HM International Blog

I applaud President Obama for his nomination of Dr. Benjamin, and I greatly appreciate the work of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Leader, for making this vote possible tonight. This is indeed a proud day for the people of Alabama.”

President Barack Obama nominated Dr. Benjamin in July. But the confirmation vote has been delayed due to a political tug of war over health care reform.

• Pregnant Women
• Children 6 months through 4 years old
• Parents, caregivers and siblings of children less than 6 months old
• Children and adolescents, 5 through 18 years old, with underlying medical conditions
• Health care workers

“We must target our limited amounts of vaccine to individuals at the highest risk because of the uncertainties in supply we face,” Dr. Donald Williamson, state health officer, said. “We ask for your support and understanding at this time. As more vaccine becomes available, our department and other health care providers will begin vaccinating school children and others outside of these target groups.”

The State Health Department hoped to receive 570,000-600,000 doses by the end of October. But it only has 55,000 doses available at this time. Dr. Williamson said 60% of the state’s supply will not arrive until after December 1. So the State Health Department has had to delay plans for things like vaccination clinics at schools until then.

“There appears to be a lack of appreciation of the potential benefits of identifying and treating those infected,” said Dr Korda. “Although Australia has adopted universal hepatitis B vaccination for infants, there are many people already infected for whom vaccination offers no benefit.

“Immigration patterns, the ageing of the infected pool of individuals and the small number of people receiving HBV drug therapy, together imply that the long-term pathology of HBV infection can be expected to become increasingly evident over the next decade.”

According to the report, under current levels of medical management and treatment:

- The number of people living with chronic hepatitis B infection will increase from 187,000 to 276,000

- The number of deaths attributable to chronic hepatitis B each year will increase from 450 in 2008 to 1,550 in 2017

- There will be a three-fold increase in the number of people living with liver cancer directly caused by hepatitis B

The researchers say that increases in the rate of infection could be mitigated through the development of a national strategy for Hepatitis B, which would increase awareness of the disease and encourage those infected to seek treatment.

“Our cost-effectiveness analyses indicate investment in such a strategy is economically justified given the looming increase in the numbers of people infected and the drug therapies that are available to treat those infected,” said Professor Butler.

Exposure to the drugs during adolescence has a more severe impact on short-term memory than being exposed as adults, researchers found in a study that was to be presented this week at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, in Chicago.

“Animals that were given the amphetamine during the adolescent time period were worse at tasks requiring working memory than adult animals that were given the same amount of amphetamine as adults,” study co-author and psychology professor Joshua Gulley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a school news release. “This tells us that their working memory capacity has been significantly altered by that pre-exposure to amphetamine.”

The researchers gave amphetamines to rats in two ways: Some were given a steady dose every other day, while others were given more and more over four days, followed by a “binge” consisting of big doses every two hours for eight hours on day five.

The findings could indicate what might happen to teenagers who take amphetamines either as a recreational drug or to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, the study authors suspect. But until more research is completed, it won’t be clear whether the rat tests accurately indicate what happens in humans.

Gulley noted that the research in rats suggests that teens who take amphetamines recreationally may be at the most risk because their doses are higher than those who take them as prescribed by doctors.

“Adolescence is a time when the brain is continuing to develop into its mature form, so drug exposure during this critical period could have long-lasting, negative consequences,” he said. “Our findings reveal that adolescents are particularly sensitive to the adverse effects of amphetamine on cognitive function and that these effects can persist well after drug use is discontinued.”

A robot designed to help doctors diagnose swine flu has been unveiled at an exhibition in Japan.

The life-sized humanoid machine, displayed at the Security & Safety Trade Expo (RISCON) in Tokyo, exhibits symptoms of the H1N1 flu virus.

It was developed to help medical workers recognise symptoms of the illness and learn to treat patients.

The robot is coated in a human-like skin. It sweats, moans, cries and convulses, just like a human would when infected with the H1N1 virus.

If it is not treated properly the symptoms gradually get worse and the robot stops breathing.

The robot was one exhibit amongst many others at the show aimed to either help prevent or aid treatment of swine flu.

As of October 11, there were 4,735 swine flu-related deaths reported worldwide to the World Health Organisation (WHO), with around 400,000 confirmed cases of swine flu in the same period.

Vaccination programmes against the virus have been rolled out in Britain for front-line health workers.

The Department of Health said at-risk groups will be given priority in the following order: people aged over six months and under 65 years in current seasonal flu vaccine clinical at-risk groups; all pregnant women; household contacts of people with compromised immune systems; and people aged 65 and over in the current seasonal flu vaccine clinical at-risk groups.

Recently published research suggests that more than half of babies now born in wealthier nations will reach the age of 100, but unless we do something about it, their bodies will still degenerate at the same rate with age and their extra years will be accompanied by poor quality of life, so a new 50 million pound project was launched in the UK this week to find ways to give people “Active Times of 50, After The Age Of 50″.

The new research initiative was launched at the University of Leeds. The University’s Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (iMBE) will be coordinating the project. Leeds’ iMBE is the UK’s largest bioengineering unit and a world-leading centre of excellence in research for artificial joint replacements.

The program will focus on developing tissue engineering and regeneration technologies that can revitalize those parts of the human body that wear out with age such as joints, spine, teeth, heart and circulation.

The project will also be speeding up the time it takes for new methods to move from discovery into clinical practice. One of its ambitious goals is to develop ten new products in the first five years and halve the time it takes to get them to market.

The iMBE itself focuses on three main areas: joint replacement, tissue re-engineering and functional spinal interventions. Researchers at the iMBE are hoping to give older people new body parts and implants grown from their own tissue, starting with hips, knees and heart valves.

Professor John Fisher, who does joint replacement and substitution research at iMBE told the BBC that they have already made an artificial hip designed to last for life, instead of the 20 or so years patients expect from current technology.

Fisher said by combining a durable cobalt-chrome metal alloy socket with a ceramic ball they can make a replacement joint that easily allows athe recipient to take the 100 million or so steps that the average 50-year old will be expected to take over another 50 years of life.

Fisher’s colleague Professor Eileen Ingham said that she and her team at iMBE are currently developing ways of making transplantable tissue and organs that grow in the patient’s own body, thus overcoming the problems of rejection currently faced by recipients of donated tissue and organs.

They have already made fully functioning heart valves using their method. They take a donated heart valve (the donor could be a human or an animal like a pig), strip out the donor cells, and implant the remaining inert scaffold in the patient where it re-populates with new cells from the patient.

Ingham told the BBC that trials in Brazil on humans and animals have shown promising results.The money for the “50 active years after 50″ initiative will come from a number of sources ranging from research councils, charities and industry groups. The project will bring together engineers, computer experts, chemists, physicists, biologists, researching and practising dentists and physicians, from all over the UK and overseas.

There are two major projects in the program: the 10 million pound Innovation & Knowledge Centre in Regenerative Therapies and Devices and the 11 million pound Wellcome EPSRC Leeds Medical Engineering Centre.

At issue is the immune system’s ability to take out the trash — to get rid of cells that don’t have long to live.

“Just like in mice, in humans, if you don’t clear the dying cells, then that predisposes you to lupus,” said Lata Mukundan, a Stanford University School of Medicine researcher and co-author of a study published online Oct. 18 in the journal Nature Medicine.

“If you look at patients with lupus, they have an inability to clear those dead cells,” Mukundan said in a statement.

The study authors report that they gained insight into how immune-system cells detect which other cells are dying in order to dispose of them. They looked at human and mouse cells outside the body and in genetically engineered mice.

The researchers suspected that a molecule known as PPAR-delta was crucial to the process. “We wanted to know, if you took a mouse and only deleted PPAR-delta from its macrophages, is that sufficient to cause an autoimmune disease?” asked Dr. Ajay Chawla, assistant professor of endocrinology and co-author of the study, in a statement. “Apparently it is,” he said.

The researchers say currently existing drugs activate the molecule in question. Perhaps, they say, the drugs could treat lupus.

Celsion Corporation (NASDAQ: CLSN) announced today that it has received official approval from China’s State Food and Drug Administration (“SFDA”) for its Clinical Trial Application for ThermoDox that permits Celsion to include Chinese clinical trial sites in its Phase III ThermoDox HEAT trial for the treatment of primary liver cancer, also known as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

Celsion’s global Phase III ThermoDox® clinical trial is evaluating the efficacy and safety of ThermoDox in combination with radiofrequency ablation (RFA) when compared to RFA alone. The trial will enroll up to six hundred patients and is currently being conducted in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, the United States and Canada. In addition to China, Celsion expects to receive CTA acceptance in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines during the fourth quarter of 2009 and will have up to sixty sites activated by the end of the year. Completion of patient enrollment is expected to occur in the first half of 2010.

“Acceptance of our CTA in China is an important milestone for Celsion because China represents a significant market opportunity for ThermoDox”, stated Michael H. Tardugno, Celsion’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “The incidence of HCC in China is growing faster than any other country at over 350,000 patients per year (55% of world’s total incidence) and the use of RFA is becoming the standard of care for the treatment of early-stage HCC.

Concurrent with sFDA’s review of our application, we have identified and qualified rapid start-up sites in China which should enable patient enrollment to commence in the near-term. The expansion of the trial to China not only accelerates patient enrollment, but builds on our global strategy to conduct our Phase III trial in regions where the incidence of HCC is significant. Our goal is to enroll patients in key markets outside of the United States to facilitate regulatory approval in multiple countries, mainly East Asia, where the incidence is among the highest in the world.”

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain. He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said. “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said. “And if we do succeed, we will send a hologram to TED to talk.”

Shared fabric
The Blue Brain project at Swizerland’s EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column – repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

The team are trying to reverse engineer the brain. “It’s a new brain,” he explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions. “It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ.”

And that evolution continues, he said. “It is evolving at an enormous speed.” Over the last 15 years, Professor Markram and his team have picked apart the structure of the neocortical column. “It’s a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest – how many trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees,” he said.

“But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity.”The project now has a software model of “tens of thousands” of neurons – each one of which is different – which has allowed them to digitally construct an artificial neocortical column.

Although each neuron is unique, the team has found the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common patterns. “Even though your brain may be smaller, bigger, may have different morphologies of neurons – we do actually share the same fabric,” he said. “And we think this is species specific, which could explain why we can’t communicate across species.”

Soon, every senator and representative must decide where they stand. Lobbyists will be racing to each office, trying every trick in the book to derail the President’s plan. In fact, just this week, the insurance lobby released a self-serving report falsely claiming that reform would increase costs. Journalists called it “deceptive” and said “something doesn’t smell right here.” A prominent M.I.T. economist described the study as “deeply flawed.”

It’s a blatant scare tactic designed to frighten voters and bully Congress — and it’s just the beginning. We need to speak out right away to show Congress that their constituents are watching closely, and we’re counting on them to say “no” to the lobbyists and “yes” to reform.

Send a message urging Congress to stand with voters, not D.C. lobbyists, and pass real reform.
It’s becoming clear that the insurance companies will do whatever it takes to stop progress: The New York Times is reporting that special interests are spending $1.4 million every day to kill reform — and even commissioned their own slanted analysis of the Finance Committee’s legislation in an effort to defeat it. But today, after widespread criticism, the company that produced the report issued a statement saying that it analyzed only part of the bill because that’s exactly what the insurance industry paid them to do!

And we just got word that insurance companies are spending $1 million on a misleading ad to scare seniors out of supporting reform. The ad falsely declares that reform will cause cuts in Medicare, even though reform is crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of the program and preserving the care that millions of seniors depend on.

Now that all five congressional committees have passed reform legislation, we’re sure to see attacks that are even more extreme. It’s up to us to make sure that ordinary Americans continue to be heard louder than the Washington lobbyists.