Episode 16 Holistic & Integrated Veterinary Medicine Part 2 – Video

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Episode 16 Holistic Integrated Veterinary Medicine Part 2
Laurie Zoock of the Half Empty Half Full Radio show interviews veterinarian Marlene Siegal (Part 2) about not just standard Veterinary care but integrated veterinary care. Get smarter faster!

By: Half Empty Half Full Consumer Advocacy Radio Show

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Episode 16 Holistic & Integrated Veterinary Medicine Part 2 - Video

GLOBAL MARCH FOR ELEPHANTS & RHINOS SF – Musical Medicine with Soleil Dakota – Video

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GLOBAL MARCH FOR ELEPHANTS RHINOS SF - Musical Medicine with Soleil Dakota
Musical Medicine with Soleil Dakota Special - SF March for Elephants Rhinos, #MarchAgainstExtinction Soleil offers her music to the world as a healing force. In this special edition, Soleil...

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GLOBAL MARCH FOR ELEPHANTS & RHINOS SF - Musical Medicine with Soleil Dakota - Video

The Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine

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The 2015 LOUIS-JEANTET PRIZE FOR MEDICINE is awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier, Head of the Department Regulation in Infection Biology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany and Guest Professor at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine, Ume University, Sweden, and to RUDOLF ZECHNER, Professor of Biochemistry, Institute of Molecular Biosciences, University of Graz, Austria.

The LOUIS-JEANTET FOUNDATION grants the sum of CHF 700'000 for each of the two prizes, of which CHF 625'000 is for the continuation of the prize-winner's work and CHF 75'000 for their personal use.

THE PRIZE-WINNERS are conducting fundamental biological research that is expected to be of considerable significance for medicine.

Emmanuelle Charpentier of France is awarded the 2015 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine for her contribution in harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful technology for editing genomes.

Bacterial pathogens also possess an immune system that defends them against predators, and particularly viruses. When studying this system, Emmanuelle Charpentier's team unravelled a unique mechanism - CRISPR-Cas9 - a pair of molecular scissors composed of a duplex of two RNAs linked to a protein. The system was harnessed into a new tool that makes genome editing within the cell almost like child's play. It is a revolution for biology, and certainly also for medicine.

Emmanuelle Charpentier will use the prize money to conduct further research on the mechanisms governing the pathogenicity of a streptococcus, namely Streptococcus pyogenes.

RUDOLF ZECHNER of Austria is awarded the 2015 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine for his contribution to our understanding of the vital role of lipids metabolism in the development of certain diseases.

Obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease: these illnesses that have become worldwide epidemics are often caused by dysfunctions of lipid metabolism. Rudolf Zechner and his colleagues discovered a new enzyme (adipose triglyceride lipase or ATGL), which plays a key role in this metabolism, degrading the fats and extracting the energy from nutrients. They also demonstrated that ATGL is involved in cachexia, an irreversible weight loss that affects numerous cancer patients, thus opening the way to new forms of treatment for this pathology.

Rudolf Zechner will use the prize money to study the (patho)physiological role of known and new enzymes involved in lipid metabolism

THE AWARD CEREMONY will be held in Geneva (Switzerland) on Wednesday, 22 April 2015.

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The Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine

Penn Medicine researchers discover possible new general anesthetics

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IMAGE:This is Roderic G. Eckenhoff, vice chair for Research and the Austin Lamont Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. view more

Credit: Penn Medicine

PHILADELPHIA - Penn Medicine researchers, in a continuation of their groundbreaking work to better understand how anesthesia works in the body, have found the first new class of novel anesthetics since the 1970s. Their findings, published in February issue of Anesthesiology, detail the processes through which the group uncovered these compounds.

The team, led by Roderic G. Eckenhoff, MD, vice chair for Research and the Austin Lamont Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that the development of novel anesthetics has historically been a process of combined serendipity and empiricism, with most new anesthetics developed via modification of existing anesthetics. Propfol, the most commonly used anesthetic in the US, and the most recently developed (in the 1970s) was very much a product of empiricism. It was originally developed in the UK and shelved because patients were having anaphylactic reactions and reformulated to include soybean oil and water. While it has been improved, propofol remains a highly potent anesthetic.

Eckenhoff believes new anesthetics are needed because current ones have a host of side effects that can be dangerous if not administered by trained specialists.

"Our previous work looked at the importance of ion channels as anesthetic targets. Ion channels are specialized protein conduits that open in response to stimuli and allow ions to cross the cell membranes of nerve cells and influence their communication with other cells in the brain," explains Eckenhoff. "Despite the clear role for ion channels in normal brain function, little is known about how they interact with anesthetics. We have therefore used simplified versions of ion channels as surrogates to understand anesthetic action." One such surrogate turned out to be ferritin, an abundant natural protein that was easy for the team to characterize, and that made this drug discovery project possible.

In this study, the team first miniaturized an assay based on ferritin and a drug-like molecule they had previously characterized, aminoanthracene, to test the ability of more than 350,000 compounds to behave like anesthetics - at least in the test-tube. This "high throughput screening" process was performed in collaboration with the National Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) at the NIH. This is a project requiring millions of separate assays, something that would normally have taken decades of work. At the NCGC, it took a week.

The team then had to validate that the "hits" from this assay behaved like anesthetics in an animal, not just a test-tube. This "secondary" assay, performed by Andrew McKinstry-Wu, MD, an instructor in the department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, resulted in two of the compounds being identified as effective and non-toxic anesthetics in mice, and both were of a novel chemical class, completely unrelated to any current general anesthetic.

"Our goal was to identify compounds with high potency, but low toxicity" explains Eckenhoff. "But we are a long way from getting these drugs into people." He emphasizes that the primary conclusion of this work is that, "it provides a new approach to identifying novel anesthetics, and we now have at least two compounds that we can optimize and test further."

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Penn Medicine researchers discover possible new general anesthetics

Advanced summer school in system medicine: Implementation of systems medicine across Europe

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The Coordinating Action Systems Medicine (CASyM) is a joint initiative of the European Commission, several European funding bodies, companies, researchers and clinicians aiming to develop a strategic roadmap for implementing Systems Medicine across Europe. To this end we are organizing the first European Summer School in Systems Medicine. Our primary objective is to identify and provide best in class inspirational scientific and clinical demonstrational examples of research, tools, and implementations of Systems Medicine targeting an audience of a balanced mix of postdocs, clinicians, and graduate students poised to become future leaders in Systems Medicine. Secondly, our aim is also to initiate an annual meeting place targeting faculty within Systems Medicine and related areas.

In this Summer School we will offer training and education activities to the next generation of clinicians, students and researchers on the path towards achieving an integrative understanding of pathophysiology and enable for the first time real practicing of 4P (Predictive, Personalized, Preventive and Participatory) medicine. Focus will be on successful examples of research and practice of systems medicine with lectures and hands-on exercises by distinguished faculty. Tutorials will be provided to fill in either medical or computational gaps.

We will offer two Youth Travel Fund Grants (1 for non-FEBS Countries - Asia, USA/Canada, Africa, South America and 1 for FEBS Countries). These grants cover the registration fee, accommodation and meals and support the travel. More information can be found here: http://www.febs.org/our-activities/advanced-courses/youth-travel-fund

The inauguration of the First European Summer School will occur in June 22-26, 2015, in the scenic archipelago of Stockholm, at Djurnset.

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On behalf of the CASyM community, I wish you very much welcome.

Sincerely,

Jesper Tegnr Strategic Professor of Computational Medicine Department of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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Advanced summer school in system medicine: Implementation of systems medicine across Europe

Living longer, not healthier

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New research by UMass Medical School suggest genes that extend lifespan won't necessarily improve health in advanced age

WORCESTER, MA - A study of long-lived mutant C. elegans by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that the genetically altered worms spend a greater portion of their life in a frail state and exhibit less activity as they age then typical nematodes. These findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that genes that increase longevity may not significantly increase healthy lifespan and point to the need to measure health as part of aging studies going forward.

"Our study reveals that if we want to find the genes that help us remain physically active as we age, the genes that will allow us to play tennis when we're 70 similar to when we were 40, we have to look beyond longevity as the sole criteria. We have to start looking at new genes that might play a part in 'healthspan.'" said Heidi A. Tissenbaum, PhD, professor of molecular, cellular & cancer biology and the program in molecular medicine at UMass Medical School, and principal investigator of the study.

Genomic and technological advances have allowed scientists to identify several groups of genes that control longevity in C. elegans, a nematode used as a model system for genetic studies in the lab, as well as in yeast and flies. These genes, when examined, have analogs in mammals. The underlying assumption by scientists has always been that extending lifespan would also increase the time spent by the organism in a healthy state. However, for various reasons, most studies only closely examine these model animals while they're still relatively young and neglect to closely examine the latter portion of the animals' lives.

Challenging the assumption that longevity and health are intrinsically connected, Dr. Tissenbaum and colleagues sought to investigate how healthy long-lived C. elegans mutants were as they aged.

"The term healthspan is poorly defined in the lab, and in C. elegans few parameters have been identified for measuring health," said Tissenbaum. "So we set out to create a definition of healthspan by identifying traits that could be easily verified and measured as the worms aged."

Identifying both frailty and movement as measureable physical attributes that declined in the nematode with age and that could be tested, Ankita Bansal, PhD, now a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, took four different C. elegans mutant specimen (daf-2, eat-2, ife-2 and clk-1) known to live longer than typical nematodes and measured their resistance to heat stress, oxidative stress and activity levels on solids and in liquids as they aged.

When Tissenbaum and her colleagues, Dr. Bansal; Kelvin Yen, PhD, now assistant research professor at the University of Southern California; and Lihua Julie Zhu, PhD, research associate professor of molecular, cellular & cancer biology at UMMS, compared these results with wild-type nematodes they found that all the animals--wild-type and mutants--declined physically as they aged. And depending on the mutant specimen and trait being measured, each declined at different rates. Overall they found that the mutant worms, despite having longer lifespans, spent a greater percentage of their lives at less than 50 percent of measured maximum function when compared to wild-type nematodes. The increased lifespan experienced by the mutants was spent, instead, in a frail and debilitated state.

"What this means, is that the mutant nematodes were living longer, but most of that extra time wasn't healthy time for the worm," said Tissenbaum. "While we saw some extension in health as the mutants aged for certain traits, invariably the trade off was an extended period of frailty and inactivity for the animal. In fact, as a percentage of total lifespan, the wild-type worms spent more time in a healthy state than the long-lived mutants."

The implication for scientists, according to Tissenbaum, is that the set of genes that influence longevity may be distinct from the genes that control healthspan. "This study suggests that there is a separate and unexplored group of genes that allow us to perform at a higher level physically as we age. When we study aging we can no longer look at lifespan as the only parameter; we also have to consider health as a distinct factor of its own."

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Living longer, not healthier

More big votes on tap for USF's downtown medical school proposal

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TAMPA The movement to build the University of South Florida's next medical school inside Jeff Vinik's downtown redevelopment project has scored two wins at home.

Now it needs to win on the road.

USF's proposal needs $62million in state funding. That must be approved by the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the State University System.

The board is set to hold two votes on the proposal when it meets today and Thursday at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

If the idea wins both votes this week, then it will move up the chain of command to the Florida Legislature for final approval. The 2015 session is set to start on March 3.

"Until the votes have been cast," said Mayor Bob Buckhorn, "I never take anything for granted."

The project was endorsed in October by a committee of USF trustees that oversees the university's medical operations. Buckhorn helped pitch the idea.

Then in December, Vinik himself appeared before the full board of trustees when it gave its approval.

Buckhorn, Vinik, USF president Judy Genshaft and Dr. Charles Lockwood, the dean of USF's medical school, will all be on hand today in case the governors' facilities committee needs convincing as well.

That committee considers all the state's higher education capital projects like USF's urban medical school and the University of Central Florida's proposed downtown Orlando campus.

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More big votes on tap for USF's downtown medical school proposal