The other day a friend of mine sent me this link to an somewhat somber article in the UK's Independent, which wondered if we should stop looking for an AIDS vaccine, following the failed Merck trial of a few months ago.

The article polled 35 British and American AIDS researchers and found that, in general, they were markedly less optimistic about the short-term prospects of finding an HIV vaccine than they were five years ago. The Independent published the results of their poll one month after a US government-sponsored summit on HIV vaccine research, about which our very own Roxanne Khamsi wrote in the new issue of Nature Medicine.

I don't know that one has to be so pessimistic. In fact, it seems that the meeting was very helpful in pointing to the limitations of the existing animal models as predictive of efficacy in humans, something that, sadly, is the rule rather than the exception when it comes down to creating models of human disease. In the context of the Merck trial, this past December we wrote this editorial, in which we indeed agreed that the field faces serious problems, but tried to conclude on an optimistic note pointing to the fact that the development of the polio, measles and hepatitis B vaccines took 47, 42 and 16 years, respectively.

Sure, the failed trial was a setback and one must take a hard look at the direction in which the AIDS vaccine field is going (in fact, very soon we'll publish a Perspective on this topic), but this is hardly enough of a reason to call it a day. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, I'd say that rumors of this field's death are being greatly exaggerated.

Bust of Mark Twain. (Image by wallyg)

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The 'News and Views' section of Nature Medicine has a new look!

This month you’ll see we’ve introduced three new columns: Bedside to Bench, Bench to Bedside, and Community Corner. These columns are available this month without a subscription.

Cancer researchers Daniele Krause and Richard Van Etten anchor the new section with a 'Bedside to Bench' column examining how recent clinical trials hint at how to kill the cancer stem cell in certain blood disorders; eliminating this source of tumor cells has the potential to lead to improved cancer treatment. Their analysis exemplifies the goal of the new column: to examine the basic research implications of a recent clinical finding.

So far the response from the community has been positive about the ‘Bedside to Bench’ column. One of our readers, Evan Snyder, a physician-scientist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, said he has initiated a seminar series with this same intent, examining how to develop testable hypotheses about basic science from clinical observations. We’d love to hear if others in the community have similar programs, or how they feel about this approach to asking the right scientific questions.

The other new column, ‘Bench to Bedside’ takes the more familiar route of examining the clinical implications of a basic research study. This month, Neil Shah complements Van Etten and Krause's column by highlighting how resistance to chemotherapy develops in tumors deficient in the well-known cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Shah takes the assignment to heart, examining in depth how patient treatment might change given this greater mechanistic understanding.

Our third column, ‘Community Corner’, scans a small segment of the research community for their response to a recent biomedical study—in this case two reports suggesting how environmental toxins might affect the development of autoimmunity. Experts with three different backgrounds each found something uniquely interesting about the study.

To make room for the changes we have largely discontinued publishing news and views on papers published outside of Nature Medicine. I’ve been wondering what to do with this format ever since, to my dismay, finding that Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and Nature had all published a news and views on the same paper. A speaker at a conference—rightly, to my mind—mocked such excess. Since the launch of Nature Medicine more than ten years ago many other journals have begun to present commentaries on their strongest papers, particularly those with a biomedical slant. Although I like to think I provide superior editorial and screening functions as an editor, that is mostly vanity---basically, with a click on a web browser you can find the commentary you need. In my mind, too much duplication risks redundancy and stretches the editorial resources of the scientific community.

Although we’ve dropped some news and views, we still have a duty to our readers to alert them to the hottest biomedical research in the previous month. So we’ve expanded our research highlights section to two pages, and added a short column highlighting papers within the Nature Publishing Group. One drawback to our process is that we rarely highlight papers that we have rejected, in order to avoid sending mixed signals to researchers who submit their papers. I must admit though, we do sometimes reject some interesting papers—often for reasons unrelated to their overall coolness, but for reasons nonetheless appropriate for our journal, such as a lack of mechanistic insight or poor in vivo data. So, these papers aside, I like to think we provide a quick snapshot in the research highlights section of the papers most relevant to that elusive beast dubbed 'Translational Research.'

Our aim with the research highlights is to provide breadth in our coverage.

Our aim with the three new columns is to provide the depth—exploring the biomedical literature with quality synthesis.

We’d like your help in this venture. If you are a researcher who has formulated a testable, reasonable—and compelling—hypothesis about the mechanistic basis of disease, based on recent clinical findings, consider submitting a proposal for a 'Bedside to Bench' column. And if you get a chance to read the new columns, send us your feedback. This is a work in progress and we hope it develops in a way to best serve the biomedical community.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A couple of people were asking me the other day why it is that I post some comments that we receive on this blog that are frankly bizarre. I must confess I don't know. I guess I must have a soft spot for people who are "out there", if you know what I mean.

Come to think of it, it must have started back when I was a student and needed to read the print edition of Nature, as there simply was no internet. After the classifieds, at the very end of the book, there was a section called "Scientific announcements". And every month or so, a man called D.B. James, based somewhere in Wales, would publish his scientific ideas, which, presumably, didn't meet with much support from the Nature editors. Does anyone else remember him? This is a sampler of his work, collected from issues of Nature as recent as late 2001.

When I lived in Britain, I met a scientist from the MRC who had the intention to create the D.B. James Appreciation Society, but I don't think his plan prospered. Or at least I think so, as I never got an invitation to join, and soon after that Nature decided to stop publishing James' snippets. Too bad.

At around the same time, during my stint at Nature Reviews Neuroscience, I had a closer interaction with an author whose writings were also difficult to categorize. Based somewhere in Georgia, in the US, and signing under the pseudonym Ken Al Sifr, our correspondent used to write to us every month. His letters were always flawless, even though he wrote them in a typewritter, and I seem to recall that he was particularly fond of using green ink whenever he needed to make a note on the margins of his text. In his letters, which he also sent to Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Medicine, and surely to Science and Neuron, he would criticize in no uncertain terms many of the papers published by said journals, pointing us in the direction of findings published decades ago, which, according to him, compromised the novelty of the new contributions and showed that we had no idea about what we were doing running the journals.

I now regret the fact that I didn't keep any of his letters; I destroyed all of them when I move to my current job at Nature Medicine. I do remember, though, that some of them had drawings that could be construed as sexually explicit. Others included pictures of the NRN editors (which, as per the style of our reviews journals, continue to appear in every print issue). In yet others, he would paraphrase famous poems such as Marvell's 'To his coy mistress':

"The brain's a fine and private place
But none, I think, do there embrace."

However, not all is lost. Ken Al Sifr is the author of two books, "Too many neurons" and "Your brain glossary for the brain decade", published by Vantage Press. I managed to purchase both of them, and can share with you two of his definitions from the second book. I hope they give you an idea of the content of his letters. Enjoy!

P.S. Incidentally, as far as I know he continues to write to the NRN editors. Hopefully they don't make the same mistake I made, and choose instead to keep such jewels.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Today's Boston Globe ran a profile of Ram Sasisekharan, the MIT-based senior author of the papers published on 23 April in NEJM and in Nature Biotech., identifying the contaminant in heparin that caused adverse effects and even killed scores of people earlier this year.

Through careful structural analysis, Sasisekharan and his colleagues found that the culprit was oversulfated chondroitin sulfate and that, owing to the chemical nature of the contaminant, conventional screening methods cannot differentiate between clean and tainted lots. Then, using in vitro and in vivo approaches, they went on to show that the mechanism of action of the contaminant involved the activation of the kinin-kallikrein and the complement systems.

It was an remarkable tour de force, particularly considering that, according to the profile, the FDA approached Sasisekharan with the project only in late February, the published submission date of the Nature Biotech. paper is 21 March, and the mechanistic work had apparently been finished by early April. Pretty impressive stuff that, I hope, will inspire those prospective Nature Medicine authors whom we invite to resubmit their work and, alas, are occasionally scooped.

Ram Sasisekharan (Photo: David Shopper, The Boston Globe)

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)