A rubbery material made using a three-dimensional printer can transmit electrical signals and mechanically fold like biological tissue in predictable ways. The work, published in this week’s issue of Science by researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, could pave the way for tissue engineering, controlled drug release technologies or other medical applications.

“We can mimic tissue properties using relatively easily obtained building blocks,” says chemical biologist Hagan Bayley, who led the work. “It’s at a primitive level at the moment, but it’s an interesting attempt to make things that behave like tissue by bottom-up fabrication.”

The technique involves printing tiny water droplets into specific positions in an oil bath. The droplets acquire a lipid monolayer and form bilayers with other droplets in the growing network. Some of these droplets also contain membrane proteins to allow for long-range electrical communication, like in a nerve axon; some have different concentrations of salt to create a gradient for osmosis-driven folding.

In the video above, two colored dyes are included to visualize the printing process. In the paper, the authors demonstrated that they could send an electrical signal along a defined path, and fold a flower-shaped network of droplets into a hollow sphere.

“They’ve demonstrated some engineered functionality to what they’ve printed,” says Lawrence Bonassar, a biomedical engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was not involved in the study. “This opens the door to printing neuronal structures or guiding neuronal in-growth in a very targeted way. That, in some ways, is a bit of a holy grail.”

Men with advanced prostate cancer now have another treatment option, thanks to the approval today by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of a pill that blocks androgen-receptor signaling and prolongs patient survival.

“To see activity in a post-hormone treated, post-chemotherapy treated prostate cancer population with a drug that doesn’t have myelosuppression [a decrease in blood cell production] and does has a very favorable safety profile is extremely exciting,” says Howard Scher, a prostate cancer specialist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “My patient who got the drug in July 2007 is still on it. I have chills actually. It’s pretty amazing.”

The newly approved agent—Xtandi (enzalutamide), developed by San Francisco’s Medivation and Japan’s Astellas Pharma—works by plugging up the receptors that bind androgens, including testosterone, to prevent those male hormones from fueling the growth of prostate cancer cells. In a phase 3 clinical trial involving around 1,200 men with prostate cancer that had spread despite prior chemo- and hormone-therapy, an international team led by Scher found that participants taking Xtandi lived a median of 18.4 months, compared to 13.6 months for those who received a placebo. The drug also significantly lowered levels of prostate-specific antigen and boosted the time of progression-free survival, with only minimal side effects of fatigue, diarrhea and rare seizures. The results were reported earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is a very active drug,” says Andrew Armstrong, an oncologist at the Duke Cancer Institute in Durham, North Carolina, who was involved with the trial. “It’s active in the most refractory of patients, and it’s likely even more active in the earlier setting when patients aren’t as far along in their disease process.” Studies evaluating the drug in men with metastatic prostate cancer who have not yet received chemotherapy are ongoing.

According to Decision Resources, the prostate cancer drug market in the US is forecast to more than double over the next decade, increasing from $3.6 billion in 2010 to around $9 billion in 2020. Medivation’s drug is expected to compete most fiercely with Johnson & Johnson’s Zytiga (abiraterone), a pill that inhibits testosterone synthesis. Zytiga won US and European approval in 2011, and earned around $430 million in global sales in the first half of this year, half of which came from the US market.

Like Xtandi, Zytiga is only approved for men who have failed chemotherapy treatment. But this week J&J announced that it had won priority review status from the FDA for the company’s application to get Zytiga approved additionally for prostate cancer patients who have not yet undergone chemo. A decision is expected before the end of the year.

A blood pressure drug in use for more than half a century might not work entirely in the way scientists had long thought. Reporting today in Nature Medicine, researchers have found in mice that spironolactone, a diuretic known to regulate hypertension through the kidneys, exerts part of its beneficial effect through the vasculature system, too.

“The blood vessel might directly contribute to blood pressure control and might be a new target for treating high blood pressure,” says Iris Jaffe, codirector of the Molecular Cardiology Research Center at the Tufts Medical Center in Boston who led the current study.

Both the 55-year-old drug sprinolactone and the newer, more selective agent eplerenone (marketed by Pfizer under the brand name Inspra) are thought to work by blocking the mineralocorticoid receptors in the kidneys to prevent sodium retention and, thus, increase water excretion. However, a handful of recent studies have hinted that the kidney does not tell the whole story. To explore the role of the vascular system, Jaffe and her colleagues created mice specifically lacking these receptors in the smooth muscle cells that line the blood vessel walls. They found that the mice had lower blood pressure as they aged, but not because of changes in salt or water handling in the kidney. Instead, the lack of vascular mineralocorticoid receptors led to a decrease in the activity of a certain class of calcium channels of the L-type variety. The change in calcium levels in turn eased the degree of smooth muscle contraction and reduced baseline tension in the blood vessels, with blood pressure lowering consequences.

“It is a comprehensive body of work using sophisticated methodology,” says cardiologist Jane Leopold, who studies how blood vessels respond to stress at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Since a number of calcium channel inhibitors are known to exert antihypertensive effects, “the obvious extrapolation in terms of clinical relevance is that we should be using a combination of mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists and L-type calcium channel blockers to treat hypertension associated with aging,” says Leopold, who was not involved in the latest research.

The findings also hint at the possibility of developing new therapies that target the mineralocorticoid receptors in the blood vessels while leaving the ones in the kidneys alone. A major limitation of the currently available drugs is that they often raise levels of potassium in the blood serum, leading to a condition known as hyperkalemia that causes many people to stop taking sprinolactone and epleronone. According to Jaffe, “If we can get the vascular benefits of blocking the mineralocorticoid receptor without hitting the kidney we would avoid the hyperkalemia and that might make these drugs more generally useful in bigger patient populations.”

For an interview with Jaffe, stay tuned for the September episode of the Nature Medicine podcast. Subscribe now in iTunes and your computer will automatically download the show as soon as it becomes available.

The US government continues to underestimate the potential of a dangerous pathogen escaping from a proposed BSL-4 containment biosecurity laboratory, according to an independent report published today.

A panel convened by the country’s National Research Council (NRC) concluded that an assessment completed earlier this year by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) overestimated the danger posed by tornadoes and earthquakes but underestimated the possibility of a disease being released by human error at the $1.14 billion National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas, which is slated to replace a half-century-old lab on Plum Island, New York.

“The DHS has just not established the safety of this facility,” Tom Manney, a retired Kansas State University geneticist and a member of No NBAF in Kansas, a group against the proposed facility, told Nature Medicine. “It may well be safe, but their analysis and how they’ve cherry-picked their data, and their assumptions give a very distorted and inaccurate view of it.”

Manney also thinks that Kansas politicians are selectively reading the NRC report. In a joint statement, US Senators Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran, both representing Kansas, together with the state’s governor, Sam Brownback, applauded the report’s authors for recognizing that the lab “would be a critical asset in securing the future health, wealth and security of the nation,” and they called on the DHS “to begin construction immediately.”

In this month’s Nature Medicine podcast, we discuss how to turn white fat into brown fat and a new species-spanning approach to biomedicine.

Nature Medicine (https://www.nature.com/nm) seeks a Locum Assistant Editor to join its editorial team for a six-month period.

This exciting position, based in Nature Publishing Group’s New York office, involves working closely with the Chief Editor and other members of the journal team on all aspects of the editorial process, including manuscript evaluation, organizing peer-review, writing for the journal, and developing the content of the title, both in print and online.

The full details can be found here.

Two years ago, FoldIt made headlines, lots of them, when players of the online protein-folding video game took three weeks to solve the three dimensional structure of a simian retroviral protein that is used in animal models of HIV, but whose structure had eluded biochemists for more than a decade. Seth Cooper, the game’s co-creator, captured the attention of the crowd at the TEDMED medical technology conference in Washington, DC by recounting how thousands of players competed in that FoldIt challenge despite the lack of prize money or prestige. He even brought on-stage the winner, a beaming British lab technician named Mimi Minet whose identity had not been previously disclosed to the public.

But the hidden news, the ‘Easter egg’, so to speak, was that Cooper and his collaborators are updating FoldIt to leverage the power of online gaming to create new proteins—enzymes that could form the basis of novel drugs or improve how they are manufactured. This freshly expanded enzyme design platform for FoldIt saw initial success in January, when gamers using an early version created a blueprint for an enzyme that lab tests indicate speeds up a type of biosynthetic reaction used in the production of a variety of drugs—including the cholesterol medication lovastatin—by almost 2,000%.

“We’ve moved beyond just determining structures in nature,” Cooper, who is based at the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science in Seattle, told Nature Medicine. “We’re able to use the game to design brand new therapeutic enzymes.” He says players are now working on the ground-up design of a protein that would act as an inhibitor of the influenza A virus, and he expects to expand the drug development uses of the game to small molecule design within the next year.

Designing small molecules, which are not composed amino acid chains as proteins are, but still function according to their 3D folded shape, requires that Cooper and his team in Seattle add to the chemical building blocks available to FoldIt players. “To build proteins, players can swap out amino acids in a protein,” he explains, “and there are only 26 amino acids, so compiling the building blocks players will need is easy.”

For example, players can swap a tryptophan for a cysteine in the active site of a potential flu inhibitor and see how it changes the protein’s stability and its interaction with target proteins on the surface of the flu virus. But in order to design small molecules, FoldIt will need a new toolbox of organic subcomponents such as rings and chains of carbon that players can then piece together into larger molecules, adding functional groups like alcohols or sulfurs to create novel small molecule chemicals. Since there the number of organic subcomponents is virtually infinite, creating such a library is daunting, but “we’re hopeful that we’ll have a small molecule in the next year,” says Cooper.

A recent Nature Medicine opinion article that called on the UK to fund more research opportunities for medical students resonated thousands of miles away. Pakistani medical students are now also asking their government to put more money toward educating young physician-researchers.

The need for funding support is, in part, a by product of substantial interest in such training. Since its founding in January 2011, the Pakistan Medical Students’ Research Society (PMSRS) has quickly swelled to more than 500 members. “Two years ago there was very little guidance for students, and opportunities for students to actually conduct research were basically nonexistent,” says Akhtar Amin, president of PMSRS and a third year medical student at Dow University of Health Sciences in Karachi. “Our organization is helping to change this, but we need the financial support of our government.”

In the past two years PMSRS has focused primarily on organizing free symposia on topics related to research careers, such as manuscript writing, presenting scientific data, experimental design and bioinformatics. They say the 17 symposia given so far have attracted more than 800 students, some of whom are located remotely and watch the presentations as internet broadcasts.

Those medical students based in Karachi are also paired by the organization with research mentors. “Funding would allow us to expand the mentor program,” says PMSRS adviser and research mentor Asif Qureshi, a physician and research associate at Dow University of Health Sciences. Qureshi notes that only 80 students have been paired with research mentors, in part because lack of resources makes it difficult to get the word out.

The organization’s primary domestic target for future funding is the Pakistan Medical Research Council, which is the country’s equivalent to the US National Institutes of Health. But the PMSRS also hopes to look outside its borders to make international resources available to Pakistani medical students. “We recently organized an online course collaborating with Indian medical students,” says Qureshi, who says such partnerships with countries where biomedical research is highly funded will be fruitful for students in his homeland.

To that end, he hopes that in the future PMSRS will be able to provide travel grants for Pakistani students doing research fellowships in the US and elsewhere. “Studying research abroad gives a big boost to students,” says Amin, who says he has been accepted to a summer research program at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore this summer. “We need more money to help make those connections.”

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