Monthly Archives: August 2010

Judge puts the kibosh on Obama’s stem cell policy

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Stem cell scientists throughout the US rejoiced last year when President Barack Obama signed an executive order effectively giving the green light again to human embryonic stem cell (ESC) research after close to a decade of funding restrictions. But that celebration may have been premature.

A US district court today issued a preliminary injunction halting federal funding of human ESC research, ruling that such research involved the destruction of embryos, and, thus, violated the “Dickey-Wicker Amendment” to the bill that funds the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Obama administration had argued that ESC research, in which cells are taken from embryos created for in-vitro fertilization that would otherwise be disposed of, does not itself lead to the destruction of embryos.

But in agreement with the coalition of groups, including several socially conservative Christian organizations, that filed the petition, Judge Royce Lamberth rejected this argument. “Simply because ESC research involves multiple steps does not mean that each step is a separate ‘piece of research’ that may be federally funded,” he wrote in a 15-page ruling. “If one step or ‘piece of research’ of an ESC research project results in the destruction of an embryo, the entire project is precluded from receiving federal funding.”

The Justice Department told AFP it was “reviewing the judge’s decision” before deciding whether to appeal the injunction or wait until the full lawsuit is heard in court.

Former NYU prof sues old bosses for scientific misconduct

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A clinical immunologist who was fired from New York University School of Medicine in May is suing his previous employer for allegedly giving him the pink slip after he accused his former supervisor of manipulating data related to an experimental cancer vaccine.

In his complaint, David O’Neill, who served for eight years as core leader of the NYU Cancer Center’s Vaccine and Cell Therapy Unit, alleges that his supervisor prevented him from personally talking about data at last year’s American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in order to present the findings herself in the best possible light, and then retaliated by firing him when he made complaints of research misconduct.

According to O’Neill, the data from that presentation is now under review in Nature Medicine (which maintains a strict firewall between the news and manuscript sides of the journal). O’Neill says he stands by the manuscript’s findings but continues to have issues with the data analysis.

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Delayed chronic fatigue syndrome paper to be published

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Cross posted from Nature’s The Great Beyond blog.

A highly anticipated paper linking viral infection with chronic fatigue syndrome will at last see the light.

The paper, to be published online later today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS), is the first to back up a previous report that chronic fatigue syndrome may be linked to infection by a virus called XMRV (see ‘Virus linked to chronic fatigue syndrome’). Chronic fatigue patients and their advocates embraced the findings as a long-sought clue to the cause of the mysterious ailment, but several research teams have since tried and failed to reproduce this link.

The PNAS paper was originally accepted for publication on 27 May. But on 4 June, the authors, who work for the US National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration, asked to delay publication while they considered conflicting results from a second paper authored by other government researchers. (For more see ‘Chronic fatigue findings were held back’.) That second paper appeared in the journal Retrovirology on 2 July, but there was still no sign of the first.

Read the rest of the post on The Great Beyond. Or for more background information, check out Nature Medicine’s timeline of the XMRV controversy.

That’s a wrap: Introducing Nature Medicine’s video tab

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Notice anything different about our homepage? If you haven’t seen it yet, in the left-hand column of the menu, below the podcast tab, we now have a link that takes you to our brand new video page.

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been making a series of videos that go behind the scenes of papers published in Nature Medicine. Although these videos were posted to YouTube, they tended to get buried on our own website, making them difficult to access. To remedy that, we’ve created this video portal as a one-stop shop for all our in-house productions.

Our latest video is a four-minute clip about a preclinical discovery published yesterday that raises hopes for a new therapeutic treatment for Parkinson’s disease. You can watch the video here.

And while we’re on the subject of multimedia, don’t forget that Nature Medicine also has a monthly audio podcast featuring Q&As with study authors, on-site reporting from conferences around the world, interviews with news writers and much more. This month’s show, for example, features an interview with the composer of a choral musical work based on the genetic code of the singers.

VIDEO: Hope seen in blocking Parkinson’s protein

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Blocking a protein called LRRK2 can prevent some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in a mouse model of the disease, researchers reported online today in Nature Medicine.

In the following video, several New York-based scientists describe how these animal models of Parkinson’s are helping researchers discover new drugs that inhibit aberrant LRRK2 activity and could perhaps ultimately treat people suffering from the neurodegenerative disease.

With egg on its face, US looks to abandon egg-based vaccine manufacturing

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Let’s do away with eggs. No, that’s not the public outcry from the salmonella outbreak terrifying omelet-lovers. It’s one of the ideas offered in a new strategy rolled out by the US government yesterday for how to deal with public health emergencies. The strategy includes plans for a $200 million bioterrorism and pandemic defense fund and a $1 billion a year kitty for upgrading the country’s vaccine manufacturing capabilities. (More on the egg bashing later.)

The recommendations come after the pandemic H1N1 swine flu virus claimed around 13,000 American lives, including a disproportionate number of children compared with seasonal influenza outbreaks. One of the problems with the US response to the H1N1 crisis, many critics argue, was that an appropriate vaccine was not manufactured, tested and rolled out fast enough to reach the millions of people who needed it.

“Our nation must have a system that is nimble and flexible enough to produce medical countermeasures quickly in the face of any attack or threat, whether it’s a threat we know about today or a new one,” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement.

To improve the country’s preparedness, both of yesterday’s reports — one from HHS officials and another from a panel of scientists and technology industry executives convened by the Office of Science and Technology Policy — urged health officials to move away from slow egg-based vaccine manufacturing to faster alternatives.

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Perot to cancer: Don’t mess with Texas

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Former US presidential candidate Ross Perot may have derailed the Republican Party’s hopes of reelecting George Bush Sr. in 1992, but the Texas businessman is now proving to be a blessing for another Republican ambition — namely winning what former President Richard Nixon coined the ‘War on Cancer’.

In a gift as big as his much caricatured ears, Perot is donating $20 million to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for research into new personalized cancer therapies. Perot, whose total fortune is estimated by some at around $3.5 billion, had previously given more than $40 million to support biomedical research at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

In Perot’s long-winded style, best exemplified by his half-hour prime-time TV infomercials, the donation will be paid in $2 million installments over ten years. But unlike in 1992, when he split the presidential vote in the Democratic candidate’s favor, the present-day donation will be divided equally between two new MD Anderson Centers: the Center for Targeted Therapy and the Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy.

(Hat tip: GenomeWeb)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Once-maligned malaria drug could get a second chance

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The medication sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, or “SP”, is currently used to treat malaria in pregnant women in the developing world. It works by disrupting the malaria parasite’s ability to make folic acid, which is a key component of nucleotide synthesis. It’s inexpensive, too, costing 15 cents for a course of treatment as opposed to $1 for a similar course of artemisin-based therapy. This alone should make it an attractive option for widespread use, but for a not-so-slight problem: up until now, research seemed to show that the most common malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, was rapidly becoming resistant to SP.

Now come two papers that challenge that notion. Reporting in the International Journal for Parasitology, researchers from the University of Bamako in Mali working with American and European collaborators suggest that the severity of SP resistance has been overplayed. Although administration of SP does increase the prevalence of SP-resistant genes, it’s possible that SP affects the infectiousness of the malaria parasite to such a degree that the effect of that resistance is negligible.

In the first study, 14 volunteers in Mali who had been previously treated with SP were exposed to the bites of mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae) uninfected with the malaria parasite. A week after feeding on the participants, the mosquitoes were dissected to look for malaria spores. Out of 928 mosquitoes, only seven had them.

The second article looks closer at the mechanism by which SP affects gametocytes, the sexually reproductive stage of P. falciparum that is transmitted via the gut of mosquitos. They found that SP causes those gametocytes to become deformed, and they don’t mature to the next stage of the parasite’s life cycle.

If the results can be replicated, it could be a strong argument for using SP to treat malaria in infants and children in areas where the drug is effective.

Image: SP-treated Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes from Kone et al.

A toast to beer research

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beerfoam.jpgBiomedical researchers are a bunch of wine snobs. There, I said it.

PubMed has nearly 4,000 studies containing the word “beer” in their title or abstract (not counting those that invoke the Beer-Lambert law, which relates the absorption of light to the properties of the material it is traveling through). Most of these relate to alcoholism, including a psychological experiment involving a simulated game of beer pong. Even a Japanese case study of a man overly fond of sake classified his pathology as “beer potomania” rather than “rice wine potomania”. Branding is everything, and, among scientists, beer has a bad rap.

Meanwhile, after reading the literature on the health benefits of wine, I’m surprised most pharmacies don’t have a sommelier on call. The compounds found in wine are cure-alls, whether they’re protecting rats from the oxidative stress of diabetes, reducing the risk of coronary heart disease, or not giving you cancer. Norwegian scientists even found that drinking wine improves cognition.

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Study puts a price on investigating bad behavior

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Integrity is priceless, but investigating it doesn’t come cheap either. An attempt to put a price on probing misconduct has estimated the cost to be at least half a million dollars.

Researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York reached that figure by examining the monetary costs of one case at their institution, where a senior scientist was accused of fabricating images and data in a federal grant application (the case is still pending). Their results, published in PLoS Medicine, pegged the direct cost of the investigation thus far at around $525,000. That total includes $512,000 representative of the hours spent on the case by salaried faculty. An additional $10,000 went to wages for security, computer forensics, and IT personnel involved in sequestering lab equipment and copying data from notebooks, hard drives and other electronic devices. Clerical support costs added another $2,500.

And that’s just the baseline. Alan Hutson, a biostatistician and one of the authors of the paper, describes other potential costs, some unquantifiable: “Sometimes the investigator has three or four NIH grants, and we have to repay that money. Then there’s the cost to our reputation that’s even worse than the monetary cost. There’re the innocent bystanders, like the graduate students who have to find a new mentor, redo their dissertation, or sometimes go to another institution.”

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