YCLOAK

Researchers have developed a blood test that could help with the early detection of pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

Doctors usually are unable to diagnose cancer of the pancreas until it is too late. Most patients die within a year.

The new test uses stem cell technology to look for markers in the blood of people who, because of diabetes or family history, are more likely to develop pancreatic cancer.

Scientists took late-stage cancer cells from a patient and used technology to genetically regress those cells to a stem cell state.

They were able to return those cells to an early cancerous state and find what are called biomarkers in the blood to detect the disease early enough for treatment.

The researchers say the new test has an 87 percent accuracy rate in identifying someone with stage 1 or 2 pancreatic cancer, and a 98 percent rate in ruling out the disease in those who are not sick.

The study appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
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Novartis AG’s pioneering cancer drug won the backing of a federal advisory panel Wednesday, paving the way for the first gene therapy to be approved in the United States.

An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration voted 10-0 that the drug, tisagenlecleucel, should be approved to treat patients with relapsed B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of U.S. childhood cancer.

The FDA is not obliged to follow the recommendations of its advisers, but typically does so. The agency is expected to rule on the drug by the end of September.

Approval of tisagenlecleucel would have significant implications not only for Novartis but for companies developing similar treatments, including Kite Pharma Inc, Juno Therapeutics Inc and bluebird bio Inc.

All four are developing chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies (CAR-T), which harness the body’s own immune cells to recognize and attack malignant cells.

If approved, the drugs, which are infused just once, are expected to cost up to $500,000 and generate billions of dollars for their developers. Success would also help advance a cancer-fighting technique that scientists have been trying to perfect for decades and lift the broader field of cell therapy.

“In the last five years, there have been a significant number of cell therapy companies that have gone public or gotten investment in hopes of moving this type of therapy forward,” said Reni Benjamin, an analyst at Raymond James. “This is our first glimpse from a commercial and regulatory perspective about how the FDA is thinking about this space.”

A clinical trial of Novartis’ drug showed that 83 percent of patients who had relapsed or failed chemotherapy, achieved complete or partial remission three months post-infusion.

Patients with ALL who fail chemotherapy typically have a 16 to 30 percent chance of survival.

Novartis is also testing the drug in diffuse large b-cell Lymphoma (DLBCL), the most common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as is Kite. Part of the competitive landscape will include which company is best able to manufacture its product most efficiently and reliably.

The products are made by extracting and isolating a patient’s T cells, genetically engineering them to recognize and target specific cancer cells, and then infusing them back into the patient.

Novartis said the entire process will take 22 days by the time it is launched.

More than half of patients experienced a serious complication known as cytokine release syndrome (CRS), which occurs when the body’s immune system goes into overdrive.

Doctors were able to manage the condition, and the syndrome caused no deaths.

The FDA expressed concern that the drug could cause new malignancies over the long term, but panelists generally felt that risk was low.
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A new report finds more than two billion people lack access to safe drinking water and more than twice that number or 4.5 billion people lack safe sanitation. The report by the World Health Organization and U.N. Children’s Fund is the first global assessment of water, sanitation and hygiene for the Sustainable Development Goals.

The United Nations reports nearly 850,000 people die every year from lack of access to good water, sanitation and hygiene. This includes more than 360,000 children under age five who die from diarrhea and many others from diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid.

The joint report by the World Health Organization and U.N. Children’s Fund finds people living in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are most at risk of disease and death from poor water and sanitation-related sources.

WHO Coordinator for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, Bruce Gordon says this report is the first to assess the importance of hygiene to good health. He says many homes, healthcare facilities and schools have no soap and water for handwashing.

“The one figure I would kind of like to emphasize here is that in sub-Saharan Africa, 15 percent of the population only has access to a hand-washing facility with soap and water,” he said. “And, as we know, good hygiene is one of the simplest and most effective ways to stop the spread of disease.”

One of the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals calls for universal and equitable access to safe water and sanitation for all by 2030. UNICEF Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, Sanjay Wijesekera says such progress would have a knock-on effect on other development areas.

“For children, access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene not only keeps them alive and healthy, but it gives them a chance to go to school and gain an education. It reduces inequality … and it just gives them a fair start to life,” said Wijesekera.

The SDGs are calling for an end to open defecation, which perpetuates a vicious cycle of disease and poverty. Open defecation is practiced by more than 890 million people, mainly in rural areas, who have no toilet or latrine.

 

 

 
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Scientists say an iceberg the size of Bali has broken away from the continent of Antarctica.

The iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, measures 5,800 square kilometers and weighs over one trillion tons, making it one of the biggest on record. It is slightly larger than the Indonesian island of Bali, which has a population of well over 4 million people.

Iceberg calving, when bergs break away from a larger ice sheet, is a natural process, although global warming is believed to have accelerated the trend. This new mass of free-floating ice has been separating from Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf for months.

Scientists say there is no immediate impact on global sea levels, but the huge iceberg is a risk to ships in the area. The extreme south Atlantic is outside major maritime trade routs, but Antarctica is is a popular destination for cruise ships, most of them traveling from South America.

The Larsen C ice shelf is still attached to land, but already largely afloat off the coast of northwestern Antarctica. It is one in a series of three connected formations that grew out from the Antarctic mainland over tens of thousands of years.

Larsen A, the most northern and smallest of the three segments, broke free of the mainland in 1995. The Larsen B Ice Shelf, somewhat larger at about 3,200 square km, with an average ice thickness of 220 meters, disintegrated into the sea in 2002.
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Donor countries at a London summit pledged Tuesday to increase funding for family planning, but proposed cuts to family planning programs by the U.S. government overshadowed the conference.

The largest boost in donations announced at the Family Planning Summit came from the U.S.-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which sought to improve women’s access to contraceptives.

“The $375 million that the foundation announced today, that is absolutely not a reaction to President [Donald] Trump,” Melinda Gates said. “There is not anything anyone can do to fill the bucket of the money that the U.S. has committed to family planning.”

The United States is by far the biggest donor to global family planning programs, giving $600 million this year. But Trump announced in April that he planned to withdraw financial support for the U.N. Population Fund, accusing it of using what he called “coercive” family planning practices, including providing abortions. The United Nations strongly rejected the claims.

Nigeria’s minister of health, Isaac Adewole, told VOA the cuts would have an impact.

“Every country in the developing world will be worried, because it really signifies an increase in the [funding] gap,” he said. “We know family planning is one of the strongest anti-poverty strategies the world has ever known. It is a low-hanging fruit for reducing maternal mortality. It will contribute to shared prosperity.”

Call for action

By 2050, Nigeria is on course to be the third most populous country, with more than 400 million people. Nigeria’s minister of budget and national planning, Zainab S. Ahmed, said action was needed fast.

“Our economy cannot grow fast enough to be able to sustain that size of population,” Ahmed said, “so it is a very significant challenge and we need to address it now.”

Nigeria is budgeting $3 million for family planning programs in 2017 and says more is needed. Ministers say reaching young people is key.

The African MTV drama “Shuga” weaves messages around sexual health, contraception and HIV, and it reaches an estimated 720 million people. It’s currently partly funded by the U.S. government.

Georgia Arnold, executive director of the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, said, “It is much harder for governments and organizations to be able to speak openly about sex. That is where we come in. We can use our brand. We can use our access to young people and all of the media platforms that they use.”

Delegates expressed hope that partnering between the private sector and governments can provide improved access to contraceptives and family planning advice.
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Doctors and parents involved in female genital mutilation will face up to 15 years in prison under new Michigan laws.

Female circumcision or cutting is already a federal crime punishable by five years in prison. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed legislation on Tuesday that creates a state crime with harsher penalties.

The legislation was proposed after six people from an India-based Muslim sect called Dawoodi Bohra were charged in a genital mutilation case involving six girls at a suburban Detroit clinic. Two of the girls are from Minnesota, and four are from Michigan.

Michigan is the 26th state to officially ban the practice, which is common in some parts of the world.

The new laws also require increased public education and lengthen the statutes of limitations to file charges and lawsuits.

The laws take effect in October. 
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Reports over the past decade have drawn global attention to shocking abuses some women have been subjected to during childbirth in developed and developing countries.

The maltreatment has ranged from lack of privacy and neglect to forced sterilization, sexual and physical assault, and refusal to release a mother or child from a birth facility without payment. The problems are especially acute in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 66 percent of all maternal deaths per year worldwide, according to a February report from UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Fund.

A four-year study by researchers in the United States and Tanzania looked at ways to reduce abuse of mothers-to-be. Keys included gathering community stakeholders and health care workers to define standards of care and identifying barriers to change.

Previous efforts to reduce mortality of women giving birth focused on getting them into health care facilities to deliver their children. Despite dramatic increases in facility-based childbirth, however, decreases in mortality remained modest. Even when facilities are equipped to save a mother’s life, reports of abuse can keep women from seeking medical treatment during birth.

Site is no guarantee

“It doesn’t matter where you give birth — just because it’s a building doesn’t mean you survive,” Lynn Freedman of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health told VOA.

With colleagues from Columbia, the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania and Harvard University, Freedman designed one of the first attempts to show how abuse could be reduced. The researchers followed facilities in the Tanga Region of Tanzania for their study and randomly selected one to receive the intervention. They called their project Staha, which means “respect” in Swahili.

They first gathered stakeholders in the community and asked them to develop a set of standards for what appropriate care during childbirth should be. The residents were able to provide a unique local perspective. In this case, stakeholders felt it was important to foster a mutual respect between patients and health providers.  

Freedman agreed, saying, “Patients can blame the health workers, who are more an expression of systemic problems and not the sole cause of them.”

Quality improvement

Researchers then distributed the standards in the facility and convened a quality-improvement team made up of its employees. The team determined drivers of abuse and implemented changes to correct them. Changes included continuous patient surveys, increased oversight by management and educators, and tea for the staff to show appreciation on difficult days.

A year after they finished working with the facility, the researchers went back to see whether there had been changes in reported abuse and if progress had been sustained.  They found that there was a 66 percent decrease in levels of reported abuse. The sharpest decreases were seen in reports of neglect and physical assault.

But Freedman warned against immediately recommending that others implement these changes. Getting the community involved is most important, she said.

It’s not, ” ‘Here’s the best practice.  Do this,’ ” she said. It’s vital “that people themselves analyze the situation and develop the intervention.”

While attention has been growing, Freedman hopes for more. This is an issue that “everyone who actually lives with and works in the system knows is there, but has been so not the priority of policymakers and donors — almost like a silent emergency.”
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American technology companies are bringing automation and robotics to the age-old task of battling mosquitoes in a bid to halt the spread of Zika and other mosquito-borne maladies worldwide.

Firms including Microsoft and California life sciences company Verily are forming partnerships with public health officials in several U.S. states to test new high-tech tools.

In Texas, Microsoft is testing a smart trap to isolate and capture Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, known Zika carriers, for study by entomologists to give them a jump on predicting outbreaks.

Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences division based in Mountain View, California, is speeding the process for creating sterile male mosquitoes to mate with females in the wild, offering a form of birth control for the species.

While it may take years for these advances to become widely available, public health experts say new players bring fresh thinking to vector control, which still relies heavily on traditional defenses such as larvicides and insecticides.

“It’s exciting when technology companies come on board,” said Anandasankar Ray, an associate professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside. “Their approach to a biological challenge is to engineer a solution.”

Smart traps

The Zika epidemic that emerged in Brazil in 2015 and left thousands of babies suffering from birth defects has added urgency to the effort.

While cases there have slowed markedly, mosquitoes capable of carrying the virus  — Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus — are spreading in the Americas, including large swaths of the southern United States.

The vast majority of the 5,365 Zika cases reported in the United States so far are from travelers who contracted the virus elsewhere. Still, two states — Texas and Florida — have recorded cases transmitted by local mosquitoes, making them prime testing grounds for new technology.

In Texas, 10 mosquito traps made by Microsoft are operating in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston.

Roughly the size of large birdhouses, the devices use robotics, infrared sensors, machine learning and cloud computing to help health officials keep tabs on potential disease carriers.

Texas recorded six cases of local mosquito transmission of Zika in November and December of last year. Experts believe the actual number is likely higher because most infected people do not develop symptoms.

Pregnant women are at high risk because they can pass the virus to their fetuses, resulting in a variety of birth defects.

Those include microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with undersized skulls and brains. The World Health Organization declared Zika a global health emergency in February 2016.

Most conventional mosquito traps capture all comers — moths, flies, other mosquito varieties — leaving a pile of specimens for entomologists to sort through. The Microsoft machines differentiate insects by measuring a feature unique to each species: the shadows cast by their beating wings. When a trap detects an Aedes aegypti in one of its 64 chambers, the door slams shut.

The machine “makes a decision about whether to trap it,” said Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft engineer who is developing the device.

The Houston tests, begun last summer, showed the traps could detect Aedes aegypti and other medically important mosquitoes with 85 percent accuracy, Jackson said.

The machines also record shadows made by other insects as well as environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity. The data can be used to build models to predict where and when mosquitoes are active.

Mustapha Debboun, director of Harris County’s mosquito and vector control division, said the traps save time and give researchers more insight into mosquito behavior.

“For science and research, this is a dream come true,” he said.

The traps are prototypes now. But Microsoft’s Jackson said the company eventually hopes to sell them for a few hundred dollars each, roughly the price of conventional traps. The goal is to spur wide adoption, particularly in developing countries, to detect potential epidemics before they start.

“What we hope is [the traps] will allow us to bring more precision to public health,” Jackson said.

Sorting mosquitoes with robots

Other companies, meanwhile, are developing technology to shrink mosquito populations by rendering male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes sterile. When these sterile males mate with females in the wild, their eggs don’t hatch.

The strategy offers an alternative to chemical pesticides.

But it requires the release of millions of laboratory-bred mosquitoes into the outdoors. Males don’t bite, which has made this an easier sell to places now hosting tests.

Oxitec, an Oxford, England-based division of Germantown, Maryland-based Intrexon Corp, is creating male mosquitoes genetically modified to be sterile. It has already deployed them in Brazil, and is seeking regulatory approval for tests in Florida and Texas.

MosquitoMate, a startup formed by researchers at the University of Kentucky, is using a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia to render male mosquitoes sterile.

One of the biggest challenges is sorting the sexes.

At MosquitoMate’s labs in Lexington, immature mosquitoes are forced through a sieve-like mechanism that separates the smaller males from the females. These mosquitoes are then hand sorted to weed out any stray females that slip through.

“That’s basically done using eyeballs,” said Stephen Dobson, MosquitoMate’s chief executive.

Enter Verily. The company is automating mosquito sorting with robots to make it faster and more affordable. Company officials declined to be interviewed. But on its website, Verily says it’s combining sensors, algorithms and “novel engineering” to speed the process.

Verily and MosquitoMate have teamed up to test their technology in Fresno, California, where Aedes aegypti arrived in 2013.

Officials worry that residents who contract Zika elsewhere could spread it in Fresno if they’re bitten by local mosquitoes that could pass the virus to others.

“That is very much of a concern because it is the primary vector for diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and obviously Zika,” said Steve Mulligan, manager of the Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District in Fresno County.

The study, which still needs state and federal approval, is slated for later this summer.
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