In The Field

September 23, 2009

Stem cell lines: let the vetting begin

The day after the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it was ready to start approving stem cell lines for federal funding, the hallways of the World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, were abuzz with excitement — and confusion.

In the morning, I chatted with Baldwin Wong, executive secretary of the NIH Stem Cell Task Force, who showed me the website that lists all the lines that have already been submitted for consideration. Two research groups were first out of the gate. After day one, 15 lines had been put forward by an investigator at Children's Hospital Boston in Massachusetts — presumably by George Daley, according to Wong — and another two lines were offered up by someone at The Rockefeller University in New York City. All of these lines were sent in with requests for special consideration by the NIH's nine-member panel — meaning they don't likely satisfy the strict criteria outlined in the NIH's new guidelines, but they can be 'grandfathered' in if they adhere to certain principles of informed consent.

Continue reading "Stem cell lines: let the vetting begin" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 23, 2009
Categories: World Stem Cell Summit | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cracking down on stem cell companies

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) has convened a new committee tasked with weeding out companies that offer unapproved stem cell 'therapies', the ISSCR's new president Irving Weissman announced today at the World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Maryland.

Last month, Weissman, who also directs the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Palo Alto, California, wrote an opinion article in Cell Stem Cell calling for stem cell purveyors to be judged on three criteria. First, the company should be able to cite peer-reviewed papers from third party investigators showing that the therapy is possible. Second, there should be institutional review board oversight of the treatment. Third, the US Food and Drug Administration or an equivalent agency should give the final green light. "That's the minimum beginning," he said at the meeting.

Weissman revealed that he had convened an 18-member panel of lawyers, FDA regulators, medical ethicists, and stem cell scientists last week to look into the feasibility of establishing an online registry of wayward companies. His idea is for the ISSCR supervisory body to request documentation of the three requirements from all known global stem cell providers. Companies that don't comply would get blacklisted.

Weissman expects the committee to issue a preliminary report in December, with final guidelines published next March.

Image of Weissman by Kris Novak

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 23, 2009
Categories: World Stem Cell Summit | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Golden State's golden example

A theme that emerged time and again at this year's World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, was the need for stable and reliable funding for the nascent and much-hyped science. Venture capital backers often expect returns after three to five years. Government-supported grants generally operate on a similar timescale. But stem cell research doesn't offer such quick turnarounds.

That's why Robert Klein, chair of the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), described his state's far-reaching $3 billion investment as a "legacy commitment to the future." He cited CIRM's reliance on long-term bonds as an appropriate way to align taxpayer investment in research with expected therapeutic and financial payoffs, which remain years or decades away. Klein outlined a new prototype loan program under consideration in which the state stem cell agency would get a kickback if research funding led to profitable spin-offs. Otherwise, the money would serve as a normal scientific grant.

In other CIRM-related news, Klein also publicly decried a recent Nature story chronicling a number of stalled building projects owing to Golden State's financial woes. "We think in this economy that to have 95% of our projects in construction is a good record," he said. And hot on the heels of last week's partnership with Germany, CIRM announced a bicoastal collaboration at the meeting with the Maryland Technology Development Corporation, which administers the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund, to allow joint funding efforts.

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 23, 2009
Categories: World Stem Cell Summit | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 22, 2009

New stem cell bill in US Congress?

After the fanfare surrounding President Barack Obama's executive order on 9 March, which lifted Bush-era restrictions on funding human embryonic stem cell research, the White House has been noticeably quiet about further expanding the science — one of Obama's campaign promises. "We need to remind the President of this type of research," Delaware congressman Michael Castle (Republican) said today at the World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, the fifth annual summit presented by the non-profit Wellington, Florida-based Genetics Policy Institute.

Castle, together with Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette (Democrat), previously introduced two bills to expand researchers' access to human embryonic stem cell lines. Both bills were approved by Congress but vetoed by former President George W. Bush. Now, both House Representatives are at it again, working on new legislation to augment the executive order and prevent potential policy reversals from future residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "I don't like to see science subject to the whim of politics at all," said Castle, who is also working to overturn the Dickey-Wicker amendment, which forbids the creation of embryos for research purposes on the taxpayer's dime.

The bill is unlikely to brought before Congress anytime this year, however. Olivia Kurtz, Castle's senior legislative assistant, told me that Castle and DeGette hope to roll out the bill before the current Congress's term ends in January 2011. In the meantime, they are watching what happens with the National Institutes of Health's expanded guidelines to identify potential shortfalls in the executive order that need remedying. Castle singled out nuclear cloning — the technique that produced Dolly the sheep — as one line of research that deserves further attention.

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 22, 2009
Categories: World Stem Cell Summit | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 17, 2009

Very personal sequencing

Posted on behalf of Brendan Maher

At the second annual personal genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York this week, bioentrepreneur Hugh Rienhoff updated conference-goers on his very personal quest to find a molecular diagnosis for his daughter Beatrice (pictured). beatrice.jpg

Recently, he’s enlisted the help of second-generation sequencing giant Illumina to sequence all the genes expressed into messenger RNA from his daughter’s white blood cells, as well as that from his wife and himself in hopes that sequencing the three might flush out a genetic defect responsible for the five-year-old’s mysterious constellation of symptoms, which include low muscle mass and mild deformities in the hands and feet. See my 2007 Nature feature here for more details on Rienhoff's quest.

Because Illumina sequences from mRNA transcripts, Vincent Butty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- who’s been analyzing the data -- has been able to see direct relationships between the sequence of the genes and their expression levels. For example, he found a variant of CPNE-1 with a single base pair change. Both Rienhoff and his wife have one normal copy of the gene and one copy of the variant, but Beatrice inherited both copies of the variant, and her expression of the gene is drastically reduced compared to her parents. It’s not clear yet if the variant is responsible for her condition, however, and there are many other leads to follow in the data.

Nevertheless, Illumina plans to perform this style of transcriptome profiling on up to nine more family trios, five of whom have children that have been diagnosed with Loyes Dietz syndrome, and four others with a variety of clinical presentations including autism, developmental delays and congenital heart failure.

Gary Schroth, who runs the RNA analysis division at Illumina, says the research could provide proof-of-principle examples for moving transcriptome sequencing into clinical application. The sequences are being provided for the patients and their families for free -- a cost of roughly $6,000 per family, he estimates.

It helps to know someone. Rienhoff was able to get Illumina interested based in part on his friendship with Illumina CEO Jay Flatley, and several of the new trios to be sequenced are friends of Rienhoff's. Still says Schroth, “it’s more than a pet project. It’s a legitimate application for my group to work on.”

For Rienhoff, of course, it’s personal.

Image: C. Pickens

Posted by Alex Witze on September 17, 2009
Categories: | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

License to ill(icitly traffic nuclear material)

Yesterday the press got a briefing from the the team running the International Atomic Energy Agency's Illicit Trafficking Database. The database was officially established in 1995 and is one of the few publicly available sources of information on nuclear smuggling. 108 countries voluntarily deposit information about lost, missing or stolen radiological material in the database. They do so on condition of anonymity, so the IAEA won't say too much about where any given incidents occur. However, they do give aggrigate numbers which are in and of themselves reasonably interesting.

The scariest of these numbers has to do with what they not-so-euphemistically call “unauthorized possessions” of nuclear materials—basically attempts by unsavory characters to sell nuclear material of one kind or another on the black market. Between 1993 and 2008 the agency recorded 333 incidents, 16 of which took place last year. Since the mid-1990s, the number of reported incidents has been relatively constant, says Viacheslav Turkin, a nuclear security officer with the agency.

Next on the list were incidents theft of lost materials. These were mainly smaller, portable sources used for commercial surveying or medical purposes. The agency has recorded a total of 463 cases in which these materials disappeared over the past decade-and-a-half. Worryingly only 65% of them have been reported as recovered (although Turkin notes that some countries may not have bothered to notify the IAEA about recovered sources).

Finally came the infamous “orphan sources”, radioactive materials that are lost and forgotten. The number of these sources has shot up in recent years to a grand total of 754, probably as a result of better reporting. Nevertheless, Turkin finds such incidents the most disturbing because they show a complete failure of a nation to keep track of its nuclear material.

I asked Turkin how the scientific community was doing at maintaining control of its radiological material, and he said overall that “not many cases show research reactor fuel.” But that doesn't mean incidents involving academic material weren't taking place. Medical isotopes have much shorter half lives and are therefor under fairly lax control, he noted, as were smaller research sources used in most laboratories. Turkin felt that it was a mistake for authorities to overlook cases in which research material might go missing. “Every theft whatever the [radio]activity of the source should be investigated,” he says.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 17, 2009
Categories: IAEA | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 15, 2009

More than non-proliferation at the old VIC

el Baradei.jpgGreetings from the Vienna International Centre (VIC), the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as the location of this year's general conference AND scientific forum.

Most of you might be surprised to hear that there is such a thing as a scientific forum at the agency responsible for policing the world's nuclear power facilities. But the agency does more than just act as a nuclear watchdog. In fact, a big part of the IAEA's job is to actually spread nuclear power technology to the countries who need it most.

And thus we come to the theme of the scientific forum, which this year is all about the energy needs of developing nations. This morning we heard from outgoing IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei who called for the creation of a whole new kind of energy agency, one that would facility technology transfer of all energy technologies to the neediest nations, provide resource assessments, and perform a certain amount of R&D. Such an agency was briefly considered during the energy crisis of the 1970s, he said, “It's time we revisit the idea.”

Subsequent speakers provided a lot of evidence for the need for more energy aid. Ashok Khosla, president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature delivered an eloquent speech about the need for action. At present billions of people lack access to the energy they need. In one part of India, the millions without power have resorted to cutting down forests, creating massive desertification. “Three million people without energy is not a moral outrage,”he told the crowd, “it's an ecological disaster.”

Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Maryland said that the mechanisms for delivering aid simply weren't there. What is needed was a Marshall-plan scaled effort in energy aid for the developing world. That in turn would require dedicated bureaucracies and new financing instruments, none of which presently exist.

It was a worthy cause, but unfortunately few at the IAEA general convention were paying much attention. During these troubled times, Iran's nuclear programme and the ensuing diplomatic hooha has stirred up a lot more interest than the needs of the developing world. I have to confess that I myself was lured away from the scientific forum to learn more about how the IAEA analyzes satellite imagery from the sites it monitors.

I do plan to get back tomorrow to learn more about the energy shortages facing billions of people. Iran may be grabbing headlines today, but the forum is obviously grappling with a far greater crisis, which may come to pass in the not too distant future.

IAEA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 15, 2009
Categories: IAEA | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 20, 2009

Lepton Photon 2009: An LHC in every home

livingston.JPGSo what's next for high-energy physics? The LHC won’t be the end. Physicists will want to go to higher energies. The question is, how? The International Linear Collider -- a planned linac that will do for positrons and electrons what the LHC did for protons -- is what the community wants right now, but it won't go to any higher energies. It might be too expensive to build just to match the LHC's capabilities. Machines like the ILC struggle to achieve accelerating gradients of 30 MeV per metre, and the radio wave power delivered to the metallic cavities would melt them were they not supercooled and superconducting.
But all is not lost. SLAC's Mark Hogan gave a talk about all the novel accelerating technologies in the works. He presented the so-called Livingston chart, which at right shows the hard-won exponential increase in accelerator energies with time. Every few decades or so, an order of magnitude increase in energy is earned. But you can also see how each successive family of accelerator technologies – cyclotrons, synchrotrons, storage rings – leap to new heights, but taper off with time. Something has to be done. And Hogan thinks that wakefields will be the way to go -- using initial pulses to create a wave in a plasma, or a fiber, that in turn allow successive electron pulses to surf on the wake.
Of course, the technology is years away -- but it could offer gradients in the GeV per metre range. That would put desktop light sources within reach. Who knows -- maybe there could be desktop colliders, too. The future is wide open. But my future at Lepton Photon is quite limited. I am skipping out on Friday, the last day -- but have enjoyed my time in Hannover thoroughly. Thanks very much to the organizers.

Posted by Eric Hand on August 20, 2009
Categories: Lepton Photon | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lepton Photon 2009: Hint of a Higgs?

cdf.JPGSo nearly all of the talks at this conference have been reviews -- not surprising, given the paucity of fresh data in the field. But there is one machine still chugging along -- the Tevatron -- and new results were presented by each of the main experiments, CDF and DZero. The new Higgs search results weren't all that surprising, just incremental advances on the last big rollout of results in the spring. But let's look at the latest results for CDF in the plot here. You can see that, even without combining their data together for a joint analysis, the individual teams are getting close to excluding certain ranges of Higgs masses. In particular, it is interesting how the plot shows observed values exceeding the expected values, especially in the low mass regime around 120 GeV -- precisely the region where many theorists expect to find the Higgs. Could this be the beginning of a signal? CDF spokesman Rob Roser says it's only a one-sigma difference from expectation -- barely a blip on the radar in the physics world. But nonetheless, he says it's a motivation to his team. This is precisely the part of the energy spectrum where the LHC is the worst at detecting the Higgs -- a place where the LHC will need a year or two of data to say anything. So it helps give Tevatron continued justification to run in 2011. And it means that, if the Higgs is in fact a low-mass particle, the race for priority is still on.

Posted by Eric Hand on August 20, 2009
Categories: Lepton Photon | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ACS Washington 2009: Energy of the nearer future?

NIF small.jpgThis year ACS hosted a two-day symposium on the National Ignition Facility and a couple of the other big nuclear fusion efforts. Given the audience, most of the talks focused on the role chemists could play in diagnostics, i.e. detecting whether fusion actually occurs, and on the different sorts of experiments chemists might be interested in, like nucleosynthesis and stellar burning processes.

NIF has had its share of delays, dilemmas and scandals, but finished construction in late March and looks to make its first attempts at ignition next year. At the conference, NIF science director Richard Boyd said they're currently running experimental implosions — up to two a day — to optimize all the parameters, and using “a bunch of tricks to make the process as efficient as possible”. For example, right now none of the experimental implosions are using deuterium-tritium targets, but Boyd notes that “with just a tiny bit of deuterium, we can actually go through most of the optimization procedures without producing neutrons, which are problematic because they activate things”.

Continue reading "ACS Washington 2009: Energy of the nearer future?" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on August 20, 2009
Categories: American Chemical Society | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Search