Attended a lively event last night in which biomed researchers and device manufacturers got together to show off their specialties in neurology. Cleveland Medical Device owner Bob Schmidt hosted the NEOBio event at his company’s facilities in the midtown area of Cleveland–a formerly rundown area that’s being renovated with the help of federal Empowerment Zone funds and the commitment of many business owners.

We heard fascinating stories about what’s being done–what’s actually out there being used to make human lives easier for those who suffer injuries and disease–and what they’re studying to create for the future. Most inspiring. I’ll be featuring a few of the companies/researchers I met starting later this week.

It’s great to see people out there just doing it. Met a woman who’s been around the Cleveland science scene a long time–and she remembered when Bob Schmidt and others were starving trying to get going. Good to know that determination and good ideas together do survive.

“The benefits of maintaining hope” is one of the topics to be presented by a neurosurgeon at a daylong conference for brain tumor patients and caregivers to be held October 23 at Cedars-Sinai, an academic medical center that both treats patients and conducts research. Another topic, mixed in with all the drugs and radiation and other harsher treatments to be discussed, is alternative medicine.

It’s encouraging to see these hints that western medical minds are growing ever more open to the mind/body connection. It won’t be long until it’s so mainstream that you’ll have these approaches as options at every doctor visit and every hospital stay…

But that’s still a long way off.

More people survive heart attacks in Seattle, WA and Edmonton, Canada: “the survival rate for cardiac arrest is three times as high in Edmonton as in Ottawa: 9 per cent versus 2.7 per cent, even though response times by emergency workers such as firefighters and paramedics are virtually identical in the two cities.” The difference is how many people in the street know how to administer CPR–and are willing to do it.

I didn’t realize that survival rates for cardiac arrest were so poor (only 2.5 to about 12 percent in the Canadian provinces where the study was done). Surprisingly, the latest U.S. stats from the American Heart Association (2001) look different. They indicate that 1 out of every 5 deaths in the U.S. is from coronary heart disease (that’s the clogged arteries variety of heart problem), but that 42% of those who have an attack die, and that another 13-plus million people are living with angina (chest pain due to coronary heart disease).

The Globe article says most people who have a heart attack are alone–meaning they won’t survive–but that applying CPR raises by 4 times the chance of surviving, and then using a defibrillator raises survival rates by 3 times. (Idle thought: I wonder if so few people survive heart attacks in Canada because it’s just not as densely populated–so more people are alone when it happens?)

I can see where if the device people could make defibrillators smaller and package them to be impervious to weather (well, and theft), they could be installed in every public building and on the street, kind of like fireplugs. The citizens could be trained in the use of these things and–even if they weren’t willing to apply CPR (in this day of HIV fears and so on, many people wouldn’t dream of touching a stranger’s lips for any reason)–they could use the defibrillator.

Of course, if the victim lives, then the victim has to decide is he or she wants to go through all the risky business of surgery–where long-term survival rates are still somewhat low. What would a few extra years be worth to you? Could be miraculous in a case where you realized there were things you still wanted to do and then you did them.

Northeast Ohio is one of many areas jockeying for position in the bioscience war. And it has some pretty sophisticated players doing some very interesting things.

Coming up soon is a new networking event that looks unique. The non-profit group NEOBio is holding its first Special Interest Group for the Neurological Area (Neurology, Neurosurgery, Neuroscience, and Sleep) and they’re “prototyping the format” for other SIGs. Here’s how they’re working it:

5:00-5:30 PM Registration and Networking

5:30-6:00 PM Welcome and 30 second introductions of each of the participants

6:00-6:45 PM Researchers bring posters to tape to the wall. Company and capital participants will view research posters.

6:45-7:30 PM Companies bring posters to tape to the wall. Researchers and capital participants will view company posters.

7:30-8:00 PM Networking

Instead of a boring trade show where people stand around and hope you eventually drift by their booth, here we’ve got a dynamic constantly moving event where everyone is fully engaged in taking in new information throughout the evening. This format shows tremendous respect for the participants’ accomplishments as well as for their time and energy.

Great way to get players in the same specialty to know one another. It’ll be interesting to see how it works and if any tweaking takes place.

Even as tens of states jump into the fray to win the lion’s share of bioscience revenues, it looks like they might actually be working together in a few ways. A North Carolina company came up with the idea of converting old school buses into traveling science labs to educate kids. Now Ohio’s bioscience organizations are hankering to be one of the first customers (after Connecticut’s Bioscience Center and Boston University). The mastermind says “spending a few hours aboard a mobile lab, no matter how high-tech, is hardly enough to start building the kind of work force that bioscience companies need.” But the organization claims the biobus,” as it’s called, makes a great marketing tool.

Seems to be that it’s particularly hard for scientists to admit that marketing is as important to their success as it to any other business. The “pure science” attitude was instilled in them during their studies and it’s hard to drop it now–when as owners of companies they simply can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.

And it’ll be interesting to see whether, even when they admit how important marketing is, they can muster up any respect for the folks who market for a living…

Altor’s Phase I grant was used to develop fusion proteins made up of a T-cell antigen receptor (TCR) linked to interleukin-2 (IL-2), an approved anti-cancer cytokine. Altor’s approach uses the TCR to guide IL-2 to the tumor site where the cytokine can stimulate the immune system to attack the cancerous cells. Altor has found that the STAR/IL-2 fusion exhibits improved pharmacokinetics and potent anti-tumor activity when compared with IL-2 in several different experimental metastases and primary tumor models. The Phase II grant will make it possible for Altor to complete its preclinical evaluations and finalize manufacturing processes for production of the STAR/IL-2 fusion protein for human clinical testing.”

Let’s non-scientists look a little closer at what they’re working on with that money.

– T-cells control immune system reactions.

– Antigens are substances that cause your immune system to react–and then they interact, or combine, with the substance your system produces.

– Cytokines are proteins (like interleukin 2) that cells release which then affect how cells act–or interact.

– Fusion protein is an organic compound that’s formed within a cell when the genetic information from two genes is combined and expressed (i.e., translated).

So, okay, I think this means the T-cell links with one kind of protein to form a another protein that tells the immune system to attack a tumor.

Whew. Sounds like it’s worth the million dollars from National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health. As our science grows ever more sophisticated, our ability to duplicate substances and direct actions in the body will only expand. This is one way we will all begin to see what many quantum physicists have begun to think–the impossibility of explaining how things happen at the subatomic level is leading many of them to conclude…there really is a God.

Recent tests showed people with mild Alzheimer’s made more errors on a driving test that required them to follow a route in a new area. Researchers concluded: “The mental demands of following verbal instructions and navigating a new route can compete with drivers’ cognitive resources and potentially impair their driving abilities.”

Combine this discovery with the increasing sophistication of identification technologies (for example, northeast Ohio company Cardinal Commerce partners globally with credit card companies to verify identities of cardholders when the card is not present), and you could imagine a future in which you might take your driver’s tests every year, and if you showed signs of impairment, be assigned a license that would only allow you to drive in certain areas, certain times of the day, etc.

The corresponding technology in the car would make it refuse to start if it was night (if you were only licensed to drive in the day), or say, warn you that you had driven outside your range… “You must turn back into your range. Otherwise, your engine will shut down in 5 minutes.” Then if you didn’t turn around, maybe you’d punch a wireless connection in the dashboard to notify some preprogrammed numbers (your kids or friends) of your location.

Or alternatively, maybe you’d have certain signs or lights flashing in the back of your car based on your driving limitations…

Oh, it sounds pretty horrible. But then, progress sometimes does look that way.

Once again we look at a situation that in some ways, we have created ourselves by inventing and applying treatments that keep patients alive long past previously “normal” expected survival times. This time it’s lupus victims (the disease afflicts mostly women, often starting in their child-bearing years) who, scientists are finding, are increasingly suffering brain damage and dementia as they grow older —but not “linked to expected causes, such as stroke or inflammation.” Recent work is focusing on how the newly discovered receptor crosses the blood brain barrier to have access to healthy neurons in the brain.

Aside from the physical suffering patients must live with, the costs to society of this disease are considerable. According to one source, lupus accounts for more than 100,000 hospital admissions in the U.S. each year, averaging 10 days and about $20,000 per visit. Kidney dialysis costs more than $40,000 per year in the U.S. Hip replacement surgery, which many lupus patients must have because of the side effects of high-dose corticosteroid therapy, costs about $30,000 per hip operation. Published research says lupus patients lose between 30 and 100 workdays per year. For more information on new lupus treatments, check out Medline.

The S.F. Mayor is calling a special conference to discuss stem cell research, and he’s timing it to coincide with the pre-election hoopla that will include Proposition 71. “Proposition 71 on the upcoming November ballot is the biggest attempt by a U.S. state to create a

massive medical research effort,” according to this article in The Examiner. The proposition is asking for $3 billion in human embryonic stem cell research grants and wants to create a state medical research institute, the “California Institute for Regenerative Medicine” with a 29-person governing body of “independent citizens.”

The conference is an effort to put San Francisco in the front lines of the battle for the California bioscience honeypot of $7.8 billion in revenues. The San Francisco Bay Area, says the article, is “where biotechnology was born, venture capitalist money is abundant and The City’s scientific research campus, Mission Bay, lies waiting for new tenants.” The city is even giving new companies payroll tax breaks and easing permit and regulatory red tape.

This battle for favorite son, so to speak, is getting fiercer every week. City governments are getting ever more creative about how to come out ahead. Let’s look at what a bioscience company normally wants:

– easy access to resources (physical and human)

– large pools of suitably educated workers from which to hire, and re-hire, solid employees

– other companies for employees that don’t work out to go to for new learning

– other like-minded companies to network and potentially partner with

– affordable housing for employees of all levels

– superior quality of life for owners, executives and workers

So if all these things are equal (which seldom happens, of course), then it’s about who gets the most creative with incentives (who uses better marketing techniques). Based on all the wisdom of social networking, my guess is that for most business owners, the quality of life will rise to the top as the biggest decision factor (though clearly if everything else is right and owners are persuaded to move somewhere, the quality of life in that location could well improve dramatically just from that influx).

But the key is, if city marketing tricks are powerful enough, the decision could be swayed. This is how marketing makes the world go round.

In Italy, where the Catholic Church holds much sway, researchers have found a way to circumvent the moral objections to storing and/or disposing of extra embryos from IVF procedures. They are freezing eggs–before fertilization–and then thawing and fertilizing them on call. So far 13 healthy kids have been born this way.

“Betterhumans > Frozen Eggs Hatch Healthy Children” reads the headline. Still experimental and used mainly for women whose eggs are under threat from some extreme situation (like chemotherapy), the procedure needs to be improved to yield more reliable results. But think of the possibilities. Women who know they want to delay motherhood may be able to freeze their eggs while they are young and most fertile and then become pregnant on their own schedule. I can totally see this in the future. It sure fits the way the world is headed in so many other respects–human beings controlling processes formerly thought to be completely up to the vagaries of nature.

Teeth not white enough? Get strips–or if you’ve got the money, pay the dentist to do it.

Don’t like the shape of your body? Get implants. Or liposuction.

Not convenient to get pregnant? Visit the doctor, have your eggs extracted and frozen and have a baby whenever you want.

Possible abuse? Certainly. Every scientific advancement has the capability of being abused. Atomic energy was this great advance–look how many people were bombed to oblivion. But the truth is, once the ability to do these things exists, people will do them. And thus raise more of those questions that have never had to be asked before.

But think back to organ donations–the idea used to raise hackles. Now it’s almost de rigeur–people check off a box on their drivers’ licenses, for heavens sake. Heck, think back to when the world was supposed to be flat–and people were executed for saying otherwise.

Progress in bioscience is inevitable; our spirits and mores are sometimes slower to follow.