In ten years the English have tripled their rates of Type II diabetes–and expect the trend to continue. A new study, to the tune of a million English pounds, is being conducted through the University of Bristol (and others) to test how much better patients will get by increasing exercise levels. One of three groups of newly diagnosed Type II diabetics will begin wearing monitors to gauge how much exercise they get each day. The study will compare results for those treated with dietary advice alone, dietary plus exercise, and the “usual care” routine.

A friend goes to a holistic treatment guy who has managed to get her off lifelong allergy medicines and out of decades-long chronic pain. One of the secrets is reducing sugar to an absolute minimum. And she says how incredibly hard that is–because almost everything that goes through any processing at all gets corn syrup or some derivative added to it. That’s everything from bread to soups–let alone the obviously sugar-laden items on our shelves.

This makes sense–because it’s hard to believe the incredible rise in obesity is due simply to the fact that people all over the world are eating so much more than ever.

Like so many regions that finally realize the economic impact of the bioscience industry, much passion from many people has gone into wanting to make Northeast Ohio attractive to those organizations. Now, according to a Plain Dealer article today, somebody’s putting the money where the talk is.

Congratulations to these four (all but one of which are consortia of other organizations) for receiving money from the Fund for Our Economic Future (itself a collaboration of more than 50 different funding organizations in the region):

• BioEnterprise (includes Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals)
• JumpStart Inc. (the merger of CWRU’s Enterprise Development Inc. NEOpreneur Inc. (a NorTech group), and NEOpreneur Exchange and is supposed to support promising entrepreneurs and start-up companies in the region)
• NorTech (stands for Northeast Ohio Technology Coalition and replaced Cleveland Tomorrow’s Technology Leadership Council and is intended to promote science and technology businesses)
• Team NEO (the Greater Akron Chamber, Stark Development Board, Lorain County Chamber of Commerce, Regional Chamber, Cleveland Tomorrow and the Greater Cleveland Growth Association fosters a regional approach to economic development)

Thanks to the Plain Dealer for explaining who all these groups are; the rapid shapeshifting of power and influence centers in the region has been hard for some of us to track. But any way you look at it, this is a lot of firepower to aim at a goal. If it can overcome issues about regionalism and sharing–which a healthy dose of funding may go a long way towards solving–the region is well positioned to take a lead in the battle to be a star arena for bioscience.

We tend to focus too much on giving medicine when we don’t have all the information about why the body is behaving in certain ways. Here’s more on why it’s not good to give hypertensive medication to people who’ve just had a stroke (from the July 27 issue of Neurology).

The body has the wisdom of the ages. Listening carefully, we can learn better how to honor that wisdom.

Neurology

This article talks about a new approach for treating obesity. When I read this my ears perked up.

Leptin triggers production of the active form of a peptide – áMSH – in the hypothalamus (controls hunger and metabolism). Researchers say this peptide, or small protein, is a powerful messenger that tells the brain to burn calories. Then we get into another peptide that works on the pituitary gland, which talks to the thyroid which then spreads the word to ask the body’s cells to produce more energy.

The reason I was so intrigued–never mind that I’d love to learn why it’s so hard to lose weight–was the “peptide” part. Read a book a couple of years ago by a fairly well known researcher called Candace Pert who (if I remember this correctly) confirmed the existence of neuropeptides (click, click, there’s that word) as the (stay with me here) place where emotions reside.

This is another one of those eerie moments where hard science and pscyhology collide. (And if we’re not careful, we might find religion in there somewhere, too.) Anyhow, the players on this one are pretty impressive: Brown Medical School and Rhode Island Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

The African continent is ravaged by deadly diseases, yet in 20 years no new preventive medicines have been developed. Now researchers there are partnering with the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCCTP) to hasten evaluating and testing therapeutic and preventive medicines for malaria, TB and HIV and Aids. The hope is that new medicines will be developed and that investigators and institutions in Africa will have acquired new systems for continuing testing on their own in the future.

I had the privilege of editing the 2002 Annual Report of the GLOBAL FUND to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It would be so nice to think that I had some small part in helping this partnership happen.

Endocrinology

Insmed, a biopharmaceutical company located in Virginia’s Biotechnology Research Park, makes a proprietary delivery compound of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) bound to its primary binding protein, IGFBP-3. Administered by injection, it’s amazingly versatile; it can:  improve blood sugar levels and reduce insulin use in diabetics, improve muscle rebuilding and reduce inflammation in burns, and improve functional recovery and bone mineral density in hip fractures. SomatoKine(R) is now in Phase III clinical trial to help kids with a severe growth disorder–and results are positive.

Insmed’s website has a page where you can get information on licensing, partnering or developing a research collaboration with them.

The debate on how to get ahead in bioscience rages.

An article in today’s Chinese People’s Daily Online says scientists are being told to look for the area where they can take the lead. A professor at Connecticut State University, Yang Xiangzhong urged attendees at a conference in Beijing to focus on embryo technology and cloning. He told them that Americans are going slowly in this area because of ethical and religious disapproval and thus their research is done largely with animals, while China has the advantage of being able to conduct human therapeutic cloning.

Oh, and today’s Washington Post announces that proponents of stem cell research are entering the political fight for the White House.

IBM has just announced a new software solution that “enables research institutions and biopharmaceutical companies across the world to integrate, store, analyze and better understand genotypic and phenotypic data for medical research and patient care.”

The gist of it is that they capture–and de-identify (a new word for the modern security-conscious HIPAA age)–data from existing hospital and research systems, store data from healthcare institutions and diagnostic labs, then centralize it all to yield the opportunity for research on steroids.

Thanks to a tip from an internationally known economic development guru Don Iannone of EdFutures located in Northeast Ohio, we’ve added a link in the Resources area. When you click on “News and Tips for Locating in Europe” you’ll be taken to a site called Techlocate where you can find, oddly enough, news about and tips for locating your life science company–or a branch thereof–in Europe. Imagine…

Hoping to post here an automatically updated list of the interviews we conduct with people who make connections. They’ll be appearing on another site, but I’d like you to be able to link from here. So I hope to get the Atom feed from that site , but right now it’s getting too late to think that much.

Anyway, here are the first two interviews: Mike Burke of Trek Diagnostics, and Steve Goldberg of NEOBio.