Genotype predicts suitability of heart medicine

Heart patients with specific arrangements of certain alleles have a higher risk of death from using beta-blockers.

Wow. Talk about personalized medicine. I put this in the same category as stem cells. Working with nature--in this case to customize your medical treatment according to your genotype--is bound to be more effective than beating the hell out of people's bodies with chemicals, radiation, and harsh procedures.

Menopause not a disease

And treating as if it were results in charging lots of money for pouring essentially useless hormone medications into bodies that are basically behaving exactly as they are meant to do, according to this report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Well, that might be oversimplifying it a tiny bit--but not much. This multi-year study concluded that there's no basis for saying that estrogen therapy for menopausal women had any significant improvement on quality of life.

I am perhaps a bit old-fashioned in thinking that we are never going to find the fountain of youth and that we do more harm than good by treating nature as if it were mistaken.

States are all anxious for bio

Doing some research for a project while I'm in Chicago, I discovered and wrote about a website that the City put up that sounds an awful lot like the way Cleveland sounds on the subject of attracting more businesses. So I pursued it a little further and found that Chicago and Illinois are just as anxious as every other state to get bio business, too.

The iBio (Illinois Biotechnology Industry Organization) group works with national BIO to give members purchasing power of up to 75% off normal prices for such needs as laboratory, business and technology equipment, employee investment and insurance options, and news distribution and relocation services--e.g., even for office stuff they can get 45% off furniture and 50% off other catalog items at Office Depot.

Not a bad deal--and a real help for emerging and startup bio ventures.

Fingerprinting an archaic forensic technique?

As a huge fan of CSI (it's the only good thing in reruns during the dinner-to-after-dinner hours when I generally turn on the TV), I always enjoy the science of forensics. This one caught my eye--fingerprints under attack as reliable evidence. So I'm reading away, and then under the secondary heading, I find this: The guys who "read" fingerprints can be heavily influenced by external factors--according to research that duped examiners "into thinking matching prints actually came from different people."

The study "suggests that subjective bias can creep into situations in which a match between two prints is ambiguous. So influential can this bias be that experts may contradict evidence they have previously given in court."

Wow. Here we go again with the old quantum physics teaching--as always giving new meaning to "what you see is what you get." It's getting to be old hat anymore--what you see turns out to be exactly what you decide to look for...no more, no less, no different.

So this doesn't make fingerprinting archaic; it just means another stake in the heart of the idea that there's objective truth about "the facts."

Is keeping to your schedule worth this?

More women are choosing cesarean section (surgical) birth as opposed to vaginal delivery. Why? Often because they just don't want to disrupt their schedule--somebody can't take off work, the boss will be on vacation so you can't be gone, etc. But the risks can be quite serious:

"Some obstetricians say that women are not aware of the risks involved. For mothers, they include hemorrhaging, infections and future pregnancy problems. Babies are at risk for surgical cuts, asthma and breastfeeding difficulties..."

Asthma? That's a major health problem that can be frightening and incredibly inconvenient at best, and terrifying and life-threatening--even fatal--at worst. And yeah, we can't predict who will get it and who won't, but to avoid that one extra risk to your child's health and life, it's gotta be worth at least the inconvenience of messing up your schedule.

Sometimes in our modern world we appear to have the cart dragging the horse around...

Nitric oxide a potential boon to fertility and IVF

Another amazing use for one of my favorite substances to write about, nitric oxide. It's been receiving accolades in such varied uses as treating impotence and preventing artheriosclerosis. Now scientists are finding that nitric oxide may help women stay fertile longer--a huge plus for today's generation of women who want to have it all--education, career success, and family--and often delay trying to get pregnant well into the 30s.

While working on a project involving in vitro fertilization, I got intimately acquainted with the difficulties many women encounter around fertility. This research has focused on mouse eggs, which are known to age rapidly if not fertilized quickly--and the article says "results suggest that nitric oxide could help prevent chromosome errors during early embryonic development...[that] can lead to Down syndrome, spontaneous miscarriages and other problems associated with pregnancies later in life."

Great news--and of course, they also have to make sure that exposing to NO to extend fertility doesn't introduce its own set of abnormalities. In science, as in tabletop puzzles, we can never trust that the piece will stand alone.

The good, the bad...in drug delivery

For ten years scientists have been trying to develop an inhalant version of insulin. Now an FDA advisory panel has approved Exubera by Pfizer despite concerns about the fact that it clearly decreases lung function--though not drastically and not progressively.

Another case of balancing the good with the bad. Diabetes I and II both depend on close control of insulin, but the method of administering it for those who need it frequently has been tough--needle pricks, injections, etc. This area of research has yielded a little progress in patches and hardware for transdermal drug delivery methods, but so far nothing is risk-free or gives perfect control.

Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research folks and the Case Western Reserve University people are doing a presentation on developments in using nanotechnology to deliver drugs. If my schedule allows, I'll be attending that next week. If I make it, I'll write up what I hear.

A new weapon against stress

I've written before about this organization and its powerful new tool called the Freeze Framer that lets you see your heart rate and rhythms on your computer screen--at home in the privacy of your own office. Their tagline is "A change of heart changes everything." And on their site they ask:

"What Would You Like to Improve? Your work performance; your child's school work; your golf game; your creative efforts; your health; your fitness; home or social relationships; your peace of mind?"

Last week I started using this biosensor myself. Read my first report and check out the research at HeartMath.org This is no-kidding revolutionary stuff.

How hard do you knock?

Incredible. I wrote some time ago about an all-natural compound that's used to neutralize odor and deactivate bad microorganisms on garbage. It was used to great effect in the cleanup of the tsunami--and the implication is that it could be extremely helpful in the aftermath of Katrina.

Late last night a sales representative from a company that sells this product commented on that blog entry that he and his company have been trying to talk to the U.S. government and state and local governments about it:

"...trying to reach the US government agencies since the Sunday before Hurricane Katrina hit. After contacting each state Governor, FEMA, The America Red Cross, the state Emergency Management Agencies, the US Senators from each state, etc., we still have not received even a reply. It has been 7 days!"

I don't know about you, but as someone who's done my fair share of selling, this non-responsiveness sounds like status quo to me.

As a bio-entrepreneur, how many doors have you knocked on--and for how long--to tell them about a product that could dramatically change their lives, do them good, and/or even pump up their bottom line--and they would not even give you a hearing?

Governments are no different. Read the blog and the comment (scroll to the bottom).

Hurricane help

Heard a comedian from New Orleans on the radio this morning. He managed to slip in a few funnies even as he described how he got out of NO because he had the means. He said that 40+% of the city's people are (or were) in poverty. He said there's one main highway through the city--to those who asked why didn't people just leave he pointed out that over a million people, many without private transportation or money to hire transport would have had to find a way to get out on the one main road. He said, "I can't get ten people to get out of my house in one hour..."

As a contributing writer to Blogcritics, I give you the link to their site where you can give through PayPal and 100% of your donation will go to the Red Cross Hurrican Relief Fund. Give if you can. If you can't or you just don't do that sort of thing, send love and prayers. They can be far more valuable and even more powerful than gold.