Genomic sequencing has made incredible strides in recent years, with both the cost and the time required to sequence an individual’s entire DNA sequence dropping meteorically. Yet one rate-limiting step for securing an organism’s genome remains: in order to sequence a species’ genetic information, you need a sample to start with. In humans or laboratory animals, a sample of blood or tissue is easily obtained. But what if a scientist wants to do a genomic study on an endangered species population, in the wild, without having to “trap 0r dart” a number of the animals to take blood samples?

George Perry, a genetics researcher at the University of Chicago, pondered this dilemma in planning his own research on endangered lemurs in Madagascar. In discussions with colleagues, he considered whether a “non-invasive” sampling technique might be possible for the collection of genomic data useful for conservationists and evolutionary biologists. The process led him to an unorthodox idea.

“We started thinking, ‘Is there a way to use fecal samples but to still do genomics work?’,” said Perry, a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Yoav Gilad. “Then everyone would have the flexibility to collect population genomics data from any species at any time, as long as you can collect poop.”

Believe it or not, the collection of genetic data from feces has a long scientific history. Alongside the unwanted parts of an organism’s diet, solid waste contains a small number of cells stripped from the lining of the organism’s digestive system. Scientists have extracted small segments of DNA from those cells for study, mostly from the intracellular structures called mitochondria, which have their own genes. But more extensive genetic mapping of nuclear DNA from fecal samples has been thwarted by another of its ingredients: bacteria. The dominance of bacteria over host DNA inside the digestive system carries over to its product, where an organism produces less than 2% of the DNA deposited in its droppings.

To apply the awesome power of next-generation sequencing technology to a fecal sample, the DNA you want has to be separated from all that DNA you don’t want. Perry decided to modify an existing technique known as DNA capture (which has also been used to sequence Neanderthal DNA), to accomplish this task. With DNA capture, custom-made RNA sequences are used as bait to fish specific stretches of DNA out of a mixture; metallic beads are attached to the RNA sequences, and a magnet separates out the target DNA from the unwanted material. Perry boosted the specificity of this model, incorporating extra washes and two separate rounds of DNA capture, to turn his lower-quality fecal sample into starting material sufficient for sequencing. In part, that means starting with a lot more DNA that typically used for DNA capture, which means starting with roughly 2 grams of poop from each animal. Fortunately, it’s an abundant resource.

“It’s not that you can only study rhinoceros because they have huge poop,” Perry said.

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Photo by John Amend/Cornell

I’ve always been fascinated with the rock solid bags of coffee bought at the store, which have all the density of a brick until opened, when they crumble into scoopable grounds. Turns out that’s a physical concept at work, known as “jamming transition,” when separate, particulate materials are pushed so close together they act like a solid structure. It turns out jamming transitions are useful for more than just compact packaging, but can also help solve a persistent, basic problem in robotics: how can you make a robot “hand” as good as the human hand at picking up objects?

An answer was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and private company iRobot. The scientists created a finger-free “universal robot gripper” by filling a balloon-like elastic bag with particulate material - such as, yes, coffee grounds - pressing the bag down on to the object, then removing the air from the bag, triggering the jamming transition and creating a perfectly shaped, tight hold. There’s video below, demonstrating some of the objects and functions the device can be used for. But when will they be installed in prize claw machines?

[Coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo, and Wired]

Resurrection of the Beagle

The HMS Beagle was the Royal Navy ship that transported a very special passenger, a naturalist named Charles Darwin, around the world in 1831. What’s left of the ship may currently lie at the bottom of a marsh, but the name has lived on as a favorite for ambitious science projects. First, the Beagle name was attached to the Mars space probe Beagle 2, and now it has been affixed to the University of Chicago Computation Institute’s newest toy: a 150-teraflop supercomputer, one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world. Housed at Argonne National Laboratory, this Beagle will sail the seas of data produced by researchers in physics, biology, and medicine.

As discussed previously on ScienceLife, the next wave of science will be less about collecting data and more about actually doing constructive things with it. The Beagle’s maiden voyages will be to help projects such as the Membrane Protein Structural Dynamics Consortium, the UChicago-led effort to study the shape and function of cellular machines. Other immediate uses may be for genomics projects, where scientists have struggled to keep up with analysis of the data created by cheaper and cheaper gene sequencing technology. In the Beagle’s announcement, Conrad Gilliam, UChicago’s dean of research for the biological sciences division, looks forward to a time when electronic medical records provide valuable data for the development of more effective treatments.

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Regular readers of the New York Times Magazine are familiar with Diagnosis, Dr. Lisa Sanders’ long-running column of medical mysteries. With false leads, twists, and surprise endings, these hospital narratives are typically as suspenseful as a Raymond Carver story, or perhaps more appropriately, an episode of House. The subject matter of these mysteries are usually what doctors call “fascinomas,” unusual and odd maladies that one rarely, if ever, encounters in the clinic. But in this past Sunday’s installment, which featured the Medical Center’s John Henning Schumann, how a particular fascinoma was diagnosed was just as interesting as the diagnosis itself.

The story, in a nutshell: a 40-year-old friend of Schumann’s was suffering nightly fevers of unknown origin, and doctors were stumped. A multitude of tests found nothing out of sorts, save a non-cancerous mass in the patient’s liver that appeared to be a hemangioma - a cluster of blood vessels. Hemangiomas don’t typically cause fevers, so the patient’s doctors were unsure whether to perform the major surgery required to remove the mass from the patient.

And then: the internet! Amid his doctors’ uncertainty, that patient (an internet expert) and his significant other decided to start a blog about the medical mystery in which he found himself the central character.

“They had a huge social network of very over-educated people, many doctors, many not, but people connected to doctors,” said Schumann, an assistant professor of medicine. “Their attitude was let’s put it out there and see what they think.”

Schumann, a concerned observer from afar, posted a link to his friend’s blog on his own blog, Glass Hospital, and the story was picked up by Kevin Pho, founder of the popular medical blog KevinMD. Pho’s post drove traffic to the patient’s blog, where doctors left comments with diagnosis suggestions and links to published obscure case reports similar to his ordeal.

The commenters’ consensus - that the hemangioma was the likely cause of the symptoms and should be removed - agreed with the eventual, independent assessment of the patient’s doctors. But Schumann said in an interview with ScienceLife that the process was still helpful to his friend, if mostly in a psychological sense.

“I don’t think it necessarily solved the case, but I think it might have expedited it slightly, and it provided a ray of hope,” Schumann said. “For a guy who is web-savvy, it gave him a level of comfort that I don’t think all the medical specialists in the world could provide.”

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A “hunchbacked” dinosaur is found in Spain, and the University of Chicago’s dinosaur expert Paul Sereno was available for comment. As Nature News points out, the interesting thing may not be the large hump on its back, but the tiny bumps on its arms, which suggest the presence of feathers long before they were predicted to have first appeared. But um, no, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t raise questions about whether humans and dinosaurs lived together.

Researchers at Argonne got to test the entries for the Automotive X-Prize, the contest to design an extremely energy-efficient car that gets the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon. See pictures and read a bit of commentary on some of the candidates from Argonne mechanical engineer Mike Duoba at Wired.

If you thought medicinal marijuana was controversial, try to wrap your head around the small study (only 12 patients) that found a benefit of psilocybin - the ingredient in “psychedelic” mushrooms - for reducing anxiety in cancer patients. The finding reflects a renewed interest in studying the possible clinical uses for psychedelics, a topic ScienceLife discussed in the context of the drug ecstasy last year. See also the recent Nature Neuroscience Review article about what is currently know about how psychedelics affect the brain, and how those effects might be harnessed for the treatment of mood disorders.

Comer Children’s Hospital nurse Tiffany Cupp was on Chicago Public Radio last week talking about her experiences offering medical relief in Haiti. If you prefer video to audio, we spoke with her about the experience earlier this year.

It seems as though every media outlet has run at least one “Is technology changing our brains?” story in recent months, most of which have come under heavy fire from science bloggers. But here’s a good summary, found via MindHacks, of what we really know and don’t know about how video games, computers, and so-called “brain games” actually affect the way our brains function. It’s written by a team of cognitive scientists including Daphne Bavelier, who actually studies the effect of playing video games on vision and attention.

Personalized genomics sites like 23andme are old news now, but this article in Nature Medicine profiles several ventures taking it to the next level, with sites organizing volunteer DIY genomics research projects.

There’s a lot of interesting angles to the New Yorker’s profile of Francis Collins, but what might be most interesting to some readers is how it opens the lid slightly on the workings of the National Institutes of Health, a $31 billion a year agency.

Welcome to Dr. Polonsky

Today’s big news on campus is the announcement of Kenneth S. Polonsky, our new dean and executive vice president of medical affairs. The position puts Polonsky, an endocrinologist and diabetes researcher, at the helm of our Biological Sciences Division, the Pritzker School of Medicine, and the University of Chicago Medical Center. Polonsky was most recently chair of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, but before that he was a faculty member at the University of Chicago from 1981 to 1999.

As such, Friday morning’s announcement event felt more like a homecoming than an introduction, with many faculty members cheerfully reuniting with Polonsky and his wife Lydia, a former math teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. In his first remarks to the University community, Polonsky admitted to feeling a little “intimidated and nervous,” but excited about the future of the Medical Center and BSD.

“It really does feel right,” Polonsky said. “I do really think that we have an opportunity to continue a spectacular tradition. I have retained the utmost respect for the University of Chicago broadly, but particularly for the medical school and the biological sciences division. When I walk around this campus, I see all these buildings, including the new hospital, that weren’t here in 1999. I thought we were pretty great then, so I think that we have an enormous potential to be even better, and I hope to facilitate that.”

Polonsky will begin his new duties on October 1st, when our current interim dean and CEO, Everett Vokes, will step back to his prior role as chair of medicine. University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer also had kind words for Vokes, saying that he “took on this role at a challenging moment for this enterprise, and I think everybody recognizes the absolutely extraordinary job that he’s done.”

You can watch video of today’s ceremony here.

Feed the World with Science

In the year 2050, the world population is estimated to pass 9 billion people, nearly a 50 percent increase over today’s number. Among many concerns with that growing population is whether all those new people will be able to be fed; after all, an estimated 1 billion people today do not get enough food for minimum energy requirements. The journal Nature devotes a big chunk of this week’s issue to the question of food’s future, and perhaps surprisingly, there’s no panic amid the fancy graphics and editorials. The percentage of hungry people has dropped over the last few decades (with a slight rebound due to the current economic crisis), food production is growing at a faster pace than the population, and productivity can be lifted even further through the spread of existing technology.

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Personalized Medicine: The Brake vs. The Accelerator

A recurring theme on the blog - and presumably on every other medicine and science blog - has been the push toward personalized medicine, the utopian future where every patient receives individualized care for a disease or even the genetic risk of disease. But the road to that future world of health care has been slower than some experts anticipated, with disappointing clinical trials, scientific setbacks and regulatory hurdles all acting as speed bumps. Those obstacles are partially why National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins was dinged this week in a New York Times article for promising “a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine” within a decade or two of the Human Genome Project’s completion…ten years ago.

So it was interesting to see Collins’ revised opinion on the timeline for personalized medicine this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, in an editorial co-written with FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. It’s a strange partnership in some ways: the country’s top scientist and the country’s top regulator. The editorial reads accordingly, with a first half marked by the go-go optimism of Collins followed by the “woah, let’s slow down” realism of Hamburg.

Still, there are some interesting initiatives within. Collins gives the glass-half-full version of the New York Times’ Human Genome Project assessment, stating that hundreds of disease-related gene variants have been characterized and are now promising drug targets. The issue, Collins claims is the lack of financial incentives for companies to pursue those targets, something he hopes to fix by allowing the NIH to step in and do the preclinical “Valley of Death” work that scares off pharmaceutical companies. Collins also promises an expanded effort to establish tissue banks and genetic databases from clinical trials and epidemiological studies such as the Framingham Heart Study, to enable better research into biomarkers that predict disease or response to treatment.

On the flipside, Hamburg argues that extreme caution should be employed in approving tests for those very biomarkers. Her argument - that most current tests are inaccurate or misleading - is backed up by the FDA’s recent move to more aggressively regulate test marketed for at-home use. While the editorial offers a table of three tests approved to predict a patient’s response to a cancer drug such as Gleevec or cetuximab, Hamburg writes that some 2,000 genetic tests are currently used by clinical laboratories - some FDA-approved, some not. The editorial promises a genetic testing registry that will offer consumers and physicians information about the tests, but promises that the agency will keep a close eye on tests that “are broadly marketed to laboratories or the public.”

If that sounds all a bit good cop/bad cop, it’s true. The key will be in the balance between the forces pushing personalized medicine forward and those entrusted with testing its validity. As Collins and Hamburg put it, “When the federal government created the national highway system, it did not tell people where to drive - it built the roads and set the standards for safety…We are now building a national highway system for personalized medicine.”

More World Cup Science

When I wrote my World Cup science piece last week, I didn’t realize that several scientists were holding back their timely soccer-science articles until the tournament was in full swing. But sure enough, a flood of new research has crossed the wires in the past week, about everything from the controversial vuvuzela horns to the age-old debate of “soccer” vs. “football.”

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At the end of April, an FDA approval marked the end of a long regulatory road for an interesting drug with an even more interesting history: Provenge. Though it’s usually described as a vaccine for metastatic prostate cancer, that terminology is a bit misleading, as unlike traditional vaccines it doesn’t work by exposing an individual to an inactivated virus or a protective antigen. Instead, Provenge is more accurately the first “activated cellular immunotherapy,” a treatment where a patient’s own white blood cells are modified in a laboratory and re-infused to attack tumor cells. Though scientists have pursued this strategy for years, Provenge is the first product to reach the market after a tumultuous path that involved three separate randomized clinical trials.

Now that Provenge has been approved, a slow rollout of the treatment will begin in medical centers and urology clinics around the country. In the Chicago area, the University of Chicago Medical Center will be the first to offer Provenge, though treatment slots will initially be limited as the company behind the treatment, Dendreon, ramps up their capacity. Because of the press attention on the treatment’s novel mechanism, its controversial past, and the questions surrounding its slow debut, I visited with Russell Szmulewitz, an instructor of medicine who treats and studies prostate cancer for a Q&A session on Provenge.

Q: How does Provenge work?

A: Provenge is an activated cellular immunotherapy, which is a complicated way to say it is using your body’s own immune cells to target and fight your cancer. The process is labor-intensive, because it involves a process called apheresis, where patients are attached to a machine that’s sort of similar to a dialysis machine. But instead of cleansing your blood, it takes the white blood cells out of the blood and gives you back the red blood cells. Those white blood cells are then sent to the manufacturer at Dendreon, exposed to an activating protein, called PAP, which is a protein made by most prostate cancer cells, attached to a white blood cell growth factor called GM-CSF. The fused protein is incubated with the cells together, and what’s left is an activated cell product that’s called sipuleucel-T. That’s then shipped back to the treating physician and infused like a transfusion. The whole process is repeated every two weeks, for a total of three times.

It’s the first of its kind in terms of active immunotherapies. It’s not really a vaccine per se; a vaccine typically means injecting a patient with a protein and then your body has an immune response to that protein. This is quite different in that the cells are taken out of your body, futzed with, and given back to you.

Q: Who is Provenge meant for?

A: The label will be for minimally symptomatic, castrate-resistant, metastatic prostate cancer patients. These are patients who have failed standard hormonal manipulation, which we call castration, and have minimal symptoms from their disease. Obviously, that’s a bit subjective, but the studies that were done with this product were not done with patients who had severe pain from their malignancy or severe weight loss or things of that nature.

So if the patient fails hormonal therapy and then fractures a bone and has severe pain from their disease, this product is probably not indicated. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t help them, we just don’t know, because that’s not the type of patient that was included in the studies. That being said it’s a huge population of patients.

Q: Why should doctors and patients be excited about Provenge?

A: It’s pretty non-toxic. Other than the fairly complicated apheresis procedure - 3 to 4 hours hooked up to this machine with a large IV - there’s really few, if any, severe toxicities. Some common things people get are fevers, chills, headaches, but that’s pretty much it in terms of side effects.

Because it’s a less-toxic, immune-based therapy, it’s gotten a lot of press. We’re excited because it works. It’s nice that it has limited toxicity, that’s for sure, but it seems to work.

In this disease state, it’s incurable. In fact, metastatic prostate cancer in general, even hormone-sensitive metastatic prostate cancer is incurable, so anything at this point in the game to improve quality of life, prolong life, meaningful life, those are the metrics you are judging success or failure by. It’s the first active cellular immunotherapy in cancer and especially in solid tumor malignancy, and it has a very different side effect profile than your typical cancer therapy.

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Climate Scientists to Politicians: Enough Already

A pretty remarkable letter was published in the journal Science this week, signed by 250 members (including4 University of Chicago scientists) of the National Academy of Sciences and calling for “an end to McCarthy-like threats” surrounding climate change. The letter makes a stand for reason on both climate change specifically and science in general, arguing that the scientific process of constantly questioning and improving the knowledge of a particular subject should not be misinterpreted as flaws.

When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

The letter comes on the heels of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggesting in March that U.S. and British scientists should be criminally investigated for their role in the “ClimateGate” hacked e-mails incident. Michael Mann, the Penn State climatologist who created the famous hockey stick graph showing the recent rise in global temperatures, was cleared by his university of any misconduct charges, but was targeted this week by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Such efforts are political grandstanding at its most despicable, and seriously endanger the ability of scientists to conduct research in an open and unpolitical forum. Great coverage, as always, by Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth.

2010 BIO Coverage Roundup

To wrap up BIO week, I thought I’d cast a net for some of the other commentary from this week’s conference in Chicago. Bruce Japsen of the Chicago Tribune saw part of Al Gore’s speech and focused on how the global recession wounded the biotechnology industry. Tuesday’s keynote session with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton was controversially closed to the media, but Forbes ran a perspective on the event from a conference attendee. Industry magazine Fierce Biotech and the San Diego Biotechnology Network were also grinding out gavel-to-gavel coverage alongside our own.

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Three days and 7,500 words later, I’m happy to be back at my office desk this morning after an exciting week at the BIO conference. For those of you without the time to wade into the coverage, here are some concluding thoughts and a selection of links to the most memorable parts of the meeting. If you want the real-time rundown, click for the coverage from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

I’ve never been to a conference quite like BIO. The ivory tower of academia is fortified enough that your typical scientific conference operates somewhat insulated from real-world dollars and cents, other than the constant calls for funding and the lavish laboratory supply displays on the exhibit floor. But at BIO, the world’s largest biotechnology conference, the conversation starts with business. Pharmaceutical companies advertise their wares, startups network with venture capital companies, countries and states tout their locale as fertile for biotech business, and countless panels discuss the impact of the world economy on the industry. The marketplace focus creates a different vibe, to say the least - from presentations handicapped by non-disclosure agreements to a significantly fancier dress code to audience questions that sound more like a shareholder’s meeting than a research seminar.

Those are not necessarily negatives - I only mean to point out how it was all a bit foreign to a former academic scientist such as myself. If nothing else, the emphasis on the bottom line produced more focused research talks - the science, in most cases, was expected to provide a concrete solution, not incremental progress. Biotechnology is a field vaguely-defined enough that those solutions were broad and ambitious: medical treatments, devices, and tests dominated the discussion, but there was also talk of ending world hunger with bio-engineered agriculture, rolling back climate change with biofuels, and protecting the world from misuse of biotechnology with biosecurity biotechnology. If occasionally one felt like the speaker was selling their science rather than presenting it for discussion - well, yeah, they were.

But with all the discussion of promising technologies for the future, the main obstacle appeared to be fairly low-tech: human communication. Many sessions hoped that the bright side of the global recession would be more partnerships between academic research centers and private companies, with industry helping academic scientists bridge “the valley of death” in commercialization while academia fills the gap created by industry R&D cuts. But the language barrier between the two entities doesn’t seem to be weakening, as evidenced by any panel where representatives from industry and university sat side by side. Disconnected motivations (profit vs. tenure), approaches (basic science vs. applied science), and pacing (quarterly reports vs. multi-year grant cycles) all would seem to make the academia-industry bridge an especially difficult construction project.

The other communication breakdown oft lamented at the conference was between the industry and the public. Any time a field comes together, an us vs. them mentality quickly forms - the sense that nobody but us understands just how critically important neuroscience or dentistry or insurance actuary is to the world. But biotechnology has its own battles to fight, after journalists and politicians have targeted products such as corn ethanol fuel and genetically-modified crops for reasons both valid and uninformed. Michael Specter, staff writer for the New Yorker, rightly said that many attacks against biotechnology are borne of unsubstantiated fear caused by scientific illiteracy. But Specter also criticized pharmaceutical companies for shooting themselves in the foot by being cagey with the press, sitting in “defensive crouches” rather than emphasizing the good things they do. A relevant lesson for a conference where media were blocked off from keynote addresses by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, save for access during the first five minutes of the latter speech.

But criticisms aside, I had a great time covering the conference. The enthusiasm of the scientists - be they from industry or university - was infectious, and the motivations of all involved are pure despite the smell of profit. The full potential of science can’t be realized if it is kept within laboratory walls, and while the process of distributing science to the greater public can be messy, it is absolutely critical if we are to improve the world around us. Here’s a roundup of the favorite things I saw this week.

The Gee Whiz Sessions

Building New Tissue with Nanotech

Stem Cells from Skin Outpace Stem Cells From Embryos

Artificial Pancreas? There’s an App for That

University of Chicago at BIO

The Chicago Innovation Pipeline

Translational Research Forum: Forging Better Partnerships and Making Trials Faster

Why Better Diagnostics Need a Better Health Care System

The Business Side of BioTech

The United States’ Narrowing Biotechnology Lead (ft. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria)

Surviving the Recession (post by Karla Melendez)

Biotechnology Battlegrounds

Improving the Science of Regulation (ft. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg)

The Arms Race of Biotechnology

The Ethics of Engineering Nature

This is the third day of our coverage of the 2010 BIO International Convention, a massive biotechnology conference being held this week at McCormick Place in Chicago. Come back all day for reports from panels, lectures, and the exhibit floor on how scientists, government leaders, and industry hope to use the combined forces of science and technology to tackle some of the world biggest problems. For the first two days of our coverage, click here and here.

6:00 PM - Biotechnological Patriotism and the Petabye Age

Walking through the elaborate castles erected by countries from Europe, Asia, and South America on the exhibit floor (pictured below), an American might develop some anxiety about their country’s status as undisputed champion of biotechnology. That’s partially an illusion - if all of the kiosks for individual American states and U.S.-based biotech companies were pooled into one giant USA! USA! booth, it would take up the majority of the exhibition. But paranoia that the rest of the world is hot on America’s trail was palpable through the conference, with rumblings of new biotech epicenters in China and India rippling through McCormick Place.

A panel organized by Scientific American this afternoon sought to set some of those fears at bay, and the message was delivered through a persuasive moderator: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. With his keynote address, Zakaria talked about the economic landscape as the world recovers from a global financial crisis, but said that the real economic story of the last 50 years was not bubbles and recessions, but the broader participation in the world economy. No longer is all the exciting innovation and economic development happening in a few North Atlantic nations, Zakaria said; now even small countries have robust, independent economies and an impact on the global system.

The downside of that phenomenon, for Americans at least, is that we are no longer the one place where the world’s biggest achievements are located. The biggest mall in the world, Zakaria pointed out, is no longer Minneapolis’ Mall of America - it’s the South China Mall in Beijing. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico City. The world’s largest refinery is in India. But the United States can still lay claim to the most highly-respected universities in the world, and the “extraordinary quantity of high quality research” that goes along with that system.

Joined by a panel of biotechnology industry leaders, the reassurance continued. China and India - while several orders of magnitude larger in population than the United States - are too concerned with building infrastructure to pose a near-term threat to American biotech expertise. The American investment system, which rewards creativity and understands that many big ideas fail, remains a model for the world. And as long as United States universities are perceived as the world’s best, they will attract the best students from around the globe to our shores - even if, increasingly, those students return to their home countries to apply their education.

With all those warm feelings, it was a little disheartening to find what I thought would be one of the day’s most engaging research sessions - on applications of computational science to drug discovery - to be also the day’s most sparsely attended. Fascinating, exciting research was presented by scientists from the University of Illinois and Argonne National Laboratory on how the rapid growth of computing power capabilities has made new types of experiments possible.

Emad Tajkhorshid showed animations representing the dynamic wobble of protein interactions, drugs and targets undulating like ocean waves - suggesting that scientists will no longer be constrained by the necessary simplifications of benchtop science. Rick Stevens, from Argonne, talked about grabbing a small soil sample and sequencing every organism within, grabbing potentially thousands of complete genomes - many of them never before seen - at once. As one questioner said, we’ve brought everyone into the genomic age, but the next step will be the petabyte age, an age of previously unfathomable computation enabling the creation of new science. Unfortunately, this afternoon there were few there to witness the new age’s early steps.

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This is the second day of our coverage of the 2010 BIO International Convention, a massive biotechnology conference being held this week at McCormick Place in Chicago. Come back all day for reports from panels, lectures, and the exhibit floor on how scientists, government leaders, and industry hope to use the combined forces of science and technology to tackle some of the world biggest problems. For day one of our coverage, click here.

5:30 PM - Regulators, Mount Up!

The boogeyman of the BIO conference has been those faceless regulators, the bureaucracy that speakers have often blamed for the bulk of the slowdown that occurs between scientific innovation and its debut on the marketplace and in the clinic. Though never named directly, the big boss of those regulators in the United States is the Food & Drug Administration, whose stamp of approval is required for each and every new treatment or device. And as much as the biotechnology and patient advocacy choruses cry “more and better drugs, faster!,” one must remember the importance of government oversight in monitoring new products for safety and efficacy - illustrated again today in the FDA-directed recall of 200,000 medical infusion pumps. Late afternoon Tuesday, the industry finally got to hear from the woman at the head of that regulatory boogeyman, in the form of Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the FDA.

Appearing at a session sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Merck, the reception for Hamburg was of course, polite and gracious - everyone knows not to bite the hand holding that magical FDA stamp. But Hamburg’s speech appeared to be quite reassuring as well, a promise to the assembled drug companies and scientists that President Obama’s FDA was committed to science and new, better, faster ways of approving medical technology. In fact, Hamburg argued for no less than a new field - regulatory science - that would study how best to judge drugs in an era where older models of clinical trials may be obsolete.

“Just as biomedical research evolved in the past decade, regulatory science must also evolve,” Hamburg said. “We cannot use 20th century science to review products using 21st century science.”

If regulatory science sounds like the dullest thing ever, Hamburg doesn’t blame you. In the Q&A session, she said the FDA looked for a different, punchier name, saying that regulatory science “sounds like such a snooze,” and conjures images of bureaucracy and intrusive government. But in the end, Hamburg said, they decided “you can only put so much perfume and fancy clothes” on the concept of improving the country’s regulatory processes. The trick now is to attract promising scientists to a field that is considered to lack the creativity of other scientific realms, and to expand the FDA workforce to keep up with the active pipeline of biotechnology

Such regulatory scientists will have some big problems to tackle. The new world of biomarkers and potentially personalized medicine have complicated the clinical trial process, which has previously relied on lumping large numbers of patients together despite individual differences in disease. New kinds of trials, such as the “adaptive” format pioneered in the BATTLE trial at MD Anderson Cancer Center, will be needed to match the best drug to the best patient in a way that can be regulated, Hamburg said. New devices, such as software that will connect glucose monitors to insulin pumps to produce automated control in diabetes patients, will also need inventive study design to quickly and properly weigh the benefits and safety risks for patients.

“We want the FDA to serve as a gateway, not a barrier, for products people need every day,” Hamburg said.

(Apologies to Warren G - ed.)

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5:00 PM - Regenerating Tissue with Nano-Engineering

After a day of hearing talks about the process of scientific research in all its funding, methodological glory, it seemed like a good idea to cap off the day’s events with some gee-whiz science. One of the 17 “tracks” or topics for breakout sessions at the BIO conference is called simply “Exciting Science 2010,” which felt just about right. The panel, “Hard Science in a Soft World: Engineering in Biology for Regenerative Medicine,” delivered on its promise of excitement, offering up a glimpse at a scientific field that sounds sci-fi today but could be routine in 10 years.

Regenerative medicine is indeed what it sounds like - the process of regrowing organs, tissue, or cells inside or even outside the body. The applications for such science would be manyfold, from obvious cases of heart or liver failure to spinal cord injury, diabetes, and even cartilage-loss disorders such as arthritis. But while tricking the body into regrowing pancreatic beta cells or spinal cord neurons has been a dream of scientists for decades, the biological barriers have proved largely insurmountable thus far. As Garry Neil of Johnson & Johnson put it in his overview introduction, the field of regenerative medicine currently resides in “the trough of disillusionment” on the hype cycle of emerging technology.

But two talks offered concrete hope that the field’s fortunes are about to change. Sam Stupp, the director of the Northwestern Institute for BioNanotechnology, talked about the importance of scaffolds in delivering drugs and signals to cells in the body - sounds boring, but was far from it. For a complex goal like organ regeneration, a doctor can’t just inject growth signals or stem cells into an area and hope for the best, the treatment must be delivered on a structure of some kind. Stupp and colleagues adapted a natural system to create self-assembling cylinders that carry whatever drug or signal a scientist wishes on the outside of the structure, producing a stable, drug-rich structure. Already, Stupp’s laboratory have tested the injection of these scaffolds expressing a neuronal growth signal with stem cells into the brains of Parkinson’s mice, prolonging their life and relieving their motor symptoms.

Another interesting use of nanotechnology that draws upon natural biology came from Thomas Webster of Brown University, an engineer who deals in biological problems. Webster worked with the manufacturers of titanium implants for ways to prevent the body from rejecting the artificial materials being placed inside the body, preventing an artificial knee or hip, for instance, from being a lifelong cure. Reasoning that the smooth, unblemished surface of titanium was quite unlike the bumpy uneven surface of a natural cell, Webster created a process for sculpting “nano-scale roughness” into the surface of the implant. Lab tests showed that this new, bumpier implant was more resistant to infection and more attractive to surrounding tissue, producing a protective layer of cells rather than a rejection.

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