25 Jan 2014 00:01

PROFESSOR Sir Ken Murray, one of the first researchers in genetic engineering, saved many lives worldwide.

PRESSTEAM

A SCIENTIST who developed the first vaccine for hepatitis B has left 30million to the charity he founded in Edinburgh.

Professor Sir Ken Murrays groundbreaking work was credited with saving lives worldwide.

The 82-year-old, who worked at Edinburgh University for more than 30 years and was one of the first researchers in genetic engineering, died at home in the city last April.

His will reveals his estate was worth 45million with his fortune built on royalties from the vaccine.

The main beneficiaries are the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh, founded by Sir Ken in 1983.

They will receive 30million to support the education of young scientists and fund research and facilities at Edinburgh University.

Trust chairman Dr John Tooze, 75, said: Ken was an extraordinary man who remained very modest despite the huge royalties that his hepatitis B vaccine brought him.

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Man who developed first vaccine for hepatitis B leaves £30million to charity

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Bullwinkle Whitetail Deer , Disease?..Genetics? New breed?Unknown.
Bullwinkle Deer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I could not believe my eyes this morning when I came across this in the Local Newspaper in the hunting section. Bullwinkl...

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Cancer and Brain disease treatment advancement with Kenneth L. Davis
Advances in genomics, personalized medicine, and new therapeutics frame part of the picture. So do changes in health care delivery, stemming from the Afforda...

By: The Aspen Institute

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Cancer and Brain disease treatment advancement with Kenneth L. Davis - Video

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Big Data and Personalized Medicine
What does Big Data mean for healthcare? What are its possibilities, now and in the future? When will you begin to see its benefits? Ultimately, healthcare or...

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Personalized Medicine: The Changing Landscape of Health Care
Edward Abrahams, Ph.D. is president of the Personalized Medicine Coalition. Representing innovators, scientists, patients, providers and payers, the Personal...

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Sarah Standing
Standing at smith machine. Cervical level injury.

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Michele #39;s Spinal Cord Injury Foundation
I am a incomplete spinal cord person who was shot in the neck by mistake. I still have progress and I #39;m looking for help for my stem cell treatment. The date...

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chris moving hands after laying on vibration pplate
C6 SCI in recovery.

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Victoria, T level Spinal cord injury, boxing
In standing frame boxinig.

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C5 SCI working into his quads at Project Walk Atlanta.

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Jaquie beginning planks April 2013

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Jaquie core strength April 2013

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Diabetes: Progress toward stem cell therapies
California #39;s Stem Cell Agency (CIRM) hosted a live Google Hangout about recent progress in stem cell based strategies for diabetes therapies. The speakers in...

By: California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

24-Jan-2014

Contact: Sandy Van sandy@prpacific.com 808-526-1708 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

LOS ANGELES (Jan. 24, 2014) An early-phase clinical trial of an experimental vaccine that targets cancer stem cells in patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and aggressive malignant brain tumor, has been launched by researchers at Cedars-Sinai's Department of Neurosurgery, Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Brain Tumor Center and Department of Neurology.

Like normal stem cells, cancer stem cells have the ability to self-renew and generate new cells, but instead of producing healthy cells, they create cancer cells. In theory, if the cancer stem cells can be destroyed, a tumor may not be able to sustain itself, but if the cancer originators are not removed or destroyed, a tumor will continue to return despite the use of existing cancer-killing therapies.

The Phase I study, which will enroll about 45 patients and last two years, evaluates safety and dosing of a vaccine created individually for each participant and designed to boost the immune system's natural ability to protect the body against foreign invaders called antigens. The drug targets a protein, CD133, found on cancer stem cells of some brain tumors and other cancers.

Immune system cells called dendritic cells will be derived from each patient's blood, combined with commercially prepared glioblastoma proteins and grown in the laboratory before being injected under the skin as a vaccine weekly for four weeks and then once every two months, according to Jeremy Rudnick, MD, neuro-oncologist in the Cedars-Sinai Department of Neurosurgery and Department of Neurology, the study's principal investigator.

Dendritic cells are the immune system's most powerful antigen-presenting cells those responsible for helping the immune system recognize invaders. By being loaded with specific protein fragments of CD133, the dendritic cells become "trained" to recognize the antigen as a target and stimulate an immune response when they come in contact.

The cancer stem cell study is the latest evolution in Cedars-Sinai's history of dendritic cell vaccine research, which was introduced experimentally in patient trials in 1998.

Cedars-Sinai's brain cancer stem cell study is open to patients whose glioblastoma multiforme has returned following surgical removal. Potential participants will be screened for eligibility requirements and undergo evaluations and medical tests at regular intervals. The vaccine and study-related tests and follow-up care will be provided at no cost to patients. For more information, call 1-800-CEDARS-1 or contact Cherry Sanchez by phone at 310-423-8100 or email cherry.sanchez@cshs.org.

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The counseling that goes along with testing for breast cancer risk genes can be delivered just as effectively over the phone as in person, and at lower cost, according to new research.

Researchers found that women counseled over the phone before testing fared about the same in their understanding of the test and reactions to it as those counseled in person.

"Genetic counselors are not evenly distributed across the country," Marc Schwartz said. "So there are parts of the country that don't have easy access to genetic cancer counseling."

Schwartz is the study's lead author. He's also co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program and co-director of the Fisher Center for Familial Cancer Research at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, D.C.

Genetic counseling is a way to provide information and support to people and families who have genetic disorders or may be at risk for inherited conditions, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

"We have - by virtue of the incredibly high demand for genetic risk counseling - been looking for alternative avenues," Dr. Sofia Merajver told Reuters Health.

Merajver is director of the Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk and Evaluation Program at the University of Michigan Health System's Comprehensive Cancer Center in Ann Arbor. She was not involved with the new study.

"We've all done telephone counseling for patients who are very far away, very ill and for patients who couldn't afford it," she said.

Telephone counseling is not necessarily encouraged, however. Schwartz also said it has been somewhat controversial.

For the new study, researchers from Washington, New York, Boston and Burlington, Vermont, recruited 669 women who were between the ages of 21 and 85 years old.

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Telephone genetic counseling good for breast cancer risk ...

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When the FDA shut down biotech company 23andMes direct-to-consumer Personal Genome Service, many in the biotech community worried that the FDA was risking the survival of a nascent industry that would revolutionize medical care with new genetic technologies. But lost in the story about 23andMe was the news that the FDA had just issued its very first approval for a next-generation DNA analysis machine, clearly signaling that the agency recognizes the growing significance of genetic testing in medicine.

The FDA approved a machine called the MiSeqDx, the first FDA-regulated test system that allows laboratories to develop and validate sequencing of any part of a patients genome. For a few hundred dollars, this little machine can analyze an amount of DNA in 24 hours that, 10 years ago, would have taken a dozen machines two weeks and cost nearly a million dollars. The rate of improvement in our technical capacity to read out DNA has been stunningly rapid, outpacing even the expectations of Moores Law, the gold standard for progress in the computer industry. Biomedical researchers can now consider ways to bring DNA analysis into the clinic that would have been impossible before. Rather than testing for mutations in one gene at a time, and in only very specific groups of patients, its becoming feasible to scan much larger portions of a patients DNA as part of a routine health assessment for everyone. Whats happening in medical genetics is the equivalent of having the operating costs of a private jet suddenly drop to those of a Honda Civicin which case youd probably start considering previously unthinkable destinations for not only the annual family vacation, but for three-day weekends as well.

In a report issued last fall (PDF), the FDA laid out its view of the regulatory challenges posed by personalized genetic medicine. At issue is the idea that with cheap, accessible DNA analysis, medical care can be personalized to match each persons genetic makeup. Cancer diagnoses, rather than being based on abnormalities that are visible under a microscope, would instead be classified more effectively by their underlying genetic mutations. The typical trial-and-error approach to find the right drug for a patient suffering from depression would give way to a genetic test that would indicate the best drug.

It sounds great in principle, but the result is a major headache for the FDA, because modern genetic medicine is demolishing regulatory concepts and categories that the agency has long used to ensure that drugs and diagnostics are safe and effective.

Take genetic tests for instance. The two primary criteria the FDA uses to evaluate diagnostics are analytical validity and clinical validity. As the FDA report describes them, analytical validity refers to how well the test measures what it is supposed to measure, whereas clinical validity looks at how well the test predicts who has or does not have a disease or condition for which it is being tested. A typical diagnostic test is required to be both analytically and clinically valid, but for large-scale genetic tests this doesnt make sense. Tests that analyze hundreds or thousands of regions of your DNA at once can be analytically validthat is, they accurately determine the identity of mutations in your genomebut the clinical validity will vary with the individual mutation, depending on whether that mutation has a discernible effect. Furthermore, clinical validity for any one mutation will often be in flux, as new research clarifies the role of poorly understood mutations.

Another challenge with personalization is that a drug and a diagnostic test are more likely to be paired in their development. Some drugs, like the cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco, are deliberately targeted only at patients with a specific mutation. Pairing genetic tests with therapeutics makes it difficult to track down the source of problems when something doesnt work. As the FDA report notes, An adverse event associated with the use of a therapeutic product may have arisen as a result of failure of the test to identify the optimal subset of patients due to design deficiencies, manufacturing deficiencies, or operator error.

To respond to these challenges, the FDA report describes the changes youd expect from a large and complex government agency tasked with keeping up with a large and complex industry. There are restructurings, efforts to increase communication and coordination among different agency centers, and committees to rethink the process by which some new treatments and diagnostics are approved.

WHILE THE FDA MAY be making an admirable effort to confront the issues raised in the report, the authors ignored the elephant in the room: the wild frontier of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, represented by 23andMe. Consumer-oriented genome services undermine one of the biggest regulatory concepts that the FDA depends on: whether or not something counts as a medical diagnostic device. Does the FDA need to protect you from information about your genome, especially if some of that information is potentially unreliable? Or should anyone be able to buy a tentative analysis of their genome based on the latest research?

This is where medical genetics shades into recreational genetics. It doesnt help that these services are often advertised with the dubious claim that they will empower you to take your health into your own hands. As a group of researchers, physicians, and health policy experts noted in a recent commentary, there is little evidence to support the basic premise implied by the empowerment rhetoricnamely that individuals will use genomic risk information to adopt a healthier lifestyle and, thus, reduce their risk for chronic diseases.

Even if a personal genome analysis is not useful yet, it is hard to make the case that we should be barred from it. These services feed our curiosity about ourselves, and they are an opportunity to educate consumers about genetics. Of course our genetics are inextricably tied up with our health, which means that direct-to-consumer genetic services will always threaten to impinge on the FDAs territory. How it should respond is an issue not yet resolved.

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CGS : The FDA Is Not Anti-Genetics

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A New Horizon - Episode 9: Advanced Genetics
Hello and welcome. I #39;m mallrat208 and you #39;re watching #39;A New Horizon #39; my #39;Feed the Beast: Horizons #39; Let #39;s Play/Discovery. Today I dive headfirst into the Adv...

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Genetics Problem using Google Drawing
CEP 812 Defining Problems of Practice Screencast: Using Google Drawing to solve genetics problems.

By: Allison Birbal

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Frosty Genetics Project

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Science 8- Genetics Part 2
Punnett Squares, Mutations and Selective Breeding.

By: Amy Howie

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Mendelian Genetics and Punnett Squares
Movie for my high school biology students on basic genetic principles including monohybrid and dihybrid crosses using Punnett Squares and basic Non-Mendelian...

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[Round 1] TTT + Genetics vs. Teamwork + The Flying Walruses

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[Round 2] TTT + Genetics vs. Teamwork + The Flying Walruses

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[Round 3] TTT + Genetics vs. Teamwork + The Flying Walruses

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Genetics Vocab
description.

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