Like Catherine, I’m a bit behind on scientific posts – so here’s a quick recap of some of the talks I attended earlier in the week.

My Sunday morning started with an excellent session on malaria/anti-malarials – Solomon Nwaka from the World Health Organization’s Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases ‘kicked off’ the session with a broad overview that really drove home why malaria is (still) such an important disease: every 30 seconds a child dies from malaria, and the disease is responsible for more that one million deaths each year. Anti-malarial drug resistance is a huge problem (and there aren’t that many new drug candidates in the pipeline), so the session focused on several academic scientists who are searching for new drug candidates. This is often done as a collaboration with Medicines for Malaria Venture, a non-profit organization created to “discover, develop and deliver new antimalarial drugs through public-private partnerships.” (For more information on public-private partnerships, click here and here).

I was only able to stay for the first half of the session, but I heard Jonathan Vennerstrom talk about synthetic peroxide anti-malarials (including this simplified analog of artemisinin) and Paul O’Neill talk about analogs of amodiaquine that were active against drug-resistant strains of malaria (click here for a recent review on 4-aminoquinoline anti-malarials).

The debate about whether or not academic scientists should try to get involved in drug discovery can get quite heated (see Derek Lowe’s take on it here; you might also be interested in this NRDD ‘Outlook’). Though I understand why some scientists think that academics should avoid this area of research, many pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing (or able) to pursue a drug discovery program that focuses on malaria or other important, yet neglected, infectious diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries. (NITD and GSK are important exceptions to this general rule…)

So my question is if many pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing/able to tackle these problems, why shouldn’t academic groups give it a try?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

It ain’t easy working in the field of ancient DNA, as Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide will tell you. His lab works on cool specimens such as Neanderthal teeth, bison bones, and moa poo, trying to extract signs of long-gone life.

But getting DNA out of old specimens is subject to many whims of fate, Cooper told the meeting in a plenary lecture today. One time his team tried to run sequences on a Viking skull from Greenland – and got 23 sequences from 23 separate individuals. “Probably 23 archaeologists,” Cooper jokes.

Technicians in ancient DNA laboratories have to take special care not to contaminate the material they’re working with. They suit up in clean suits, wear surgical gloves that they change regularly, and work in rooms with negative air pressure to blow contaminants out. Lab equipment has to be sterilized with ultraviolet radiation because it can be contaminated with mouse droppings. Visitors have to wear visors because the fluttering of eyelashes can spread DNA everywhere.

But if it’s done right, ancient DNA can reveal a lot about long-lost worlds – like the fact that different-sized moas can be just different sexes and not different species, or that bison in North America may have been starting to crash before human hunters ever showed up on the plains.

Findings like that are probably worth all the tidying up around the lab.