Today was the first day of the science part of the M Foundation’s aging conference at UCLA. There were many impressive speakers and academics, but the most impressive was Zheng Cui from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has discovered that white blood cells in cancer resistant mice can be used to completely cure cancer in other mice. The same principle may hold for humans and he has been approved by the FDA to start human trials. He had a video where he showed the white blood cells eating up the cancer cells (they popped like a balloon). I’m not sure if that video is online anywhere, but I will ask if I see him again tomorrow.

The Methuselah Foundation is hosting a conference on aging in LA this weekend. Most of it is scientific, but they will have one small session on policy issues. I’ll be there, and will report back on developments as they happen.

Personalized medicine is touted as the wave of the future, but recent government action points to problems for Americans looking to join the health revolution. Last week, California’s Department of Public Health issued cease-and-desist letters to 13 genetic testing startups, threatening to deny service to consumers curious about their DNA.

“Any laboratory offering genetic tests to California residents must be licensed as a clinical laboratory in California. The tests must be ordered by a licensed physician and validated,” reads a statement on the department’s Web site. 23andMe didn’t require a physician’s note when this author and many others used its service, so it seems the company, along with most of the others, may be in trouble.

Despite this threat, 23andMe this week maintained that it is in compliance with California law and is continuing to operate in the state at this time. However, not all genomics firms are taking such an aggressive stance.

Sciona, which tests genes in order to offer nutritional and fitness advice, also received a cease-and-desist letter. The company’s reaction was to yank its US$299 products off the market in both California and New York, another state that is targeting the industry.

Those attempting to read their own genetic data, not somebody else’s, find it appalling that government would stand in the way. One’s genome contains important personal information that each individual should be able to access, without a doctor acting as gatekeeper. Tests like the ones 23andMe supply not only imply possible futures, but also reveal a lot about one’s past. There is something frighteningly Orwellian about government bureaucrats deciding that individuals are not allowed to view their body’s map without official permission.

It is appropriate, of course, for government agencies to enforce the laws on the books, which is what the California’s Department of Public Health is doing. However, when the old rules are so out of sync with the current health landscape provided by new technology, that calls for new rules. As with anything in the technology industry, the faster things are fixed, the better.

[...]

Read more here.

This is a great article by Gordy Slack. He argues that we shouldn’t be so quick to write off creationists, as they do make some good points.

Dr. Dean Ornish, head of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, CA, and his team showed that changing diet and exercise led to changes in what genes were switched on or off. Reuters reports that “the activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

In case you haven’t noticed, life expectancy is growing. According to the US National Center for Health Statistics, “Life expectancy at birth hit a new record high in 2006 of 78.1 years, a 0.3 increase from 2005.” Here is their press release. AP also did a story on it, which can be found here.

The other interesting thing was that there were 22,117 fewer deaths in 2006. With an aging population, it is odd to see the number of deaths declining. The NCHS says it is probably “the result of more mild influenza mortality in 2006 compared with 2005.”

The United States Federal Trade Commission recently began a formal antitrust investigation into Intel’s business practices. This action is not simply a problem for Intel, but should serve as a wake-up call for the entire technology industry and anyone who values innovation.

Some of the drivers behind the Intel inquiry are complaints by its competitor, Advanced Micro Devices. Both AMD and Intel compete to provide microprocessors for computers, with Intel holding a larger portion of the market. For more than 15 years, AMD has complained about Intel, arguing that the company cuts prices and offers discounts in attempts to monopolize the market. The United States government has rejected such claims in the past, but now that there is a new FTC chief, the investigation is moving forward.

The idea that lowering prices for consumers is anticompetitive is so off-base that it would be laughable if it weren’t being wielded by politically motivated individuals such as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. He launched formal proceedings in January, accusing Intel of “potential anticompetitive conduct.” Cuomo’s investigation just happens to coincide with AMD’s plans to locate a new US$3.2-billion factory outside of Albany, capital of New York state. The attorney general of California — where both Intel and AMD are located — rejected an invitation to join the action.

If there were no competition in the market, an antitrust inquiry might be less objectionable. However, greater access to computing power is getting continually cheaper precisely because competition remains strong.

“There is absolutely competition in the marketplace,” says Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, a research firm focusing on PC-related semiconductor and components markets.

Because of Moore’s Law, McCarron says that products in this space change every year and a half or so. “That’s the treadmill everyone is on. If [the companies] don’t constantly improve their manufacturing processes, they will be at a competitive disadvantage.” Intel might be a big firm, but if it makes any mistakes, competitors can gobble up its market share.

[...]

Read more here.

From Resveratrol Partners’ press release:

“Once mega-doses of resveratrol (more than 500 mg) began to be employed, side effects like anemia, Achilles heel tendonitis, anxiety reactions, numbness in the fingers, began to be reported,” says Bill Sardi, spokesperson for Longevinex® (long-jev-in-ex), a leading brand resveratrol dietary supplement. “This is probably because resveratrol is a copper chelator and excessive chelation will impair the availability of copper which is needed for collagen formation and nerve regeneration,” he says. “Resveratrol is relatively safe, but not absolutely safe at any dosage. There are drawbacks,” he adds.

Some online suppliers of resveratrol pills, who have no medical training, irresponsibly recommend up to 7000 milligrams of resveratrol a day. There is also evidence that supra-high dose resveratrol inhibits the absorption of folic acid (vitamin B9), an essential nutrient needed for DNA repair. [European Journal Nutrition 46: 329-36, 2007] High doses have not been tested in humans for long-term use.

This looks like it would have been a cool event. According to this report, “The discussion of aging was a closing event of the first World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science for the public that brought together researchers ranging from biologists to quantum physicists. Participants included Nobel laureates, business leaders and philosophers.”

This op-ed by Brian Greene makes the eloquent case that science is more than just details, facts, and figures. He says that it also helps explain why we are here, why the sky is blue, and other important questions perennially asked by humankind. Here’s a paragraph that I found relevant to what I’m doing:

“And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.”

The WSJ today reported that “New genetic research emerging from a major cancer meeting [annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology] could help doctors better identify the drugs most likely to work in their patients — but sharply reduce the market for certain blockbuster cancer drugs.”

Interesting that they are predicting more drug products for smaller markets. Apparently, “Both Amgen and Merck argue that patients who are successfully treated will stay on the drugs longer, potentially offsetting at least some of the impact of narrowing the target market.”

A brain-computer interface was implanted in a Japanese man’s motor cortex. Signals that would have made his own arms and legs move instead went to the avatar’s, making it move. Here’s the video and the story.

CMU researchers may be creating technology that speeds up the progress of medical advances that can help us live longer. From Bio IT world:

“The researchers published their findings in a paper last month (“Graphical Models for Structured Classification, with an Application to Interpreting Images of Protein Subcellular Location Patterns,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, Volume 9, p. 651 to 682, April 2008).

In their paper, they discussed the benefits of using current computer vision systems to distinguish patterns that are difficult for humans to detect. But they noted how in many cases the automated systems may confuse similar patterns. This confusion can only be resolved by considering neighboring cells – something that has been impractical because of computing limitations.

That’s where the new technique comes in. The CMU researchers were able to expand the analysis to multiple cells by increasing the efficiency of the belief propagation algorithm, which is an algorithm widely used in many artificial intelligence applications.”

This should be an interesting conference. The invite says:

“At Aging 2008 you will engage with top scientists and advocates as they present their findings and advice, and learn what you can do to help accelerate progress towards a cure for the disease and suffering of aging.”

Last week, President Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which will protect individuals from employer and insurance discrimination based on the results of high-tech gene tests. Fighting discrimination is a good idea, but the lack of opposition to GINA points to some potentially serious problems.

GINA passed the Senate unanimously and the House by a margin of 414-to-1, with Ron Paul (R-Texas) the lone dissenter. Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, currently battling a brain tumor, hailed GINA as the “first civil rights bill of the new century of life sciences,” and the trade association for health insurance providers testified in support. By all accounts, GINA must be a great piece of legislation, but some nagging problems don’t bode well for the future.
Since GINA prevents insurers from discriminating on the basis of known risk, premiums will go up for everyone, and healthy people may opt out of the insurance system, leaving only those who will cost more to insure. This could cause America’s health insurance system to crash financially, yet the major health insurance companies don’t seem concerned. Perhaps that’s because a large majority of people receive their health insurance through their employers, and thus never really examine or directly see the entire cost of their care, making them less likely to opt out.

Such a situation is disturbing because it means that the health insurance system is not responsive to the very people it purports to serve. Think about it: There is a reason there are no cute ads for healthcare featuring a gecko. Of course, unresponsiveness and inefficiency in the healthcare marketplace are not new, but they are the issues that tech firms like Google and Microsoft are beginning to address with their products, Google Health and HealthVault, that enhance consumer control and access to personal health information.

Once health data becomes more prevalent, people may begin asking why it’s OK to charge higher premiums based on age but not OK to charge higher premiums based on genetics. This is an interesting question because it forces one to think about situations where discrimination is considered permissible.

[...]

Read more here.

If you didn’t get a chance to clone your cat before Genetic Savings & Clone shut down, you now have a chance to clone your Dog. New company, BioArts, is having Woo Suk Wang of Seoul, South Korea perform the clonings. Yes, he’s the guy who was discredited after he falsely claimed to have created stem cell lines from cloned human embryos. That said, he later created Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog (that research was verified). So, hey, I guess he’s found something to do now that he is a black sheep in the research community.

The NYT reports that Dr. Andrew Schwartz, professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh, and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University have managed to get monkeys to control a robotic arm with their thoughts in order to put food in their mouths. This is not a new feat, but according to the Times, the “snacks reached their mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.”

Great news for people with paralyzing conditions and also for those fascinated with machine-brain interfaces.

This op-ed by James A. Bianco, president and CEO of Cell Therapeutics, makes a lot of sense. He says: “What’s missing from the debate is the public policy encouragement to produce more “smart” medicine.”

I agree. All too often, anti-aging activists simply turn to the idea that the solution is more money. While more money may help, it is innovation that will really win the day.

This news story from the NYT is good news for John McCain.

That’s a lot of 6’s, but this author argues that despite passing the 6 billion mark, population is not a problem. He writes, “the world’s population will soon peak, and then plummet downward at an ever-increasing rate. Many countries have already fallen below replacement-rate fertility, with more to follow.”