Category Archives: Molecular Medicine

Undergraduate students in the biological sciences honors program were informed on Wednesday afternoon that they will officially not be allowed to work in laboratories starting March 28, the deadline the University set after which all classes must be held online.

As a part of the honors program, students conduct novel, independent research and then write a formal honors thesis in a specific field of study. As a result of the disruption, participants should plan to collect as much data as possible before spring break, according to an email sent by Laura Schoenle, coordinator of undergraduate research and honors.

Even though aspects of the course will be cut short, students enrolled in Biology 4990: Independent Research in Biology, will receive full credit.

If you are enrolled in BIOG 4990, you will be able to receive full credit for the course, as we will have passed the 60% time point in the semester when we reach spring break, Schoenle wrote in an email to biological sciences honors students.

The decision was made in line with the Department of Educations guidelines for assigning credit in case of a disruption in instruction.

Although students living in off-campus housing may be inclined to continue working on their research projects, Cornell has discouraged working in research labs after March 27.

I was informed yesterday that Cornell does not want undergrads to continue working in research labs after March 27 even if you are living in off-campus housing and you plan to stay here in Ithaca, said Scott D. Emr, director of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, in an email to Weill Institute undergraduate students.

After March 27, honors students are encouraged to work with their laboratory research mentors to continue any data analysis and finish their theses remotely. The timeline for the program will remain the same, with students expected to submit their final papers to their group leader and committee for review by mid-April.

However, honors poster sessions to be held in May have been cancelled and the presentation requirement for honors will also be waived, according to Scheonle.

I realize these are challenging and stressful times. Please know that the entire university community, including the Bio Sci Honors Committee, has your best interests at heart, and respects the great efforts honors students put towards their research, Scheonle wrote.

The change in honors thesis policies sparked a variety of responses from students.

Natalie Brown 20, a Biology and Society major, works in Prof. Minglin Mas lab, biological and environmental engineering, pursuing an honors thesis project that investigates therapeutic approaches for diabetes.

I definitely understand that the decisions to cancel classes and close campus were made with consideration, but research isnt something you can just immediately pull out of, Brown said, who, like many students, acknowledged the necessity of the move while struggling to grapple with the effects of it.

Pooja Reddy 20 is a molecular and cell biology major that conducts research in Prof. Ankur Singhs lab, mechanical and aerospace engineering. For her honors thesis project, Reddy is studying how underlying health conditions, like metabolic syndrome, affect the effectiveness of vaccines.

In response to class cancellations, Reddy expressed concerns over finishing her experiments in time.

I planned on completing my experiments over the next 4 weeks to have them ready for my final thesis draft, but now I need to scramble to fit them all in two weeks, Reddy said. Having to do this while also saying goodbye to all my friends is super overwhelming and upsetting.

Claire Malkin 20, a computational biology major, works in Prof. Toshi Kawates lab, molecular medicine, studying the structure of a protein membrane receptor linked to chronic pain.

I was lucky to have just finished a lot of my data analysis so Im hoping that I can do work remotely, she said. [But] it is upsetting that we dont get to present our work, and its definitely harder to get feedback and continue work in the lab.

Even though Brown expressed frustration that many of us were planning to finish getting all of the data wed like to have during or after Spring Break, she appreciated steps being taken to accommodate undergraduates in the face of unforeseen circumstances.

I respect that measures are being taken to address the severity of this pandemic, and Im happy that we are still able to submit our theses for consideration at all, Brown said.

Whether these announced changes pertaining to biological sciences honors students will affect all undergraduate students doing research remains unclear.

For now, there is no specific guidance for students living off-campus, wrote Bill Loftus, director of administration for the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, in an email sent to students and employees at the Weill Institute on Wednesday night. Presently, we do not know if undergrads can continue working in Institute labs after April 6. We are waiting for further clarification from the University.

Prof. Julia Thom-Levy, vice provost for academic innovation, did not respond for comment by the time of publication.

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In-Person Class Cancellations Halt Undergraduate Research on Campus - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

Interested participants have until 27 April 2020 to submit abstracts for the IAEA International Conference on Molecular Imaging and Clinical PETCT (IPET-2020), to be held in Vienna, Austria, from 23 November to 27 November 2020.

The conference will focus on theranostics, a patient-centred and personalized form of care, coupling diagnostics and therapy, which enables medical professionals to focus on the specific needs of individual patients.

The meeting, in which participation is free, will include presentations as well as interactive sessions and free discussions with top experts in the field. Participants will be able to earn continuing medical education (CME) credits, and virtual attendees can officially register to the livestream and take brief quizzes using the conference app after individual sessions to earn some CME credits too. Up to 100 conference abstracts will be published on the conference webpage on iaea.org.

IPET-2020 will focus on theranostics which is a major topic in global health that allows us to provide personalized care tailored to the specific needs of the patient, said Diana Paez, Head of the Nuclear Medicine and Diagnostic Imaging Section at the IAEA. Participants will have the opportunity to attend in person, as well as virtually, to learn about advances in the field, the challenges faced by countries to address theranostic applications and future developments and trends.

IPET-2020 is the fourth conference of its kind; it follows three earlier conferences organized by the IAEA in 2007, 2011 and 2015. It will bring together about 500 nuclear medicine physicians, radiologists, oncologists and medical physicists from around the world. It will be a unique chance for nuclear medicine physicians and scientists working in all aspects of molecular imaging to showcase their research and create lasting connections with their colleagues from all over the globe, Paez said.

IPET-2020 provides a unique platform for professionals in medical imaging to come together and exchange experiences from their clinical work and learn how things are being done in different countries since theranostics is a field that is rapidly evolving and increasingly relevant for all of us globally, said Stefano Fanti, Director of the Nuclear Medicine Division at the St. Orsola-MalpighiUniversity Hospital in Bologna and lecturer for IPET-2020.

In addition to its focus on theranostic applications, IPET-2020 will cover the latest developments in imaging devices, radiopharmaceuticals and radio-guided surgery. Special sessions on ethics and leadership will provide an opportunity for participants to learn about the tools needed to prepare themselves for leadership in their respective professions.

An exhibition, where companies and professional organizations will be demonstrating their cutting-edge technologies, will take place alongside the sessions of the conference.

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Call for Papers: International Conference on Molecular Imaging and Clinical PETCT in November - International Atomic Energy Agency

Researchers from the University of Torontos Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research are working on developingantivirals that can combat thenovel coronavirus outbreak.

Led bySachdev Sidhu, a professor of molecular genetics, the team will apply their protein engineering technology to identify promising therapeutics.

We have diverse expertise on our team from across U of T and the University of Manitoba, which is renowned for its virology research, and we have already demonstrated that we can engineer proteins that inhibit MERS, a related coronavirus, says Sidhu, who, in addition to the Donnelly Centre holds cross appointments in the Faculty of Medicine and at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. We will now expand on this work to design therapeutics for COVID-19.

The team recently received almost $900,000 over two years from the federal government through a rapid funding competition announced on Feb. 10 to address the COVID-19 outbreak.

Sidhu is collaborating withRoman Melnyk, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and assistant professor of biochemistry at U of T, andBrian Mark, a structural virologist and professor at the University of Manitoba. In a 2016 proof-of-principle study withMarjolein Kikkert, a virologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, they applied a protein engineering pipeline developed by Sidhus team to create proteins that inhibit a related coronavirus that caused the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2012.

Wei Zhang, then a post-doctoral researcher in Sidhus lab and now an assistant professor at the University of Guelph,received a national innovation award for this research.

The researchers now plan to use the same strategy to battle the coronavirus behind the COVID-19global health crisis, which the World Health Organization today declared a pandemic.

Since the outbreak began in China in late 2019, the virus has spread to every continentexcept Antarctica, with more than 120,000 confirmed cases and more than 4,000 deaths, according to the latest figures. And while researchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine, that is only a part of the solution, Sidhu says.

Even if a vaccine becomes available, not everyone is going to get vaccinated, says Sidhu. We see that with the flu the vaccination rates are far from 100 per cent. Should the virus become endemic and end up circulating in the population like the flu, medicines that stop the virus from replicating in an already infected person will be as important as vaccines, which prevent infection, according to Sidhu.

Jacky Chung, a research associate in the Sidhu lab, will spearhead the project by first engineering proteins that can inhibit the virus. The team will then search for small molecules that behave in the same way since they are easier to develop into therapeutics than proteins.

It's important to get the therapeutic inside the cells, which is where the virus replicates, says Chung. And small molecules can get into cells much more readily than proteins, which are much larger.

At the heart of the approach lies a protein called ubiquitin, named for being present in all plant and animal cells. Ubiquitin is an essential part of the cellular machinery that the virus hijacks for its own benefit. Upon infection, the virus releases proteins that interfere with human ubiquitin and allow it to bypass the hosts defence system and spread in the body.

To block the virus, the researchers will create synthetic ubiquitin variants (UbV) that thwart rather than aid its ability to replicate. By analyzing the molecular structures of different UbVs bound to the viral protein, they will gain clues into the kinds of small molecules that are most likely to be effective against the virus.

Sidhu says that, within two years, they should have candidate molecules that could be developed into therapeutics. We know there are literally armies of medicinal chemists and various companies that could then optimize the molecule into a drug that can be given to humans, says Sidhu who was previously at pharmaceutical giant Genentech and has founded six startups since joining the university.

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U of T researchers hunt for antivirals to treat COVID-19 patients - News@UofT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Flagship Pioneering, a life sciences innovation enterprise, announced the launch of Repertoire Immune Medicines, a clinical-stage biotechnology company tapping the curative powers of our immune system to prevent, treat and cure cancer, autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases.

Repertoire Immune Medicines was formed by combining two Flagship companies the innovative and proprietary immune decoding platforms of Cogen Immune Medicines and the immuno-oncology platforms of Torque Therapeutics to create a fully integrated Immune Medicines company. At the helm is Chief Executive Officer John Cox, who most recently led the spin-off of Bioverativ (BIIV) from Biogen (BIIB), and its growth and successful acquisition by Sanofi (SNY).

During the last 4 years, these two Flagship Pioneering originated companies each advanced novel and complementary platforms protected by over 30 patent families. Through their combination, Repertoire Immune Medicines now has the unique capability to decipher human subject-derived antigen-T cell receptor (TCR) codes from healthy or diseased tissues in the context of the major MHC (HLA) types. These complexes dictate T cell activation or exhaustion, and their immunological codes can be used to design and clinically test a multitude of unprecedented therapeutic products based on precedented and specific mechanisms of T cell killing of antigen presenting tumor cells or infected cells.

Repertoire is pioneering a new class of therapies based on high throughput, high content interrogation of the intrinsic ability of T cells to prevent, or cure diseases, said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Repertoire Immune Medicine. He continued, our products will be designed to leverage the highly evolved, potent and clinically-validated mechanism of the natural immune synapse to provide immune security to patients. With these ambitious goals in mind, we are pleased to have a proven leader, John Cox, as CEO to realize our shared vision to dramatically improve outcomes for those in need or at risk.

Repertoire has developed a suite of DECODE technologies that allows in-depth characterization of the immune synapse with unprecedented precision. The company leverages its functional response technologies to thoroughly understand the presentation of antigens in disease, de-orphan T cell receptors in the context of single-cell phenotypes, and curate vast amounts of data to enable deep-learning computational prediction models. By coupling single cell technologies with cellular and acellular antigen libraries, the company decodes CD4+ and CD8+ TCR-antigen specificity across selected T cell subsets from patients and from healthy individuals.

I am pleased to work with the Flagship Pioneering team to integrate these two pioneering companies into a fully formed immune medicines business, said John Cox, Chief Executive Officer of Repertoire Immune Medicines. Advancing rationally designed immune medicines into the clinic and eventually to commercialization offers tremendous potential for patients and long-term value for our shareholders.

Three DECODE discovery technologies are at the core of the companys immune synapse deciphering platform:

Decoding immune synapses relevant to a particular disease allows Repertoire to deploy the molecular codes to rationally design new immune medicines as disease-fighting TCRs and disease-associated antigens in its therapeutic products.

Repertoires DEPLOY technologies form a product-based platform that includes:

Repertoire is currently engaged in its first dose escalation safety trial with an autologous T cell product TRQ15-01, which leverages its proprietary PRIME platform to prepare the patients T cells and its proprietary TETHER platform to link an IL-15 nanogel immune modulator to the T cells.

The journey for Repertoire Immune Medicines commenced when Flagship Labs scientists contemplated how to rationally and efficiently direct the power of our T cells for therapeutics and cures. One origination group, led by David Berry, M.D., Ph.D., General Partner of Flagship Pioneering, focused on systematically unlocking antigen specific immune control. In parallel, another Flagship origination group, led by Doug Cole, M.D., General Partner of Flagship Pioneering, and based on the cytokine binding work from Prof. Darrell Irvines lab at MIT, focused on using autologous T cells to direct potent immune modulators to the tumor microenvironment.

To date, the combined companies raised over $220M to create and develop the DECODE discovery platform and DEPLOY product platform, and to initiate its first clinical trial of PRIME & TETHER T cells in cancer. Repertoires rapid advancement reflects its creative, dedicated and diverse team of over 120 professionals possessing expertise in immunology, experimental medicine, physics, computational science, material sciences, process engineering, bioengineering, protein design and applied mathematics.

ABOUT REPERTOIRE IMMUNE MEDICINESRepertoire Immune Medicines, a Flagship Pioneering company, is a clinical stage biotechnology company working to unleash the remarkable power of the human immune system to prevent, treat or cure cancer, autoimmune conditions and infectious diseases. The company is founded on the premise that the repertoire of TCR-antigen codes that drive health and disease represents one of the greatest opportunities for innovation in medical science. The company harnesses and deploys the intrinsic ability of T cells to prevent and cure disease. Repertoire scientists created and developed a suite of technologies for its DECODE discovery and DEPLOY product platforms that allow in-depth characterization of the immune synapse and the ability to rationally design, and clinically develop, multi-clonal immune medicines. The company is currently conducting experimental medicine clinical trials using autologous T cells primed against cancer antigens and tethered to IL-15. To learn more about Repertoire Immune Medicine, please visit our website: http://www.repertoire.com.

ABOUT FLAGSHIP PIONEERINGFlagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life sciences companies to transform human health and sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, the firm has applied a unique hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $30 billion in aggregate value. To date, Flagship is backed by more than $3.3 billion of aggregate capital commitments, of which over $1.7 billion has been deployed toward the founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside more than $10 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises 37 transformative companies, including: Axcella Health (NADAQ: AXLA), Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Foghorn Therapeutics, Indigo Agriculture, Kaleido Biosciences (NASDAQ: KLDO), Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB), and Syros Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SYRS). To learn more about Flagship Pioneering, please visit our website: http://www.FlagshipPioneering.com.

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Flagship Pioneering Announces the Launch of Repertoire Immune Medicines with Industry Veteran John G. Cox as Chief Executive Officer - Business Wire

Internationally renowned neurodegeneration academic, Professor Glenda Halliday, who is shaping the treatment of non-Alzheimers dementias and Parkinsons disease, has been recognised as one of Australias leading female medical researchers.

Professor Halliday, from the Faculty of Medicine and Health and the Brain and Mind Centre, was awarded the NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator Grant Award for Leadership in Clinical Medicine and Science.

The award is named in honour of Professor Elizabeth Blackburn, an Australian molecular biologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.

Professor Hallidays groundbreaking research has shaped current international diagnostic criteria and recommendations for neurodegenerative patient identification and management.

After developing quantitative methods to evaluate the symptoms of patients with Parkinson's disease, she revealed more extensive neurodegeneration in Parkinson's and related syndromes than previously thought.

Her 70 strong research team in the Brain and Mind Centres Dementia and Movement Disorders Lab is now focused on finding biomarkers that identify under-recognised non-Alzheimer diseases to target with disease modifying strategies.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Duncan Ivison congratulated Professor Halliday on this prestigious award, adding that her work is at the forefront of understanding the origins of neurodegeneration and developing new treatments.

Glenda has rightly been recognised as one of Australias, and the worlds, leading experts on neurodegeneration. Her research is critical to improving the lives of those with Parkinsons, dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases and we are proud to support her and her team to conduct this important research.

Professor Halliday has produced more than 430 publications, has a h-index of 83, and was named among the world's most influential academics on the Clarivate Analytics 2019 Highly Cited Researchers List.

She is on the editorial boards of five international journals, and on the scientific advisory boards for a number of international organisations and research institutes. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

The University of Sydney is ranked 18th in the world for medicine, according to the latest QS Subject rankings.

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Renowned neurodegeneration expert receives top accolade - News - The University of Sydney

A central promise of regenerative medicine is the ability to repair aged or diseased organs using stem cells (SCs). This approach will likely become an effective strategy for organ rejuvenation, holding the potential to increase human health by delaying age-related diseases (1). The successful translation of this scientific knowledge into clinical practice will require a better understanding of the basic mechanisms of aging, along with an integrated view of the process of tissue repair (1).

The advent of SC therapies, now progressing into clinical trials, has made clear the many challenges limiting the application of SCs to treat disease. Our duty, as scientists, is to anticipate such limitations and propose solutions to effectively deliver on the promise of regenerative medicine.

Degenerating tissues have difficulty engaging a regulated repair response that can support efficient cell engraftment and restoration of tissue function (2). This problem, which I encountered when trying to apply SC-based interventions to treat retinal disease, will likely be an important roadblock to the clinical application of regenerative medicine approaches in elderly patients, those most likely to benefit from such interventions. I therefore hypothesized that the inflammatory environment present in aged and diseased tissues would be a major roadblock for efficient repair and that finding immune modulators with the ability to resolve chronic inflammation and promote a prorepair environment would be an efficient approach to improve the success of SC-based therapies (2, 3).

Immune cells, as sources and targets of inflammatory signals, emerged naturally as an ideal target for intervention. I chose to focus on macrophages, which are immune cells of myeloid origin that exist in virtually every tissue of the human body and which are able to reversibly polarize into specific phenotypes, a property that is essential to coordinate tissue repair (3, 4).

If there is an integral immune modulatory component to the process of tissue repair that has evolved to support the healing of damaged tissues, then it should be possible to find strategies to harness this endogenous mechanism and improve regenerative therapies. Anchored in the idea that tissue damage responses are evolutionarily conserved (5), I started my research on this topic using the fruit fly Drosophila as a discovery system.

The fruit fly is equipped with an innate immune system, which is an important player in the process of tissue repair. Using a well-established model of tissue damage, I sought to determine which genes in immune cells are responsible for their prorepair activity. MANF (mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor), a poorly characterized protein initially identified as a neurotrophic factor, emerged as a potential candidate (6). A series of genetic manipulations involving the silencing and overexpression of MANF and known interacting partners led me to the surprising discovery that, instead of behaving as a neurotrophic factor, MANF was operating as an autocrine immune modulator and that this activity was essential for its prorepair effects (2). Using a model of acute retinal damage in mice and in vitro models, I went on to show that this was an evolutionarily conserved mechanism and that MANF function could be harnessed to limit retinal damage elicited by multiple triggers, highlighting its potential for clinical application in the treatment of retinal disease (2).

Having discovered a new immune modulator that sustained endogenous tissue repair, I set out to test my initial hypothesis that this factor might be used to improve the success of SC-based therapies applied to a degenerating retina. Indeed, the low integration efficiency of replacement photoreceptors transplanted into congenitally blind mice could be fully restored to match the efficiency obtained in nondiseased mice by supplying MANF as a co-adjuvant with the transplants (2). This intervention improved restoration of visual function in treated mice, supporting the utility of this approach in the clinic (7).

Next, my colleagues and I decided to address the question of whether the immune modulatory mechanism described above was relevant for aging biology and whether we could harness its potential to extend health span. We found that MANF levels are systemically decreased in aged flies, mice, and humans. Genetic manipulation of MANF expression in flies and mice revealed that MANF is necessary to limit age-related inflammation and maintain tissue homeostasis in young organisms. Using heterochronic parabiosis, an experimental paradigm that involves the surgical joining of the circulatory systems of young and old mice, we established that MANF is one of the circulatory factors responsible for the rejuvenating effects of young blood. Finally, we showed that pharmacologic interventions involving systemic delivery of MANF protein to old mice are effective therapeutic approaches to reverse several hallmarks of tissue aging (8).

A confocal fluorescence microscope image of a giant macrophage shows MANF (mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor) expression in red.

The biological process of aging is multifactorial, necessitating combined and integrated interventions that can simultaneously target several of the underlying problems (9). The potential of immune modulatory interventions as rejuvenating strategies is emerging and requires a deeper understanding of its underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms.

One expected outcome of reestablishing a regulated inflammatory response is the optimization of tissue repair capacity that naturally decreases during aging (3). Combining these interventions with SCbased therapeutics holds potential to deliver on the promise of regenerative medicine as a path to rejuvenation (1).

PHOTO: COURTESY OF J. NEVES

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Joana Neves

Joana Neves received undergraduate degrees from NOVA University in Lisbon and a Ph.D. from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. After completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California, Neves started her lab in the Instituto de Medicina Molecular (iMM) at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon in 2019. Her research uses fly and mouse models to understand the immune modulatory component of tissue repair and develop stem cellbased therapies for age-related disease.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF A. SHARMA

FINALIST

Arun Sharma

Arun Sharma received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Having completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Medical School, Sharma is now a senior research fellow jointly appointed at the Smidt Heart Institute and Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. His research seeks to develop in vitro platforms for cardiovascular disease modeling and drug cardiotoxicity assessment. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1206.1

FINALIST

Adam C. Wilkinson

Adam C. Wilkinson received his undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is currently completing his postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University, where he is studying normal and malignant hematopoietic stem cell biology with the aim of identifying new biological mechanisms underlying hematological diseases and improving the diagnosis and treatment of these disorders. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1206.2

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Aging eyes and the immune system - Science Magazine

Everyone is looking for silver-linings in the COVID-19 pandemic, which is only natural. In the tech sector, for example, many people have decided that one of the up-sides of the crisis is that it has demonstrated the fantastic power of artificial intelligence.

The argument is that AI helped doctors anticipate, diagnose, and formulate treatments for COVID-19.

The truth is somewhat less fantastic.

In MITs Technology Review, Will Douglas debunked these claims, concluding that AI could help with the next pandemicbut not with this one. Where AI has made an impact, its been in ways that we might not like. The Wall Street Journals Tech News podcast points out that the most consequential implementation of AI during this crisis may have been Chinas use of facial recognition to identify and report citizens who were using public transportation without wearing masks.

In other words, so far AI has been most useful as a means to extending an authoritarian regimes surveillance capabilities, and in this one instance that may have contributed some unmeasurable public health benefit. Yay?

And advances in the biotech sector have not been terribly impressive, either.

We are more than 60 years into the molecular age (Watson and Crick first published their double helix structure of DNA in 1953) and the two most valuable remediation techniques at our disposal are the admonitions to (1) wash your hands and (2) isolate the afflicted. According to the CDC, this latter technique was developed in the Middle Ages.

This isnt to say that weve learned nothing in the ensuing 700 years: the supportive care afforded to those who are critically ill is an extraordinary achievement, the result of iterativeand often unheraldedimprovements in processes over time. And it seems that real and rapid progress is being made toward the development of potential therapies (to treat the disease), and vaccines (to protect from it)but the proof here will be in the eventual clinical trials.

To their credit, physicians and other health care providers tend to be painfully aware of the limitations of their armamentarium, and feel a powerful sense of humility in response to this pandemic.

Yet the worst attitude elicited by the current crisis isnt hubris, but disdain. There is a sense emanating from certain sectors that there would be karmic justice if MAGA zealots who believe more strongly in the Deep State than in science were to become preferentially infected with coronavirus because they dismissed precautions around social distancing and regarded these public health admonitions as an anti-Trump conspiracy.

You may have heard of the Darwin Award, the satirical prize given to people who are killed by their own foolishness. Example: A lawyer who dies after running through a skyscraper window, trying to demonstrate its safety. Or a rhino poacher stomped to death by an elephant (then digested by a lion).

There is, here and there in the tech and science communities, the whispered belief that Trump supporters who disdain public health advice like social distancing are lining up to win their own Darwin Awards and that if they start dropping like flies, they will have gotten what they deserved.

This notion is deplorable and runs directly counter to the spirit of medicine. And it must be stamped out. Immediately.

One of the best things about being a doctor is the bedrock commitment to helping each person in need. When you approach a patient as a physician, you dont take on the complex moral calculus of how complicit someone may or may not be in their condition, and then titrate care and concern accordingly. You attend to each person equally, and without qualification.

Beyond that, to be a physician is to recognize that diseases afflict all of us; while those with the least are often the most susceptible to illness, all of us can, at a moments notice, move from the realm of the well to the realm of the sick. As Susan Sontag eloquently wrote,

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

As long as disease has existed, theres been a tendency to attribute illness to a failing of the sufferer; yet while someones behavior and choices often plays a role in illnesssmoking predisposes to lung cancer, and obesity contributes to the prevalence of type 2 diabetesdoctors know that although prevention is important, illness can strike anyone. Which is why physicians aspire to offer you understanding, rather than judgment.

When I started my medical training, one of the things which struck me is just how much so many people are dealing with, all the time. We get a sense of this from the occasional celebrity revelations: rapper Lil Wayne coping with epilepsy; Giants great Tiki Barber managing his sickle cell disease; Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor living with type 1 diabetes since she was a child; the revelation that President John F. Kennedy suffered from an adrenal gland deficiency called Addisons Disease; and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun, and Colorados senior Senator Michael Bennet, who each have overcome dyslexia.

The arrival of a global pandemic upon our shores, despite the insistent skepticism of the president and his supporters, should not be looked at as a victory of science over the heathens.

Instead, this pandemic should remind us just how far science and technology still have to go, while reawakening our sense of responsibility to care for all the afflicted, to the best of our ability, and with all our hearts.

The most appropriate response to misplaced arrogance and self-regard isnt the transposition of these qualities from politicians to scientists.

Its to replace these reflexes with the humility that science demands, and the empathy our patientsall of themdeserve.

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We Can Be Better Than COVID-19 - The Bulwark

Mar 12th 2020

THREADWORMS ARE trending, according to the app on Johannes Schildts phone. The app was created by Kry, the Swedish digital health-care firm Mr Schildt runs. It offers information on the sicknesses for which people are currently booking doctors appointments, as well as on things specifically important to its userit keeps Mr Schildt, who suffers from hay fever, up to date with the pollen count. It lets him book an appointment with a family doctor or a specialist, and indeed to have such an appointment by phone. None of this sounds particularly stretching. But in health care, it counts as radical.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of richer nations, the world creates 2.5 exabytes of data a daythousands of times what even the grandest sequencing centre can produce in a month. Of those which get stored, 30% pertain to health. The trove contains insights into the health of populations and of individuals, the efficacy of drugs and the efficiency of health-care systems, the failings of doctors and the financial health of insurers. But OECD countries typically spend less than 5% of their health budgets managing these data, much less than is the norm in other areas. By failing to make the most of their potential, these countries are wasting $600bn a yearroughly the GDP of Sweden.

This underutilised resource has attracted the attention of a panoply of private companies, from minnows like Kry to giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Governments, hospitals and insurers, they think, will pay for what they glean from it. So will individualswho will often pay for the privilege of supplying yet more data off their own bat. Mobile phones log their users physical activity, creating records used by many of the billions of health-related smartphone apps downloaded globally every year (1.7bn in 2013, 3.7bn in 2017). Make sense of all this data for them, the argument goes, and you can make money helping people stay healthy and warning them of disease.

As with the genome twenty years ago, some scepticism is warranted. But in time a picture of a life built up from the genomes underlying recipe, from medical histories and tests that profile specific bodily functions, and from the monitoring of every step and heartbeat, will allow personalised, preventive medicine to be rolled out across entire populations. All these layers define the medical essence of a human being, says Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.

Adding real-world data to genome-based profiles would undoubtedly be useful. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and Nigel Paneth at Michigan State University argue that characteristics such as family history, neighbourhood, socioeconomic circumstances, height and girth still outperform genetic profiling as predictors for all sorts of health outcomes. This does not mean genetic information is without value; it means it needs context.

Various new frontiers in diagnosis are being explored. Firms across the world are competing to develop liquid biopsies that can detect and characterise cancers by means of fragments of DNA in the blood; other molecular markers could reveal other diseases. But so could the digital footprints people leave when they decide whether to leave the house, what to buy, what to search for or what to stream.

Sometimes the footprints may be just that. Dan Vahdat, who runs Medopad, a health-technology firm in London, says conditions as varied as Parkinsons disease, depression and breast cancer can all have a distinctive effect on a patients gait. He speculates that with enough data covering different behaviours it will be possible to identify digital biomarkers capable of predicting the risk of Alzheimers or a heart attack. Work by Dr Topol has already shown that spikes in resting heart ratemore common when people have an infectionallow someone with access to lots of fitbits to see when flu is breaking out in the population.

The recognition of such patterns is clearly a job for the machine-learning techniques driving the current expansion of AI. These techniques are already being used to interpret diagnostic tests, sometimes with real success. An AI system for prostate cancer diagnosis developed by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has held its own against a panel of 23 international experts; a nine-country trial is now assessing how much it can reduce the workload of doctors. But recent research published in The Lancet Digital Health, a journal, suggests some caution is advisable. Looking at around 20,000 studies of medical AI systems that claimed to show that they could diagnose things as well as health-care professionals, it found that most had methodological flaws.

One particular worry with machine learning in general is that bias in the training sets from which the computers learn their stuff can mean that the algorithms do not work equally well for all members of the population. Medical research has a poor historical record on such matters, for example when it does not match clinical-trial populations to the population at large, or excludes women of child-bearing age from trials. Machine learning could bake in such biases, and make them invisible.

Excessive optimism that edges into barefaced hype is just one cause for concern about datomics. Privacy is, as always, an issue. The amount of data that parts of the NHS have shared with Google has worried some Britons. Conversely, some researchers feel hampered by constraints such as those of Europes General Data Protection Regulation, says Claire Gayrel of the EUs data protection authority. They see it as an obstacle to innovation. Ms Gayrel treats that with equanimity: I dont think it is a bad thing to think slower, especially in health.

As well as worries over what researchers or companies might do with personal data, there are reasonable concerns over how safe they can keep it. A cyberattack on Premera Blue Cross, an American insurer, may have exposed the medical data of 11m customers in 2015.

There is also the challenge of cost. Whatever claims are made early on and whatever benefits they may demonstrate, new technologies have a marked, persistent tendency to drive up spending on health in rich countries. There is no obvious reason to think that, just because sequencing, data processing and some forms of machine learning are getting cheaper, their ever greater application to health care will drive down costs.

One reason is that, although knowledge may be power, it may also be a needless worry. A DNA test that seems to tell you some of your future, or a watch that can pick up atrial fibrillation, may seem great to users; they are less enticing to health systems that have to deal with diagnoses which are not, in themselves, clinically relevant. Last year the New York Times reported that a period-tracking app which also evaluated womens risk of polycystic-ovary syndrome, a hormonal problem, was recommending that an improbably large number of its users see their doctors.

Trustable intermediariessuch as government health-care systems, regulators and reputable insurerswill help consumers to know what works best. They should also be able to help each other. Not everyone is motivated to improve their health, and even avid consumers of health data will rarely have the same sense of common cause as people with congenital diseases and their families. But health concerns bring people together, and through supporting each other they may develop new mechanisms for change.

Because health systems look to the needs of the many, personalised medicine will hit its stride only when it can show that its approaches work in the round. But as people get more used to customising their lives through online services that know what they want, health care will get pulled along. There will be many false correlations, privacy violations, and errors along the way. But in the end, people of all sorts will benefit from being understood as unique.

This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "The coming of the datome"

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The way people live their lives can be mined, too - The Economist

By Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press on March 15, 2020.

HALIFAX For a Halifax father and daughter dedicated to taking on global infectious diseases, the novel coronavirus has led to their latest, exhausting push to create tests and vaccines to save lives.

Alyson Kelvin, 39, and David Kelvin, 65, are once again in the trenches of a race to find long-term solutions, hoping for success while public interest and funding remain in place.

Alyson, a virologist working at Dalhousie University, has been seconded to the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization International Vaccine Centre in Saskatoon since mid-February to test vaccines in lab animals.

Meanwhile, back in Halifax, her father a professor in Dalhousies department of microbiology and immunology is immersed in creating a portable test kit to identify the severity of the illness for people who test positive for the virus.

Both are engaged in rapid response science, which has meant fast-tracked federal funding is paired with swift collaboration with scientists around the globe working on the pandemic.

I work from waking up until going to sleep, the younger Kelvin said during an interview from Saskatoon. My whole life has shifted. My husband and children are back in Halifax.

The pursuit of infectious disease solutions is a family passion, she adds.

Thats how I was raised, she says, referring to her observation of her fathers work on HIV-AIDS as a young woman.

Her career has already included work on the first SARS outbreak, the Zika virus and various influenza outbreaks. Her father has worked on many of the same outbreaks.

David Kelvin has several projects on the go, including a push to identify biomarkers in this instance molecules that activate white blood cells that will indicate if a person who tests positive for the virus is at risk of developing a severe case of COVID-19.

The goal is to create a kit that would allow health care providers to determine in as little as 20 minutes who needs to be hospitalized, which could potentially keep vitally needed beds and respirators open for patients most in need.

Rather than going through a lengthy process of days, we can do it rapidly and provide assistance to doctors who are looking at a surge of patients and can decide who should receive hospitalization at the earlier stages of the disease, he explained in an interview.

In Saskatoon, his daughter, accompanied by a doctoral student and technician from Dalhousie, is working with coronavirus investigator Darryl Falzarano at the International Vaccine Centre to carry out animal tests for potential vaccines.

Her knowledge of ferrets is key as the animal was identified as a helpful model for human immune reactions in the SARS outbreak in 2002-03, and is believed to also be a useful lab animal for testing vaccines for the novel coronavirus.

Her team is working with three vaccines developed by Halifax molecular virologist Chris Richardson, also a Dalhousie University scientist, and a vaccine developed by a scientist at the centre.

While their work has to move as swiftly as possible, she says that doesnt mean compromising a meticulous methodology to avoid any safety risks. Without animal-testing stages in vaccine research, its possible errors can occur, she said.

Its especially important because the original SARS vaccines werent effective and sometimes led to more severe disease in the end. So, this is an important stage of the evaluation, she said.

Having vaccines a year from now for the novel coronavirus may still be vital, the researcher said.

We may see waves of it in the same way we do with influenza . Having a vaccine and being ready for this particular virus could help us if that becomes a reality, she said.

Richardson, who has worked in the field for four decades, said regular vaccine research can take several years.

Typically it could be two years and clinical trials can go even further, he said in an interview.

He says one of the frustrations is that funding can dry up after an outbreak prompts an initial surge in interest. The veteran virologist said he hopes it will be different this time.

The father and daughter both say they are relying on Ottawa to keep funding flowing in the months to come, even if the pandemic calms.

This call for the initial research was $1 million, David Kelvin said. Its a fantastic initial start. We realize and know that to continue this through the full duration of the infection cycle, were going to have to have a lot more investment.

Hes hopeful the biomarkers for the potential test kits will emerge from his collaborators in China and Italy in four to 10 weeks, but further work will then require commercial collaborators interested in producing the kits.

The family connections in the research are likely to continue. Alyson Kelvin said that as her fathers teams kits evolve, her team will be able to test their effectiveness.

We can experimentally induce viral infection and disease, and we can evaluate the kits using samples from our experiments before theyre used in people, she said.

Amid the current pressure for results, David Kelvin says it may be time for government to reflect on whether the funding for vaccine research should have been in place sooner and on a steadier basis.

Too often, he says, interest has faded when the worst of an international infection passes.

We need to impress on everyone this is our third pandemic in 20 years, he said. We dont want to respond in an emergency fashion every time. We want to be really well prepared.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 15, 2020.

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Rapid response COVID-19 science conducted by father and daughter virologists - Medicine Hat News

Dr. Adrian R. Krainer, pioneer in neuromuscular disease treatment to be honored at June 8 symposium in New York City

The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research has selected Adrian R. Krainer, PhD, St. Giles Foundation Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as the eighth awardee of the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine. The prize is awarded annually through the Feinstein Institutes peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Molecular Medicine, and includes a $50,000 award that will be presented to Dr. Krainer on June 8 at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) in Manhattan.

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Dr. Adrian R. Krainer (Credit: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

The Ross Prize is made possible by the generosity of Feinstein Institutes board members Robin and Jack Ross. It is awarded to scientists who have made a demonstrable impact in the understanding of human disease pathogenesis and/or treatment and who hold significant promise for making even greater contributions to the general field of molecular medicine. Dr. Krainer is being recognized for his pioneering work in introducing antisense therapy in clinical use, and for its successful application to spinal muscular atrophy.

Dr. Krainer studies the mechanisms of RNA splicing, ways in which they go awry in disease, and the means by which faulty splicing can be corrected. Dr. Krainers research is focused in part on genes associated with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a neuromuscular disease that has been the leading genetic cause of death in infants. He worked on antisense approaches to correct mis-splicing, and in collaboration with Ionis Pharmaceuticals and Biogen, developed the first treatment for pediatric and adult SMA.

"I am very grateful and honored to receive this years Ross Prize," said Dr. Krainer. "My trainees and I feel privileged that our research has helped SMA patients. In keeping with the intent of this generous award, we will redouble our efforts to explore new ways to address unmet medical needs."

After a brief award presentation, a symposium will be held during which Dr. Krainer will discuss his research along with Michelle Hastings, PhD, director at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, Edward Kaye, MD, CEO of Stoke Therapeutics, and Timothy Yu, MD, PhD, attending physician and assistant professor at Boston Childrens Hospital, who will discuss their latest research.

"Dr. Krainers remarkable discoveries have revolutionized the treatment of a devastating, crippling pediatric illness. His inventions are already giving children the ability to crawl, walk, and live their lives," said Kevin J. Tracey, MD, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes and editor emeritus of Molecular Medicine.

Dr. Krainer and his lab have also worked to shed light on the role of splicing proteins in cancer, particularly breast cancer, and on fundamental mechanisms of splicing and its regulation.

Past recipients of the Ross Prize are: Daniel Kastner, MD, PhD, the National Institutes of Healths (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) scientific director; Huda Y. Zoghbi, MD, professor, Departments of Pediatrics, Molecular and Human Genetics, Neurology and Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine; Jeffrey V. Ravetch, MD, PhD, the Theresa and Eugene M. Lang Professor and head of the Leonard Wagner Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at The Rockefeller University; Charles N. Serhan, PhD, DSc, director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury at Brigham and Womens Hospital, the Simon Gelman Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and professor at Harvard School of Dental Medicine; Lewis C. Cantley, PhD, the Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York-Presbyterian Hospital; John J. OShea, MD, scientific director at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS); and Dan R. Littman, MD, PhD, the Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Professor of Molecular Immunology in the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University School of Medicine.

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To learn more about the Ross Prize celebration and symposium, and to register for the event, please visit http://www.nyas.org/RossPrize2020. If you would like to nominate a candidate for the 2021 Ross Prize, please make a submission here.

About the Feinstein Institutes

The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research is the research arm of Northwell Health, the largest health care provider and private employer in New York State. Home to 50 research labs, 2,500 clinical research studies and 5,000 researchers and staff, the Feinstein Institutes raises the standard of medical innovation through its five institutes of behavioral science, bioelectronic medicine, cancer, health innovations and outcomes, and molecular medicine. We make breakthroughs in genetics, oncology, brain research, mental health, autoimmunity, and are the global scientific leader in bioelectronic medicine a new field of science that has the potential to revolutionize medicine. For more information about how we produce knowledge to cure disease, visit feinstein.northwell.edu.

About Molecular Medicine

Molecular Medicine sits at the forefront of its field, rapidly disseminating discovery in the genetic, molecular, and cellular basis of physiology and disease across a broad range of specialties. With over two decades of experience publishing to a multidisciplinary audience, and continually celebrating innovation through the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine and Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine, the journal strives towards the design of better molecular tools for disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Molecular Medicine is published by BMC, part of Springer/Nature, in partnership with The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.

About the New York Academy of Sciences

The New York Academy of Sciences is an independent, not-for-profit organization that since 1817 has been committed to advancing science, technology, and society worldwide. With more than 20,000 members in 100 countries around the world, the Academy is creating a global community of science for the benefit of humanity. The Academy's core mission is to advance scientific knowledge, positively impact the major global challenges of society with science-based solutions, and increase the number of scientifically informed individuals in society at large. Please visit us online at http://www.nyas.org.

About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. CSHL has been a National Cancer Institute designated Cancer Center since 1987. Home to eight Nobel Prize winners, the private, not-for-profit Laboratory employs 1,100 people, including 600 scientists, students and technicians. The Meetings & Courses Program annually hosts more than 12,000 scientists. The Laboratorys education arm also includes an academic publishing house, a graduate school and the DNA Learning Center with programs for middle and high school students and teachers. For more information, visit http://www.cshl.edu

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Contacts

Matthew Libassi516-465-8325mlibassi@northwell.edu

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Ross Prize Awarded to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor - Yahoo Finance