career.

"It is greatly unjust and disproportionate," he said. "It is a very wide-ranging and unusual clause to have in a restraining order."

In September last year, the General Medical Council suspended the 56-year-old from practising medicine for a year. Significant factors in that decision were the harassment conviction and restraining orders, and a diagnosis from 1999 that he suffered from bipolar mental disorder.

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Bristol Evening Post published Prominent doctor fails to overturn his ban on contacting former...

CMS Delays Point-of-Service Change Until October

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CMS is delaying implementation of Transmittal 2407 containing “revised and clarified” point-of-service (POS) coding instructions from April 1 to Oct. 1, 2012. The delay will be announced in Transmittal 2435, which the agency is planning on posting on its Web site. (The agency’s Web site is apparently experiencing technical difficulties, and the Transmittal is not yet posted. The CAP will post a link to the Transmittal on the Advocacy Web site when it is live.)

 

 

As outlined in the March 15 issue of Statline, the CAP extensively engaged with CMS officials, explaining to them that if implemented, the transmittal would result in significant confusion regarding anatomic pathology services, particularly for Medicare carriers processing claims subject to the technical component “grandfather” provision in light of its scheduled July 1st expiration date.
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Mayo v. Prometheus and Its Impact on Myriad "Gene Patenting" Case—Antoinette Konski – Video

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29-03-2012 12:24 More LXBN TV interviews at: While talk this week of course focuses on the oral arguments in the Affordable Care Act case, the Supreme Court last week ruled in a very important and influential intellectual property case. In Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., the court ruled that the patent Prometheus had obtained for correlations between blood test results and patient health is not eligible for a patent because it incorporates laws of nature. Not only does this have a big impact on the medical community, but also another major case—the Myriad "gene patenting" case. To explain the background of Mayo v. Prometheus, whether or not these types of patents slow medical research and what this means for the Myriad case, we bring in Foley & Lardner Partner Antoinette Konski, who has covered this case exceptionally on the Personalized Medicine Bulletin--

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Mayo v. Prometheus and Its Impact on Myriad "Gene Patenting" Case—Antoinette Konski - Video

Heart attacks without chest pain more common than thought, especially among women

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by: PF Louis

The CDC reports that approximately 800,000 first time heart attacks occur annually. Ignoring iatrogenic deaths (death by medicine), heart disease is still the number one killer for both men and women.

However, the common perception of chest pain or discomfort as a signal that a heart attack is occurring are less than one normally thinks, especially among younger women under 45.

A study led by Dr. John Canto at the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, Florida, used medical records in a national database of heart attack patients from 1994 to 2006, covering around 1.1 million people treated at close to 2,000 hospitals.

Dr. Canto and his team reported their study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on February 21, 2012.

What was revealed is that chest pain is not necessarily the only indication of a heart attack. Dr. Canto used the term "atypical symptoms" to describe possible indications of a heart attack other than chest pain.

Atypical symptoms of a heart attack include numbness, unprovoked arm, jaw or back pain, sudden shortness of breath, weakness or fatigue, or unusual feelings of indigestion or nausea. Read more...

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Liberty Property Trust Hosts First Quarter 2012 Results Conference Call

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MALVERN, Pa., March 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Liberty Property Trust (NYSE: LRY - News) will host its first quarter results conference call on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, at 1:00 P.M., ET. The call can be accessed by dialing (888) 870-2815 and entering the passcode 68152370. The conference call will also be available live at http://www.libertyproperty.comin the "Investor Relations" section of the site. Liberty will issue a press release detailing results the same day before the market opens.

If you are unable to join the conference call, you may access the archived webcast, also in the Investor Relations section of the web site. In addition, a recording will be available telephonically until May 8, 2012 by dialing (855) 859-2056 and using the passcode 68152370.

Liberty Property Trust is a leader in commercial real estate, serving customers in the United States and United Kingdom, through the development, acquisition, ownership and management of superior office and industrial properties. Liberty's 79 million square foot portfolio includes nearly 700 properties which provide office, distribution and light manufacturing facilities to 1,900 tenants.

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Liberty Property Trust Hosts First Quarter 2012 Results Conference Call

Amazon And The NIH Team Up To Put Human Genome In The Cloud

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Amazon and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that the complete 1000 Genomes Project is being made available on Amazon Web Services as a public data set. The announcement, made at the White House Big Data Summit, will make the largest collection of human genetics available to anyone free of charge.

In case youre light on the details, the 1000 Genomes Project is an international research effort started in 2008 that involves 75 companies and organizations working together to create a detailed catalog of the human genome, and all its 3 billion DNA bases. To date, over 200 terabytes of data have been created since the projects start.

Theres now DNA sequenced from over 2,661 individuals from 26 populations, and the NIH is planning to add more samples this year. The effort led to the techniques used to sequence the DNA of other species, going from the mouse to the gorilla.

The project started off with three pilot studies. Amazon began hosting the initial pilot data on Amazon S3 in 2010, so its not surprising to see the remainder of the data added today. The latest dataset is the most current, containing the DNA of 1,700 people.

The move to put the data up on Amazon, specifically, Amazon Web Services, aims to help speed up access to the research. Previously, researchers had to download data from government data centers or their own systems, or even snail mail it on discs.

The data will be stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and can be accessed from AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR).

The 1000 Genomes Project is only one of many of the publicly hosted datasets found on Amazon. Others include data fromNASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory,Langone Medical Center at New York University,Unilever,Numerate,Sage BionetworksandIon Flux.

More details on the data itself are here.

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazons...

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Amazon And The NIH Team Up To Put Human Genome In The Cloud

Eastday-Neurosurgeon, geneticist take top prizes in science

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A brain surgeon and a scientist doing basic research on genes were honored with the city's top award for science innovation yesterday.

The prizes went to Zhou Liangfu, 70, a neurosurgeon at Huashan Hospital, and He Lin, 58, a geneticist at Jiao Tong University, who detected many genes related to diseases.

Each will receive 500,000 yuan (US$79,365).

Projects and research involving life science, pharmaceutical development and food safety covered 42 percent of the awards this year.

The two foreign experts who received this year's international scientific and technological cooperation award were also in the medical field. Michael Phillips, a Canadian mental health expert, and Issei Komuro, a Japanese cardiovascular expert, were honored for their efforts to boost China's health development and improve China's position on the international stage.

"Different from previous year's science and technology awards focusing mainly on scientific innovation, this year's awards focused more on the introduction of scientific research into practice and industrialization and its economic result," said Yin Bangqi of the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission. "This encourages scientists to focus on civil needs and translate their research into practical use and create more profits."

Zhou Liangfu said he will put all of his 500,000 yuan prize into his research, which leads neurosurgery development in China. At age 70, he has a full schedule - doing surgery two days a week, serving at an outpatient clinic on Wednesdays and checking his patients on the remaining two days.

"I have been working in clinical practice for almost 50 years and have done over 10,000 surgeries, witnessing the growth of China's neurosurgery from blankness to the current status," said Zhou, who created surgical methods to treat tumors at the bottom of the brain.

He Lin completed the accurate localization, cloning and mutation detection of a gene, IHH, which causes the disease brachydactyly type A-1, which results in babies born with shortened toes or fingers. It is a common but not serious prenatal disease, with a global incidence of about 2 percent.

He also set up the world's largest psychosis sample library and made important progress in studies of psychosis nutrigenomics and pharmacogenomics - the effects of nutrition and drugs on genes. He also confirmed that prenatal nutritional deficiencies seriously increase the risk of schizophrenia.

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Eastday-Neurosurgeon, geneticist take top prizes in science

Q&A: GE Healthcare's Mark Dente on the Challenges of Integrating Genomics Data with EMRs

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GE Healthcare has taken initial steps to integrate 'omics data into its Centricity electronic medical record system through an exploratory research project that is developing a genomics data analysis infrastructure.

Mark Dente, GE healthcare's chief medical officer for healthcare information technology, discussed the project last week during a panel discussion at the American Medical Informatics Association's Translational Bioinformatics conference in San Francisco.

The panel discussed several projects that are looking to integrate genomics data into EMRs. In addition to Dente, panel participants included representatives from the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network, the Pharmacogenomics Research Network, and the HL7 clinical genomics workgroup.

BioInform spoke to Dente after the conference to get additional details about GE Healthcare's genomics infrastructure development plans. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

During your presentation at AMIA, you mentioned that GE Healthcare is developing a genomics analysis infrastructure. Could you provide some more details about what you hope to develop and where those efforts currently stand?

What we presented at AMIA was a mix of our technologies that we have today like our EMR and our ability to have large datasets to do research against. [T]he genomics effort is where we are headed, [but] it is not a product [now and] it may never become a product.

What we are talking about here is the driving of personalized medicine and translational medicine. I am a biomedical, clinical informaticist ... and my claim to fame is to think about knowledge management and clinical decision support and how we can shorten the ... bench-to-bedside timeline, [which] is about 17 years for something to go from research to full adoption in clinical practice. Now you compound that with a part of medicine that most clinicians in clinical practice are [unfamiliar with]. They learn a little bit of genomics in undergraduate school [and] in medical school but how do you educate folks as to ... where the research is going? Finally, how do we deal with new knowledge repositories in medicine?

A lot of our industry is run on old technology. We've made a large investment on the technology side looking at services-oriented-architecture. We can put legacy systems ... and new technology into this new infrastructure and because is platform we can aggregate data across the institution and even across the community and do analytics on this data in our data warehouse.... this SOA architecture is a modern way of doing that. [We have a] joint venture [with] Microsoft [called Caradigm that is] focused around that and advanced clinical decision support.

The final leg is [the] genomics platform itself One thing around genomics is that there needs to be a higher expectation on the technology's ability to handle large datasets. An SOA infrastructure allows us to be more flexible on the technical side of dealing with genomic information. [Also,] you really want to think about a genomic repository external to the EMR. That is my personal approach and how I will strongly suggest that we as GE will approach this. You do not want to clog up your operational EMR database with genetic data because it's just too large. [Also, because] its genetic data, we need to have a higher expectation of security. We have rigorous HIPAA and other internal standards of how we manage and keep private patient information and that will get ratcheted up in the future.

As you start to put data into a genomics database, we need to marry up the genomic data with the phenotypical data coming off an EMR. The real exciting part [is] we can start looking at the genomic data coupled with the phenotypical data in and a genomic analytic engine concept. With a analytics engine and the creation of algorisms to look for signal how do we start to think about running very targeted studies and [looking] for signals that suggest that these four hypothetical genes, [for example,] could be predictive of a [disease] state?

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Q&A: GE Healthcare's Mark Dente on the Challenges of Integrating Genomics Data with EMRs

Early Autoimmune Therapy Helps Autoimmune Epilepsy Patients

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Editor's Choice Academic Journal Main Category: Epilepsy Article Date: 30 Mar 2012 - 5:00 PDT

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5 (1 votes)

According to the researchers:

Seizures are prevalent in autoimmune neurologic disorders, such as limbic encephalitis.

Amy M. L. Quek, M.B.B.S., of the Mayo Clinic, College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn., and her team collected data from the Mayo Clinic computerized diagnostic index from patients diagnosed with autoimmune epilepsy who were assessed between January 2005 and December 2010 in both the Autoimmune Neurology Clinic and Epilepsy Clinic, in order to assess clinical characteristics and immunotherapy responses in individuals suffering with autoimmune epilepsy.

Of the patient data examined, the researchers found 32 patients eligible for inclusion in the study. All participants of the study had partial seizures, 81% had daily seizures and had failed treatment with 2+ AEDs, while the remaining participants had at least one seizure per month. Despite AED therapy, 27 of the 32 participants received immunotherapy for treatment of persistent seizures.

The authors found that 81% (22 of 27) of the participants reported improvement following immunotherapy after a median follow-up time of 17 months (3-72 months). In addition, the team found that 18 participants were seizure free. 44% (8) of these 18 patients were seizure free within 12 weeks of starting immunotherapy. Although 5 participants did not respond to the treatment, 2 of the 5 showed subsequent improved after the AEDs were changed.

The authors conclude:

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Early Autoimmune Therapy Helps Autoimmune Epilepsy Patients

"Backpacking" Bacteria Ferry Nano-Medicines

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Featured Article Main Category: Medical Devices / Diagnostics Also Included In: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses;Biology / Biochemistry Article Date: 30 Mar 2012 - 12:00 PDT

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This week, at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Diego, Dr David H Gracias, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, gave an account of the progress he and his team are making in this area.

Gracias told the press:

"Cargo-carrying bacteria may be an answer to a major roadblock in using nano-medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat disease."

Nano-technology concerns itself with making ultra-tiny devices, small enough to fit a million or so on the head of a pin. In medicine the idea is to use them to transport particles of medication, sensors and other materials to precise locations in the human body.

But it is not easy to devise self-sustaining motors and propulsion mechanisms at this scale: so scientists are increasingly turning to nature, where organisms like bacteria are already of the right scale and capable of moving on their own.

As Gracias explained:

"Currently, it is hard to engineer microparticles or nanoparticles capable of self-propelled motion in well-defined trajectories under biologically relevant conditions."

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"Backpacking" Bacteria Ferry Nano-Medicines

'Backpacking' bacteria

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Public release date: 29-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 619-525-6268 (March 23-28, San Diego Press Center) 202-872-6042

Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 619-525-6268 (March 23-28, San Diego Press Center) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society

SAN DIEGO, March 29, 2012 To the ranks of horses, donkeys, camels and other animals that have served humanity as pack animals or beasts of burden, scientists are now enlisting bacteria to ferry nano-medicine cargos throughout the human body. They reported on progress in developing these "backpacking" bacteria so small that a million would fit on the head of a pin here today at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

"Cargo-carrying bacteria may be an answer to a major roadblock in using nano-medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat disease," David H. Gracias, Ph.D., leader of the research team said. Gracias explained that nanotechnology is the engineering of ultra-small machines and other devices. These devices generally lack practical self-sustaining motors to move particles of medication, sensors and other material to diseased parts of the body. So why not attach such cargo to bacteria, which have self-propulsion systems, and have them hike around the human body?

"Currently, it is hard to engineer microparticles or nanoparticles capable of self-propelled motion in well-defined trajectories under biologically relevant conditions," Gracias said. He is with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "Bacteria can do this easily, and we have established that bacteria can carry cargo."

In addition, bacteria can respond to specific biochemical signals in ways that make it possible to steer them to desired parts of the body. Once there, bacteria can settle down, deposit their cargo and grow naturally. Bacteria already live all over the body, particularly in the large intestine, with bacterial cells outnumbering human cells 10-to-1. Despite their popular reputation as disease-causers, there are bacteria in the human body, especially in the intestinal tract, that are not harmful, and the backpackers fall into that category.

Gracias' bacteria don't really carry little nylon or canvas backpacks. Their "backpacks" are micro- or nano-sized molecules or devices that have useful optical, electrical, magnetic, electrical or medicinal properties. The cargos that the team tested also varied in size, shape and material. So far, the team has loaded beads, nanowires and lithographically fabricated nanostructures onto bacteria.

Other scientists are seeking to enlist bacteria in transporting nano-cargo. They already have established, for instance, that large numbers of bacteria so-called "bacterial carpets" can move tiny objects. Gracias' research focuses on attaching one piece of cargo to an individual bacterium, rather than many bacteria to much larger cargo. The bacteria, termed "biohybrid devices," can still move freely, even with the cargo stuck to them.

"This is very early-stage exploratory research to try and enable new functionalities for medicine at the micro- and nanoscale by leveraging traits from bacteria," explained Gracias. "Our next steps would be to test the feasibility of the backpacking bacteria for diagnosing and treating disease in laboratory experiments. If that proves possible, we would move on to tests in laboratory mice. This could take a few years to complete."

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'Backpacking' bacteria

'Backpacking' bacteria help ferry nano-medicines inside humans

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2012) To the ranks of horses, donkeys, camels and other animals that have served humanity as pack animals or beasts of burden, scientists are now enlisting bacteria to ferry nano-medicine cargos throughout the human body. They reported on progress in developing these "backpacking" bacteria -- so small that a million would fit on the head of a pin -- in San Diego on March 29 at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

"Cargo-carrying bacteria may be an answer to a major roadblock in using nano-medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat disease," David H. Gracias, Ph.D., leader of the research team said. Gracias explained that nanotechnology is the engineering of ultra-small machines and other devices. These devices generally lack practical self-sustaining motors to move particles of medication, sensors and other material to diseased parts of the body. So why not attach such cargo to bacteria, which have self-propulsion systems, and have them hike around the human body?

"Currently, it is hard to engineer microparticles or nanoparticles capable of self-propelled motion in well-defined trajectories under biologically relevant conditions," Gracias said. He is with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "Bacteria can do this easily, and we have established that bacteria can carry cargo."

In addition, bacteria can respond to specific biochemical signals in ways that make it possible to steer them to desired parts of the body. Once there, bacteria can settle down, deposit their cargo and grow naturally. Bacteria already live all over the body, particularly in the large intestine, with bacterial cells outnumbering human cells 10-to-1. Despite their popular reputation as disease-causers, there are bacteria in the human body, especially in the intestinal tract, that are not harmful, and the backpackers fall into that category.

Gracias' bacteria don't really carry little nylon or canvas backpacks. Their "backpacks" are micro- or nano-sized molecules or devices that have useful optical, electrical, magnetic, electrical or medicinal properties. The cargos that the team tested also varied in size, shape and material. So far, the team has loaded beads, nanowires and lithographically fabricated nanostructures onto bacteria.

Other scientists are seeking to enlist bacteria in transporting nano-cargo. They already have established, for instance, that large numbers of bacteria -- so-called "bacterial carpets" -- can move tiny objects. Gracias' research focuses on attaching one piece of cargo to an individual bacterium, rather than many bacteria to much larger cargo. The bacteria, termed "biohybrid devices," can still move freely, even with the cargo stuck to them.

"This is very early-stage exploratory research to try and enable new functionalities for medicine at the micro- and nanoscale by leveraging traits from bacteria," explained Gracias. "Our next steps would be to test the feasibility of the backpacking bacteria for diagnosing and treating disease in laboratory experiments. If that proves possible, we would move on to tests in laboratory mice. This could take a few years to complete."

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'Backpacking' bacteria help ferry nano-medicines inside humans