Scientist hones cancer therapy strategies

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., -- A U.S. scientist says he's using highpowered computers to create cancer treatments involving a new class of tumor-killing drugs. Florida State University Assistant Professor Kevin Chen says he wants to determine how substances known as recombinant immunotoxins can best be modified to attack and kill malignant tumors while doing minimal harm to a patient's healthy cells. "Cancer is a disease of tremendous complexity, so the analysis and interpretation of data demands sophisticated, specialized computational methods," Chen said. He said recombinant immunotoxins are new drugs consisting of tiny fragments of antibody proteins that are fused at the genetic level to toxins produced by certain types of bacteria, fungi or plants. "Once injected into the body, the antibody portion of the immunotoxin targets specific proteins called antigens that are massively expressed on the surface of cancer cells," Chen said. "These cells are subsequently killed by the accompanying toxins. Normal, healthy cells, meanwhile, are not recognized and thus are spared." The study that included FSU researchers Junho Kim and Xinmei Li and molecular biologist Byungkook Lee of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., appeared in the March issue of the journal Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

Proverbs

Pathogens and Prayer

By Rachel Zelkowitz
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 July 2008

The same diseases that plague humanity may also drive one of the fundamental elements of human culture, a new study suggests. A statistical analysis shows an association between higher rates of infectious disease and religious diversity around the world. The findings have already sparked debate within the academic community; critics are questioning the validity of the interpretation, and supporters say that the finding could offer a new perspective on why religions exist and what role they play in society.
The histories of individual religions are well-documented, but the evolution of religion itself is not well-understood. Two schools of thought have dominated the debate. The first views religion as a "byproduct" of other evolutionary adaptations such as larger brains. The second sees religion itself as adaptive, arguing that its role in social cohesiveness and other traits may have helped humans survive.

Corey Fincher, a biologist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, falls into the second camp. Religion marks group members, he says, and can dissuade people from interacting with those outside the group. In areas with rampant infectious disease, this can be an advantage: No outsiders means no outside pathogens. Isolation can also prevent the exchange of ideas, or religions, in this case. That might lead to the rise of many independent religious systems.

Fincher and his colleagues looked for an association between a nation's religious diversity and rate of disease. They used Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia to tally the number of religions in 219 countries and checked that against pervasiveness of disease in those areas, as documented in a global epidemiology database. There was a statistically significant, positive relationship between prevalence of disease and religious diversity, or religion richness. This persisted even when the researchers controlled for other variables that could impact the number of religions in a country: land area, population, religious freedom, and economic inequality. To correct for different patterns of human settlement in different parts of the world, they also tested the association of disease and religious diversity within the world's six major regions; the correlation still held true.

The results, published online yesterday by the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, offer a new answer to the question of why religions exist, Fincher says. "Religions may be for marking, but at a more fundamental level, social marking may in and of itself be due to infectious disease stress."

But Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion at Columbia University, disagrees. Religions around the planet range from being very open to very closed to outsiders, she says: "You can't just say religions have strong boundaries." Indeed, traditional religious societies often interact with those outside their own group for trade or military alliances, says Richard Sosis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut (U Conn), Storrs. Still, Sosis welcomes the study as a "great first step" in explaining religious diversity.

"I think [the researchers] are introducing an area that has been absent in the evolution of religion studies and is potentially an important one," says anthropologist Candace Alcorta, also of the U Conn. Alcorta notes that the existence of great empires in tropical, disease-rich areas--such as the Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula--seems to fly in the face of Fincher's findings. But the questions the study raises could inspire research that will move the field forward, she says.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/730/1?etoc


Enviado por Dr. José Manuel Ferrer Guerra

Garfield: Comics & Cliparts

Gene link to schizophrenia found

PEOPLE with schizophrenia are more likely to have genetic mistakes in their DNA, according to a major study which brings science closer to understanding the mysterious disease.

International research involving Queensland scientists has provided new clues to the types of genetic abnormalities that increase the risk of developing the psychiatric disorder.

The researchers said it is still too soon to gene test individuals for schizophrenia, as much of the genetic puzzle is still missing, but the find provides powerful insight into the type of mutations to look for and where to find them.

"This is a real breakthrough in a condition that affects one person in 100 but that we really don't know much about," said co-investigator Dr Peter Visscher, from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research.

"We can now pinpoint several hot spot regions in the genome which must have something to do with why people have this condition."

Researchers sifted through the DNA of about 6000 people, half with the condition, to analyse how common it was to have mistakes in chromosomes, with portions either missing or duplicated.

"What we found, somewhat to our surprise, was that people with schizophrenia had 15 per cent more of those missing or duplicated bits of chromosomes," said Dr Visscher, who helped analyse three billion pieces of DNA data.

"In particular, we found three regions on three different chromosomes that seem to be hot spots for such events."

The results of the multinational study by the International Schizophrenia Consortium are published today in the science journal Nature.

The researchers said the specific way a small overall increase in this kind of genetic variation translates into schizophrenia for a given patient is not yet known.

Further studies are underway to test whether the variations are linked to specific schizophrenia symptoms, like hallucinations or delusions.

At this stage, the information will not be used for gene screening, with family history still a much better predictor of risk than any DNA test, Dr Visscher said.

Professor Vaughan Carr, chief executive of Australia's Schizophrenia Research Institute, welcomed the findings but said they were more exciting from a scientific rather than practical or clinical treatment point of view.

Professor Pat McGorry, executive director of Orygen Youth Health, agreed it was impossible to measure the impact on treatment for patients.

"But any increased knowledge regarding etiology will eventually affect the quality of care we are able to offer," Prof McGorry said.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24105436-12377,00.html


Enviado por Dr. José Manuel Ferrer Guerra

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