Lauren Gravitz

Many fear that the next worldwide flu epidemic will come from a mutant form of a virus currently plaguing chicken coops throughout Asia. The avian influenza or “bird flu” virus mutates quickly, can leap species, and has already caused at least 250 human deaths. A few vaccines have been made that fight off single strains of the virus, but the slippery devil changes so quickly that such single-strain inoculations may be useless against an emergent pandemic. Now, researchers may have a solution: a DNA-based vaccine with the potential to combat multiple strains simultaneously. From a story I wrote for MIT’s Technology Review:

“Everyone fears that the virus only needs to make a few mutations to become virulent and transmissible human to human, so this is certainly one of the biggest pandemic threats that we face,” says David Ho, a professor at Rockefeller University and the scientific director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, in New York. “It obviously continues to be a threat, even though it’s no longer on everyone’s radar screen.”

The bird flu’s rapid mutations are precisely what make the virus so difficult to fight. The few vaccines that are currently approved to treat it were created using existing viruses, and therefore, each immunizes against only a single virulent mutation. To develop a more broadly acting vaccine, Ho and his colleagues at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica took a DNA-based approach. DNA-based vaccines are made up of DNA that’s been genetically modified to elicit a specific immune response and thus allow a greater level of control over design than do traditional vaccines.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

In a breakthrough for regenerative medicine, researchers may have finally found a way to circumvent the ethically charged debate surrounding embryonic stem cells.

Last year they created induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells — converted from adult skin cells, these iPS cells appeared to have the same regenerative abilities as their embryonic counterparts. But there was one huge catch: the cells also had viruses embedded in them that had the potential to turn cancerous. Now, in a study published in Science, researchers say that they’ve managed to make iPS cells that are virus-free.

From my story on Technology Review’s website:

Many view the creation of genetically unmodified iPS cells as regenerative medicine’s magic bullet. The cells are not derived from embryos, so researchers can circumnavigate the ethical gray areas. And if these cells turn out to be as potent as embryonic stem cells, they could be used to help regrow tissues damaged in conditions ranging from paralysis to Parkinson’s disease to diabetes. If they can be grown from a patient’s own cells, they could furthermore be transplanted without triggering immune rejection.

Until now, however, creating iPS cells without integrated viruses had been a major hurdle for stem-cell researchers. Although Hochedlinger has overcome that hurdle, he says there is still some distance to travel. While retroviral techniques allow scientists to turn about one in every 1,000 skin cells into an iPS cell, the adenovirus is far less efficient: only one in every 10,000 to 100,000 fetal liver cells can be converted. “It may be that people have tried adenoviruses before but missed the iPS cells because the efficiency is so low,” Hochedlinger says. “We ourselves tried to use adenoviruses a year ago, and it didn’t work.”

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Tags: Medicine, stem cells

Scientists can now tell us for certain what they’ve been able to tell us conditionally for decades: cancer is a tricky target. A trio of studies published last Thursday provides, for the first time, a detailed look at the genome of two of the deadliest of human cancers, pancreatic and glioblastoma (the brain cancer Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with this past spring). A close look at the results shows that treating advanced cancer may be even more difficult and complicated than people had thought. From my article on Technology Review’s Web site:

Scientists have known for decades that cancer develops in response to genetic changes that cause cells to grow and divide uncontrollably. But uncovering each of these changes, and understanding how they lead to disease, is a Herculean task–one that involves sequencing and analyzing upward of 100 different kind of tumors, with hundreds of different patient samples of each. And while some believe that systematically cataloging the mutations could provide unprecedented insight into fighting or even preventing cancers, others believe that the high cost of such research might not be worth the rewards. These papers provide the first glimpse at what the rewards could be.

Read the full story here.

Tags: glioblastoma, pancreatic cancer, TCGA

The MIT Media Lab’s Sandy Pentland has developed an ID badge that can not only track your large-scale movements around the office, it can track your micromovements, too. The small badge, about the size of a deck of cards, is stuffed with GPS receivers, accelerometers, bluetooth, infrared sensors…just about anything that might be needed to determine where you are, who you’re talking to, what you’re doing. Pentland believes the technology will be useful for everything from workplace management to the interactions of doctors and their patients. On The Economist’s website, I wrote about one recent application and the study’s results:

GOT rhythm? If so, you are likely to be more productive than your arrhythmic colleagues. That was one conclusion drawn from a study carried out recently by Benjamin Waber and Sandy Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moreover, it did not apply only when the subject of the study was typing away furiously. It also held when he was sitting, wandering, fidgeting or chatting with his colleagues. Those who did so with measured regularity were more productive than those whose activity levels, though the same on average, flitted from high to low to somewhere in between.

Sure, there are all kinds of privacy issues involved. But on the flip side, this experimental technology–part of the exploding field of “data mining”–also holds incredible potential.  Click here to read the full story.

Tags: MIT, reality mining

Worried about the lungs and performance of Olympic athletes, officials in Beijing ordered thousands cars off the roads and moved or temporarily closed their emissions-laden factories. In doing so, they unwittingly enabled an incredible experiment: The opportunity for researchers to examine the effect of a single city’s air-pollution levels on global climate.

A team led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate and atmospheric scientist at the University of California, San Diego, will spend the next six weeks flying autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) downwind of Beijing to measure emissions reductions. “By cutting down on the pollution over Beijing during the Olympics, the Chinese have created a huge natural laboratory for understanding how pollution impacts climate,” Ramanathan says. He and collaborators at Seoul National University, in South Korea, have packed an assortment of miniature instruments into 30-kilogram, three-metre-wide AUAVs and set up a research station on South Korea’s Cheju Island, about 500 kilometers south of Beijing.

Click here to read the full story on Technology Review’s website.

Tags: Beijing, Environment, Olympics, pollution, Technology