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Clinical Studies Validate Cancer Gene Delivery Platform: Landmark Publication Confirms Rexin-G Effectively Targets Metastatic Cancers
Epeius Biotechnologies stuns the medical and scientific communities with a dramatic demonstration of single-agent efficacy with its lead product, Rexin-G, for metastatic cancer. The landmark article (accessible online as of June 16, 2009 in Molecular Therapy, the Official Journal of The American Society of Gene Therapy, documents the results of two related studies using Rexin-G, a tumor-targeted anti-cancer agent designed to seek-out and destroy metastatic cancers that have spread throughout the body, while sparing normal cells and healthy tissues and organs. Following the FDA"s designation of Rexin-G as an Orphan Drug for the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma and osteosarcoma in 2008, the results of these two independent studies represent a major step toward gaining Accelerated Approval of Rexin-G for osteosarcoma in the United States.
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Families Of Sudden Unexplained Death Victims Should Receive Comprehensive Cardiogenetic Testing
Relatives of a young person who dies suddenly should always be referred for cardiological and genetic examination in order to identify if they too are at risk of sudden death, a scientist told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics. Dr. Christian van der Werf, a research fellow at the Department of Cardiogenetics, Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands said that, although his team"s research showed that inherited heart disease was present in over 30% of the families of sudden unexplained death (SUD) victims, the majority of such relatives were currently not being referred for examination.
News of the day
Obama To Review Court Picks Over Weekend
President Obama on Wednesday said he would review potential Supreme Court nominees to replace retiring Justice David Souter over the weekend, prompting those involved with the process to believe he will make an announcement within days, the Washington Post reports. Obama was speaking to a group of senators that included Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and the committee"s ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). According to White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs, Obama told the senators that he "would choose a nominee who respects the Constitution and judicial precedent and also has the good judgment and common sense to reach fair decisions" (Murray, Washington Post, 5/14). Although a list of six to eight potential names has been circulating in public, a White House official said an official pick is not likely to be announced before Memorial Day (Weisman, Wall Street Journal, 5/14).During the meeting, the president also urged senators to act quickly during the confirmation hearing so the new justice is confirmed prior to the court"s next session, which begins in October. Obama told Reid that the goal was to hold the confirmation vote before the Senate leaves for its summer recess, for which the official adjournment date is Aug. 7 (Washington Post, 5/14). However, Republican members at the meeting "poured cold water on that idea," the Journal reports. According to McConnell, 60 days usually passes between the naming of a nominee and the first confirmation hearing in the Judiciary Committee. According to the Journal, Obama is aiming to avoid partisan controversy over the summer and "ease his choice onto the court." Obama "got a lift" from Sessions during the meeting when the senator indicated that a filibuster attempt is not in the works, the Journal reports (Weisman, Wall Street Journal, 5/14).Court Watchers Say Next Pick Likely To Be a WomanWhile there has been much speculation on who will be nominated, court watchers have said Souter"s successor likely will be a woman, as the "lack of women [on the court] is widely perceived as the gap that most needs to be addressed," the Journal reports. Advocates for a female nominee argue that the need for a woman on the court is not only a matter of perception. Hannah Brenner, executive director of the University of Texas Center for Women in Law, said that the U.S. and the court benefit from justices with differing experiences and viewpoints. She added that "there is no one who can argue there is not (an) overwhelming number of qualified women who could be nominated to the court" (Forsyth, Wall Street Journal, 5/14).NPR"s "All Things Considered" reports that a list of potential nominees circulating in the public includes the following names: Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals judge in New York; Diane Wood of Chicago"s federal appeals court; Elena Kagan, the new solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean; Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D); and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Merrick Garland of the Washington, D.C., federal appeals court is the only male included on the list. The "triumvirate mentioned most often" is Sotomayor, Wood and Kagan, "All Things Considered" reports (Totenberg, "All Things Considered," NPR, 5/13).However, some critics -- namely conservatives -- say that there is danger in using gender or race as the primary criteria for selecting a nominee, arguing that such an approach could cause justices to believe they need to reflect the views of a particular group instead of act as a neutral figure. Stephen Presser, a legal historian at Northwestern University, said, "You have to be very careful of having the court be a representative body and thinking about it in political terms, because that weakens the rule of law." Deborah Rhode, director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University, said that studies show a justice"s legal ideology to be a greater predictor of decisions than his or
Diagnostics

A Swiss Army Knife For Nanomedicine: All-In-One Nanoparticle

Nanoparticles are being developed to perform a wide range of medical uses -- imaging tumors, carrying drugs, delivering pulses of heat. Rather than settling for just one of these, researchers at the University of Washington have combined two nanoparticles in one tiny package. The result is the first structure that creates a multipurpose nanotechnology tool for medical imaging and therapy. The structure is described in a paper published online this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "This is the first time that a semiconductor and metal nanoparticles have been combined in a way that preserves the function of each individual component," said lead author Xiaohu Gao, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. The current focus is on medical applications, but the researchers said multifunctional nanoparticles could also be used in energy research, for example in solar cells. Quantum dots are fluorescent balls of semiconductor material just a few nanometers across, a small fraction of the wavelength of visible light (a nanometer is 1-millionth of a centimeter). At this tiny scale, quantum dots" unique optical properties cause them to emit light of different colors depending on their size. The dots are being developed for medical imaging, solar cells and light-emitting diodes. Glowing gold nanoparticles have been used since ancient times in stained glass; more recently they are being developed for delivering drugs, for treating arthritis and for a type of medical imaging that uses infrared light. Gold also reradiates infrared heat and so could be used in medical therapies to cook nearby cells. But combine a quantum dot and a gold nanoparticle, and the effects disappear. The electrical fields of the particles interfere with one another and so neither behaves as it would on its own. The two have been successfully combined on a surface, but never in a single particle. The paper describes a manufacturing technique that uses proteins to surround a quantum dot core with a thin gold shell held at 3 nanometers distance, so the two components" optical and electrical fields do not interfere with one another. The quantum dot likely would be used for fluorescent imaging. The gold sphere could be used for scattering-based imaging, which works better than fluorescence in some situations, as well as for delivering heat therapy. The manufacturing technique developed by Gao and co-author Yongdong Jin, a UW postdoctoral researcher, is general and could apply to other nanoparticle combinations, they said. "We picked a tough case," Gao said. "It is widely known that gold or any other metal will quench quantum dot fluorescence, eliminating the quantum dot"s purpose." Gao and Jin avoided this problem by building a thin gold sphere that surrounds but never touches the quantum dot. They carefully controlled the separation between the gold shell and the nanoparticle core by using chains of polymer, polyethylene glycol. The distance between the quantum dot core and charged gold ion is determined by the length of the polymer chain and can be increased with nanometer precision by adding links to the chain. On the outside layer they added short amino acids called polyhistidines, which bind to charged gold atoms. Gao compares the completed structure to a golden egg, where the quantum dot is the yolk, the gold is the shell, and polymers fill up the space of the egg white. Using ions allowed the researchers to build a 2- to 3-nanometer gold shell that"s thin enough to allow about half of the quantum dot"s fluorescence to pass through. "All the traditional techniques use premade gold nanoparticles instead of gold ions,"Gao said. "Gold nanoparticles are 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, and with factoring in roughness the thinnest coating you can build is 5-6 nanometers. Gold ions are much, much smaller." The total diameter of the combined particle is roughly 15-20 nanometers, small enough to be able to slip into a cell. Incorporating gold provides a well-established binding site to attach biological molecules that target particular cells, such as tumor cells. Gold could also potentially amplify the quantum dot"s fluorescence by five to 10 times, as it has in other cases. The gold sphere offers one further benefit. Gold is biocompatible, is medically approved and does not biodegrade. A gold shell could thus provide a durable non-toxic container for nanoparticles being used in the body, Gao said. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Seattle Foundation and the UW"s Department of Bioengineering. Hannah Hickey University of Washington


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