A controversial prostate cancer vaccine has become the first therapeutic cancer vaccine to receive regulatory approval in the United States.
On 29 April, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Provenge (sipuleucel-T) for the treatment of advanced hormone-resistant prostate cancer. Stock in Dendreon, the vaccine’s Seattle, Washington-based manufacturer, rose 27% on the announcement.
The heir to the British throne has closed his controversial alternative medicine charity, just days after a former member of staff was arrested over fraud allegations.
In a statement, Prince Charles’s Foundation for Integrated Health said, “Whilst the closure has been planned for many months and is part of an agreed strategy, the Trustees have brought forward the closure timetable as a result of a fraud investigation at the charity. The Trustees feel that The Foundation has achieved its key objective of promoting the use of integrated health.”
Ellen Raphael, director of the group Sense About Science, said in a statement, “If this marks the end of an organisation that for more than 20 years has been the vehicle for the Prince of Wales’ interference in policy and restricted the development of evidence-based medicine, then the public has everything to gain, however this has come about.”
What happens when you pit a 2-tonne, US$2 million dollar balloon-launched gamma-ray telescope against a jeep? I won’t keep you in suspense, nobody’s a winner.
The good news is that your future can be predicted. The bad news is that it’ll cost a billion euros.
That, at least, is what a team of scientists led by Dirk Helbing of the ETH in Switzerland believes. And as they point out, a billion euros is small fare compared with the bill for the current financial crisis – which might conceivably have been anticipated with the massive social-science simulations they want to establish.
This might seem the least auspicious moment to start placing faith in economic modelling, but Helbing’s team proposes to transform the way it is done. They will abandon the discredited and doctrinaire old models in favour of ones built from the bottom up, which harness the latest understanding of how people behave and act collectively rather than reducing the economic world to caricature for the sake of mathematical convenience.
Oil leaking from the site of the Deepwater Horizon drilling accident has begun to hit the shores of the United States, according to media reports. Read more
Getting your entire genome sequenced – until now something reserved for a select few – is about to become open to many. Already, for $50,000, consumers can have their genomes sequenced, as did former biotech CEO John West and his entire family recently (see reports in The Times, Genetic Future).
But easy access to sequencing raises a head-scratcher of a question: What’s a doctor to do if a patient walks in with a copy of her sequence and asks to be treated on its basis? An article published in The Lancet today tries to answer that question, proffering the first attempt at a complete clinical analysis from the genome sequence of a relatively healthy person.
A woman in Connecticut has filed a complaint against her employer for genetic discrimination, saying essentially that she was terminated due to her increased risk for breast cancer. According to several legal experts, this appears to be the first publicly filed complaint invoking the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), a law passed with much support in 2008 that would forbid employers from using employees’ genetic information against them. According to reports, 39-year-old Pamela Fink tested positive for mutations in her BRCA2 gene that are associated with increased risk for breast cancer in 2004. Read more
Japan and Australia have both rejected a proposal from the International Whaling Commission that would allow commercial whaling and, in the process, reduce the number of whales killed each year. Read more
The report produced by the investigators does not say so explicitly, probably out of fear of prejudicing future criminal/civil inquiries,… ... Read more
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