Cancer Biossenser Development

This is a pleasant surprise that leaps us forward to the day when cancer is cured. It is well known that early detection allows us to aggressively eliminate the disease while it is still easy to treat.

I recall that in the first applications of the AIDS cocktail that the dosages were aggressive and caused severe side effects. Today the process is almost gentle and victims are living out their lives in very good order.

We have the ability to do this with the early onset stages of almost all cancers, yet the care is dominated by late cancers and desperate interventions. So a device able to screen immediately for the presence of offending cell forms will swiftly change all that.

And intervention is likely to be a cocktail of specific drugs able to suppress the problem, or location and removal if warranted.

It also sounds like it will be available rather quickly and can become as ubiquous as a stethoscope.

This also technology that will see steady upgrading similar to what we have experienced with cell phones.

September 28, 2009

U of T researchers create microchip that can detect type and severity of cancer

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/u-of-t-researchers-create-microchip.html

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University of Toronto researchers, Shana Kelley and Ted Sargent, have made a cancer diagnostic breakthrough. Kelley said a five-year time frame would be a "conservative estimate" to get the device on the market.

U of T researchers have used nanomaterials to develop an inexpensive microchip sensitive enough to quickly determine the type and severity of a patient's cancer so that the disease can be detected earlier for more effective treatment.

The researchers' new device can easily sense the signature biomarkers that indicate the presence of cancer at the cellular level, even though these biomolecules - genes that indicate aggressive or benign forms of the disease and differentiate subtypes of the cancer - are generally present only at low levels in biological samples. Analysis can be completed in 30 minutes, a vast improvement over the existing diagnostic procedures that generally take days.

"Today, it takes a room filled with computers to evaluate a clinically relevant sample of cancer biomarkers and the results aren't quickly available," said Shana Kelley, a professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Medicine, who was a lead investigator on the project and a co-author on the publication.

"Our team was able to measure biomolecules on an electronic chip the size of your fingertip and analyse the sample within half an hour. The instrumentation required for this analysis can be contained within a unit the size of a BlackBerry."

Kelley, along with engineering professor Ted Sargent - a fellow lead investigator and U of T's Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology - and an interdisciplinary team from Princess Margaret Hospital and Queen's University, found that conventional, flat metal electrical sensors were inadequate to sense cancer’s particular biomarkers. Instead, they designed and fabricated a chip and decorated it with nanometre-sized wires and molecular "bait."

Abstract Nature Nanotechnology: Programming the detection limits of biosensors through controlled nanostructuring

Advances in materials chemistry offer a range of nanostructured shapes and textures for building new biosensors. Previous reports have implied that controlling the properties of sensor substrates can improve detection sensitivities, but the evidence remains indirect. Here we show that by nanostructuring the sensing electrodes, it is possible to create nucleic acid sensors that have a broad range of sensitivities and that are capable of rapid analysis. Only highly branched electrodes with fine structuring attained attomolar sensitivity. Nucleic acid probes immobilized on finely nanostructured electrodes appear more accessible and therefore complex more rapidly with target molecules in solution. By forming arrays of microelectrodes with different degrees of nanostructuring, we expanded the dynamic range of a sensor system from two to six orders of magnitude. The demonstration of an intimate link between nanoscale sensor structure and biodetection sensitivity will aid the development of high performance diagnostic tools for biology and medicine.

2 page pdf with supplemental information

Shana Kelly Lab webpage at the University of Toronto

"Uniting DNA - the molecule of life - with speedy, miniaturized electronic chips is an example of cross-disciplinary convergence," said Sargent. "By working with outstanding researchers in nanomaterials, pharmaceutical sciences, and electrical engineering, we were able to demonstrate that controlled integration of nanomaterials provides a major advantage in disease detection and analysis."

The speed and accuracy provided by their device is welcome news to cancer researchers.

The team's microchip platform has been tested on prostate cancer, as described in a paper published in ACS Nano, and head and neck cancer models. It could potentially be used to diagnose and assess other cancers, as well as infectious diseases such as HIV, MRSA and H1N1 flu.

"The system developed by the Kelley/Sargent team is a revolutionary technology that could allow us to track biomarkers that might have significant relevance to cancer, with a combination of speed, sensitivity, and accuracy not available with any current technology," said Dr. Fei-Fei Liu, a radiation oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital and Head of Applied Molecular Oncology Division, Ontario Cancer Institute. "This type of approach could have a profound impact on the future management for our cancer patients."

Changing Life Spans

This story has been brewing for a while. It is that death rates have fallen ahead of expectations. This also shows that expectations are rising. Whether the recent pronounced fall is simply a statistical anomaly or caused by a specific change is not clearly determined as yet.

I can make a conjecture or two. During the early eighties, for reasons not terribly obvious at the time, the boomer generation not only began dumping the smoking habit, but also decided to closely manage their drinking.

It was no longer cool to become drunk out of ones mind. Those are two changes that were a clear break with the previous generational practice, or at least appeared to be.

The decline of smoking was remarked and visible, while the tighter management of alcohol was largely invisible. It was remarked more by hosts having to take back half the liquor brought in for a party.

Both changes promote better health outcomes. We forget that chronic low level drinking that occurs everyday, does damage to the liver and also promotes diabetes.

These changes have been in place for a good twenty years and that suggests that the effects on life span should now begin showing up as the boomer generation moves into their final decades.

To put this into proper perspective, if we had a serious shift in behavior in only twenty percent of the population and I believe that that is conservative, and that proportion added a reasonable ten years to their respective life spans, then that accounts for a shift in the statistics of about two years, and as noted, its appearance is simply timely.

As noted quitting smoking consistently adds a solid decade to an individual life span and management of drinking postpones the advent of diabetes by a decade also. Unfortunately, they are not additive. Most likely individuals did both and strongly reinforced their gains. Thus, in retrospect the present sudden jump in apparent life spans is consistent with past behavior that was partly unremarked upon.

All this means that boomer life spans will average in at eighty plus.



August 19, 2009

Life Expectency in the USA has increased and total deaths have fallen

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/life-expectency-in-usa-has-increased.html

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The preliminary number of deaths in the United States for 2007 was 2,423,995, representing a decrease of 2,269 from the 2006 total. The crude death rate of 803.7 per 100,000 population was 0.83 percent less than the rate of 810.4 per 100,000 in 2006. The estimated age-adjusted death rate, which accounts for changes in the age distribution of the population, reached a record low of 760.3 per 100,000 U.S. standard population, 2.1 percent lower than the 2006 rate of 776.5. illustrates the pattern of decline in both crude and age-adjusted death rates from 1980 through 2007. In 2007, age-adjusted death rates decreased from 2006 by 2.1 percent for males and by 2.2 percent for females. All of the sex, race, and Hispanic origin groups described in this report showed significant decreases in the age-adjusted death rate in 2007 from 2006, with the exception of ASIAN males, who experienced a decrease that was not statistically significant. The relative magnitudes of these decreases in age-adjusted death rates by sex, race, and Hispanic origin are:


* White males (1.7 percent)
* White females (1.8 percent)
* Non-Hispanic white males (1.4 percent)
* Non-Hispanic white females (1.4 percent)
* Black males (4.1 percent)
* Black females (4.0 percent)
* Non-Hispanic black males (4.1 percent)
* Non-Hispanic black females (3.9 percent)
* ASIAN males (0.4 percent, not significant)
* ASIAN females (4.7 percent)
* API males (4.2 percent) [Asia Pacific Islander - API)
* API females (4.8 percent)
* Hispanic males (5.5 percent)
* Hispanic females (6.6 percent)

Diseases of heart, decreased by 4.7 percent. The age-adjusted death rate for Malignant neoplasms decreased by 1.8 percent

The HIV death rate dropped 10 percent, the biggest one-year decline in 10 years

.

Michael Darling at the Speculist rightly points out that these statistics are really for the actual life expectency of people born around 1929 who ended up in America at the time of their death. Average age of death of those who died in 2007. Back in 1929 the estimate of life expectancy was 58, which was the actual of amount of life expectancy for people born in 1871. So people born in 1929 did 21 years better than those born in 1871. How will those born in 2009 actually do in terms of average lifespan ? Probably a lot better than 78 years. How about the average of the likely number of years of life left for people who are now 40 ? It is a lot more than 38 years because those alive now at 40 have made it past all infant and childhood and early adult risks. If you do a few things right (don't smoke, drink only in moderation, exercise, get checkups and know your family medical history and actively work to prevent or detect your personal risks) then you have a very good chance of making to 90+ years of age even without breakthroughs. Supporting Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) projects, like the recent successful fundraising for laser ablation of libofuscin, will help accelerate the life extension breakthroughs


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National Vital Statistics Reports, preliminary data for 2007 has just been released. (51 page pdf)

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Portugal's Successful Decriminalization

This program in Portugal is as close to a rational drug management program as I have yet seen. You start by transitioning the criminal addict to the health care system as a patient. And you do this for all forms of addictive drugs.

The one extra step that could be added is to permit prescription controlled access to the drugs in question in order to remove the third party supplier from the equation. The difficulty is that all medical practitioners have sworn oaths to do no harm and authorizing access to an addict is pretty hard to swallow however rational the reasons.

The immediate benefit is to eliminate the economic incentive to produce new addicts. Actual drug costs are so low now that most addicts have options.

In the first five years of the program Portugal has experienced a marked improvement that fully supports the arguments in favor of this approach.

I personally loathe chemical abuse in any form. I have a drink once a month to prove I am not a teetotaler. I respect mind and body way too much to play games with it.

That does not change the fact that drug addiction is a crippling difficult to treat disease normally induced by merchants to the gullible. The tobacco industry is the classic business model. Portugal is quite correct to continue to criminalize free lance pr0oduct marketing.

A thought: Smokers die ten years early thereby eliminating ten years of prime tax production. How does the tax loss through early death compare to the tax revenue through tobacco sales? This should be easy to calculate.

April 7, 2009

5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results
Street drug–related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes
By Brian Vastag

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization&sc=DD_20090408

DRUG PLAN: Portugal decriminalized the use and possession of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other illicit street drugs in an attempt to cut down on related deaths and infections

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs.

The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination." Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working."

He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it.

In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico's president has proposed doing the same. .

A spokesperson for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office's new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.