As economists puzzle over the future direction of global markets, there is a growing consensus among pharmaceutical industry analysts that slimming down will reap profits for Pfizer. Last week the company saw its stock price increase after an analyst at Goldman Sachs wrote that Pfizer’s chief executive, Ian Read, had signaled in a meeting she attended that he may go beyond the divestitures the company has already announced. Pfizer is already in the midst of spinning off its nutritional and animal health businesses, and last week’s news raised speculations from analysts that other divisions may also be destined for the chopping block in the near future.

The time scale for further spin-offs by Pfizer is probably two to five years, says Damien Conover, an analyst at Morningstar in Chicago. “This is a good strategy to unlock value within the company,” he says, adding that “the most likely next step would be to get rid of the over-the-counter business.” It wouldn’t be the first pharma giant to do so: New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb sold its own over-the-counter division in 2009.

Although there have also been rumblings that the Pfizer might also consider spinning off its generics business, he and others say such a move would be both unprecedented and ill-advised because of the synergy between generic and new drug research and development at the company. “Investors have signaled they welcome streamlining, but [selling] generics is not on the table,” says Jamie Davies, head of pharmaceuticals and healthcare analysis at Business Monitor International in London.

Pfizer is not the only company in the process of scaling back. Illinois’s Abbott Laboratories last week unveiled the name of its new non-pharmaceutical sister company, AbbVie. The trend is a predictable reaction to the merger-mania of the last three years, says Lindsay Meyers, an analyst at Canaan Partners in Menlo Park, California. “It takes a lot of clean-up when you’ve been through a merger or acquisition,” she says.

Meyers expects more companies both in the US and in Europe to begin consolidating and selling off inefficient businesses in the coming years. “Pfizer is not the only company that made a big purchase in the last few years,” she says. But others think the trend will remain a US phenomenon. “European companies have to look more broadly because the markets in their domestic region are contracting,” explains Davies, who says shrinking profits at home are an incentive for European companies to stay big and diverse in order to tap into new markets.

European companies such as British GlaxoSmithKline, French Sanofi and Swiss Novartis have all grown in recent years. “This trend speaks to more European exposure to emerging markets,” says Conover, “and emerging markets are good for diverse product lines.”

Photo courtesy of Pfizer

NEW YORK — Chimeras, part one species and part another, have a long and violent history in the world of art and religion. But the way society views the mythical creatures is changing, thanks in part to the advent of genetic engineering.

“If you look back at depictions of chimeras, it is clear that there have been changes in our relationship with the animal within us, whether we fear it or try to harness its power,” Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at Columbia University in New York, told Nature Medicine.

At a lecture here this week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Klitzman argued that art reflects our changing attitudes toward the differences between humans and animals, a line which is increasingly being blurred by genetic technologies such as the creation of chimeric mice and monkeys for research.

Klitzman’s survey of artistic representations of chimeras began in ancient Egypt, when the duality of the gods was their most terrifying trait. For example, Anubis, god of the afterlife, had the head of a conniving jackal and the body of a man, and Sekhmet, the warrior goddess who carried out heavenly punishments on earth bore the head of a lion. By the time of the Greeks, the most famous chimera, the murderous sphinx, had evolved to have the haunches of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the tail of a serpent and the head of a woman.

But attitudes have changed, Klitzman said, and “modern artists like Magritte, Picasso, and Dali saw animalistic traits as integral and powerful parts of their identities.” Their paintings reflected this, featuring powerfully self-aware chimeras that appeared to gain strength and poise from their animal traits rather than becoming blood-thirsty beings, banished like their predecessors in art and myth. In this way, early twentieth-century art signaled the beginning of a greater modern acceptance of the line between human and animal, a feeling which has only grown with the advent of modern genome manipulation.

“To some extent, we still fear chimeras,” said Klitzman, author of the new book Am I My Genes?: Confronting Fate and Family Secrets in the Age of Genetic Testing. “But it’s also becoming clear that there is a lot to be gained—longer, healthier, more productive lives—from genetic engineering.” How we decide to adjust our beliefs and morals as a society faced with new biological possibilities, he noted, could ultimately determine how future generations view chimeras and where they draw the line between man and beast.

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Evidence is emerging that B cells, once thought to fight infection solely by producing antibodies, might also prevent disease without them. In the traditional view, antibodies specific to a bacterium or virus are produced by B cells and maintained against future infection by certain classes of T cells as part of the slow-but-smart ‘adaptive’ immune response. However, it seems that B cells also play an important role in the short-term immediate immune response to pathogens.

Recent research on this expanded B cell function was thought to apply only to bacterial infection, but a paper published today in Immunity suggests it also applies to viral infection. The study demonstrates that mice without adaptive immune systems, whose B cells have been rendered incapable of producing antibodies, nonetheless survive infection by vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a pathogen closely related to rabies that attacks the nervous system. They found B cells were producing type 1 interferon signaling protein that prompted macrophages to recognize the virus and destroy it, protecting the body from invasion, all without antibodies.

“B cells are clearly the difference between life and death from this virus, but antibodies are not the reason for this difference,” says senior author Ulrich von Andrian, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Taken together, the bacterial and viral studies revolutionize how immunologists understand B cells. “These findings are getting a lot of attention, as they should,” says Lyle Moldawer, an immunologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville and the first to publish evidence of an innate B-cell response in bacterial infection. “B cells are the last cell population that anyone considered to be involved in primary response to a viral or bacterial infection.” Moldawer’s August 2011 study was the first to demonstrate that B cells communicating via type 1 interferon contributed to protection against primary infection.

Immunologists are quick to warn that their findings do not undercut the importance of vaccines, which guard against future infection by priming B cells to create antibodies against a particular pathogen. “What we are beginning to understand is an additional function of B cells in preventing infection, not an alternative function,” says von Andrian. However, the additional role of B cells could provide new targets for treating bacterial and viral disease, he says, potentially by boosting the interferon response to protect the body soon after infection.

Photo courtesy of Spectral Design via Shutterstock