Alabama's Governor Bentley creates state health care task force

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Robert Bentley

FILE - In this March 3, 2015 file photo, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley speaks during the annual State of the State address at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Bentley is trying to take his sales pitch directly to voters with a series of speeches promoting his proposed tax increase and the creation of a new nonprofit to promote his policy agenda for the remainder of his term. However, legislators still don't seem to be buying into his ideas. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

MONTGOMERY| Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley on Monday created a new task force aimed at making health care in Alabama more accessible and more affordable.

Bentley signed an executive order creating the Alabama Health Care Improvement Task Force.

The 38-person panel includes physicians, nurses, dentists, mental health professionals, insurance companies and hospitals. State Health Officer Don Williamson will lead the task force. Bentley said more people could be added if needed.

"We're going to look at all of these things and what I'm asking people to do when they come together in this task force is to leave their turf at the door," Bentley said.

The team plans to examine a number of ideas for improving health care infrastructure in both rural and urban areas. Possibilities include expanding telemedicine, medical resources and scope-of-practice laws.

"Distance does not have to be an obstacle to health care," Bentley said.

The first meeting is scheduled for April 15.

Bentley said he hopes to have some ideas ready for the 2016 legislative session.

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Alabama's Governor Bentley creates state health care task force

Health Care Sector Update for 04/06/2015: OVAS,QURE,NYMX

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Top Healthcare Stocks

JNJ -0.41%

PZE +0.39%

MRK +0.43%

ABT +0.28%

AMGN -0.33%

Healthcare stocks were mostly higher today with the NYSE Healthcare Sector Index climbing 0.4% and the S&P Healthcare Index adding about 0.2%.

In company news, Ovascience ( OVAS ) shares fell Monday after a new report today questioned the effectiveness of the company's Augment infertility treatment.

The treatment was only effective just 27% of the time, according to the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation report, or nearly one-half the 53% success rate cited by OVAS last week. The report also criticized the lack of a control group, making it difficult to tell whether the results were promising.

OVAS shares were down over 5% at $33.20 a share, earlier sinking as low as $31.01 a share. The stock has traded within a 52-week range of $5.51 to $33.69 a share, rising nearly 288% over the past 12 months prior to today's retreat.

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Health Care Sector Update for 04/06/2015: OVAS,QURE,NYMX

Can cancer vaccines prolong survival?

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IMAGE:Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals, published 10 times per online with open access options and in print, is under the editorial leadership of Co-Editors-in-Chief Donald J. Buchsbaum, PhD, Department of Radiation... view more

Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

ew Rochelle, NY, April 6, 2015--Therapeutic anti-cancer vaccines developed to treat metastatic disease such as advanced prostate cancer or melanoma rarely have a noticeable effect on the tumor but have been associated with a statistically significant increase in patient survival. Robert O. Dillman, MD, NeoStem, Inc., asserts that "overall survival" rather than "progression-free survival" should be the gold standard for evaluating the efficacy of cancer vaccines in clinical trials, in a provocative new article published in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals website until May 6, 2015.

In the article "Cancer Vaccines: Can They Improve Survival?" Dr. Dillman differentiates between the two key endpoints typically used to assess therapeutic cancer vaccines in clinical studies. As cancer vaccines are designed to stimulate an immune response to cancer cells and induce long-term memory recognition of a tumor, they may improve overall survival even if they do not appear to slow the progression of disease. Although measuring overall survival compared to progression-free survival would usually require longer clinical trials, overall survival may be the only relevant efficacy endpoint, the author concludes.

"This is a timely article considering the number of vaccine and antibody immunotherapy trials ongoing or planned," says Co-Editor-in-Chief Donald J. Buchsbaum, PhD, Department of Radiation Oncology, Division of Radiation Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham. "The conclusion that overall survival is the best clinical endpoint for efficacy in therapeutic vaccine and antibody immunotherapy trials in patients with metastatic cancer is based on an analysis of four completed trials."

About the Journal

Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals , published 10 times per online with open access options and in print, is under the editorial leadership of Co-Editors-in-Chief Donald J. Buchsbaum, PhD, Department of Radiation Oncology, Division of Radiation Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Robert K. Oldham, MD, CAMC-Teay's Valley Cancer Center. Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals, celebrating 30 years in 2015, is the only journal with a specific focus on cancer biotherapy, including monoclonal antibodies, cytokine therapy, cancer gene therapy, cell-based therapies, and other forms of immunotherapy. The Journal includes extensive reporting on advancements in radioimmunotherapy and the use of radiopharmaceuticals and radiolabeled peptides for the development of new cancer treatments. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research, Human Gene Therapy, and Stem Cells and Development. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) (http://www.genengnews.com), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

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Pulling the strings of our genetic puppetmasters

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IMAGE:This is Charles Gersbach, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. view more

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke researchers have developed a new method to precisely control when genes are turned on and active.

The new technology allows researchers to turn on specific gene promoters and enhancers -- pieces of the genome that control gene activity -- by chemically manipulating proteins that package DNA. This web of biomolecules that supports and controls gene activity is known as the epigenome.

The researchers say having the ability to steer the epigenome will help them explore the roles that particular promoters and enhancers play in cell fate or the risk for genetic disease and it could provide a new avenue for gene therapies and guiding stem cell differentiation.

The study appears online April 6 in Nature Biotechnology.

"The epigenome is everything associated with the genome other than the actual genetic sequence, and is just as important as our DNA in determining cell function in healthy and diseased conditions," said Charles Gersbach, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. "That becomes immediately obvious when you consider that we have over 200 cell types, and yet the DNA in each is virtually the same. The epigenome determines which genes each cell activates and to what degree."

This genetic puppetmaster consists of DNA packaging proteins called histones and a host of chemical modifications -- either to these histones or the DNA itself -- that help determine whether a gene is on or off.

But Gersbach's team didn't have to modify the genes themselves to gain some control.

"Next to every gene is a DNA sequence called a promoter that controls its activity," explained Gersbach. "But there's also many other pieces of the genome called enhancers that aren't next to any genes at all, and yet they play a critical role in influencing gene activity too."

Timothy Reddy, assistant professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Duke, has spent the better part of a decade mapping millions of these enhancers across the human genome. There has not, however, been a good way to find out exactly what each one does. An enhancer might affect a gene next door or several genes across the genome -- or maybe none at all.

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Pulling the strings of our genetic puppetmasters

Gene Therapy Delivery: What Can be Accomplished with Existing Vector Technology? – Video

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Gene Therapy Delivery: What Can be Accomplished with Existing Vector Technology?
Moderator: Joshua Schimmer, M.D., Managing Director Senior Research Analyst, Piper Jaffray Speakers: David Kirn, M.D., CEO Co-Founder, 4D Molecular Therapeutics Richard Lawn, Ph.D., ...

By: Alliance for Regenerative Medicine

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Gene Therapy Delivery: What Can be Accomplished with Existing Vector Technology? - Video

UniQure's stock soars after Bristol-Myers Squibb deal to buy a large stake

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NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Shares of UniQure NV QURE, +47.03% soared 44% in premarket trade Monday, after the gene therapy company announced a collaboration deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb BMY, -0.36% which includes Bristol-Myers acquiring an initial equity stake of 4.9% in UniQure. The stake will be acquired at $33.84 per share, which is 48% above Thursday's closing price of $22.86, UniQure said. Under terms of the agreement, which will give Bristol-Myers exclusive access to UniQure's gene therapy technology for multiple targets in cardiovascular diseases, Bristol-Myers will acquire an additional 5% stake in UniQure by Dec. 31, 2015 at a 10% premium, and will be granted warrants to buy up to an additional 10% stake. Bristol-Myers will also make an upfront payment of $50 million and a $15 million payment for the selection of three collaboration targets. UniQure's stock has surged 54% year to date through Thursday and Bristol-Myers has climbed 7.1%, while the S&P 500 has gained 0.4%.

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UniQure's stock soars after Bristol-Myers Squibb deal to buy a large stake

UniQure NV (QURE) Stock Soars to 52-Week High on Bristol-Myers Squibb Investment

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NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- Shares of UniQure NV (QURE)soared more than 50% to a 52-week high of $35.50in morning trading Monday after Bristol-Myers Squibbinvested in the Dutch company to collaborate on gene therapies for cardiovascular disease.

Bristol-Myers will have exclusive access to UniQure's proprietary gene therapy program for congestive heart failure. The two companies will collaborate on 10 targets and could also work on more projects for other diseases in the future.

Bristol-Myers will pay approximately$100 million, including an upfront payment of $50 million, a $15 million payment to select two collaboration targets, and a $32 million investment in UniQure for a 4.9% stake in the Dutch company. Bristol-Myers will earn an additional 5% ownership before the end of the year at a 10% premium.

UniQure is eligible toreceive at least an additional $254 million if certain milestones are reached. It can also receive $217 million for other gene therapy products.

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UniQure NV (QURE) Stock Soars to 52-Week High on Bristol-Myers Squibb Investment

The Large Hadron Collider Is Back In Action

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(Credit: CERN - Photograph: Dominguez, Daniel; Brice, Maximilien)

Yesterday, scientists at the Large Hardon Collider successfully turned it on, injecting two proton beams moving in opposite directions into the massive particle accelerator. The particles will be travelling at a relatively low energy at first of 450 GeV so that the operators of the can ensure that everythings working as it should be. Once all systems are cleared, proton beams will be accelerated to 13 TeV, nearly twice the energy used to find the Higgs Boson.

And thats where the fun will start.

The Large Hadron Collider has been shut down for about two years as upgrades were made to its various systems. This included consolidating some of the electrical systems, adding magnet protection systems, and making improvements to its cryogenic and vacuum systems. The LHC will also be able to fire proton beams in bunches separated by 25 ms, half the time it used to take.

The improvements to the LHC along with the higher energies will allow thousands of physicists around the world including over 1,700 in the United States alone to conduct experiments to test theories that so far have only been the province of computer simulations.

We are on the threshold of an exciting time in particle physics: the LHC will turn on with the highest energy beam ever achieved, Fleming Crim, National Science Foundation Assistant Director said in a statement. This energy regime will open the door to new discoveries about our universe that were impossible as recently as two years ago.

The Large Hadron Colliders particle accelerator consists of a ring 27 km (about 16.7 mi) long. The protons are emitted into the ring (which is a vacuum), and then are accelerated using superconducting magnets that are cooled to near absolute zero: -271 degrees C. They are then sped up to nearly the speed of light and have energies added to them. The particles are then crashed together, which produces huge amounts of energies. By studying the byproducts of those collisions, physicists are able to discover new particles and learn other things about the physics of subatomic particles.

Some of the things that the Large Hadron Collider will be looking for during its next round of experiments will be more information about the Higgs boson and how it works. Scientists at CERN will also be trying to create the particles that are hypothesized to make up dark matter as well as evidence for the first supersymmetric particle.

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The Large Hadron Collider Is Back In Action

Facial Recognition Company Kairos Acquires Emotion Analysis Company IMRSV

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(Credit: Kairos)

Miami-based facial recognition software company Kairos announced today that it has acquired emotion analysis company IMRSV for $2.7 million. IMRSV will be folded into Kairos business structure rather than existing as a separate entity.

Prior to the acquisition, Kairos was a customer of IMRSV, incorporating their technology of emotional analysis into their facial recognition offerings.

The impetus for emotional analysis, Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen told me. Came from our customers. One of them, for example, was a bank that was using our facial recognition as a means of authentication. They came back later and said that there were scenarios when access might be desired by the right person, with the right code, but we dont want them to have it. Like if theyre anxious, maybe thats because its the day theyre going to rob the bank.

Another reason for the acquisition, Brackeen told me, was the companys developer focus. As part of the acquisition announcement, the company has also introduced new APIs and an SDK for facial recognition, emotion analysis and crowd analytics. Being able to combine emotion analysis and facial recognition means there are fewer APIs for developers to deal with, allowing them to incorporate Kairos technology more quickly.

As an added benefit, Brackeen said, the company also expects the acquisition to enable them to develop better products more quickly.

Now well have one API and code base to work with, Brackeen said. But more importantly, the larger sciences of computer vision and machine learning build on each other. This allows the improvement of both our facial recognition and emotion analysis because the synergies between the two are very strong.

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Facial Recognition Company Kairos Acquires Emotion Analysis Company IMRSV

TUTORIAL: Como Baixar, Instalar e Usar Freedom (Hacker de Jogos) no Android 5.0.2 Lollipop – Video

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TUTORIAL: Como Baixar, Instalar e Usar Freedom (Hacker de Jogos) no Android 5.0.2 Lollipop
OBS.: BAIXE A NOVA VERSO AQUI EM BAIXO E ANTES DE INSTALAR, DESINSTALE QUALQUER VERSO ANTERIOR QUE VC POSSUIR. LEIA A DESCRIO ...

By: Edmilson Furtado Correia

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TUTORIAL: Como Baixar, Instalar e Usar Freedom (Hacker de Jogos) no Android 5.0.2 Lollipop - Video

GovBeat: What everybody missed during the fight over religious freedom laws this year

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This is the lastin a four-part explainer about the past, present, and future of religious liberty laws.

1.The twisted history of how religious freedom laws confused everybody

2.How religious freedom laws were praised, then hated, then forgotten, then, finally, resurrected

3.Heres how to use religious freedom laws to fend off a gay discrimination suit

4.What everybody missed during the fight over religious freedom laws this year

On Saturday, bedecked in rainbow pins, rainbow banners, and rainbow flags, the gay backlash marched on Indianapolis.

Hoosiers dont discriminate! they chanted as they rounded the statehouse.

No more Band-Aids masking hate! they said as they wound through the shops downtown.

No hate in our state, they continued, as they approached the stadium where thousands of visitors had come to watch Duke play Wisconsin in the mens Final Four.

Indiana had also become the main venue for this years religious freedom fracas, which wound down last week when two governors made two divergent choices for the futures of their states.

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GovBeat: What everybody missed during the fight over religious freedom laws this year

Lecture Series at UCSB Explores Politics of Female Biology and Reproduction

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By Andrea Estrada for the UCSB Office of Public Affairs and Communications | Published on 04.06.2015 1:39 p.m.

Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent. Approximately 20,000 sterilizations took place in state institutions, comprising one-third of the total number performed in the 32 states where such action was legal.

Terence Keel (Sonia Fernandez / UCSB photo)

Known as eugenics, the practice was a commonly accepted means of protecting society from the offspring (and therefore equally suspect) of those individuals deemed inferior or dangerous the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals and people of color.

Although the law was repealed by the state legislature in 1979, the legacy of the eugenics movement continues today. It is one of the main topics in a public lecture series at UC Santa Barbara. Titled The Biopolitics of Reproduction, the series will approach issues of reproduction from a historical and ethnographic perspective, exploring the eugenics movement, progressive era public health reform, the cultural politics of abortion and the science of womens reproductive systems.

The lectures, which begin at 5 p.m., will take place in 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building at UCSB. They are free and open to the public.

The aim of the series is to place the current crisis facing womens right to comprehensive reproductive health, especially for women of color, within a historical context, said Terence Keel, assistant professor at UCSB, jointly appointed in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of History. The goal is to create awareness and a conversation on campus about how present-day controversies over abortion, sterilization and access to contraception and reproductive care have deep ties to the eugenics movement and long-standing racial and gender biases within Western science.

These connections have left an indelible mark on public health policies, practicesand technological innovation, Keel continued.

The series begins Tuesday, April 14, with a talk by Alexandra Minna Stern, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, American culture and history at the University of Michigan. She will discuss Racial and Reproductive Injustice: The Long History of Eugenic Sterilization in California.

Sterns work focuses on the history of medicine, including eugenics, medical genetics, epidemics, childrens health and tropical medicine. Her book Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America is widely considered to be the definitive study of eugenics in California, said Keel.

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Lecture Series at UCSB Explores Politics of Female Biology and Reproduction

A Guide to Thesis Writing That Is a Guide to Life

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In How to Write a Thesis, Umberto Eco walks students through the craft and rewards of sustained research. Credit Photograph by Martine Franck / Magnum

How to Write a Thesis, by Umberto Eco, first appeared on Italian bookshelves in 1977. For Eco, the playful philosopher and novelist best known for his work on semiotics, there was a practical reason for writing it. Up until 1999, a thesis of original research was required of every student pursuing the Italian equivalent of a bachelors degree. Collecting his thoughts on the thesis process would save him the trouble of reciting the same advice to students each year. Since its publication,How to Write a Thesishas gone through twenty-three editions in Italy and has been translated into at least seventeen languages. Its first English edition is only now available, in a translation by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina.

We in the English-speaking world have survived thirty-seven years withoutHow to Write a Thesis. Why bother with it now? After all, Eco wrote his thesis-writing manual before the advent of widespread word processing and the Internet. There are long passages devoted to quaint technologies such as note cards and address books, careful strategies for how to overcome the limitations of your local library. But the books enduring appealthe reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mailhas little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, its about what, in Ecos rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in ones early twenties. Your thesis, Eco foretells, is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget. By mastering the demands and protocols of the fusty old thesis, Eco passionately demonstrates, we become equipped for a world outside ourselvesa world of ideas, philosophies, and debates.

Ecos career has been defined by a desire to share the rarefied concerns of academia with a broader reading public. He wrote a novel that enacted literary theory (The Name of the Rose) and a childrens book about atoms conscientiously objecting to their fate as war machines (The Bomb and the General).How to Write a Thesisis sparked by the wish to give any student with the desire and a respect for the process the tools for producing a rigorous and meaningful piece of writing. A more just society, Eco writes at the books outset, would be one where anyone with true aspirations would be supported by the state, regardless of their background or resources. Our society does not quite work that way. It is the students of privilege, the beneficiaries of the best training available, who tend to initiate and then breeze through the thesis process.

Eco walks students through the craft and rewards of sustained research, the nuances of outlining, different systems for collating ones research notes, what to do ifper Ecos invocation of thesis-as-first-loveyou fear that someones made all these moves before. There are broad strategies for laying out the projects center and periphery as well as philosophical asides about originality and attribution. Work on a contemporary author as if he were ancient, and an ancient one as if he were contemporary, Eco wisely advises. You will have more fun and write a better thesis. Other suggestions may strike the modern student as anachronistic, such as the novel idea of using an address book to keep a log of ones sources.

But there are also old-fashioned approaches that seem more useful than ever: he recommends, for instance, a system of sortable index cards to explore a projects potential trajectories. Moments like these makeHow to Write a Thesisfeel like an instruction manual for finding ones center in a dizzying era of information overload. Consider Ecos caution against the alibi of photocopies: A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many. Many of us suffer from an accelerated version of this nowadays, as we effortlessly bookmark links or save articles to Instapaper, satisfied with our aspiration to horde all this new information, unsure if we will ever get around to actually dealing with it. (Ecos not-entirely-helpful solution: read everything as soon as possible.)

But the most alluring aspect of Ecos book is the way he imagines the community that results from any honest intellectual endeavorthe conversations you enter into across time and space, across age or hierarchy, in the spirit of free-flowing, democratic conversation. He cautions students against losing themselves down a narcissistic rabbit hole: you are not a defrauded genius simply because someone else has happened upon the same set of research questions. You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian, he writes, because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation.

Eco captures a basic set of experiences and anxieties familiar to anyone who has written a thesis, from finding a mentor (How to Avoid Being Exploited By Your Advisor) to fighting through episodes of self-doubt. Ultimately, its the process and struggle that make a thesis a formative experience. When everything else you learned in college is marooned in the pastwhen you happen upon an old notebook and wonder what you spent all your time doing, since you have no recollection whatsoever of a senior-year postmodernism seminarit is the thesis that remains, providing the once-mastered scholarly foundation that continues to authorize, decades-later, barroom observations about the late-career works of William Faulker or the Hotelling effect. (Full disclosure: I doubt that anyone on Earth can rival my mastery of John TravoltasWhite Mans Burden, owing to an idyllic Berkeley spring spent studying awful movies about race.)

In his foreword to Ecos book, the scholar Francesco Erspamer contends thatHow to Write a Thesiscontinues to resonate with readers because it gets at the very essence of the humanities. There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves. As critics continue to assail the prohibitive cost and possible uselessness of collegeand at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a longreadits understandable that devoting a small chunk of ones frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas. Even from the perspective of the collegiate bureaucracy, the thesis is useful primarily as another mode of assessment, a benchmark of student achievement thats legible and quantifiable. Its also a great parting reminder to parents that your senior learned and achieved something.

ButHow to Write a Thesisis ultimately about much more than the leisurely pursuits of college students. Writing and research manuals such as The Elements of Style,The Craft of Research, andTurabianoffer a vision of our best selves. They are exacting and exhaustive, full of protocols and standards that might seem pretentious, even strange. Acknowledging these rules, Eco would argue, allows the average person entry into a veritable universe of argument and discussion.How to Write a Thesis, then, isnt just about fulfilling a degree requirement. Its also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with the knowledge that anyone can teach us something. It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of ones own voice.

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A Guide to Thesis Writing That Is a Guide to Life