Besides an earlier entry on finally eliminating the use of a long-standard treatment for traumatic head injuries (more people died with it than with nothing), here comes a study testing the use of antibiotics (azithromycin) to treat coronary patients.

Scientists have long thought that a certain bacteria has something to do with causing arteriosclerosis. This test measured results from treating people who’d had some form of a heart attack. The hope was that antibiotic treatment would help prevent secondary coronary events. “The Azithromycin and Coronary Events Study (ACES) enrolled 4012 participants…in [locations across] the United States” and followed them for four years. After a year of antibiotic treatment, there was no difference in incidence between them and the control group.

This is like Thomas Edison and trying the what-was-it? three thousand things that didn’t work before he invented the light bulb. Research is a slow and painstaking process. This may have something to do with why investors are so nervous about getting into the bioscience area. High-risk, high-return–because it something hits, the payback can be enormous (ask any pharmaceutical company), but you might have to wait a lo-o-o-ng time for that to happen.

As the number of genes thought to make up a human being shrinks (from a high of 100,000 ten years ago to the current estimate of 20 to 25,000, scientists are increasingly able to hone in on particular gene and figure out what’s going on with it. Zinc “fingers” (proteins that point to and “read” specific genes) have been proven to help regrow blood vessels.Interestingly, these fingers are unique to humans–mice, rats, apes and most mammals have the same number of genes as we do, but they don’t have these zinc fingers.

The fingers are already being reproduced artificially at will and experimentation is rolling along. They’re being used to grow new blood vessels in animals–something that could bring dramatic progress to treating heart disease and associated cardiovascular ailments such as congestive heart failiure. The possibilities are exciting. “It’s a different strategy. This is using the body’s strategy as opposed to producing what you think the body needs,” says one of the scientists involved.

Yes, using the body’s natural abilities is what stem cell research is all about, too. It is promising and thrilling to learn that we humans actually can learn to work with our bodies to heal rather than inventing painful and destructive methods such as chemotherapy and radiation or horribly invasive things like open heart surgery.

Will zinc fingers one day grow new blood vessels around a set of diseased arteries–making open-heart surgery unnecessary? Will stem cells be able to grow new heart valves–obviating the need for surgery to replace them with artificial means? These ideas don’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

This item’s been reported a lot recently. A study, published in the journal Neurology, revealed that of 435 patients who got obesity surgery, 16 percent developed peripheral neuropathy (nerve damage characterized by numbness, tingling and pain) that was caused by malnutrition–a direct result of interfering with the body’s ability to absorb vitamin B-12.

Got curious about B-12 and found this on the Vegan Society‘s website:

No plant sources are reliable sources of B-12. Many vegan (no meat, eggs or dairy) foods have to be fortified. And listen to this:

Human faeces can contain significant B12. A study has shown that a group of Iranian vegans obtained adequate B12 from unwashed vegetables which had been fertilised with human manure. Faecal contamination of vegetables and other plant foods can make a significant contribution to dietary needs, particularly in areas where hygiene standards may be low. This may be responsible for the lack of aneamia due to B12 deficiency in vegan communities in developing countries.

Another good reason to file up the grill…

Parents of a little boy suffering from a tough but rare bone-marrow-blood disease called Diamond Blackfan anaemia decided to have in vitro fertilization so their doctor could conduct pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and pick the embryo that was a perfect match. Stem cells from the new baby’s umbilical cord have ended his brother’s daily regimen of shots in the stomach and nearly cured his disease.

Interestingly, the British hospital that started the procedure had to transfer the couple to Chicago to complete the work because of their government’s objection to the procedure.

Lesson 1: stem cells are capable of performing incredible transformations.

Lesson 2: Those countries that hesitate to approve these advanced healing techniques–for whatever reasons–are only delaying the inevitable and will lose ground to those that recognize and honor the powerful potential here.

U.S. naysayers, listen well.

MS is an insidious disease that afflicts 1 in 700 people in America with short-term memory loss, gradual loss of motor control and/or other neurological damage. Statistics for MS are high: 250,000 to 500,000 cases in the US (Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, NIH, 2004), and the most common type is the relapsing/remitting form. Its early stages are characterized by alternating damage and then spontaneous repair to the myelin sheath surrounding and insulating nerve fibers–which until now doctors were unable to detect until much later. Eventually the spontaneous repairing stops.

Now a relatively recent MRI advance called magnetization transfer “makes damaged tissue stand out more clearly against the backdrop of normal brain tissue.” They hope that this will eventually mean they can better evaluate treatments in clinical trials–to tell whether people might improve by reading the brain tissue.

Medical device researchers back in the lab studying how MRI works knows they’re working to improve diagnostics. But it’s got to be really gratifying to hear how those discoveries are being put to use to give people that most precious gift–hope.

Now they’re combining that amazing natural substance nitric oxide (see earlier posts) with another equally amazing, but much more well known substance aspirin (already shown to prevent certain cancers in half the cases) to slow or stop the growth of colon cancer cells.

This sounds like maybe a promising trend–identifying natural substances that can be mixed with known effective medicines to boost their power against certain diseases or conditions.

The new compound is called nitroaspirin, and studies (reported at an international conference on cancer prevention held in Seattle) have shown it to be “hundreds to thousands of times more potent than traditional aspirin.” Scientists expect to start testing on humans by the end of this year.

Seems that my earlier admonition to get the companies themselves involved is being echoed by the Minneapolis bioscience council. Formed last May, it’s now asking executives of local bioscience companies to come on board. People whose lives and financial fortunes are not intimately tied in with results will never have the same passion and commitment as those who live in the trenches everyday. Medtronic is just one of the companies being invited to come on board and basically “make the bioscience council work.” In Northeast Ohio that might translate into having successful local biomed entrepreneurs sitting on the governing bodies of–or at least advising them–the several groups (Jumpstart, NorTech, etc.) that are being given money by the conglomeration of local foundations to build the region up for bioscience.

Just as the lines are being blurred between countries with global marketing, so the lines between business and medicine and business and nonprofits are growing ever dimmer. That means big challenges and, if handled well, new opportunities.

Businesses aren’t the only ones whose ethics are up for review these days. Conflict of interest is an increasing phenomenon in bioscience because so much private money is funding research at universities–two-thirds of it in fact. Twenty years ago, one-third of research was funded privately. And now the guidelines for what constitutes “good” levels of cholesterol are being revised lower–meaning more people “need” medicine.

How do scientists avoid this? It’s the same as in business–the higher your rank, the more you tend to hang out with those who want to leverage your power to help them get what they want–in this case, a pharmaceutical company’s cholesterol-lowering drugs sold to ever more citizens.

Power and position have always been the great temptations in our world. Even the most ethical people sometimes compromise in the interests of substantial personal gain. In the bioscience “game,” the challenge to avoid this is even more important–for it’s people’s lives that are the chips with which we gamble.

Yep. Affordable networks for every business owner and every research lab, for every person in each office or conference room. Most of us have telephones in a lot of rooms, but unless you have a wireless network–including routers and cards for every computer–you can’t have Internet access for every person with a computer.

But soon you will be able to do just that without routers or cards. And I suspect it’s going to change the nature of the business day for those who can use the Internet for their work. How has having “instant” Internet access all day changed the way you conduct your day? Too much attention to email might be one way–and/or giving better customer service because you CAN respond immediately. Knowing important news more quickly is another–and maybe making better strategic decisions because of it.

Read more about why the FCC has changed its mind and BPL (broadband over powerlines) and how the competition is reacting on www.blogforbusiness.com.

It’s being said at every level. But this quote from a story in the BangorDailyNews.com website says it quite well so I’ll just include the whole thing…

“Ken Paigen, the longtime director of the Jackson Lab (a Maine bioscience lab that does IVF) and now a senior researcher there, estimates that there must be several million surplus embryos in freezers in the United States by now. ‘Using even a few hundred or a thousand of these with donors’ permission would be a breakthrough.’ He puts the matter this way: ‘Once they are no longer needed, tens or even hundreds of thousands of human embryos are destroyed every year in in vitro fertilization clinics, but by order of the president we can’t use our NIH (National Institutes of Health) support to use them for stem cell research, even when the donors want us to. This is pure hypocrisy, blocking efforts that have the potential to alleviate great human suffering. Any parent with a diabetic child, any adult with a parent suffering from Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease should be in revolt.'”

And in the same vein, Harvard researchers are now asking permission of their ethics board to clone human embryos for the express purpose of removing their stem cells for research and then destroying the blastocytes (as embryos that have not been implanted are called). Some scientists believe the cells from cloned embryos are better for research (because they are able to recreate and extract the stem cells that contain the genetic ID for specific diseases like Parkinson’s. But the President has asked Congress to expressly forbid cloning human embryos.

So, do you suppose the world is flat after all? Or will we eventually admit that this science is miraculously promising and just get going?