Cook Islands in the South Pacific Chosen as Pristine Location for Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Swimsuit Issue

Los Angeles, California (PRWEB) March 06, 2014

Sports Illustrated is celebrating the magazines 50th Anniversary with the debut of its iconic 2014 swimsuit issue photographed in the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific.

According to John Petersen, General Manager North America for Cook Islands tourism, travel officials are optimistic that the edition will stir significant interest in visiting the pristine islands, given that the magazine has more than 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million people each week.

The 50th Anniversary edition cover was shot at the stunning Aitutaki Lagoon in the Cook Islands, one of the most spectacular of all South Pacific destinations where a triangular shaped reef encompasses Aitutaki lagoon which is imbedded with massive coral heads, and is home to countless varieties of brilliantly colored tropical fish and marine life.

From the North American Cook Islands Tourism office, we also hope to capture the targeted audience of both Sports Illustrated readers and viewers to our new website http://www.paradiseincookislands.com, which explains the Cook Islands story, and links to special airfares and leisure packages. This method is one of the best ways to convey to Sports Illustrated readers the options for vacationing in the Cook Islands, one of the most idyllic visitor experiences in the world, adds Petersen.

Air New Zealand, the leading airline to the Cook Islands, also chose Aitutaki to shoot its newest in flight safety video, Safety in Paradise in celebration of Sports Illustrated Swimsuits 50th anniversary. The safety video combines the picturesque Cooks with some of the biggest names in modelling including Christie Brinkley, Chrissy Teigen, Ariel Meredith, Hannah Davis and Jessica Gomes. Making a special guest appearance is one of the original supermodels, Christie Brinkley, who famously appeared on three consecutive Sports Illustrated Swimsuit covers.

Air New Zealand Head of Global Brand Development Jodi Williams says working with the Sports Illustrated franchise was a phenomenal opportunity to further lift the airline's brand on the global stage and to promote a key Pacific Island destination the airline has been flying to for more than 40 years.

With the magazines 50th Anniversary issue, which hits newsstands across the country last week, the North American Cook Islands Tourism office also plans to leverage positive publicity in the future by working closely with the national magazines public relations, promotions, and special events departments to position the Cook Islands utilizing the Islands official branding and messaging. This emphasis will also be combined with an integrated online campaign to ensure the momentum generated by the 50th Anniversary issue.

Historically, since the swimsuit editions debut in 1964, the magazine has chosen some of the most exotic and prestigious locations in the world for photography. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (http://www.SI.com/Swimsuit) franchise reaches more than 62 million people annually.

To learn more about travel to the Cook Islands, its special packages and airfares, visit, http://www.paradiseincookislands.com or e-mail John Petersen, General Manager North America Cook Islands Travel North America LLC office at USAManager(at)CookIslands(dot)travel. To obtain information about airfares to the Cook Islands, visit Air New Zealand at http://www.airnewzealand.com.

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Cook Islands in the South Pacific Chosen as Pristine Location for Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Swimsuit Issue

Supreme Court Set to Hear Arguments on Whether Human Genes Can Be Patented

As the justices prepare to hear arguments in the Myriad Genetics case, observers are debating the impact of the outcome on personalized medicine and whole-genome sequencing

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When Daniel Weaver pitches Genformatic to potential investors, he feels obliged to note a future legal uncertainty. The two-year-old company, based in Austin, Texas, offers whole-genome sequencing and analysis to researchers and physicians, with plans to apply the technology to medical diagnostics. But Weaver fears that the company could become ensnared in a thicket of thousands of patents. Who knows how much it would cost in legal fees just to sort through that? he says.

Weaver and others in his line of business are looking to the US Supreme Court to prune that thicket. On 15 April, the court will hear arguments in a long-running lawsuit intended to answer one question: are human genes actually patentable? Yet the implications of the courts decision expected by the end of June may be narrower for business and medicine than many people hope and think. The case is limited to patents that cover the sequence of a gene, rather than methods used to analyze it (see A plethora of patents). Symbolically, this case is a pretty big deal, says Robert Cook-Deegan, a policy researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But the practical consequences of it are limited.

The case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, tackles the validity of patents owned by Myriad Genetics, a medical diagnostics company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, on isolated DNA that encompasses the human genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain forms of these genes increase the risk of breast, ovarian and other cancers. Myriad says that its patents are necessary to protect its investment in research. But physicians and patients charge that the intellectual-property restrictions have limited development of and access to medical tests based on the genes. In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation, both based in New York, sued Myriad. The case has been rumbling through the courts ever since.

To many in biotechnology, it has ramifications beyond specific genes. The case highlights concerns that a network of individual gene patents could threaten the future of personalized medicine and whole-genome sequencing by blocking companies and clinicians from reporting a patients genetic risk factors for different diseases. Its as if somebody had a patent on the X-ray images of the pelvic region of a human being, says Weaver. You could administer the test, but you wouldnt be able to inform the patient about that region. Its crazy.

By some estimates, the number of patents on human DNA is indeed extensive. In 2005, researchers reported that 20% of human genes had been patented. Two weeks ago, another team raised that estimate to at least 41%. But some dispute these numbers and their implications. Christopher Holman, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, read through 533 of the 4,270 patents referenced in the 2005 study, and found that more than one-quarter were unlikely to limit genetic testing. The literature is full of this kind of problem, he says.

His analysis was backed up by Nicholson Price, an academic fellow at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who found that few, if any, DNA patents would be infringed by companies or clinics sequencing whole genomes of individuals for medical insight. Many, for example, apply only to the selective isolation of specific stretches of DNA, says Price, whereas whole-genome sequencing is an untargeted sweep of the entire genome.

Myriads contested patents are part of a dying breed, says David Resnick, a patent attorney at the law firm Nixon Peabody in Boston, Massachusetts. They were filed in 1995, before much of the human genome was sequenced and put into the public domain. Many other US gene patents issued before the human genome was sequenced are no longer enforced, because the companies that hold them have stopped paying maintenance fees. This case is a conversation we should have had 20 years ago, says Resnick. Its moot now.

Cook-Deegan thinks that whole-genome approaches may still be threatened if courts interpret patent claims broadly. Christopher Mason, a genomics researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, says that companies and clinics should not have to bear the risk of a court case. If youre so sure those patents wont be a problem, he says, when I get sued, youll pay my court fees.

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Supreme Court Set to Hear Arguments on Whether Human Genes Can Be Patented

Dog Genetics Spur Scientific Spat

Researchers disagree over the whens and wheres of canine domestication

Les Hirondelles Photography/Flickr/Getty Images

Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.

In recent months, three international teams have published papers comparing the genomes of dogs and wolves. On some matters such as the types of genetic changes that make the two differ the researchers are more or less in agreement. Yet the teams have all arrived at wildly different conclusions about the timing, location and basis for the reinvention of ferocious wolves as placid pooches. Its a sexy field, says Greger Larson, an archeogeneticist at the University of Durham, UK. He has won a 950,000 (US$1.5-million) grant to study dog domestication starting in October. Youve got a lot of big personalities, a lot of money, and people who want to get their Nature paper first.

In January, Erik Axelsson and Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, geneticists at Uppsala University in Sweden, and their colleagues reported in Nature that genes involved in the breaking down of starch seemed to set domestic dogs apart from wild wolves. In the paper and in media interviews, the researchers argued that dog domestication was catalyzed by the dawn of agriculture around 10,000years ago in the Middle East, as wolves began to loiter around human settlements and rubbish heaps (see Nature http://doi.org/mv4; 2013).

But Larson, who has worked with Lindblad-Toh on other projects, says that their claim is dubious. He notes that bones that look similar to those of domestic dogs predate the Neolithic revolution by at least several thousand years, so domestication must have occurred before then. Why waste space [in a paper] saying something that is patently untrue? he says.

Axelsson concedes that the changes in starch digestion in dogs could have occurred after they were domesticated. But he also counters that the Neolithic era lasted for thousands of years, and that dogs may have been domesticated during the earliest steps towards agrarian life when human hunter-gatherers settled down and began eating more starch-rich wild plants.

A second study, published last month in Nature Communications, argues that dogs were domesticated 32,000years ago when they began scavenging with Palaeolithic humans in southern China. A team led by Ya-ping Zhang at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China drew that conclusion from studying the whole genomes of several grey wolves, modern European dog breeds and indigenous Chinese dogs.

But Larson says that there is no evidence to suggest that wolves ever lived in southern China, so how do you domesticate a wolf if there arent any? And Jean-Denis Vigne, an archeozoologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, agrees, noting that in earlier work, Zhangs team completely ignored what has been published, even in the frame of genetics.

Peter Savolainen, a geneticist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Solna, Sweden, who co-authored the Nature Communications paper, argues that Chinese scientific literature suggests that wolves did once live south of Chinas Yangtze River, but have since become extinct. But he acknowledges that the date that his team reported like all molecular dating efforts relies on several assumptions, such as the number of genetic mutations that develop in each generation.

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Dog Genetics Spur Scientific Spat

Renacci Floor Speech: All Hardworking Americans Deserve Relief From The President’s Health Care Law – Video


Renacci Floor Speech: All Hardworking Americans Deserve Relief From The President #39;s Health Care Law
Floor Speech Text: "Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 4118, the Simple Fairness Act. "According to a recent Gallup poll, 51 percent of Amer...

By: RepJimRenacci

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Renacci Floor Speech: All Hardworking Americans Deserve Relief From The President's Health Care Law - Video

Obama to Latinos: Last call for health care signup

By JOSH LEDERMAN/Associated Press/March 6, 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) Issuing a last call for health care, President Barack Obama assured Latinos on Thursday that signing up for new insurance exchanges wont lead to deportation for any relatives in the U.S. illegally.

Facing fresh skepticism from one of his traditionally most loyal constituencies, Obama pushed back on the notion of some critics that hes become Americas deporter in chief, insisting that Latinos know that I've got their back. In a virtual town hall meeting with Spanish-language media outlets, Obama disputed that his credibility had been undermined by the chaotic health care rollout and his failure to secure legal status for millions of Latinos in the U.S. illegally.

The main point that I have for everybody watching right now is, you dont punish me by not signing up for health care, Obama said. Youre punishing yourself or your family if in fact theres affordable health care to be had.

Obamas push to boost enrollment comes as the end-of-March deadline to enroll is rapidly approaching and with it, renewed concerns that if the Obama administration misses its target, the insurance pool could become unsustainable and undermine the broader laws success. The federal government has provided millions of dollars for advertising campaigns geared toward the Latino community, and top officials have been fanning out to spread the word, with first lady Michelle Obama appearing Wednesday in a predominantly minority neighborhood in Miami.

Enrolling Latinos, who are disproportionately uninsured in the U.S., has been a major priority, but the effort has been complicated by a cascade of obstacles including problems with the Spanish-language website. Californias state-based exchange, which co-hosted Obamas event, has come under heavy criticism for lackluster efforts to sign up Latinos.

People in the U.S. illegally arent eligible to sign up, Obama said, but those with a legal presence in the country such as legal residents can enroll. Obama sought to pre-empt concerns that information collected in the process of signing up could be used to identify and deport the relatives of citizens or legal residents.

So for everybody out there who is in a mixed family, there is no sharing of the data from the health care plan into immigration services, Obama said. They should feel confident.

Those assurances came from a president who has found himself squeezed this year between Latinos frustrated by the pace of progress on immigration and Republicans who say they distrust Obamas commitment to enforcing the law. Those competing forces have complicated Obamas push to secure an immigration overhaul in Congress a task that will only become more difficult as the midterm elections grow nearer.

While some Republicans criticize Obama for unilaterally halting deportations for young people brought into the U.S. illegally by their parents, immigration activists have said Obama didnt go far enough and should halt all deportations. But Obama said his move to protect so-called Dreamers already stretched my administrative capacity very far.

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Obama to Latinos: Last call for health care signup

Money Pours Into Health-Care ETFs Spurred by New Drugs

Money is flooding into exchange-traded funds focused on health care at the fastest rate in at least six years, driven by booming biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors bringing new products to market.

In 2014, 51 percent of money flowing into U.S. sector-focused ETFs, or $4.06 billion through Feb. 28, was for health-care funds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Thats more than two-thirds of the total deposits the funds attracted in all of 2013, and a greater share of total ETF contributions than any time since at least 2008.

People thought drug development was dead and all there was was a patent cliff, Doug Foreman, chief investment officer at Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management in Los Angeles whose firm oversees about $9 billion, said referring to the loss of exclusivity for top-selling brand-name medicines. There isnt a day that goes by that some company doesnt report positive results from a trial and the stock is up 100 percent.

Exchange-traded funds are securities that track an index or basket of stocks or bonds in a given market or industry sector. They can be easily traded and come with low costs. Inflows to U.S. ETFs more than tripled to $183 billion last year from 2004, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

This year also is the health-care sector's highest share of exchange-traded funds ... Read More

This year also is the health-care sector's highest share of exchange-traded funds inflows since President Barack Obama took office and debate began in 2009 over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's signature health-care overhaul. Close

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This year also is the health-care sector's highest share of exchange-traded funds inflows since President Barack Obama took office and debate began in 2009 over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's signature health-care overhaul.

This year also is the health-care sectors highest share of ETF inflows since President Barack Obama took office and debate began in 2009 over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamas signature health-care overhaul. After the law was signed in 2010, health-care ETFs saw $944.9 million leave, and health was the worst performing of 12 ETF sectors.

Concern that the law known as Obamacare would damage the sector -- which helped drive down health stocks in 2010 -- is largely over, said Les Funtleyder, a longtime heath-sector investor and analyst who is a consulting partner at Bluecloud Healthcare. The firm doesnt have an health-care ETF investments.

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Money Pours Into Health-Care ETFs Spurred by New Drugs

Obama talks about health care, immigration

President Obama told a Hispanic audience Thursday that he has no choice but to deport immigrants who are in the United States illegally because that's what the law demands.

"Congress has said you have to enforce these laws," Obama said during a virtual town hall otherwise devoted to health care. "I cannot ignore these laws."

Obama used the event, co-sponsored by Spanish-language media outlets, to encourage Hispanics to sign up for health care coverage ahead of a key deadline at the end of this month.

In addition to discussing health care, Obama found himself defending record-setting deportation numbers that have drawn the ire of Hispanic organizations nationwide. Earlier this week, Janet Murguia - president of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino advocacy organization - described Obama as "deporter-in-chief."

Asked repeatedly about the issue, Obama said he has told immigration authorities to focus deportations on people who have criminal records or a history of gang activity, not young people who are in school.

Obama also reminded the audience that he has asked Congress to pass new legislation that can help clarify the immigration system, including a path to citizenship for people who are already here illegally.

"Until Congress passes a new law, I am constrained as to what I can do," Obama said.

The town hall was designed to encourage Hispanics to sign up for insurance coverage through exchanges created by the health care law.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for health care benefits, Obama said in response to one question, and he told the crowd that private health care information will not be shared with immigration authorities.

The virtual town hall took place a day after the Obama administration announced another delay in parts of the law, including one that will give people more time to hold insurance policies that do not have all the new legal requirements.

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Obama talks about health care, immigration

Proove Biosciences Will Present Clinical Research and Data at the American Academy of Pain Medicines 30th Annual …

Irvine, CA (PRWEB) March 06, 2014

Proove Biosciences, the leader Personalized Pain Medicine testing services, will participate and present clinical data and research at the American Academy of Pain Medicines 30th annual meeting this weekend, March 6-9, 2014. The meeting provides a comprehensive overview and review of current and cutting-edge pain medicine practice topics.

AAPM President and Proove Medical Advisory Board Member, Dr. Lynn Webster, will be moderating a workshop on safe opioid prescribing practices. The program will educate prescribers about eight evidence-based principles that will drastically reduce the number of unintentional overdose deaths from prescription medication.

"We are thrilled to be a part of the AAPMs Annual Meeting. As the premiere industry forum, we are excited to share and present our clinical data on how our Proove Genetic tests have been helping pain medicine professionals throughout the country improve the selection, dosing, and evaluation of medications. We will exhibit how Proove helps identify patients at risk for tolerance and misuse of medications, and how we have been creating efficiency within the healthcare system, while improving safety and decreasing risks associated with pain medicine therapies," stated Brian Meshkin, President of Proove Biosciences.

Proove will again be the only company presenting data on the genetics of pain medicine. During the poster session, Proove will be presenting data correlating genetic variations with co-occurring psychiatric disorders among chronic pain patients taking narcotics.

About the American Academy of Pain Medicine

The American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM) is the medical specialty society representing physicians practicing in the field of pain medicine. As a medical specialty society, the Academy is involved in education, training, advocacy, and research in the specialty of pain medicine.

About Proove Biosciences

Proove Biosciences is the leading Personalized Pain Medicine laboratory that provides proprietary genetic testing services to help physicians improve outcomes for patients and contain costs for insurers. With offices in Southern California and the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, the Company is the research leader investigating and publishing data on the genetics of pain medicine with clinical research sites across the United States. Physicians use Proove Biosciences testing to improve pain medicine selection, dosing, and evaluation of medications they prescribe. From a simple cheek swab collected in the office, Proove performs proprietary genetic tests in its CLIA-certified laboratory to identify patients at risk for misuse of prescription pain medications and evaluate their metabolism of medications. For more information, please visit http://www.proovebio.com or call toll free 855-PROOVE-BIO (855-776-6832).

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Proove Biosciences Will Present Clinical Research and Data at the American Academy of Pain Medicines 30th Annual ...

Clinics Offer Expensive Whole-Genome Tests for Undiagnosed Disorders

Two university-based clinics have debuted large programs that rely on sequencing to diagnose genetic disorders, including developmental disorders such as autism

Cancer.gov

Reprinted with permission fromSFARI.org, an editorially independent division of The Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.)

Over the past few years, teams of scientists have been finding genetic glitches related to a wide variety of disorders by sequencing exomes, the protein-coding portions of the genome. But these genetic tests are typically out of reach for people unless they enroll in research studies, and even then, theyre almost never privy to their individual results.

But that looks set to change: A few clinics are debuting large programs that rely on sequencing of exomes or even of whole genomes, and making the results directly available to individuals. For less than $10,000 each, the tests offer people with unexplained genetic disorders the chance to find the cause of their condition.

The first academic lab to offer clinical exome sequencing was the Whole Genome Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Since November 2011, the lab has sequenced the exomes of some 1,700 individuals with undiagnosed conditions, including many children with developmental disorders. It now averages about 200 exomes a month.

"It's gone gangbusters," says Richard Gibbs, director of Baylor's Human Genome Sequencing Center, which helped establish the new lab. The researchers have pinpointed the genetic cause of about one-quarter of the 1,700 cases as mutations in known disease genes, he says.

Last week, the Harvard-affiliated Partners Healthcare Center in Boston launched a similar lab focused on sequencing whole genomes. And two private companies Ambry Genetics in Aliso Viejo, California, and GeneDx in Gaithersburg, Maryland have offered clinical exome sequencing since 2011.

Deciding which parts of the sequencing data should be divulged to individuals is far from straightforward. A few mutations are clearly associated with disease, but most are still tricky to interpret.

From a research perspective, however, the development is unequivocally exciting, experts say.

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Clinics Offer Expensive Whole-Genome Tests for Undiagnosed Disorders

A Father's Genetic Quest Pays Off

A genetic mutation provides a clue to Hugh Rienhoff's daughter's undefined syndrome

Colston Rienhoff

Hugh Rienhoff says that his nine-year-old daughter, Bea, is a fire cracker, a tomboy and a very sassy, impudent girl. But in a forthcoming research paper, he uses rather different terms, describing her hypertelorism (wide spacing between the eyes) and bifid uvula (a cleft in the tissue that hangs from the back of the palate). Both are probably features of a genetic syndrome that Rienhoff has obsessed over since soon after Beas birth in 2003. Unable to put on much muscle mass, Bea wears braces on her skinny legs to steady her on her curled feet. She is otherwise healthy, but Rienhoff has long worried that his daughters condition might come with serious heart problems.

Rienhoff, a biotech entrepreneur in San Carlos, California, who had trained as a clinical geneticist in the 1980s, went from doctor to doctor looking for a diagnosis. He bought lab equipment so that he could study his daughters DNA himself and in the process, he became a symbol for the do-it-yourself biology movement, and a trailblazer in using DNA technologies to diagnose a rare disease (see Nature 449, 773776; 2007).

Talk about personal genomics, says GarySchroth, a research and development director at the genome-sequencing company Illumina in San Diego, California, who has helped Rienhoff in his search for clues. It doesnt get any more personal than trying to figure out whats wrong with your own kid.

Now nearly a decade into his quest, Rienhoff has arrived at an answer. Through the partial-genome sequencing of his entire family, he and a group of collaborators have found a mutation in the gene that encodes transforming growth factor-3 (TGF-3). Genes in the TGF- pathway control embryogenesis, cell differentiation and cell death, and mutations in several related genes have been associated with Marfan syndrome and LoeysDietz syndrome, both of which have symptomatic overlap with Beas condition. The mutation, which has not been connected to any disease before, seems to be responsible for Beas clinical features, according to a paper to be published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.

Hal Dietz, a clinician at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, where Rienhoff trained as a geneticist, isnt surprised that the genetic culprit is in this pathway. The overwhelming early hypothesis was that this was related, says Dietz, who co-discovered LoeysDietz syndrome in 2005.

Rienhoff had long been tapping experts such as Dietz for assistance. In 2005, an examination at Johns Hopkins revealed Beas bifid uvula. This feature, combined with others, suggested LoeysDietz syndrome, which is caused by mutations in TGF- receptors. But physicians found none of the known mutations after sequencing these genes individually. This was a relief: LoeysDietz is associated with devastating cardiovascular complications and an average life span of 26 years.

In 2008, Jay Flatley, chief executive of Illumina, offered Rienhoff the chance to sequence Beas transcriptome all of the RNA expressed by a sample of her cells along with those of her parents and her two brothers. After drilling into the data, Rienhoff and his collaborators found that Bea had inherited from each parent a defective-looking copy of CPNE1, a poorly studied gene that seems to encode a membrane protein. It looked like the answer.

But questions remained. The gene did not have obvious connections to Beas features, and publicly available genome data suggests that the CPNE1 mutations are present in about 1in1,000people an indication that there should be many more people like Bea.

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A Father's Genetic Quest Pays Off