Indian researchers find the pathway to cancer

BANGALORE, Indian Researchers have achieved a breakthrough, identifying a protein pathway that triggers cancer in the human body owing to its erratic behaviour.

Researchers at Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) led by Satyajit Mayor and Neha Vyas have identified what is known as the Hedgehog pathway and the ways in which it forms and leads to cancer. The researchers, who have published their work in the journal, Cell, say this pathway is formed when the proteins (called hedgehog), which are separate, get drawn to each other by electrostatic interactions between amino acids present around the proteins.

A small cluster of proteins then gets formed and goes on to form a mega-cluster. This travels to other cells and creates effects that are good or bad — the cluster could be normal and help organ regeneration or tissue repair, or the cluster could get hyperactive and affect other cells, which is the sign that cancer is coming.

Simply put, the NCBS research indicates that hyperactivity of the hedgehog proteins within the human body can cause cancer and that its cluster formation has to be prevented to eliminate the possibility of hyperactivity entirely.

“Identifying the initial step that initiates the electrostatic attraction between amino acids that bring together hedgehog proteins in a cluster might help other scientists to design an anti-cancer drug that could stall a mutant hedgehog pathway in effective ways,” Said Neha. Such a drug could target the very source of these attractions — the amino acids that cause them — which are the first cause of cancer.

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NIH's Funding Boost to Support Grants

The National Institutes of Health will allow the average award value of competing grants for fiscal 2008 to increase by three percent for fiscal 2009, in line with the three percent increase the institutes received under this year's budget appropriation from Congress, NIH said this week.

NIH is predicting that this year's appropriation of $30.3 billion from the omnibus spending bill will allow its institutes and centers (ICs) to support approximately 9,800 new and competing research project grants.

The ICs are expected to maintain the average number of new investigators as it did in the five most recent years, and to continue to use the NIH Director's Innovator Awards and the NIH Pathway to Independence awards within the common fund.

The ICs also are expected to continue to use the NIH Director's Bridge Award Program, which gives continued but limited funding to meritorious investigators whose applications were close to the funding range of the relevant IC, but which have little support from elsewhere. That program will provide up to one year's funding across NIH in order to "help balance the grant cycling variation challenges and support other approaches to sustain established grantees and first time competing renewals."

NIH also said that the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Awards will support a one percent increase in fiscal 2009 in all stipend levels.

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Pioneering Biomedical Web Community Poised For Leap To Web 3.0

The Alzheimer Research Forum (http://www.alzforum.org), a dynamic, biomedical Web community that is heavily used by Alzheimer researchers around the world, is preparing to migrate to a new platform that will enable it to more fully exploit social networking ("Web 2.0") and the Semantic Web ("Web 3.0"). Founded 13 years ago when the Web was still in its infancy, the "Alzforum" has more than 5,000 registered members and is familiar to most Alzheimer scientists in the world.

Ever since launching in 1996, the Alzforum Web site has been interactive, posting researchers' comments on published papers and research news. The site has published thousands of peer commentaries and mini-reviews by leading scientists in the field, and has established itself as the "go to" Web site for anyone who wished to be up to date on Alzheimer research. Members can post commentaries on any journal article or news story, and can participate in live discussion forums. Researchers frequently reference Alzforum in scientific papers and conduct weekly "Alzforum" sessions in their labs to discuss current findings. The AlzGene database, designed and curated by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and developed and hosted by Alzforum, is a workhorse of the global genetic community, and has generated a primary research publication in Nature Genetics. Alzforum has built numerous other data resources for the research community.

This spring, Alzforum will re-develop its site using the Scientific Collaboration Framework (SCF), a project based on open-source Drupal technology that is designed for building scientific Web communities. SCF was piloted by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute to build a Web publication called StemBook (www.stembook.org). Alzforum will develop some new software modules in Drupal and contribute them back to the SCF, where they will be freely available for other research organizations that are building their own Web communities. (SCF software is available at http://www.sciencecollaboration.org).

SCF is well-suited for publishing articles, comments, forums and blogs, and for managing member communities with fine degrees of editorial control. "We want it to be very easy for anyone to participate, but it's also essential for our editors to vet all postings in order to maintain civil and productive discourse," says Alzforum's co-founder and Executive Editor June Kinoshita.

A feature of SCF that Alzforum's editors are excited about is a semantic tagging module that locates scientific terms within an article, such as names of genes, organisms, and biological processes, and proposes them as tags that describe key concepts in the article. The tags enable the user to search other content with matching or related tags, so that an article about a gene can be automatically linked to a description of the gene, to articles about the gene, and even to the profiles of scientists who study that gene.

"The possibilities this opens up for scientists to navigate a knowledge network of articles, databases, and people is amazing," says Kinoshita. "And all of the Web communities that share the SCF platform will be interconnected. Alzforum has always been about building a research community without walls. Using the SCF, we will take this idea to a whole other level."

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Molecular Connections Launches XTractor Premium for Effective Knowledge Management and real time access to Biomedical data

Bangalore, India — Indian Life Sciences Informatics Company, Molecular Connections announced today, the launch of XTractor Premium (www.xtractor.in/premium), a new Knowledge Management Platform designed to enable Pharmaceutical Companies, Researchers, Scientists identify, verify and develop predictive relationships from PubMed Literature.

“The release of XTractor Premium reflects the evolution of our client’s knowledge management needs and our continued commitment to provide knowledge solutions which add value & bring better efficiencies in Drug discovery,” said Jignesh Bhate CEO Molecular Connections.

Leveraging the ability to transform DATA to KNOWLEDGE to assist experts is crucial to the success of drug development today. XTractor Premium offers several enhancements over the beta version in managing large volume of published biomedical data to accelerate decision making in drug discovery.

Data Search: One would be able to perform searches over the entire XTractor knowledgebase of 120600 relationships on proteins, drugs, biological process and diseases (which is ever growing). On an average more than 600 manually annotated facts get added to XTractor everyday, thus it is the ONLY Knowledgebase that gets updated everyday with manually annotated relationships from the latest PUBMED publications. 733 Unique Drugs, 2254 Unique Diseases, 7626 Unique Proteins, 1449 Unique Biological Processes. Hence in no time one gets to access one of the largest and the most current manually annotated datasets across the world.

Semantic Search Features: The first of its kind highly advanced search feature, where in one could query the XTractor Knowledgebase using multiple ontologies. This would enable one to narrow down on the targets at ease.

Concept Linking: Construct hypothesis from multiple abstracts and discover new facts and relationships, which are hitherto not easily decipherable.

Bibliographic search: Would also enable one to search based on author, organization or country.

Save, Export and Visualize: Provides the utility to save and export data in user-friendly formats. Integration with CytoScape provides better knowledge representation and visualization.

All these Premium Features are available via four licensing options; Academic, Commercial, Governmental and Onsite Installation. XTractor Premium is now available with an Attractive Introductory Offer for Academic Researchers. Subscribe now and save! Visit www.xtractor.in/premium for more details.

Currently, XTractor’s user base includes Abbott, AstraZeneca, Bayerhealthcare, Celera, Cephalon, GSK, JNJ, Novartis, Pfizer, P&G, Wyeth, Vertex, USFDA, NIH, NCI, MD Anderson, Harvard Medical School, Max Planck, Scripps Inst. and many more.

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XTractor Premium, a platform for discovery, analysis and modeling of published biomedical facts. The application also comes with XTractor Premium Knowledgebase, the only knowledgebase, which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis.

To know more about the advantages of the XTractor Premium and to register for a free trial account and a webex demo please visit XTractor Premium portal www.xtractor.in/premium.

About Molecular Connections

Molecular Connections is a pioneering In silico Discovery Services Company. It provides high quality, cost effective curation, literature informatics solutions and annotation services as well as products. Dr. Limsoon Wong is the Chairman of Molecular Connections. Customers of Molecular Connections include leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology, drug discovery, genomics, proteomics, medical technology, equipment companies and academic institutions spanning across the globe. In addition, Molecular Connections has powerful tool development, database integration, effective data visualization capabilities, specific expertise in building knowledge bases for rapidly growing needs in, ADME Tox, clinical, drugs, chemistry and patent industries. For more information write to us at xtractorpremium@molecularconnections.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Gel for Controlled Drug Delivery

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have demonstrated that a gel composed of small, woven protein fragments can successfully carry and release proteins of different sizes, potentially enabling the delivery of drugs such as insulin and trastuzumab (Herceptin).

Researchers can control the rate of release by changing the density of the gel, allowing for continuous drug delivery over a specific period of time. The team is led by Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering.

The gel, known as a "nanofiber hydrogel scaffold," enables a gradual release of the proteins from the gel over hours, days or even months. The gel itself is eventually broken down into harmless amino acids - the building blocks of proteins. Peptide hydrogels are ideally suited for drug delivery as they are pure, easy to design and use, non-toxic, non-immunogenic, bio-absorbable, and can be locally applied to a particular tissue.

Composed of self-assembling amino acid chains (peptides), the gel is about 99 percent water by volume. Depending on the size and density of the mesh, it can carry protein molecules between 14,000 and 150,000 daltons (a unit of molecular weight). Trastuzumab, an antibody protein often used to treat breast and ovarian cancer under the brand name Herceptin, is about 50,000 daltons. Researchers also showed that proteins carried by the gel emerge unscathed after delivery, with no adverse affect on their function.

Potential applications include delivery of insulin, monoclonal antibodies such as Herceptin, hormones, growth factors and cancer drugs, as well as eye medications.

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Roche to Buy German Cell Analysis Company

Roche has reached an agreement with Innovatis to buy the cell analysis company for €15 million ($19.5 million), the Swiss life sciences firm said today. Roche said that the acquisition of the Bielefeld, Germany-based company, which focuses on automated cell analysis solutions including cell counting, viability testing, and cell function, fits with its strategy to strengthen its cell research market offerings.

Innovatis will become a fully integrated part of Roche Applied Science, and it will develop and market its products through that part of Roche's diagnostics division. Roceh said that Innovatis' technology will complement its existing cell analysis products and is synergistic with its xCelligence technology, which was launched last year.

"Roche has been one of our key customers for many years, in particular since the successful development of our cell analysis technology over 10 years ago," Innovatis CEO Michael Grohmann said in a statement. Roche said it expects the deal to close in a few weeks, after it receives approval from shareholders and is cleared by regulators.

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23andMe-Led Team Offers Program to Enroll Parkinson's Patients

The personal genetics service firm 23andMe, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, and the Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center announced yesterday that they are enrolling 10,000 people to be part of a new Parkinson's disease community. The effort is aimed at establishing the resources necessary for future genome-wide association studies and other research initiatives.

In an effort to entice individuals with Parkinson's disease to participate, 23andMe is slashing the price of its service from $399 to $25 for a limited time for up to 10,000 individuals with Parkinson's disease who sign up through the Parkinson's Institute or the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is married to 23andMe co-founder Ann Wojcicki, will ante up an undisclosed amount of cash to subsidize the genotyping costs.

To be eligible, individuals must have physician-diagnosed Parkinson's disease and agree to provide saliva samples and fill out online surveys about their condition. Members of the Parkinson's community will also have access to the complete 23andMe Personal Genome Service. Current 23andMe customers who do not have the disease can participate as healthy controls in the project by voluntarily filling out the company's Parkinson's disease survey.

The latest research project is distinct from a collaboration between the same organizations announced last spring, Rachel Cohen, manager of communications at 23andMe. Cohen said that effort was specifically aimed at developing web-based diagnostic tools for Parkinson's disease, whereas the latest project is aimed at making sure they have individuals with Parkinson's disease on board for research efforts.

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• The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users
  
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