https://www.projectlifemovement.org/impact/https://www.projectlifemovement.org/impact/

Our Impact

The Project to Save Lives Leukemia, Sickle Cell anemia and other diseases can often be cured with a bone marrow transplant. However, African American patients with leukemia and Sickle Cell have only a 23% chance of finding a bone marrow match on the National Registry. For mixed race patients the chance of finding a match is even lower. Conversely, African American and mixed race patients with leukemia or Sickle Cell have a 77% or more chance of dying if the only treatment that will save their lives is a bone marrow match and transplant. Compare this to the 41% chance of finding a match for Asian or Pacific Islanders, 46% for Hispanics or Latinos, 57% for American Indian and Alaska Natives, and 77%f for whites. The only reason for these discrepancies is the lack of bone marrow donors from the African American and mixed race communities. The solution to this problem is simple. We can save lives by having more African American and mixed race bone marrow donors, and providing supportservices to African American and mixed race children and adults in need of bone marrow transplants. This is the mission of The Project to Save Lives.

Doctors also use bone marrow transplants to treat aplastic anemia, autoimmune diseases (including scleroderma and multiple sclerosis), Hodgkin lymphoma, immune deficiency disorders, inborn errors of metabolism, non-hodkin lympohma, myelodysplastic syndrome, myeleproliferative neoplasms, multiple myeloma, myelofibrosis.

Thousands of patients with these diseases will need a bone marrow transplant to survive. Given the lack of African American and mixed race donors, the shortage of diverse donors costs lives. With ethnicity being the key to a perfect match between donor and recipient, we can change the odds only by increasing donors from the African American and mixed race communities. Increase the donors and the odds of finding matching donors will increase. You could save a life and become a hero by being a donor, and being a donor can be as simple as donating blood platelets.

ligible donors must be 18-44 years of age and in general good health. Donors must be willing and committed to donate to any patient they might match. Registration involves completing a consent form and a simple cheek swab test. Cheek swabbing is free. This can be done at an actual drive or by requesting a kit online to complete your swab. This places you on the Be The Match Registry for anyone you might match. While the current method of registration is digital The Project to Save Lives is working on a method of registration for those not equipped to register digitally.

If you match a patient in need, there are two ways to donate. The patients doctor chooses the method of donation that is best for the patient. 80% of the time Peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation is used. This is the method of collecting blood-forming cells for transplants. The same blood forming cells that are found in marrow are also found in the circulating (peripheral) blood. PBSC is a non-surgical procedure, called apheresis. The donation takes place at an experienced facility that participates in PBSC collections. For 5 days leading up to donation you will be given injections of a drug called filgrastim to increase the number of cells in your bloodstream that are used for transplant. Some of your blood is then removed through a needle in one arm and passed through a machine that separates out the blood-forming cells. The remaining blood is returned to you through the other arm. The other 20% of marrow donations take place in a hospital under general anesthesia. Doctors use a needle to withdraw liquid marrow from the back of your pelvic bone. Donors feel no pain or discomfort during the donation. The procedure is out-patient. There is small discomfort to save a life. Further, donors never pay for donating and are never paid to donate. The amount of cells donated will not weaken your immune system. Most donors are back to their usual routine in a few days and your marrow naturally replaces itself within 4-6 weeks.

Some believe that donors are usually found in their family. This is not true. 70% of patients do not have a matching donor in the family. Adding more registry members increases the ethnic diversity of the registry which increases the variety of tissue types available, which helps more people of ethnicity and ethnic diversity find the match they need. Additionally, members of the LGBTQ+ community can join the registry and donate. The African American and mixed race communities need members who are committed to helping save a life. This means being willing to donate to anyone in need. If you are called as a potential match for a patient, your commitment means that youre willing to take up to 20-30 hours spread over 4-6 weeks to: attend an information session, attend appointments, and donate. You are also committing to keeping your contact information up-to-date so that the registry can find you to quickly get a blood sample for further match testing.

There are many myths about bone marrow donation:MYTH: Donating is very painful.FACT: Donating is less painful than you think.MYTH: Donating involves opening up or removing bones.FACT: This is not true. Most blood stem cell donors (80%) give PBSC a process similar to platelet donation. This is a non-surgical, out-patient procedure and no bone is removed. The donorreceives a drug for 5 days to increase the number of cells in the bloodstream. The cells are then collected during donation. The donor may experience head or muscle aches that disappearshortly after the donation, and are typically back to their normal routine in 1 to 2 days.

The other procedure (20%) is a surgical, out-patient procedure that takes place in a hospital operating room. While the donor is under anesthesia, the doctors collect marrow from the back ofthe donors pelvic bone. After donation, donors may feel soreness in the lower back. Donors are typically back to their normal routine in 2 to 7 days.MYTH: Donating is dangerous.FACT: There are few risks to donating.MYTH: Donating takes a long time.FACT: It doesnt take long to save someones life.MYTH: Donating is expensive and you need medical insurance.FACT: Donating is absolutely free to the donor.MYTH: Sharing your personal information and DNA is risky.FACT: Be the Match and HIPPA will protect your privacy andconfidentiality.MYTH: Asking about a donors ethnic background is racist.FACT: Ethnic background is an important factor for matching donors to patients. When it comes to matching human leukocyte antigen (HLA) types,a patients ethnic background is important inpredicting the likelihood or finding a match. This is because HLA markers used in matching are inherited.MYTH: Gay men cannot join or donate.FACT: Gay men and others in the LGBTQ+ community CAN join the registry and donate.MYTH: Be the Match discriminates against people age 45+.FACT: Age guidelines protect the safety of the donor and provide the best possible outcome for the patient. They are not meant to discriminate.

More Important Facts:1. Every 3 minutes, someone is diagnosed with a blood cancer like Leukemia. For many of these and other patients with diseases like Sickle Cell anemia, a marrow transplant is the only lifesaving treatment-their only chance for a cure.2. Every year, more than 14,000 patients are diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancerslike leukemia and lymphomaor other diseases for which a marrow or cord blood transplant from an unrelated donor may be their best or only hope of a cure.3. 70% of all patients who need a transplant do not have a matched donor in their family. They depend on Be The Match Registry to find an unrelated donor or cord blood unit.4. Approximately 70 % of transplants facilitated by the National Marrow Donor Program are for patients diagnosed with leukemia or lymphoma.5. Every 10 minutes, someone dies from a blood cancer. Thats more than six people each hour, or 148 people each day.6. More than 70 diseases can be treated & cured by an unrelated donor transplant.7. Leukemia causes more deaths than any other cancer among children and young adults under the age of 20.8. Be The Match Registry works tirelessly on behalf of patients in need of a life-saving transplant. Through successful partnerships with organizations, more volunteer donors step forward, more funding becomes available to support critical outreach and more advances are made in the science of transplants. We all have the power to heal, the power to save a life. Take the first step.9. African Americans and people of mixed race are particularly at risk of dying due to inability to find a match.10. Due to significant medical achievements in recent decades, survival rates are higher than ever for bone marrow and PBSC transplants. There are Health Benefits of Diets That Increase Bone Marrow in Donors. There are health benefits to diets that will increase your Red Blood Count to make you a more valuable donor. The Be the Match registry can give you information on what to eat to increase your Red Blood Count which will, in turn, greatly improve you health.

Join the Be The Match RegistryBe the Match is the largest, most diverse registry of potential marrow donors and cord blood units in the world. Be the Match offers one-on-one support, education and guidance before, during and after transplants. But first a marrow match must be found. And there are many patients in need of a donor. The ICLA DA SILVA FOUNDATION, INC. is A Recruitment Center for the Be the Match Registry. The Icla da Silva Foundation is the largest recruitment center for the Be The Match Registry in the United States. It recruits over 38,000 new potential bone marrow donors every year, with a strong focus on minority communities. The Icla da Silva Foundation was established in 1992, in memory of the 13-year-old Brazilian girl named Icla da Silva. After two years of fighting leukemia, Icla passed away in New York City, where she came hoping to get her life saving treatment: a bone marrow transplant. The young girl never found a matching donor.

With offices across the United States and Puerto Rico, the Foundation is continuously expanding its efforts in providing assistance and hope to thousands of families in the United States and all over the world. The mission of the Icla da Silva Foundation is to save lives by recruiting bone marrow donors and providing support services to children and adults with leukemia and other diseases treatable by marrow transplants. The Icla da Silva Foundation is a nonprofit organization under section 501(c) 3 of the IRS Code. Eligible donors must be 18-44 years of age and in general good health. Be willing and committed to donate to any patient that you might match. Registration involves completing a consent form and a simple cheek swab test. This places you on the Be The Match Registry for anyone you might match. You can contact the ICLA/Be the Match organization through the following:

https://bethematch.org/support-thecause/donate-bone-marrow/donation-faqs/. You can also contact The Project to

Save a Life through its two community volunteers: John-Michael Lawrence atlawrencejohnmichael9@gmail.com and Rhoda London at diversitydonordrive@aol.com.

What You Can Do Besides Being a Donor:If you are not able to donate or are younger than 18 or older than 44, you can:1. Host an actual cheek swabbing drive in you place of worship, school, business organization;2. Publicize a digital drive in any of the above on Facebook or any other social media;3. Share the information with other groups,family and friends;4. Make a financial donation in honor of your own good health or in honor of your recovery from and illness. Since swabbing and medical expenses are free, financial donations go to support analyzing the swabs and medical expenses for the donor and recipient;5. For a PHYSICAL Drive, register online at Join.Bethematch.org/JaxDonors for information and videos on how to hold a drive. Please join the effort, you can save a life.

Read more here:
The Project to Save Lives Free Press of Jacksonville - Jacksonville Free Press

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Gurugram/New Delhi, Dec 19 : In a ground-breaking procedure, Haematologists and Bone Marrow Transplant specialists successfully treated Anurag Mishra, a 47-year-old man from New Delhi, suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS) from the past seven years.

The most common symptoms of MS include loss of sensation and balance, restricted arm or leg movement and vision loss in one or both the eyes.

Mishra, who was bedridden earlier, is back to his normal routine life, was diagnosed with MS an autoimmune neurodegenerative disease, where the body's own defence system starts attacking its nervous system, without any specific reason

Unlike the current line of MS treatment, which mainly includes steroid therapy, physiotherapy and symptom management, doctors used Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT).

Dr Rahul Bhargava, Director, Department of Clinical Hematology iamp; Bone Marrow Transplant, Fortis Hospital in Gurugram with his team performed autologous bone marrow transplant where they used Mishra's stem cells for transplant, thereby reducing the chances of rejection and infections.

"In an autologous BMT procedure, the healthy stem cells from the patient are taken out and preserved. Chemotherapy is then administered to reset the body's immunity and then the stem cells are injected back to rescue the person from the side effects of chemotherapy," said Bhargava.

After the surgery, the patient is kept under isolation for a few months to ensure he/she does not contract any infection. In this case, when Mr Anurag approached us, he was entirely dependent on others for his basic needs. But within six months after the treatment, he is back on his legs and is carrying on with his normal life," Bhargava added.

According to the patient, the attacks are sudden and may affect any part of your body, limiting your abilities.

"Extreme pain and disabilities this disease gave, made me very scary and depressing. I think I am very lucky to get to know about Dr Rahul Bhargava and team, who cured me miraculously," Mishra said.

"Too much delay in the procedure can considerably affect the clinical outcomes. In the case of Mr Anurag, recovery is 90 per cent, which means he received the treatment within recovery time-frame," Dr Bhargava said.

Continued here:
47-year-old successfully treated with bone marrow transplant | newkerala.com News #267197 - New Kerala

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

At just 13 years old,Charlie Knuth, of Darboy, Wisc., has known more pain than most others do in a lifetime. The teen, who suffers from epidermolysis bullosa, a rare disease that causes his skin to blister incredibly easily, is near-constantly wrapped in bandages to protect his fragile skin. He takes special baths to soothe his sores, which can form from the slightest touch and are lanced before he is covered in fresh dressings.But the so-called butterfly child a name often given to EB sufferers as their skins fragility is similar to that of a butterfly wing has another battle ahead: cancer.

Its unimaginable, Trisha Knuth, Charlies mother, told Fox News. Even as his mom, when I see him taking it in stride, I cant even believe that he can.

BOY, 2, HAS RARE 'SCALE'-LIKE SKIN CONDITION THAT AFFECTS 1 IN 500,000: 'HES OVERCOME SO MUCH'

Charlies biological parents abandoned him at the hospital shortly after his birth. Knuth and her husband, Kevin, had long fostered children with complex medical needs. But just weeks before they received a call about Charlie, they were readying to let their license expire; the tragic cases were simply becoming too much. Even so, Knuth said shecouldnt say no to Charlie she knew to do so was likely a death sentence. They began the lengthy adoption process shortly after bringing him home.

Trisha Knuth and Charlie, 13. (Trisha Knuth/Facebook)

When I went to the children's hospital in Milwaukee, he was slathered from head-to-toe in Vaseline," she recalled."Nobody ever came for him. I worked with the nurses and learned his care but EB is so rare that many hospitals don't know how to care for those with [the condition]. They sent me home with morphine and a few things and it was a learning process from there.

Thirteen years later, Charlie didnt end up dying, he ended up thriving, she said. When he was 5 years old, he underwent an experimental skin grafting procedure at the University of Minnesota in an attempt to make his skin stronger and less prone to blistering. Knuth called it a transformation for her young son, who had two really good years before his body rejected the graft and he began to suffer from aplastic anemia, a potentially deadly condition that occurs when the body doesn't produce enough red blood cells.

In 2012, he underwent a stem cell transplant in an attempt to treat his severe EB. He was hospitalized for six months but eventually pulled through.

Charlie, who suffers from EB, was recently diagnosed with cancer. (Trisha Knuth/Facebook)

Hes done pretty well after that second time. But he is constantly wounded, very fragile, said Knuth.

But in recent months, Charlie began to complain of a sore throat not uncommon for those with EB, as blisters can form on the inside of the body as well on the outside. The mouth and throat are commonly affected.But there were no visible blisters, raising his doctor's suspicions. ACT scan later revealed enlarged lymph nodes in his neck and armpits. A biopsy later confirmed lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the bodys lymphatic system. Knuth called the diagnosis another hurdle in his very hard life.

The pain was masked by EB. Its hard to tell whats what because EB causes so much pain, she said.

Cancer treatment often consisting of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery is hard enough on an average persons body. But those with EB face an entirely different battle; Knuth said nurses inserting an IV cant use medical tape to help attach the drip, as the adhesive ripsher sons skin when removed. Oxygen and anesthesia masks are often a struggle as well, as are blood pressure cuffs.

Charlie (R) when he was younger. (Trisha Knuth/Facebook)

How do you treat someone who cant be touched? Knuth questioned, noting she has gone into the operating room with Charlie in times past to ensure he is not injured. You cant even imagine. [Its like] being burned every day, and then bandaged, and nowundergoing cancer treatment it boggles the mind.

When speaking to Fox News, Knuth and Charlie were in Minnesota, where doctors are working to build atreatment plan. The day after Christmas which the pair are celebrating in an Airbnb Charlie is slated to undergo a procedure to remove fluid from his spine and bone marrow from his hips. One of his affected lymph nodes will be taken for further testing.

In the meantime, Kevin is home with the couples 2-year-old adopted daughter, who also suffers from EB.

"He puts on a great outward attitude, but I know there is trauma."

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He is very brave and resilient and funny, said Knuth of Charlie. But in addition to the physical pain, He does have emotional pain; he puts on a great outward attitude, but I know there is trauma.

When asked how she and Kevin manage it all, Knuth acknowledged theirs is a crazy life. But, she quickly noted, I am very happy with this life. Its hard. But when I die, I'll know my life was fulfilled and great.

Link:
Wisconsin teen diagnosed with cancer while battling rare 'butterfly skin' disease: 'He is resilient' - Fox News

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Imagine if your skin was so fragile that even the slightest knock caused it to blister and tear. This is the reality for people with a condition called epidermolysis bullosa. It occurs when a person inherits faulty copies of the genes that make the crucial skin protein collagen. But help may now be at hand,because Columbia University researcher Joanna Jackow has found a way to make stem cells, called iPS cells, from patients skin cells; edit the faulty genes in the stem cells, and use the now-repaired cells to grow new, healthy skin. It's the first step towards skin replacements for patients with these sorts of genetic skin diseases...

Joanna - Patients have an extensive blistering of the skin because they were born with this mutation. The skin starts to blister right after birth. These blisters are chronic wounds that are not healed, and these chronic ones convert to extensive scarring and, finally, with increasing age, the patients get a skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma.

Chris - What's the approach you've taken to try to put this right?

Joanna - Using this magic genetic scissors called CRISPR, we can fix this mutation in cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are cells that we can generate from the patient's own cells. Because the cells have a potential of differentiation to any cell type we want, in our case skin cells, we can develop skin equivalents, which we called grafts, and these skin equivalents can be grafted onto the wounded areas of the skin.

Chris - So you're saying 'make some stem cells, fix the gene problem in those stem cells, and then grow new rafts of skin from the fixed stem cells so that you've got new skin to put on to the individuals with the condition?

Joanna - That's correct.

Chris - How do you go, though, from those "fixed" skin cells into actually making skin?

Joanna - Yes, we take the right cells now and put them together in a matrix called collagen, and the cells will grow into a normal skin that we called a skin-equivalent; and the skin equivalent can be grafted on the patients.

Chris - Have you tested this though, in the sense that: you've got these patches of skin-equivalents, do they survive in the long term and for instance, if you put them onto an animal in place of its own skin, do they work?

Joanna - Yes. We used for this immune deficient mouse model, which is a model which doesn't have immune system and will not reject this graft. And we've been testing the survival of this graft two months post grafting and we could demonstrate that the grafts survived and produced this protein that was missing in previously in the patient's skin.

Chris - In other words, the implication is, were you to do this in a patient, because it would be their own cells, there wouldn't be an immune problem. So you could just put these skin patches on in place of the individual's injured skin, and it should take over the function of their injured skin and give them a healthy working skin?

Joanna - Exactly. That's exactly what is the concept of our strategy.

Chris - Big problem though, when you consider how big a person is, I mean the surface area of a human that's, you know, metres squared of skin, isn't it? So is it feasible to actually do this on the scale of the entire body? Because you'd have to replace all their skin, wouldn't you?

Joanna - Yes, this is an excellent question and we've been already thinking of this. So, we would like to first cover the large wounds of the patient's body and we hope that, because we are deriving the skin equivalents from keratinocytes, that - hopefully - have also a population of stem cells. Eventually, these grafts can take over and cover the whole body of the patient.

Chris - Thing is, skin isn't just skin-producing cells, is it? There's hair follicles in there; there are more complicated structures, like sweat glands, as well. Those aren't going to be present in the grafts you make, are they?

Joanna - That's what we are thinking as a next step, to make more complex skin including all these very important components. As you mentioned, hair follicle and sweat glands. This is what we keep in mind in the future...

Continued here:
Treating a tricky skin disease | Interviews - The Naked Scientists

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

As interest in intermittent fasting keeps growing, a completely different type of fasting trend is coming out of Silicon Valley. Followers of "dopamine fasting" believe that if they deprive themselves from anything stimulating devices, movies, TV, light or even other people they can alter the levels of dopamine in their bodies and reset their brains.

On the surface, it's a life hack that sounds like a good idea: try to modify the dopamine chemical known as one of the "happy hormones" in the body simply by unplugging from devices and stepping away from activity.

"Dopamine fasting is like, 'I'm getting off my devices so I can feel more,'" Dr. Zach Freyberg, an assistant professor of psychiatry and cell biology at the University of Pittsburgh, told TODAY. "It's doing things that are that are meant to keep you sensitized to the world around you."

To fast, followers say they avoid things they enjoy, which can include mobile devices, sex, social media, entertainment, shopping, gambling, exercise, food and alcohol, for a set period of time. Some might even avoid eye contact or chats during that time.

The goal avoiding stimulation in the present, in order to be happier later. For example, love online shopping? During a fast, you'd skip it.

In a way, it's like meditation where people spend time without outside excitement. But this type of fasting is tailored to what specifically causes your dopamine to spike, whether it's red wine, Snapchat or Christmas movies.

Sounds simple, right? Not really.

Your brain is always working. Your neurotransmitters, like dopamine, are always working, Madelyn Fernstrom, a neuroscientist and NBC News health and nutrition editor, told TODAY.

While dopamine fasting focuses on the molecule's role as a neurotransmitter in the brain, dopamine does a lot of heavy lifting throughout the body.

Dopamine is something that's inside of our bodies that our bodies make, Freyberg said. In the brain, dopamine is responsible for lots of important brain functions. You need it to help control mood, you need that to feel a sense of satisfaction and reward.

Trending stories,celebrity news and all the best of TODAY.

People often think of it as the hormone of excitement and novelty seeking, said Dr. Amit Sood, executive director of the Resilient Option, and former professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic.

This means people experience a surge of it when they try something new or anticipate something. Some of what Silicon Valley sells causes dopamine spikes.

A lot of social media is driven by dopamine, he said. Youre just chasing it.

But dopamines role is much more complex. It also helps the brain control movement and exists in other parts of the body, regulating insulin, aiding digestion, managing kidney function and maintaining blood pressure.

Its kind of like an air traffic coordinator. It controls and coordinates the functions of a lot of different organs, a lot of different parts of the body, to make sure they work harmoniously, Fryberg explained.

Not having enough dopamine causes real problems. Parkinsons disease, for example, is a disorder of dopamine, Fryberg said.

The body absolutely needs to make that dopamine because it needs to control the life support systems, he said.

In some ways, eating and exercising can influence dopamine production, but not in the way that dopamine fasting fans think.

When you eat, the amount of dopamine in your blood stream temporarily goes up because that helps control insulin, Fryberg said. There's more and more evidence that exercise can help in Parkinson's patients preserve the amount of dopamine in the brain.

Beyond that that's all we know, he said.

The experts agree that even if the name is an oversimplification of how brain chemistry works, the concept behind dopamine fasting is positive. What "fasters" are truly proposing is taking a break from stimulation and being mindful both healthy practices.

There is no downside, unless you believe you are having an immediate impact on your brain chemistry, Fernstrom, a nutrition scientist, said. It is mistake to think that a short-term behavior of any kind is going to be having an impact on your brain.

Whats more, unplugging and spending time without stimulation might have an opposite effect than anticipated.

Meditation has been shown to increase dopamine in the brain reward activity center, Sood said.

While meditation and avoiding devices is beneficial, Sood encourages people to think of it as adding something to life not subtracting.

It is very difficult to empty your life of something, he said. I tried emptying my mind and it doesnt work. It is not about emptying it. Its about filling it with the right things.

That's why he suggests that people think of something positive while stepping away from devices and overactivity.

If you meditate on gratitude or compassion or kindness it will be more effective, Sood said.

The rest is here:
What is 'dopamine fasting'? How some are trying to change their brains - TODAY

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The elderly patients muscles didnt look right beneath the microscope.

He wasnt just old. He had diabetic myopathy, a complication where muscles degrade faster than normal. The mitochondria die, fibers weaken, and the tissues become so broken up they resemble crackedDust Bowl earth. Like cottage cheese, offers Russ Cox, a Genentech and Jazz Pharma alumn.

But now they looked healthy. Mitochondria were firing. The fibers perked and stretched.

These muscles were really looking as if they were muscles of a person 20 years younger, Sundeep Dugar, the J&J and Bristol-Myers Squibb vet on the other end of the microscope, told Endpoints News.

The patient and others had been injected with a form of flavanol, the metabolites found in grape skins and wine and dark chocolate that lead nutritionists to sometimes recommend those foods for heart health. Its considered an antioxidant. But the results that Dugar and his collaborator George Schreiner saw, along with earlier animal studies, led them to a bold idea: Flavanoid was actually following biological pathways normally used by a yet undiscovered human hormone, the first of its kind discovered in over 50 years.

Its a big deal, Dugar said. I think its a big deal.

That was in 2012. Dugar, Schreiner and Cox are now forming a company called Epirium around that finding and the subsequent work they did confirming the new hormone. Its a rejig of an older, poorly funded group the trio had worked on called Cardero, but now theyve managed to convince a fleet of topflight investors: Longitude, ARCH, Vertex and Adams Street have joined in an $85 million Series A.

Theres also an investor called Longevity Fund, a group focused on extending human life, and ARCH head Bob Nelsen has made no secret of his desire to live forever. The two hint at an idea the new biotech isnt particularly shy about: That while they will begin with trials in rare neuromuscular disorders, namely a form of muscular dystrophy called Beckers, they have ambitions that are much broader.

They made the investment not just because they think we can do something meaningful in Beckers muscular dystrophy, but primarily because some of these larger diseases could benefit as well, Cox, the CEO, told Endpoints. Theres no question we will evolve.

Epirium isnt yet revealing what their claimed new hormone is. They say the long delay has been in trying to secure the intellectual property and that a scientific paper is coming early next year.

It has to do, though, with mitochondria biogenesis, or the creation of new mitochondria. These organelles are often called the engine of the cells but they break down with age or with certain diseases and bring the muscles down with them. Exercise is one of the only ways to make more.

You and I lose 10% of our mitochondria every decade, so by the time you get to my age, youre underwater as opposed to when youre 18, said Cox, a former track and cross country athlete now approaching 60.

Dugar and Schreiner, who worked at Scios before it was bought by J&J for $2.4 billion in 2003, had been enlisted at UC San Diego to investigate why flavanol had biological effects. To emerge from that research claiming to find a new human hormone is bold, particularly without publishing the work. Researchers have long studied flavanol for its cardiovascular impact without arriving at similar conclusions. The hormone would be the first mitochondrial steroid in 50 years, they said.

But the pair conducted 11 proof-of-concept trials on 110 patients and say they saw profound results that appeared to work along each of the three well known mitochondrial pathways. They didnt follow up on the diabetic myopathy patients long term, but they walked and stood better and that, combined with his muscle slides, was overwhelming.

This told us that while everyone classifies flavanol as an antioxidant, that couldnt be true, said Dugar.

The two set up the parameters for a human equivalent that must operate along the same metabolic path as flavanoid, and soon found it. Cox said that in early meetings, investors were mystified by Epiriums presentation, but eventually came around.

Of course, they all went to google it, and couldnt find a publication on it and said how can that damn be?' he said.

Epirium will start out with a clinical trial on Beckers muscular dystrophy patients, one of the groups they studied in the early proof-of-concepts. Beckers is akin to a less devastating form of Duchenne. When patients muscles fire, they release toxins that kill mitochondria and deplete overall muscle tissue. Cox said their hormone should be able to slow or even reverse that muscle loss.

Beckers may seem an odd starting point given the gene therapies nearing market for muscular dystrophy, but Cox said that their hormone might be used in combination with the flashier approach. For the company as a whole, though, rare diseases are primarily places they already have data and think they might place a foothold for a much larger project, one that includes neurodegeneration and other age-related disorders.

Mitochondria deplete as we age. Epirium says theyve found a way to make them grow, a chemical exercise.

Im not saying I want to call it anti-aging, said Dugar. But the question is, if you can really have a separation between your biological age and your chronological age, then, hey 80 years olds who have healthy mitochondria, will look like they were 60 years old or act like they were 60 years old. Maybe thats what anti-aging is.

Go here to see the original:
ARCH-backed biotech emerges with $85M and a bold claim: A new human hormone can reverse a key effect of aging - Endpoints News

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Cushings disease patients who are treated with cabergoline while undergoing conventional fractionated radiotherapy have a higher risk of disease recurrence after initial remission, a small study has found.

The study, Cabergoline may act as a radioprotective agent in Cushings disease, was published inClinical Endocrinology.

Radiation therapy can be an effective method of controlling Cushings disease a condition caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland particularly when the tumor cannot be removed surgically or when surgery fails to remove the whole tumor.

Conventional fractionated radiotherapy, or CRT, is a form of radiation therapy in which lower doses of radiation are given over a longer period.

The current medical literature suggests that CRT is effective at achieving remission in about three-quarters of Cushings disease patients, and to date, there has not been any documented case of recurrence following such a remission.

However, the researchers behind the new study found this to be inconsistent with their experience in the clinic, where they found disease recurrence after CRT in a few of their Cushings disease patients.

Thus, the researchers analyzed their data for Cushings patients treated with CRT to better understand the treatments long-term outcomes.

The analysis included data for 42 patients (12 males and 30 females) who were followed for at least one year after radiation therapy. They were 24 years old on average. Two patients received CRT as the first line of treatment; the remainder had surgery first.

In total, 29 (69%) achieved clinical remission, which occurred a median of one and a half years after CRT. Of these, six (20.7%) later experienced recurrence, a median of 74 months after initial remission. Using statistical models, the researchers looked for clinical factors that were predictors of remission.

They found that most clinical features, including age, sex, disease severity, and tumor characteristics, were not associated with recurrence, but one clinical feature was: the use of cabergoline around the same time as CRT, referred to as peri-CRT cabergoline use. In fact, peri-CRT cabergoline use was found in all six people who experienced a recurrence.

Cabergoline is a medication that works on the pituitary gland to decrease the secretion of adrenocorticotropic hormone, the hormone that ultimately drives excess production of cortisol, which is the defining feature of Cushings syndrome.

Importantly, peri-CRT cabergoline use was not significantly associated with whether an individual would go into remission in the first place but was associated with whether they would experience recurrence after an initial period of remission. Additionally, this association was independent of follow-up time and the use of another medication, ketoconazole (which was the only other medication analyzed).

Based on this finding, the researchers speculated that peri-CRT cabergoline use might offer pituitary tumors protection against radiotherapy.

Specifically, they pointed to the fact that radiation is most effective in killing cells that are actively dividing which is why it is used against cancer cells that divide rapidly and uncontrollably. The researchers noted that previously published data suggests that dopamine agonists (the class of drugs to which cabergoline belongs) may stop pituitary cancer cells from dividing, which may in turn limit the efficacy of CRT.

At this point, such a radioprotective (protective against radiotherapy) effect is largely speculative, since the current study showed only an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship. The small sample size and the fact that treatment was provided on a case-by-case basis do not allow more robust conclusions to be drawn as would a clinical trial with a larger sample size and stricter protocols.

Use of cabergoline in the peri-CRT period did not affect initial remission after CRT but was associated with increased recurrence after initial remission, the researchers stated. Hence, we caution against the peri-CRT use of cabergoline in [Cushings disease] patients. However, further studies with larger number of patients and longer follow-up as well as basic in-vitro studies to elucidate radioprotective effects of cabergoline are needed.

Marisa holds an MS in Cellular and Molecular Pathology from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied novel genetic drivers of ovarian cancer. She specializes in cancer biology, immunology, and genetics. Marisa began working with BioNews in 2018, and has written about science and health for SelfHacked and the Genetics Society of America. She also writes/composes musicals and coaches the University of Pittsburgh fencing club.

Total Posts: 11

Ins holds a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she specialized in blood vessel biology, blood stem cells, and cancer. Before that, she studied Cell and Molecular Biology at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and worked as a research fellow at Faculdade de Cincias e Tecnologias and Instituto Gulbenkian de Cincia.Ins currently works as a Managing Science Editor, striving to deliver the latest scientific advances to patient communities in a clear and accurate manner.

More:
In Cushing's, Cabergoline Reduces Efficacy of Radiotherapy, Study Finds - Cushing's Disease News

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

We might look back on 2019 as a year of perpetual crises, should we survive their enduring damages. The Amazon rainforest burned for weeks under a far-right populist in Brazil, as land long-held by indigenous peoples was effectively cleared for cattle. At the moment of writing, there is ongoing, large-scale and violent civil unrest in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, and Iran. Even limiting our attention to the American news cycle, as we often do, its difficult to cultivate hope for a future which, per the U.N. Emissions Gap Report, may not exist without significant infrastructural change. Millennials are increasingly opting not to have children, if not for financial insecurity, thenout of an acute anxiety over the diminished prospects for life on earth. The contested appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court (to pluck one item from the trash fire of this year in American politics) has ensured a bleak outlook for the future of Roe v. Wade as well. Women dressed as Atwoods handmaids protested a stylized dystopia of forced birth that is, in some ways, already real for poor women in states with no practical access to abortion services.

Architects often feel called to address these political terrains as the conceptual and material grounds for design solutions, as if architecture is not already implicated and architects are not human actors also living under these same existential conditions. The objects in need of solutions are so immense, so out of scale, and so tangled in intersecting forces, that its difficult to do more than call attention to themto try to express the unspeakable.

Wall texts and graphics ask viewers to consider the way female bodies have been regulated, whether it be through abortion or fertility. (Courtesy the Druker Design Gallery)

Love in a Mist (The Politics of Fertility) is an ambitious show currently on view at the Druker Design Gallery at Harvards Graduate School of Design that acknowledges the urgency and complexity of an endangered reproductive future. And yet, it reaches for hope in the face of possible extinction. Conceived by the architect Malkit Shoshan, the show assumes an activist posture to address a nuanced set of concerns around the body, fertility, and seemingly detached environmental crises. By assembling research, activist artifacts, artistic works, and a deep bibliography of feminist texts, Love in a Mist locates resistance and hope in interconnection and its enunciation. As Donna Haraway pleads in her science-fiction workChildren of the Compost, cited in the exhibition text, we can and must articulate new forms of relation to each other and the earthits a matter of inter-species survival.

The domination (and depletion) of the environment and the control over human reproduction are intimately entangled, Shoshan argues. At the fulcrum of fertility (engineered by synthetic hormones or controlled through conservative legislation), women and nature are recognized as mutually domitable objects. Its a problematic alignment, but the show works through that tension with care.

The exhibition was instigated as an urgent response to the sharp increase in anti-abortion legislation known as heartbeat bills, some of which were signed into law in Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Georgia this year. The exhibited work builds on the scholarship of Lori Brown, whose study of the landscapes of U.S. abortion access is presented in takeaway texts and series of infographics.

Lori Brown has mapped out abortion clinics across a number of states, including Texas, shown here. (Justin Knight)

From this legal ground, the sequence of the show quickly expands that predicament to an ecological scale with research on the history of synthetic estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol, or DES, had been prescribed to women suffering miscarriages beginning in the 1940s. Understood to reduce pregnancy complications and loss, its harmful effects werent known until the 1970s, when DES was linked to clear-cell carcinoma in women and girls. DES had also been used as a growth hormone in livestock feed and caused breast and cervical cancer in those consuming estrogen-laden poultry and meat. Introduced into the agricultural ecology, DES contaminated the surrounding land, water, and plants. Hyperproduction is an acceleration of death.

The content of the exhibition is organized into four distinct chapters: Reproductive rights, accelerated growth, extinction, and compost. This framework is spatialized into a linear sequence of four wood-framed greenhouses, beginning with the heartbeat and finding its way out through the compost bin.

The greenhouse is the primary architectural device in the design of the show, also by Shoshan. She acknowledges it as a natural container for the content on view; its an obvious reference to the greenhouse effect, and also a literal technology for the cultivation and control of nature. The framing also stands in for the less discernible spaces of fertility that Love in a Mist tries to accessincluding brick-and-mortar and mobile clinics, crisis pregnancy centers, and state legislatures, as well as fields, forests, and swamps.

As the exhibition directly points out, artificial estrogen was commonly used on both women and farm animals. (Justin Knight)

Multimedia work enlivens the information-rich exhibition environment. A video by Desire Dolron shows swamps in Texas overtaken by a disruptive weed. Audio recordings of Northern California woods by Bernie Krause over nearly 30 years testify to a depleted biophany. Diana Wittens documentary Vessel shows the travels of Women on Waves, whose portable abortion clinic is also represented in the show. Yael Bartanas trailer to What if Women Ruled the World fantasizes an international government of women against an apocalyptic backdrop. Tabita Rezaires Sugar Walls Teardomis a vibrant video document in the compost section which acknowledges the contribution of black womxns wombs to advancements in biomedical technology.

The work, in the end, is thoroughly documentary but it maintains an effective pulse. Rather than directly taking up representational concerns, as feminist exhibitions so often do, it leans into the artifacts and techniques of fertility politics. For that reason, the distinct outlier of the show is a figural womb sculpted by Joep van Lieshout, a Dutch architect who also collaborated with Rebecca Gomperts on the Women on Waves clinic. It makes a static object of a living organ, one weve come to understand as influenced by so many external forces.

Love in a Mist finds recourse through the living. Named for a flower whose seeds were once ingested for their abortifacient properties, the exhibition puts as much faith in the home remedy as in the clinical procedure. Making kin, to borrow Donna Haraways prescription for earthly survival, must remain a matter of choice.

The exhibition is on view through December 20.

Continued here:
Love in a Mist (The Politics of Fertility) deftly blends design with pregnancy politics - The Architect's Newspaper

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

HAMBURG, GERMANY / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2019 / Evotec SE (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: EVT, MDAX/TecDAX, ISIN: DE0005664809) today announced successful achievement of a third milestone in their diabetes research alliance with Sanofi ("TargetBCD"), resulting in a payment of 3 m to Evotec.

This milestone was triggered after Evotec met pre-agreed critical criteria within the beta cell replacement therapy programme. The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to develop a beta cell replacement therapy for people with diabetes based on beta cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells.

Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented: "We are extremely pleased with the progress we are making on this beta cell therapy approach which has the potential to restore beta cell function and, thereby, address the root cause of diabetes rather than only its symptoms."

About the Evotec-Sanofi-Alliance in Diabetes ("TargetBCD")In August 2015, Evotec and Sanofi announced a research alliance to develop a beta cell replacement therapy based on functional human beta cells derived from human stem cells for diabetes. Both companies have made significant contributions to this collaboration in terms of expertise, platforms and resources. The collaboration, which is a key value-driving relationship under the Company's EVT Innovate business segment, extends Evotec's metabolic disease and stem cell-based drug discovery programmes. To date, Evotec has received 12 m in upfront and milestone payments from Sanofi, as well as substantial research funding.

About DiabetesDiabetes mellitus ("diabetes") is a chronic incapacitating disease associated with severe lifelong conditions which require intensive monitoring and control, such as cardiovascular diseases, kidney diseases, nerve damage and eye diseases. At present, there is no cure for diabetes and only symptomatic treatment options are available. According to the International Diabetes Federation, approximately 425 million people worldwide suffered from diabetes in 2017 (2015:415 million). The disease is a major burden to the global healthcare systems with $ 727 bn being spent on the treatment of diabetes in 2017 (2015: $ 673 bn).

About Beta CellsBeta cells play a key role in the pathogenesis of diabetes. Beta cells reside in clusters of hormone producing cells ("islets") within the pancreas. They respond to elevated blood glucose levels (e.g. after a meal) by secreting the glucose lowering hormone insulin. In the type 1 form of diabetes ("T1D"), beta cells are destroyed by the patient's own immune system. As a result, T1D patients have to follow a life-long regimen of carefully-dosed insulin injections. In patients with type 2 diabetes ("T2D"), beta cells are functionally impaired and yet have to work in the presence of metabolic stress and increased work load due to an impaired tissue insulin response. T2D is progressive, and current therapeutic options cannot prevent the deterioration of beta cell function, eventually also creating a need for insulin injections. Despite the fact that insulin treatments are important and widely used for people with diabetes, they cannot fully mimic the normal control of blood glucose levels by normal beta cells necessary to avoid acute and long-term complications of diabetes. There is a critical medical need for novel therapeutic options which can restore beta cell mass and, thereby, reduce or eliminate the need for insulin injections. Furthermore, beta cell replacement therapy also has the potential to prevent or reverse the decline in beta cell function in type 2 diabetes.

ABOUT EVOTEC SEEvotec is a drug discovery alliance and development partnership company focused on rapidly progressing innovative product approaches with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academics, patient advocacy groups and venture capitalists. We operate worldwide and our more than 2,900 employees provide the highest quality stand-alone and integrated drug discovery and development solutions. We cover all activities from target-to-clinic to meet the industry's need for innovation and efficiency in drug discovery and development (EVT Execute). The Company has established a unique position by assembling top-class scientific experts and integrating state-of-the-art technologies as well as substantial experience and expertise in key therapeutic areas including neuronal diseases, diabetes and complications of diabetes, pain and inflammation, oncology, infectious diseases, respiratory diseases and fibrosis. On this basis, Evotec has built a broad and deep pipeline of approx. 100 co-owned product opportunities at clinical, pre-clinical and discovery stages (EVT Innovate). Evotec has established multiple long-term alliances with partners including Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celgene, CHDI, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Sanofi, Takeda, UCB and others. For additional information please go to http://www.evotec.com and follow us on Twitter @Evotec.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTSInformation set forth in this press release contains forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements contained herein represent the judgement of Evotec as of the date of this press release. Such forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, but are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in these forward-looking statements. We expressly disclaim any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.

Contact Evotec SE:Gabriele Hansen, SVP Corporate Communications, Marketing & Investor Relations, Phone: +49.(0)40.56081-255, gabriele.hansen@evotec.com

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More here:
Evotec Achieves Third Milestone In Cell Therapy Diabetes Alliance With Sanofi - Yahoo Finance

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Older men receiving testosterone treatment with higher waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) experience greater increases in noncalcified coronary plaque volume, according to study results published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Several studies have explored the effect of testosterone treatment on cardiovascular risk, reporting conflicting results. The Testosterone Trials included men aged 65 years with evidence of hypogonadism who were randomly assigned to placebo gel or testosterone 1% gel. The Cardiovascular Trial of the Testosterone Trials reported that in older men with hypogonadism, testosterone treatment was associated with greater progression of noncalcified plaque.

The goal of this study was to assess the impact of baseline anthropometric measures and cardiovascular biomarkers on the progression of coronary artery plaque volume in patients from this cardiovascular evaluation study of the Testosterone Trials.

The study included 170 patients, of whom 138 (mean age, 71.2 years) completed the study. Of these, 73 received testosterone treatment (average body mass index, 30.63.8 kg/m2; mean WHR, 1.0) and 65 received placebo (average body mass index, 30.53.5 kg/m2; mean WHR, 1.0).

Of various anthropometric measures and cardiovascular biomarkers evaluated for possible correlations with the progression of coronary artery plaque volume, the only significant interaction was between treatment assignment and WHR in the testosterone group (P =.007).

The model used in the study indicated that for every 0.1 change in WHR (baseline WHR value range, 0.9-1.2), 12-month treatment with testosterone was associated with an increase of 26.96 mm3 (95% CI, 7.72-46.20 mm3) in noncalcified plaque volume.

The researchers noted several study limitations, including the use of a surrogate marker and not a clinical outcome to measure heart disease, as well as limiting the study population to elderly men with low testosterone levels. As such, the results may not apply to other populations.

[A]mong older men receiving testosterone treatment, those with higher vs. lower WHR may experience greater increases in noncalcified coronary plaque volume, concluded the researchers.

Disclosure: Several study authors declared affiliations with the pharmaceutical industry. Please see the original reference for a full list of authors disclosures.

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Reference

Shaikh K, Ellenberg SS, Nakanishi R, et al. Biomarkers and non-calcified coronary artery plaque progression in older men treated with testosterone [published online November 30, 2019]. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. doi:10.1210/clinem/dgz242

Read this article:
Waist Circumference Affects Coronary Plaque Accumulation in Testosterone Therapy - Endocrinology Advisor

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Aspen Neuroscience, a new San Diego biotech company working on stem cell treatment for Parkinsons disease, has come out of stealth mode and raised $6.5 million to pursue clinical testing for its therapy.

Co-founded by well-known stem cell scientist Jeanne Loring, Aspen Neuroscience proposes creating stem cells from modified skin cells of Parkinsons patents via genetic engineering.

The stem cells, which can become any type of cell in the body, then would undergo a process that makes them specialize into dopamine-releasing neurons.

People with Parkinsons lose a large number up to 50 percent at diagnosis of specific brain cells that make the chemical dopamine.

Without dopamine, nerve cells cannot communicate with muscles and people are left with debilitating motor problems.

Once these modified skin cells have been engineered to specialize in producing dopamine, they can be transplanted into the Parkinsons patient to restore the types of neurons lost to the disease.

The reason we called it Aspen is because l was raised in the Rocky Mountain states, said Loring. When there is a forest fire in the Rockies, the evergreens are wiped out but the aspens are the fist that regenerate after the burn. So it is a metaphor for regeneration.

Aspen still has a long way to go before its proposed therapy would be available to Parkinsons patients. It has been meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to provide animal trial data and other information in hopes of getting permission to start human clinical trials.

But the company expects the earliest it would get the go-ahead from FDA to start human trials would be 2021.

Loring has been working on the therapy for eight years. She is professor emeritus and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute.

Loring co-founded the 20-employee company with Andres Bratt-Leal, a former post-doctoral researcher in Lorings lab at Scripps.

Joining them as Aspens Chief Executive is Dr. Howard Federoff, former vice chancellor for health affairs and chief executive of the University of California Irvine Health System.

Federoff said the company is the only one pursuing the use of Parkinsons patients own cells as part of neuron replacement therapy.

Aspens proprietary approach does not require the use of immuno-suppression drugs, which can be given when transplanted cells come from another person and perhaps limit the effectiveness of the treatment.

Aspens approach is a therapy that is likely to benefit from the fact that your own cells know how to make the best connections with their own target cells in the brain, even in the setting of Parkinsons disease, said Federoff. So when transplanted it is able to set back the clock on Parkinsons.

In addition to Aspens main therapy, it is researching a gene-editing treatment for forms of Parkinsons common in certain families.

Aspens research work up to now has been supported by Summit for Stem Cell, a non-profit on which provides a variety of services for people with Parkinsons disease.

The new seed funding round was led by Domain Associates and Axon Ventures, with additional participation from Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, OrbiMed and Section 32.

Aspens financial backing, combined with its experienced and proven leadership team, positions it well for future success, said Kim Kamdar, a partner at Domain Associates. Domain prides itself on investing in companies that can translate scientific research into innovative medicines and therapies that make a difference in peoples lives. We clearly see Aspen as fitting into that category, as it is the only company using a patients own cells for replacement therapy in Parkinsons disease.

Continue reading here:
Aspen Neuroscience gets funding to pursue personalized cell therapy for Parkinsons disease - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Technavio has been monitoring the global allogeneic stem cells market and the market is poised to grow by USD 1.24 billion during 2020-2024 at a CAGR of over 12% during the forecast period. Request Free Sample Pages

Read the 131-page research report with TOC on "Allogeneic Stem Cells Market Analysis Report by geography (Asia, Europe, North America, and ROW), by application (regenerative therapy and drug discovery and development), and segment forecasts, 2020-2024".

https://www.technavio.com/report/allogeneic-stem-cells-market-industry-analysis

The new product approvals and special drug designations are anticipated to boost the growth of the market. Based on the application, the allogeneic stem cells market has been segmented into regenerative therapy and drug discovery and development. Manufacturers are increasingly emphasizing innovations and improvisation in the development of regenerative therapies. Many of the regenerative therapeutic candidates have obtained approval for clinical trials in the US, Europe, and APAC due to the efficacy of allogeneic stem cell therapeutics. This is encouraging market players to launch new product lines to stimulate the overall product demand for stem or regenerative therapy using allogeneic stem cell therapeutics and provide better options for their customers. Thus, new product approvals are expected to drive market growth during the forecast period.

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Major Five Allogeneic Stem Cells Market Companies:

Biosolution Co. Ltd.

Biosolution Co. Ltd. is headquartered in South Korea (Republic of Korea) and operates the business under its Unified business segment. The company offers an allogeneic keratinocyte spread medication, Keraheal-Allo, that promotes skin regeneration.

Cynata Therapeutics Ltd.

Cynata Therapeutics Ltd. is engaged in the discovery, development, licensing, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and sales of innovative therapeutics for the treatment of various diseases. The company provides a mesenchymal stem cell product, Cymerus, which is used to treat graft-versus-host disease.

JCR Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd.

JCR Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. is headquartered in Japan and operates under two business segments, namely Pharmaceuticals, and Medical Devices and Laboratory Equipment. The company offers a regenerative medical product, TEMCELL HS Injection, which uses human mesenchymal stem cells for the treatment of acute graft-versus-host disease.

Lineage Cell Therapeutics Inc.

Lineage Cell Therapeutics Inc. is headquartered in the US and offers products through its Unified business segment. The company provides OpRegen, which is currently being tested in a Phase I/IIa clinical trial. This product is intended for the treatment of dry AMD.

MEDIPOST Co. Ltd.

MEDIPOST Co. Ltd. is headquartered in South Korea (Republic of Korea) and offers products through its Unified business segment. The company provides an allogeneic umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cell drug, CARTISTEM, which is used for the treatment of knee cartilage defects.

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Allogeneic Stem Cells Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2024)

Allogeneic Stem Cells Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2024)

Technavios sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report, such as the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more. Request a free sample report

Related Reports on Health Care include:

Cancer Stem Cell Therapeutics Market Global Cancer Stem Cell Therapeutics Market by type (allogeneic stem cell transplant and autologous stem cell transplant) and geography (Asia, Europe, North America, and ROW).

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavios report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavios comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

See the article here:
Global Allogeneic Stem Cells Market 2020-2024 | Evolving Opportunities with Biosolution Co. Ltd. and Cynata Therapeutics Ltd. | Technavio - Business...

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Aspen Neuroscience, a new biotech company, has raised $6.5 million to develop cell therapies for Parkinsons disease using patients own cells.

The company was co-founded by renowned stem cell scientists Jeanne F. Loring, PhD, and Andres Bratt-Leal, PhD, and initially supported by Summit for Stem Cell, a non-profit organization that provides a variety of services for Parkinsons patients.

Parkinsons hallmark motor symptomsinclude tremor, slowness of movement (bradykinesia), stiffness (rigidity), uncontrollable movements (dyskinesia), and poor balance.

As the disease progresses, patients typically need to gradually increase their dopaminergic therapeutic dose for maximum benefit. Even after that they might sometimes experience reappearance or worsening of symptoms due to diminishing effects of dopaminergic therapy, known was off periods.

Importantly, dopaminergic therapy is delivered to areas of the brain other than the striatum, a key motor control region severely affected in Parkinsons disease. Because of the therapys off-target behavior, patients also may experience side effects such as hallucinations or cognitive impairment.

Aspen wants to combine its expertise in stem cell biology, genomics and neurology and develop the first autologous (self) stem cell-based therapy for Parkinsons disease.

In this type of cell therapy, a patients own cells (usually skin cells) are reprogrammed back into a stem cell-like state, which allows the development of an unlimited source of almost any type of human cell needed, including dopamine-producing neurons, which are those mainly affected by this disorder.

Because these cells are derived from patients, they do not carry the risk of being rejected once re-implanted, eliminating the need for immunosuppressive complementary therapies, which carry serious side effects such as infections and possibly limiting therapeutic potential.

In theory, replacing lost dopaminergic neurons with new stem cell-derived dopamine-producing ones could potentially ease or reverse motor symptoms associated with the disease.

Aspen is developing a restorative, disease modifying autologous neuron therapy for people suffering from Parkinsons disease, Howard J. Federoff, MD, PhD, Aspens CEO, said in a press release.

We are fortunate to have such a high-caliber scientific and medical leadership team to make our treatments a reality. Our cell replacement therapy, which originated in the laboratory of Dr. Jeanne Loring and was later supported by Summit for Stem Cell and its President, Ms. Jenifer Raub, has the potential to release dopamine and reconstruct neural networks where no disease-modifying therapies exist, Federoff said.

The companys lead product (ANPD001) is undergoing investigational new drug (IND)-enabling studies for the treatment of sporadic Parkinsons disease. Aspen experts also are developing a gene-editing treatment (ANPD002) for familial forms of Parkinsons, starting with the most common genetic variant in the GBAgene, which provides instructions to make the enzyme beta-glucocerebrosidase.

The new seed funding round was led by Domain Associates and Axon Ventures, with additional participation from Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, OrbiMed and Section 32, according to the press release.

With over three years of experience in the medical communications business, Catarina holds a BSc. in Biomedical Sciences and a MSc. in Neurosciences. Apart from writing, she has been involved in patient-oriented translational and clinical research.

Total Posts: 208

Ana holds a PhD in Immunology from the University of Lisbon and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Instituto de Medicina Molecular (iMM) in Lisbon, Portugal. She graduated with a BSc in Genetics from the University of Newcastle and received a Masters in Biomolecular Archaeology from the University of Manchester, England. After leaving the lab to pursue a career in Science Communication, she served as the Director of Science Communication at iMM.

Read more:
Aspen Neuroscience Receives $6.5M for Parkinson's Stem Cell Therapy - Parkinson's News Today

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Welcome back to Worth It, a bi-weekly breakdown of the new beauty products Ive tested and adored: Im talking that drain-it-to-the-bottom-and-tell-my-friends-Ive-found-The-One kind of love. If it's featured here, consider this my permission to splurge on it. Read on for the product you dont want to live without, and catch up on the latest Worth It breakdown here.

Courtesy

The Cream

$170.00

When you try The Cream, it comes at a price. You know, not your soul or an Infinity Gauntlet situation, but it's hefty nonetheless: $265 for 50 mls of the world-famous lotion. That said, its a skincare nerds dream. Bader, a professor and director of Applied Stem Cell Biology and Cell Technology at the University of Leipzig in Germany, is considered the top scientist in the world on the subject of regenerative tissue. His work, particularly his extensive studies on disfiguring burns and wound healing, led him to create the illustrious cream: The formulas secret is its TFC8 (Trigger Factor Complex 8), a proprietary blend that the brand says will activate the bodys own stem cells to promote major anti-aging benefits like minimized lines, even tone, and redness-reduction.

Ive been aware of the product's cult-status for years, but I honestly just tried it for shits-and-gigs. My skin is typically easily managed: I get ruddy and dry, and I tend to develop tiny, under-the-skin bumps on my cheeks after I sleep on hotel sheets (should I forget my Slip pillowcase). On rare occasions, Ill wake up with a pimple thats so mountainous and painful that I wonder if I contracted staph on the F train. But for the most part, I have good skin, and Im grateful for it. Thats why I typically seek out products that impart glowiness and hydration rather than something to totally overhaul my facebut that's exactly what The Cream claims to do.

Despite my dry skin type, I chose the original formula rather than the Rich Cream (I prefer lighter textures when it comes to moisture). I also didnt adhere to the proper instructions: Bader recommends using it for 27 days, minimum, with no additional skincare products except for cleanser, but I couldnt bring myself to abandon the rest of my arsenal. Instead, I used this as my last step in both my morning and evening routines.

My makeup went on smoothly in the mornings, but my off-dry skin never felt truly quenched before bed unless I applied a hydrating serum underneath. Meh. Yet, after about three weeks, I started to receive an onslaught of complexion compliments. I guess I havent looked as red recently, I thought. And I didnt have any active pimples, so I didnt think much of it. Ill take a good skin week anytime.

But one morning, mid-glam, I realized Id forgotten to apply both foundation and concealer and had gone straight for my Nudestix blush stick. I genuinely couldnt tell if Id put my complexion makeup on. Peter Parker getting stuck to the ceiling on his first morning as Spiderman? Same level of confusion. I took a closer look, skeptical. Do I look amazing?

Rather than that translucent, un-plump look my skin usually has in the morning, it appeared stronger, almost thicker. My fair tone was even and clear, and my typical little dark circles were nowhere to be found, seemingly buried underneath my reinforced complexion.

I do. I look fucking amazing.

I suddenly felt invinciblelike my own more stunning evil twin, or a supervillain whod traded their lovers heart for immense power and was rewarded with that golden, CGI glow-from-within that comes with Marvel-sanctioned immortality. I was transformed, and the expensive blue bottle on my dresser was the precious source of my new supremacy.

Ive been using The Cream ever since (about three months now) and my complexion has a whole new baseline. When people ask if it's really worth it, rather than offer a cheaper alternative like I typically do with products this expensive, I answer: This shit is wild.

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Continue reading here:
Augustinus Bader's The Cream Review - MarieClaire.com

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

In a process similar to 3D printing, it is possible to artificially create tissues by using cells and biomaterials. Bioprinting has allowed scientists to create organoids, meat, skin and bones. Researchers from Brazil have now bioprinted, mini-livers that can perform all the functions of a liver.

The printed organoid can produce vital proteins, store vitamins, secrete bile, and all the other functions that are carried out by a liver. Researchers from the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center (HUG-CELL) at the University of So Paulo (USP) can create the miniature liver in just 90 days.

Researchers in their study published in the journal, Biofabrication used various bioengineering techniques to come up with a new method to print organoids. Normally, bioprinting uses bioink made up of cells and other biomaterials to print tissues layer-by-layer just like 3D printing.

Instead of just cells, researchers used clumps of cell, which they called spheroids in the bioink. The use of spheroids substantially extended the life of organoids, compared to previous studies, as they were able to avoid the gradual loss of contact between cells.

SEE ALSO: Researchers Have Found A Way To Print Complex Living Tissue In A Matter Of Minutes

By reprogramming blood cells obtained from three people, researchers created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The stem cells are then transformed into hepatocytes, vascular cells, and mesenchymal cells that make up the hepatic tissues of the liver. The spheroids, consisting of these cells are then mixed with a hydrogel-like fluid to make the bioink that can be used to create liver organoids.

The director of HUG-CELL, Mayana Zatz explained, In the very near future, instead of waiting for an organ transplant, it may be possible to take cells from the patient and reprogram them to make a new liver in the laboratory. Another important advantage is zero probability of rejection, given that the cells come from the patient.

SEE ALSO: Researchers Create 3D-Printed Human Skin And Bone To Help Astronauts On Mars

Image Credit: Daniel Antonio/Agncia Fapesp

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Researchers Have 3D-Printed A Functional Miniature Liver - Mashable India

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

By Chloe Pek December 20, 2019

How to make the most of your holy grail skincare products at these beauty spas in Singapore

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We all have our favourite beauty brandsit could be a holy grail skincare product or a go-to beauty routine you rely on for a clear, radiant complexion. But are you truly making the most out of your skincare products? Only the experts will knowwhich is why there's no better way to experience your cult favourites than at their boutiques, where assistants are at hand to offer tips and tricks.

These beauty brands below do it better: with a complete spa experience that will leave your skin glowing and your mind, relaxed.

(Related: Biohack Your Way To Beauty And Health Using Your DNA And Stem Cells At These Wellness Retreats Around The World)

Want to harness the full benefits of SK-IIs miracle water? Then the SK-II Boutique Spa by Senze Salus is the place to go. Operating under an exclusive license by SK-II, the spa offers a selection of facials that last between 60 minutes to 105 minutes, catering to a myriad of skincare concerns like hydration, uneven skin tone, and clogged pores.

Besides their trademark miracle water, pure water is also the secret to their holistic spa experience. A four-stage water filtration system ensures that all water used in treatments are free of impurities, and only 100 per cent pure distilled water is used for facial steaming. Theres even a lot of thought put into the water that they serveonly alkaline water for hydration and antioxidant properties.

(Related: Why Water Is The Essence Of SK-II's Spa Treatments)

Currently exclusive to CldePeauBeauts Diamond tier members, the beauty brands SoindeBeaut offers the ultimate experience of their signature skincare ranges. Treatments available include the 60-minute Intensive Brightening Facial Treatment using CldePeauBeauts Key Radiance Care and targeted Brightening range for a radiant, glowing complexion, as well as the 60-minute Firming Supreme Facial Treatment that helps to firm and lift contours while enhancing your glow with the brands Supreme skincare range.

These services are available at CldePeauBeauts Mandarin Gallery flagship and department store counters.

(Related: Cl de Peau Beaut Revamps Its Signature La Crme Face Cream For Spring 2020)

Touted as the temple of Dior beauty, Dior Institut strives to offer a unique sensory experience for every guest. Each treatment begins with a consultation and examination of the skin with a Dior Skincare Expert to address skincare concerns. Then, a massage using Dior Instituts exclusive tissue massage techniques help to soothe customers and relieve muscle tensions.

The wide suite of services include the Brightening and Radiance-Activating Treatment, Age-Delay and Beautifying Treatment, the Dior Homme Treatment for men, and also sculpting treatments for facial contours and around the eyes. Youll also return home with tips and techniques to maximise your beauty routine. Dior Institut can be found at Dior Beauty's The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands flagship, Robinsons The Heeren, and Tangs at Tang Plaza.

(Related: Dior Makeup's Peter Philips Reveals Why The Brand's New Lipsticks Are Infused With Flower Oil)

Available in Sulwhasoo boutiques at Capitol Building, Ion Orchard, Westgate and the Sulwhasoo Facial Treatment Studio at Tangs, Sulwhasoo offers a suite of facial treatments to address various skin concerns, from the moisturising Essential Treatment to the rejuvenating Timetreasure Renovating Treatment.

A specialised anti-ageing facial for men is also available. Creating a holistic experience for consumers, each treatment begins with a meridian point massage using a fragrance of the customers choice, followed by a foot bath using ginseng peels and red ginseng water. Traditional applicators like jade, amber and white porcelain are also used to enhance the efficacy of the treatments.

(Related: A Holistic Approach To Beauty At The Sulwhasoo Beauty Lounge)

Previously only available at the Ritz-Carlton Spa, fans of La Mer can now indulge in the full pampering experience with the recent opening of La Mers flagship at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, an experiential space complete with a VIP consultation area and a facial suite. On top of the complimentary services available, the flagship also offers a menu of facial services, including the 75-minute Miracle Broth Facial, which harnesses the healing energies of La Mers signature ingredient, the Miracle Broth.

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These Cult Beauty Brands Offer The Most Luxurious Spa Experience At Their Boutiques: Sulwhasoo, La Mer, Dior And More - Singapore Tatler

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

No longer must you wait until the National Enquirer gets a hot tip from an anonymous source that "various celebrities" are getting facials made from liquefied cells of a baby's foreskin to learn about the latest skincare trends. In 2020, we suggest a slightly more discerning approach: get your forecast on the biggest treatments and ingredients to try in the new year straight from the experts.

To be clear, that doesn't mean the future of skin care is any less exciting or innovative. (As dermatologist Matthew Elias, MD, put it: "2020 is going to be a banner year for skin care.") There will be blood, personalization, and a slight tweak to the lip filler movement you've been seeing everywhere of late. TDLR? The next phase of skincare trends will be anything but boring, and we asked a handful of derms to break down which ones you should be most excited about in 2020.

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These 5 Skincare Trends Are the Wave of the Future, and You'll See 'Em Everywhere in 2020 - POPSUGAR

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For the first time ever, Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv made a 3D printed artificial heart using a patients own cells," proclaims a Washington Post story headlined Researchers create 3D printed heart on April 17 this year.

In the scientific paper published two days earlier, the Israeli scientists describe how they made a bioink out of heart cells and other materials from a patient, and then bioprinted the tissue in the shape of a tiny heart, which was kept alive in a nutrient solution. Their paper makes it clear that this 3D printed heart could not function like a real heart. But the way the research that was projected in media shows how the idea of 3D printed organs is hyped.

Biotechnology has made significant advances, but its still a long way from creating organs that can be transplanted into people. The vasculaturethe network of blood vessels that feeds the organis a challenge.

Stem cell engineering to grow all the cells of an organ in a personalised way to avoid rejection by the recipients immune system is another challenge. And finally, researchers will have to show that a lab organ will work with all the other organs in a human body.

At the same time, the development of 3D bioprinters in the last few years has raised the prospects of making tissues and organs in a more affordable and consistent way because of the speed and precision of the machines. Advances in related fields like nanotechnology and gene editing are also pushing the needle.

These are exciting times, but for startups rushing into this nascent field with huge potential, its as important to be prudent as brave. One way is to go after low hanging fruit instead of the holy grail.

Shift to clinical use

Something like skin is easier to translate into a clinical setting," says Alok Medikepura Anil, director and co-founder of Bengaluru-based 3D bioprinting startup Next Big Innovation Lab (NBIL), which has made human skin in the lab. The skin has good regenerative properties and most of the function of bioprinted skin is to keep infections away, provide nutrition for skin to regenerate and stop the scarring of wounds. Replicating this is easier than replicating the function of a critical organ such as the heart."

This approach contrasts with that of another Bengaluru-based 3D bioprinting startup Pandorum Technologies, founded in 2011 by two researchers at Indian Institute of Science. Pandorum first tried its hand with liver tissue and more recently announced that it had bio-engineered corneal tissue.

Organ tissue for clinical use will require FDA and other approvals. So thats a very expensive proposition," says angel investor Venkat Raju, who took an interest in Pandorum but eventually made a bet on NBIL whose proprietary Innoskin also has non-clinical use in cosmetics testing.

The regulatory environment is evolving. This year, FDA released an RMAT (regenerative medicine and advanced therapy) policy that includes tissue engineering. The FDA wants to fast-track tissue-engineered products if they have a lot of benefits," says Pooja Venkatesh, NBIL co-founder.

Raju feels that startups like NBIL gaining traction and validation could bridge the current gap between academic research and business.

Theres tonnes of research happening across the globe on bioprinting. But universities are struggling to commercialize their research. The fact that NBIL is getting receptive audiences in academia is because they see an opportunity to push their research out."

The Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine in the US is one of the leading institutions for research in this field. Researchers there are growing tissues for over 40 different areas of the body. They were the first to transplant a lab-grown organ into a 10-year-old patient.

Made-to-order organs

Dr Anthony Atala, who is now the director of the institute, had taken a piece of the boys bladder and grown a new one in the lab over the course of two months. The lab-grown bladder was then transplanted into the patient.

That boy, Luke Massella, went on to become the captain of his school wrestling team. Pretty much I was able to live a normal life after that," Massella, who is now 28, said in a recent interview on BBC.

Stories like that of Massella stoke excitement over futuristic scenarios where you could get made-to-order organs. But researchers admit that there are many unsolved problems in tissue engineering before complex organs like the heart, kidney and liver can be bioprinted. The crash of well-funded San Diego 3D bioprinting startup Organovo, which hit a brick wall in commercializing liver tissue, reminds us to keep the hype in check.

Sumit Chakraberty is a contributing editor with Mint. Write to him at chakraberty@gmail.com.

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Cutting through the hype to get to bioprinted human tissue - Livemint

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Scientists have discovered a gene linked to male infertility, which they hope could help to account for 50 percent of unexplained cases.

Variants of a gene called SYCP2 could be the reason why some men struggle to conceive, according to the authors of a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. So far, they have pinpointed them in four men with fertility problems.

Back in 1991, a 28-year-old man who had been unable to conceive for two years and had a very low sperm count was referred to the authors of the study. The team assessed his chromosomes, and found he had what is known as a chromosomal rearrangement, where parts of the chromosome might be missing, duplicated, or moved around. This appeared to make the SYCP2 gene 20 times more active, they found.

Identifying this abnormality led the researchers to look at how the gene behaved in a lab using cells and yeast. By modeling the rearrangement in yeast, they found it appeared to trigger an issue linked with defective sperm production in mammals, they wrote in the study.

Next, they looked at whether infertile males had variants of this gene, working with scientists at the University of Mnster. Compared with the general population, disruptions to SYCP2 were more common in those with fertility problems, the investigators found.

Co-author Samantha Schilit, an expert in unexplained infertility at Harvard Medical School, commented in a statement that these chromosomal problems in infertile men are rarely followed up beyond reporting a higher risk for an issue, which can lead to recurrent miscarriages.

"This work shows that a chromosomal rearrangement may also disrupt or dysregulated genes important in fertility, and therefore should be considered."

Infertility is one of the most common problems among those aged between 20 to 45 years old, affecting between 10 to 15 percent of couples. Evidence suggests doctors are unable to diagnose the source of the problem in between 40 to 72 percent of men. Of those, between 30 to 50 percent of cases are estimated to be caused by genetics, the authors wrote. "Searching for genes involved in unexplained infertility is a rich endeavor," they said.

Co-author Cynthia Morton, a medical geneticist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, told Newsweek: "This study focuses our interest in chromosomal rearrangements that underlie infertility beyond what is typically presumedthat is, the infertility results from embryos that are chromosomally unbalanced and may lead to miscarriage."

Morton, whose laboratory has had a longstanding interest in structural rearrangements of human chromosomes that underlie clinical disorders, said: "It brings emphasis to the fact that structural rearrangements in chromosomes may contribute to infertility by dysregulating gene expression of genes with a role in gametogenesis," or the creation of sperm.

More work needs to be done to validate the role of SYCP2 male infertility. This would be strengthened by finding more males with genomic variants in SYCP2, she said. The team envisions SYCP2 one day being included in genetic screenings for males to identify the genetic basis of infertility.

"A diagnosis can be therapeutic in itself -- even if there isn't something that can be done to correct it. It ends the search for the underlying issue and opens the door for enrolling in clinical trials," said Morton. "And I believe there is good reason to be optimistic; we now have better tools for discovery and can begin on the path toward therapy."

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A Gene Linked to Male Infertility Has Been Discovered, and It May Account for 50 Percent of Unexplained Cases - Newsweek

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

One out of eight couples has trouble conceiving, with nearly a quarter of those cases caused by unexplained male infertility. For the past decade, research has linked that infertility to defective sperm that fail to evict proteins called histones from DNA during development. However, the mechanisms behind that eviction and where this is happening in the sperm DNA has remained both controversial and unclear.

Now, researchers atPenn Medicineshow, using newer genome-wide DNA sequencing tools, the precise genetic locations of those retained histones, as well as a key gene regulating it. The findings were published inDevelopmental Cell.

Taking it a step further, the researchers created a new mouse model with a mutated version of the gene,Gcn5, which allows investigators to closely track the defects in sperm from the early stages of sperm development through fertilization and on. This is an important step forward as it could lead to a better understanding of not only infertility in menand ways to potentially reverse itbut also the suspected epigenetic mutations being passed onto the embryo from males either naturally or through in vitro fertilization.

Epigenetics, the factors influencing an organisms genetics that are not encoded in the DNA, play a strong role in sperm and egg formation.

For men who have unexplained infertility, everything may look normal at the doctors: normal semen counts, normal motility. Yet they can still have problems conceiving, says first authorLacey J. Luense, a research associate in the lab of the study's senior author,Shelley L. Berger, the Daniel S. Och University Professor in the departments of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine and Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute. One explanation for persistent problems is histones being in the wrong location, which may affect sperm and then early development. Now, we have a really good model to study what happens when you dont get rid of the histones appropriately in the sperm and what that may look like in the embryo.

Read more at Penn Medicine News.

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Uncovering a defective sperm epigenome that leads to male infertility - Penn: Office of University Communications

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

Say hello to SoCal's newest mountain lions, P-78 and P-79. (Courtesy, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area/Facebook)

Christmas has come early for Southern California wildlife enthusiasts in the form of two new mountain lions.

On Tuesday, Angela Beatriz Cholo, a ranger with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, introduced via Facebook P-78 and P-79 to greater L.A. and to wildlife officials' study of big cats in the region.

Officials found both cats within a day of each other. P-78, a "subadult male," was captured Dec. 11, in the Santa Monica Mountains. P-79, another young male, was spotted and captured in the backyard of a home on Dec. 12.

Both were outfitted with GPS collars and released. P-78 will roam the Santa Monica Mountains, and P-79 will roam the Santa Susana Mountains, according to the Facebook post.

As their designated numbers suggest, P-78 and P-79 are the 78th and 79th mountain lions to join the study overall. Last month, P-77 was captured and tagged in the Santa Monica Mountains. In June, officials captured P-75 in a mobile home park in Pacific Palisades, outfitted her with a tracking collar and released her into the Santa Monica Mountains.

Despite these additions, Southern California's puma population has suffered in recent decades due to habitat loss and inbreeding.

Three big cats were found dead this year. P-53, a 4-year-old female lion, and P-30, a 6-year-old male, had traces of rat poison in their bodies. P-61, a 4-year-old male, died after being hit by a car on the 405 in the Sepulveda Pass area. Researchers think he may have been running from an uncollared puma at the time.

Like her fellow big cats, P-77 has a lot to contend with. There are turf wars with other mountain lions. There's the risk of getting hit by a vehicle while trying to cross freeways, which limit mating opportunities and decrease the genetic diversity of the local mountain lion population. Then there's the risk of mange. Plus, these big cats have to contend with rat poison and other chemicals introduced into the food chain by humans, who are the worst.

Reporter Ryan Fonseca contributed to this story.

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LA Gets Early Christmas Gift In The Form Of 2 New Mountain Lions, P-78 And P-79 - LAist

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BOTHELL, Wash. & TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seattle Genetics, Inc. (Nasdaq:SGEN) and Astellas Pharma Inc. (TSE: 4503, President and CEO: Kenji Yasukawa, Ph.D., Astellas) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to PADCEV for the treatment of adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who have previously received a PD-1/L1 inhibitor and a platinum-containing chemotherapy before (neoadjuvant) or after (adjuvant) surgery or in a locally advanced or metastatic setting. PADCEV is approved under the FDAs Accelerated Approval Program based on tumor response rate. Continued approval may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials. PADCEV is the first FDA approved treatment in the U.S. for these patients. It is a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that is directed against Nectin-4, a protein located on the surface of cells and highly expressed in bladder cancer.1,3

Metastatic urothelial cancer is an aggressive and devastating disease with limited treatment options, and the approval of PADCEV is a significant advance for these patients who previously had limited options after initial therapies failed, said Jonathan E. Rosenberg, M.D., Medical Oncologist, Chief, Genitourinary Medical Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The PADCEV clinical trial enrolled a range of patients whose cancer was difficult to treat, including those whose disease had spread to the liver.

The FDA approval of PADCEV is welcome news for patients with bladder cancer, said Andrea Maddox-Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network. Though new medicines for bladder cancer have been approved in recent years, most people living with advanced stages of this disease face a difficult journey with few treatment options.

This approval underscores our commitment to develop novel medicines that address unmet patient needs, and were grateful to the patients and physicians whose participation led to this outcome, said Andrew Krivoshik, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Oncology Therapeutic Area Head, Astellas.

PADCEV is the first antibody-drug conjugate approved for patients facing this aggressive disease, and it is the culmination of years of innovative work on this technology, said Roger Dansey, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Seattle Genetics.

PADCEV was evaluated in the pivotal trial EV-201, a single-arm phase 2 multi-center trial that enrolled 125 patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who received prior treatment with a PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitor and a platinum-based chemotherapy.1 In the study, the primary endpoint of confirmed objective response rate (ORR) was 44 percent per blinded independent central review (55/125; 95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 35.1, 53.2). Among patients treated with the single agent PADCEV, 12 percent (15/125) experienced a complete response, meaning no cancer could be detected at the time of assessment, and 32 percent (40/125) experienced a partial response, meaning a decrease in tumor size or extent of cancer in the body. The median duration of response (DoR), a secondary endpoint, was 7.6 months (95% CI: 6.3, not estimable [NE]). The most common serious adverse reactions (3%) were urinary tract infection (6%), cellulitis (5%), febrile neutropenia (4%), diarrhea (4%), sepsis (3%), acute kidney injury (3%), dyspnea (3%), and rash (3%). The most common adverse reaction leading to discontinuation was peripheral neuropathy (6%). The most common adverse reactions (20%) were fatigue (56%), peripheral neuropathy (56%), decreased appetite (52%), rash (52%), alopecia (50%), nausea (45%), dysgeusia (42%), diarrhea (42%), dry eye (40%), pruritus (26%) and dry skin (26%). The most common Grade 3 adverse reactions (5%) were rash (13%), diarrhea (6%) and fatigue (6%).

The FDA's Accelerated Approval Program allows approval of a medicine based on a surrogate endpoint if the medicine fills an unmet medical need for a serious condition. A global, randomized phase 3 confirmatory clinical trial (EV-301) is underway and is also intended to support global registrations.

About PADCEV

PADCEV is a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that is directed against Nectin-4, a protein located on the surface of cells and highly expressed in bladder cancer.1,2 Nonclinical data suggest the anticancer activity of PADCEV is due to its binding to Nectin-4 expressing cells followed by the internalization and release of the anti-tumor agent monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) into the cell, which result in the cell not reproducing (cell cycle arrest) and in programmed cell death (apoptosis). PADCEV is co-developed by Astellas and Seattle Genetics.

PADCEV Support Solutions offers access and reimbursement support to help patients access PADCEV. For more information, go to PADCEV Support Solutions at PADCEVSupportSolutions.com.

About Bladder and Urothelial Cancer

Approximately 80,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with bladder cancer this year.4 Urothelial cancer accounts for 90 percent of all bladder cancers and can also be found in the renal pelvis, ureter and urethra.5

Important Safety Information

Warnings and Precautions

Adverse Reactions

Serious adverse reactions occurred in 46% of patients treated with PADCEV. The most common serious adverse reactions (3%) were urinary tract infection (6%), cellulitis (5%), febrile neutropenia (4%), diarrhea (4%), sepsis (3%), acute kidney injury (3%), dyspnea (3%), and rash (3%). Fatal adverse reactions occurred in 3.2% of patients, including acute respiratory failure, aspiration pneumonia, cardiac disorder, and sepsis (each 0.8%).

Adverse reactions leading to discontinuation occurred in 16% of patients; the most common adverse reaction leading to discontinuation was peripheral neuropathy (6%). Adverse reactions leading to dose interruption occurred in 64% of patients; the most common adverse reactions leading to dose interruption were peripheral neuropathy (18%), rash (9%) and fatigue (6%). Adverse reactions leading to dose reduction occurred in 34% of patients; the most common adverse reactions leading to dose reduction were peripheral neuropathy (12%), rash (6%) and fatigue (4%).

The most common adverse reactions (20%) were fatigue (56%), peripheral neuropathy (56%), decreased appetite (52%), rash (52%), alopecia (50%), nausea (45%), dysgeusia (42%), diarrhea (42%), dry eye (40%), pruritus (26%) and dry skin (26%). The most common Grade 3 adverse reactions (5%) were rash (13%), diarrhea (6%) and fatigue (6%).

Lab Abnormalities

In one clinical trial, Grade 3-4 laboratory abnormalities reported in 5% were: lymphocytes decreased, hemoglobin decreased, phosphate decreased, lipase increased, sodium decreased, glucose increased, urate increased, neutrophils decreased.

Drug Interactions

Specific Populations

For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information for PADCEV here.

About Seattle Genetics

Seattle Genetics, Inc. is an emerging multi-product, global biotechnology company that develops and commercializes transformative therapies targeting cancer to make a meaningful difference in peoples lives. The company is headquartered in Bothell, Washington, and has a European office in Switzerland. For more information on our robust pipeline, visit http://www.seattlegenetics.com and follow @SeattleGenetics on Twitter.

About Astellas

Astellas Pharma Inc., based in Tokyo, Japan, is a company dedicated to improving the health of people around the world through the provision of innovative and reliable pharmaceutical products. For more information, please visit our website at https://www.astellas.com/en.

About the Seattle Genetics and Astellas Collaboration

Seattle Genetics and Astellas are co-developing PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin) under a collaboration that was entered into in 2007 and expanded in 2009. Under the collaboration, the companies are sharing costs and profits on a 50:50 basis worldwide.

Seattle Genetics Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements made in this press release are forward looking, such as those, among others, relating to the continued FDA approval of PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) for the treatment of adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who have previously received a PD-1/L1 inhibitor, and a platinum-containing chemotherapy in the neoadjuvant/adjuvant, locally advanced or metastatic setting; the conduct of an ongoing randomized phase 3 confirmatory clinical trial (EV-301) intended to verify the clinical benefit of PADCEV and support global registrations; and the therapeutic potential of PADCEV including its efficacy, safety and therapeutic uses. Actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected or implied in these forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such a difference include the possibility that EV-301 and subsequent clinical trials may fail to establish sufficient efficacy; that adverse events or safety signals may occur; that utilization and adoption of PADCEV by prescribing physicians may be limited by the availability and extent of reimbursement or other factors; and that adverse regulatory actions may occur. More information about the risks and uncertainties faced by Seattle Genetics is contained under the caption Risk Factors included in the companys Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2019 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Seattle Genetics disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

Astellas Cautionary Notes

In this press release, statements made with respect to current plans, estimates, strategies and beliefs and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements about the future performance of Astellas. These statements are based on managements current assumptions and beliefs in light of the information currently available to it and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: (i) changes in general economic conditions and in laws and regulations, relating to pharmaceutical markets, (ii) currency exchange rate fluctuations, (iii) delays in new product launches, (iv) the inability of Astellas to market existing and new products effectively, (v) the inability of Astellas to continue to effectively research and develop products accepted by customers in highly competitive markets, and (vi) infringements of Astellas intellectual property rights by third parties.

Information about pharmaceutical products (including products currently in development), which is included in this press release is not intended to constitute an advertisement or medical advice.

1 PADCEV [package insert]. Northbrook, IL: Astellas, Inc.2 Rosenberg JE, ODonnell PH, Balar AV, et al. Pivotal Trial of Enfortumab Vedotin in Urothelial Carcinoma After Platinum and Anti-Programmed Death 1/Programmed Death Ligand 1 Therapy. J Clin Oncol 2019;37(29):2592-600.3 Challita-Eid P, Satpayev D, Yang P, et al. Enfortumab Vedotin Antibody-Drug Conjugate Targeting Nectin-4 Is a Highly Potent Therapeutic Agent in Multiple Preclinical Cancer Models. Cancer Res 2016;76(10):3003-13.4 American Society of Clinical Oncology. Bladder cancer: introduction (10-2017). https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/bladdercancer/introduction. Accessed 05-09-2019.5 National Cancer Institute. Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. Cancer stat facts: bladder cancer. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/urinb.html. Accessed 05-01-2019.

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FDA Grants Accelerated Approval to Astellas' and Seattle Genetics' PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) for People with Locally Advanced or Metastatic...

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As a new mother, she didnt know to look for blue-tinged lips. She could just tell her babys color was off. On a chest X-ray, the clean, white-against-dark curves of his ribs were obscured, clouded by fluid. Pneumonia. That tipped Ray Ballards physicians off: He had a form of severe combined immunodeficiency SCID, for short a genetic mutation that hampered the growth of crucial immune cells, leaving him utterly vulnerable to infection.

The best fix was a transplant of his mothers bone marrow. The attitude was that in three to six months, you should be able to go back to normal life, recalled his mom, Barb Ballard.

That was true at least sort of. He got two more booster transplants before he hit 10. An antibiotic left him with hearing loss, and a virus with digestive tract damage. His lack of B cells meant he needed regular injections of other peoples antibodies, and his T cell counts were never ideal. But he was healthy enough to go to public school, to move through the hallways high-fiving half the guys, to slowly inhale and take aim during rifle team practice.

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His T cells had to be working well enough that he wasnt coming down with everything that walked into the classroom, Ballard said.

Then, when Ray was around 18, his immunity began to wane. For him, it came in the form of a norovirus he couldnt shake. For others with the same rare disease, it appears as pneumonia or gastrointestinal trouble or an unexpected T cell decline. Over the last 10 years, the trend has become increasingly clear: The bone marrow transplants that kept certain babies with SCID alive sometimes stop working after years or decades of providing fairly reliable immune defenses.

Now, to patient advocates, this has become an urgent lesson in the language people use to talk about treatment and not just for SCID. They see their communitys experience as a cautionary tale for anyone developing or receiving a therapy thats marketed as potentially curative.

Theres an expectation and a hope: When they hear about bone marrow transplants, it sounds like a lifetime deal, a forever fix, said John Boyle, president and CEO of the Immune Deficiency Foundation. Weve discovered, as a result of this issue, that bone marrow transplant ended up not being the forever fix we thought it was.

Experts have known for years that some of these transplants wouldnt provide full immune protection over the course of a SCID patients entire life. They say clinicians should have avoided the word cure. But even scientific papers that hinted at such complications called the treatment curative. Just this year, an Immune Deficiency Foundation employee was given the unenviable task of sifting through the organizations thousands of pages of online material, scrubbing out every cure that popped up. It was only there a handful of times sometimes in quotes from clinicians, Boyle said but it was there and it needed to be removed.

The language patients hear can sometimes even change their outcomes. Weve heard of cases where, years later, they realized their immune system isnt as healthy as they thought, but nobody was tracking that because they hadnt maintained a relationship with the physician, or the physician didnt maintain a relationship with them, explained Ballard. The word cure, it gives them a false sense of security.

At a time when seemingly every biotech is promoting the idea of one-and-done therapies and setting prices accordingly these advocates hope companies, too, will be more wary. One of the things Im trying to make them very aware of is the need for lifelong follow-up, said Heather Smith, who runs the SCID Angels for Life foundation. For her, its personal: This summer, her son took part in a clinical trial for a gene therapy in the hope that it would provide the immune protection that his decades-old bone marrow transplant no longer could. My son will be followed for 15 years, she said. But what about after that?

Part of the issue with bone marrow transplants from one person to another is the natural genetic variation between us, particularly in the proteins that help our bodies distinguish its own cells from foreign ones. Receiving cells from someone whose proteins dont match yours could cause a civil war within you. Thats why bone marrow transplants began back in the 1950s with identical twins: Sharing those genes meant increasing the likelihood of harmony between the body and the graft.

But the vast majority of people dont have a protein-matched sibling, let alone an identical twin. So researchers set about figuring out how to transplant bone marrow from a parent to a child in spite of only sharing half of their genes and from a matched unrelated donor to a stranger. Like cooks intent on refining recipes to their taste, the doctors who adapted the technique for SCID often did so slightly differently from one another. Over the past 35 years, those idiosyncrasies have hardened into habits. Right now, everybody transplants their patients their way, said Dr. Sung-Yun Pai, an immune deficiency researcher and co-director of the gene therapy program at Boston Childrens Hospital.

Perhaps the most vociferous controversy has been about whether to use chemotherapy to wipe out the existing stem cells within a recipients bone marrow to make room for the donors. The doctors who do use chemo before a transplant might prescribe different doses; others forego it entirely.

The arguments were sound on both sides. On the one hand, the toxic drugs could clean out the niches within our bone and increase the chances that the donors cells take root. On the other, these chemicals could hamper growth, brain development, and fertility, could make an infant who was already sick even sicker, and could increase the likelihood of certain cancers later in life. Its like being exposed to a bunch of X-rays and sunlight, or other DNA-damaging agents, Pai explained.

Because SCID is so rare the most common subtype is thought to occur in 1 out of every 50,000 to 100,000 newborns and because every hospital was doing transplants slightly differently, it was hard for physicians to systematically study what was working best. But even early on, they could tell that some of the infants whod gotten no chemo were developing incomplete immune systems. They didnt produce their own B cells, for instance, and so needed regular injections of antibodies collected from other peoples blood.

In healthy infants, stem cells migrate from the crevices of the skeleton to an organ in the chest called the thymus, where theyre trained to become T cells. In these infants, the T cell counts grew after transplant but it wasnt necessarily because the sludge was securely taking hold in the niches of their bones. Rather, immunologists say, the donors progenitor cells were only transient. Some were able to head toward the thymus for schooling. Some graduated and started fighting off infections. But as those populations were depleted with age, there werent robust reserves of stem cells in the bone marrow that could arrive to produce more. To Pai, its like trying to fill a kindergarten class in a neighborhood where no ones having babies.

You and I continue to have a slow trickle of new T cells coming out, said Dr. Harry Malech, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, who sits on the board of a gene therapy company, Orchard Therapeutics (ORTX), but does not receive any financial compensation. Instead of a torrent becoming slower, in these patients it goes from a trickle to practically nothing.

Thats why immunity starts to wane in kids like Ray Ballard. To many immunologists, it isnt a surprise, though they still arent sure why chemo-less transplants last longer for some of these kids than others. They can also understand how some families and clinicians might have viewed this treatment as a lifetime fix.

As Malech put it, If I said to you, Your child, instead of dying in infancy, will likely get to adulthood, go to school, have a normal life, you might think the word cure in your mind.

Even for parents who knew the protection might not last forever, the failure of a long-ago bone marrow transplant puts them in a bind. If they do nothing, their child will once again be vulnerable to any passing infection, which could prove fatal. They can try another round of the same procedure, though booster transplants sometimes come with added complications. Or they can try getting their child into a research trial for gene therapy, which comes with the risks of any experimental treatment.

Some feel an irrational guilt when the bone marrow they donated to their child stops functioning. Its your cells, and if it doesnt work, you failed them, said Ballard, who lives in Clifton, Va., about a 40-minute drive from Washington, D.C. Her son Ray had already had three transplants as a child. When his immune system started to fail again in early adulthood, gene therapy at the NIH seemed like the only reasonable choice.

That would involve researchers removing cells from his bone marrow, using an engineered virus as a kind of molecular syringe to slip in a healthy copy of the gene in which he had a defect, and then threading these corrected cells back into his veins a bone marrow transplant to himself. But preparing a virus can be tricky, and there were delays.

Meanwhile, Rays condition was getting worse. His norovirus was preventing him from absorbing much nutrition, and as Ballard put it, his bone structure was just crumbling at that point. His doctors told her he had the skeleton of an 85-year-old.

He died this past February, at 25 years old. One friend got his birth and death dates tattooed onto her shoulder. Another painted a portrait of him for Ballard, in which his arms are crossed, his lips pressed together in a wry smile.

At Boston Childrens, Pai is now helping to lead a randomized trial to better understand what dose of chemo works best for SCID patients receiving transplants. Over the last decade or so, she, Malech, and many other clinicians have also teamed up to track the long-term results of immune deficient patients whove received someone elses bone marrow.

Pai is hopeful that knowing about the phenomenon of waning immunity will give gene therapies a better shot at becoming a durable fix. They probably have a better chance of achieving a one-time, lifelong cure, but its never wrong to be humble, she said. Only after decades more and hundreds or thousands of patients will we know for sure.

Patient advocates point out that even then, these patients will still have the capacity of passing on their SCID-causing gene to future generations, and so the word cure is overly optimistic. Thats why I like the word remission, said Smith. That still gives you the hope. If you were given a cancer diagnosis, you wouldnt go through treatment and then just forget about it for the rest of your life.

As Boyle put it, Weve seen the promise and then weve seen the reality. Everyone who is looking at a transformational therapy should be optimistic, but also realistic, and not assume that this is truly one and done. (Boyles foundation has received financial support from Orchard Therapeutics, which is developing a gene therapy for a form of SCID.)

To Amy Saada, of South Windsor, Conn., that isnt theoretical. Her son Adam is now 12, and the immunity from the bone marrow transplant he got as a baby is wearing off. He isnt yet sick, but his parents know they need to decide between gene therapy or another transplant soon. She has a very clear memory of how long and uncertain the recovery from treatment felt. In some ways, she wishes she didnt know quite as much as she does; that way, she would feel less trepidation about what lies ahead.

Your heart kind of sinks, she said. Youve already been through it once, and it was hell. Its harder the second time.

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Waning treatment is a warning for all 'one-and-done' therapies - STAT

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

The last few decades have seen revolutionary developments in the field of Assisted Reproduction. IVF is over 40 years old. It took hundreds of experiments on animal and human eggs and sperm before Louise Brown was born in Oldham, the UK in 1978. Scientific advancement calls for a healthy interaction of colleagues, scientific bodies and the media.

After much discourse, IVF received scientific and societal acceptance ultimately resulting in the Nobel Prize for Bob Edwards in Medicine or Physiology in 2010 for work leading to the birth of Louise Brown. However, scientific ignorance can thwart major discoveries. Dr Subash Mukhopadhyay created Indias first and the worlds second test-tube baby. Durga was born just 67 days after Louise Brown. The scientific climate did not allow Dr Mukhopadhyay his claim to fame. This resulted in a crushing halt to the spread of ART in India for almost a decade.

The earlier decades saw a plateau in success rates with IVF techniques. Several factors have made IVF a household name making it the standard of care for many infertile conditions.

The introduction of the hormones like LH (Luteinizing Hormone) & FSH (Follicle-stimulating Hormone) to bring about the formation of multiple eggs was a major step to improving success, as there were more eggs and embryos to choose from. Besides, efforts were made to better understand the microenvironment of the embryo. This resulted in nutrient medium satisfying the need for embryos at various stages of development thereby enhancing pregnancy rates.

A major breakthrough occurred for males with very low or no sperm counts, with the introduction of Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection in 1992 by Dr Palermo & Dr Andre van Steirtegheim in Brussels. This caused a major paradigm shift in treating male infertility. In 1994, our team created Luv Singh the first ICSI baby in South-East Asia. The technique gave a major boost to the success of Assisted Reproduction in India.

The early 90s saw an interest in looking at genetic disorders in couples who were otherwise fertile. Handyside & his group described pregnancies after biopsy of human preimplantation embryos in cases of sex-linked diseases. Techniques were refined over the years so that instead of only 5 chromosomes being checked, today we have the ability not only to check for all 46 chromosomes but to also detect minor variations in the structure and placement of chromosomes by powerful platforms like Next Generation Sequencing.

The technique of Pre Implantation Genetic Testing (PGT) also applies to couples with inheritable mutations for genetic diseases like Thalassemia, Sickle Cell Disease, Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy, and Huntingtons Chorea. This technology has been a boon for couples who would otherwise be at risk of having a genetically compromised baby.

There has been a constant endeavour to enhance pregnancy rates for couples facing fertility issues. The endometrium i.e. the inner lining of the uterus may sometimes be ineffective in helping the process of implantation. We devised a co-culture technique called Cumulus Aided Transfer (CAT) for the first time in the world, in which cells surrounding the oocyte (Cumulus Cells), are used as a feeder layer on which the embryos can grow. This has resulted in better pregnancy chances.

Immunological competence and its vagaries are now better understood. Modulating the womans immune system can prevent the block from implantation.

Today we are witnessing diminishing fertility potential globally due to the presence of different types of pollution affecting the ovaries and testes, thus decreasing egg and sperm counts prematurely. Our team has successfully carried out Ovarian Rejuvenation by instilling Platelet Rich Plasma in the ovaries of such women.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHealthworld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

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Better Success Rates of IVF Treatments - Health Files by Dr Firuza R. Parikh - ETHealthworld.com

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith

It remains one of Northern Irelands most notorious cold-cases, still unsolved after 31 years.

It was in April, 1988 when a pretty young blonde schoolgirl from Munich named Inga Maria Hauser, a budding singer with intrepid spirit to match, decided to go backbacking during the Easter break, and full of the anticipation of adventure, primed to see something of other countries and cultures, she set out to visit England, Scotland and Ireland.

Her friend Walter Schreiner, who first met Inga in their local youth club in the mid-1980s, said of the budding young adult: Every person who knew her loved her. She was always smiling, she was always shining and was very intelligent.

A girl with charm and wit and all before her then, setting off to see new sights and meet new people in a different culture to her own; a brave soul, unfazed by the prospect of travelling alone.

Poignantly, Inga had already noted the friendliness of the local people.

During her travels one of the 18-year-olds postcards home from England said: The people here are so helpful and lovely that I cant imagine anything bad could happen to me.

A note in her diary added: The day after tomorrow I am going on to Ireland. Im looking forward to that the best.

She got the ferry from Stranraer, arriving in the port town of Larne on April 6. But she would never make it to her next destinations of Belfast and then Dublin.

Two weeks after she was last seen alive, her dumped mutilated body, having, acorrding to Police, been subjected to a vicious and ruthless sexual and physical assault, was found by a sheep farmer in a remote part of Ballypatrick Forest near Ballycastle.

Here was the life of a beautiful girl cut senselessly short, her dreams and hopes for the future callously denied and a family back in Germany plunged into unimaginable grief.

In the 31 years since the horrific murder both of Ingas distraught parents have died without seeing justice served.

Her mother Almut passed away in October of this year. Her father, Josef, died in 2006 from cancer. Both were hearbroken that the case was never solved; that they were denied answers, a perpetrator or perpetrators brought to justice.

Ingas sister Frederika was particularly badly affected by her sisters death, her son Viktor told a BBC programme last year:

Siblings always have a little tension around them. But they were really close, even though they were quite different. There is a German saying - ein Herz und eine Seele - one heart, one soul.

Of the pursuit of justice for Inga, Viktor said: It would be especially important for my mother. I hope if the murderer gets caught, my mother can finally leave this behind and we can be free of this curse.

SDLP MLA for East Londonderry John Dallat has been involved in the campaign to find Inga Maria Hausers killer for many years; for him the quest to find those responsible for Ingas death has become a life-long priority and passion project.

He was instrumental in getting the case reopened by the PSNI last year after the files were closed due to lack of progress.

John said: I remember when Inga was murdered and my heart went out to her family. I was a young father then to a young girl who I hoped would grow up also and travel the world - and she did. Every parent expects their child to be able to travel without being murdered in the brutal way that Inga Maria was. After ten years of campaigning the parents said they werent coming back and so I assumed that role fighting for justice for Inga. And it has been a long struggle.

This is a personal and emotional struggle for me and it has been a great privilege getting to know Ingas only sister Frederike Leibel. She has one son, Victor, who visited last year, and stayed with us.

In all the years since Inga was murdered they only received a series of letters in English and werent even aware for a long time that they were entitled to legal representation. The support they received was not good.

But we want to focus on getting whoever did this heinous crime to be brought to justice.

Since a memorial stone to Inga was erected in Ballypatrick Forest Park on the 30th year of her death, well-wishers have left tokens at the site, flowers, soft toys, cards, religious objects.

This week John Dallats granddaughter Caitlin laid a wreath at the headstone to mark 31 years. The hope is to send the Hauser family a festive message of support - that their beloved sister and aunt has not been forgotten; the difficult quest for answers continues.

The also plan to erect a German flag to acknowledge Ingas home country and to signify that she was the only international student to die here in Ulster during the Troubles.

Christmas means nothing to the Hauser family since they lost their beloved Inga in one of the most brutal murders ever recorded and all the more reason why we need to show that we really care, continues John.

The family know that Inga hasnt been forgotten and they have recovered hope that justice may still be done.

In May last year, a 59-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of the murder by police investigating the case and later released on bail pending further inquiries.

Detectives said they believe several people may have been involved directly in the murder, or in the subsequent cover-up, and said they only need fractional piece of evidence to bring the chief suspects to justice.

Police also found a male genetic profile at the murder scene, although have yet to find a match.

The Public Prosecution Service is now in receipt of a lengthy file of evidence against the chief suspect.

Dallat continued: The fact that a file has gone to the Public Prosecution Service after 31 years is welcome news and offers some hope to the Hauser Family.

It represents the first chink of light in a long struggle for justice for their daughter Inga who died a most brutal death at the hands of a killer who was intent on raping a young girl over here during a school break to find out about a country that her parents loved.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the murder of Inga is the silence of those who know who did it, but that silence cannot be sustained for much longer.

Hopefully the file which has gone to the Public Prosecution Service will be a historical development which will bring closure to a family who have suffered in silence for far too long, Mr Dallat added.

It is our responsibility and that of the police and courts to redouble our efforts to ensure that those involved in Ingas murder are brought to justice.

I am so sorry that my efforts and that of others havent achieved their purpose so far.

But I remain confident that sooner, rather than later, that justice will be done and that the retribution Almut and Josef were denied will be delivered.

Dallat is clear about what he would like to say to those responsible for, or who know something about, Ingas murder:

I urge them to admit their guilt. Its not easy to give evidence against people who were perhaps once friends. But we believe there are witnesses out there who must do the right thing and demonstrate some level of decency.

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Inga was a beautiful girl with her whole life in front of her, her death was a national shame - Belfast Newsletter

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith