It takes a global pharmaceutical company with extensive resources to produce drugs that can alleviate suffering due to unheralded diseases. This is the challenge that Shire plc has chosen for their mission and the Lexington-based Shire’s Human Genetic Therapies (HGT) business unit exemplifies this effort. The business unit focuses on the research, development and marketing of “novel products and services that profoundly enhance the quality of life of patients suffering from rare diseases”. Rare diseases afflict thousands rather than millions of people world-wide. In the United States, …
It seems unimaginable that anyone could reject Darwin’s Theory of Evolution when we are surrounded daily with examples of its process. One of the most onerous impacts of natural selection occurs in medicine with the onslaught of “superbugs." A superbug is a strain of bacterium that carries genes that turn out to be resistant to currently-used antibiotic drugs. In any given population of bugs there is always the probability that some bugs will have such genes. Even if the antibiotic destroys 99 percent of the population the few that remain will reproduce and forever be resistant to that …
There are diseases and then there are super-diseases. To visualize the scope of diseases that affect millions is almost incomprehensible. To visualize the scope of super-diseases that affect billions of people staggers the mind. When a disease impacts the lives of one out of three people on the entire Earth it is apocalyptic. Yet, that is the scourge of iron-deficiency-anemia (IDA). According to the Mayo Clinic, IDA (low red-blood-cell levels) is characterized by extreme fatigue, weakness, poor appetite, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness and lightheadedness. The result is a loss of …
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in 2010 malaria caused 655,000 deaths worldwide. Most of the deaths were among African children, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where just about every minute a child dies from the disease. Annually, there are over 200 million cases of malaria. The disease is spread by parasites transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The use of drugs to prevent the disease has become problematic due to evolutionary drug-resistant-strains developed in both the parasite and the mosquito population. Although there is currently no …
That living forms reproduce themselves is a wonder. That we understand the process of cell replication borders on the incredulous. The first level of understanding began in 1870 when the biochemist Friedrich Miescher discovered that, in addition to protein, there was an acid contained within the nucleus of living cells. In early 1900, this nucleic acid was determined to be DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). This discovery raised the question as to whether-or-not it is the proteins in living cells or the DNA that is the molecule of heredity. It was not until 1944 that DNA was declared the genetic …
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that the number of annual deaths in the United States in 2008 from lung cancer was approximately one-hundred and sixty-thousand. The American Lung Association estimates that in 2012 lung cancer deaths will exceed the death rate for prostate, pancreas, breast and colon cancer combined. The disease presents itself in the form of a lung carcinoma (hereafter "tumor”). After diagnosis, based on the disease’s spread throughout the body, the five-year survival rate ranges from about fifty percent down to four percent. …
During the years 1905 to 1917 the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein published papers on the special and general theories of relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian-motion and the theoretical basis for nuclear energy. In addition, he published the Quantum Theory of Radiation that included the statistical probability for Light-Amplification-by-Stimulated-emission-Radiation, now known as the “LASER”. It was not until 1960 that the first working laser was invented by Theodore H. Maiman at the Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California. Although the invention provided considerable…
We are born with the biological seeds of our own self destruction. The process that provides normal embryonic growth to produce a complete human being is the same mechanism that can create cancerous cells in our mature body. The biological cells that created our face can, under constant exposure to the Sun’s ultraviolet rays, begin to mutate into abnormal growth patterns that result in basal cell carcinoma. The mechanism that produces this sort of cancer is termed “activation of the Hedgehog signaling pathway." The formally-assigned name “Hedgehog (gene symbol Hh)” is derived from the shape …
If the first humans who stood erect had any inkling their actions would lead to a host of leg problems due to peripheral vein damage then they probably would have remained knuckle-walkers. Our veins are the vessels that transport blood back to our hearts. Some veins lie just under our skin and others run deep within our muscles. The veins contain valves that keep the blood-flow one-way unless they become weakened or damaged due to life’s physical pressures. Within damaged veins the blood pools and can even flow backwards as our muscles contract. This type of damage is referred to as venous …
Imagine you could see through the smoke, haze and darkness caused by structure fire and accurately locate people trapped among the debris and save their lives. To do this, your eyes would need to see far beyond our limited capacity to see colors deeper than red. You would have to see the always available radiation emitted in what is categorized as the far-infrared. Infrared radiation is more familiar as “heat," which you can feel but cannot see it with the unaided eye. Far-infrared refers to a band of radiation that can pass through not only smoke but through the atmosphere itself. Now, …
The technological landscape consists of both ascendant and broken dreams. One such dream is that of higher density, lowest cost, fastest-ever optical computers manufactured with all-silicon components. So, when Professor Lorenzo Pavesi’s nanosilicon photonics team at the University of Trento, Italy coupled the optical emission from a tiny dot of silicon to a silicon waveguide, they emblazoned a trail in the landscape that moved the breakthrough computer dream one step closer to reality. Due to Pavesi’s multiple contributions to nanosilicon photonics he was welcomed as a guest lecturer by …
