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New Microchip Technology Performs 1,000 Chemical Reactions At Once
Flasks, beakers and hot plates may soon be a thing of the past in chemistry labs. Instead of handling a few experiments on a bench top, scientists may simply pop a microchip into a computer and instantly run thousands of chemical reactions, with results - literally shrinking the lab down to the size of a thumbnail.
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Wiley-Blackwell Publishes Inaugural Issue Of LUTS (Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms)
Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc (NYSE: JWa), (NYSE: JWb), has announced that the inaugural issue of its new journal, LUTS (Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms), is now live online.
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Advocates Eager To Learn More About Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Abortion-Rights Views
Abortion-rights groups on Wednesday offered their support for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor but said that they were eager to learn more about her views on abortion rights, an issue on which she has made few major rulings in her time as a judge, the New York Times reports. According to the Times, groups on both sides of the abortion-rights debate tend to believe that Sotomayor would uphold Roe v. Wade because she was nominated by President Obama, who supports abortion rights. However, when asked on Tuesday if Obama questioned Sotomayor about her views on abortion rights before the nomination, White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said that the president "did not ask that specifically." In addition, none of her rulings has directly dealt with the underlying issues of constitutional privacy that are the foundation for the Roe decision, according to the Times. The abortion-related cases Sotomayor has handled in the past have "turned on other legal issues," rather than privacy, and they have resulted in rulings in favor of abortion-right opponents, the Times reports. For example, in 2002, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration"s "global gag rule" policy banning federal funding of international groups that offer abortion information or services. "The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the antiabortion position over the pro-choice position and can do so with public funds," Sotomayor wrote in the opinion. In 2004, she said that antiabortion-rights protesters were permitted to sue police who they claimed used excessive force in stopping a demonstration at a clinic. Sotomayor also has ruled on several immigration cases related to people fighting deportation orders to China over its family planning policies, the Times reports. Because of the limited information on Sotomayor"s abortion-rights views, advocates have stressed that senators ask questions about her views during her confirmation hearing. NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan in a letter to supporters urged them to press senators to ask Sotomayor about privacy rights. Keenan wrote, "Discussion about [Roe] will -- and must -- be part of this nomination process. As you know, choice hangs in the balance on the Supreme Court as the last two major choice-related cases were decided by a 5-to-4 margin" (Savage, New York Times, 5/28). Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said that she would be surprised if an Obama nominee did not support abortion rights but added that "other presidents have been surprised before" when their nominees" views did not align with their assumptions. Northup said that "no one has been able to give us an assurance" of Sotomayor"s views on abortion rights, adding that she would be "very concerned if the question is not asked and answered during the Senate hearings." Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal said, "What we know about [Sotomayor] we like, but I don"t know that answer on abortion rights" (Savage/Nicholas, Los Angeles Times, 5/28). The New York Times reports that more about Sotomayor"s views on abortion rights could come to light if a past writing on the subject surfaces, as was the case during Justice Samuel Alito"s confirmation process. Steven Waldman, editor in chief of beliefnet.com, said, "Everyone is just assuming that because Obama appointed her, she must be a die-hard pro-choice activist, but it"s really quite amazing how little we know about her views on abortion" (Savage, New York Times, 5/28). Thomas Goldstein, a leading appellate attorney and founder of scotusblog.com, said that the "fact that she hasn"t gone off on these sorts of questions" on contentious topics like abortion rights and gay marriage, "I think shows that honestly she"s not a dyed in the wool liberal." He added that there are issues on which Sotomayor could prove to be more conservative than retiring Justice David Souter (Lerer, Politico, 5/27).According to the Washington Post, many antiabortion-rights supporters are critic
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An Entirely New Direction For RNAi Delivery - The Future Of Personalized Cancer Treatment

In technology that promises to one day allow drug delivery to be tailored to an individual patient and a particular cancer tumor, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have developed an efficient system for delivering siRNA into primary cells. The work was published on May 17 in the advance on-line edition of Nature Biotechnology. "RNAi has an unbelievable potential to manage cancer and treat it," said Steven Dowdy, PhD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "While there"s still a long way to go, we have successfully developed a technology that allows for siRNA drug delivery into the entire population of cells, both primary and tumor-causing, without being toxic to the cells." For many years, Dowdy has studied the cancer therapy potential of RNA inhibition which can be used to silence genes through short interfering, double-stranded RNA fragments called siRNAs. But delivery of siRNAs has proven difficult due to their size and negative electrical charge - which prohibits them from readily entering cells. A small section of protein called a peptide transduction domain (PTD) has the ability to permeate cell membranes. Dowdy and colleagues saw the potential for PTDs as a delivery mechanism for getting siRNAs into cancer cells. He and his team had previously generated more than 50 "fusion proteins" using PTDs linked to tumor-suppressor proteins. "Simply adding the siRNAs to a PTD didn"t work, because siRNAs are highly negatively charged, while PTDs are positively charged, which results in aggregation with no cellular delivery," Dowdy explained. The team solved the problem by making a PTD fusion protein with a double-stranded RNA-binding domain, termed PTD-DRBD, which masks the siRNA"s negative charge. This allows the resultant fusion protein to enter the cell and deliver the siRNA into the cytoplasm where it specifically targets mRNAs from cancer-promoting genes and silences them. To determine the ability of this PTD-DRBD fusion protein to deliver siRNA, the researchers generated a human lung cancer reporter cell line. Using green and fluorescent protein and analyzing the cells using flow cytometry analysis, they were able to determine the magnitude of RNA inhibitory response and the percentage of cells undergoing this response. They found that the entire cellular population underwent a maximum RNAi response. Similar results were obtained in primary cells and cancer cell lines. "We were subsequently able to introduce gene silencing proteins into a large percentage of various cell types, including T cells, endothelial cells and human embryonic stem cells," said Dowdy. "Importantly, we observed no toxicity to the cells or innate immune responses, and a minimal number of transcriptional off-target changes." These RNAi methods can be continually tweaked to combat new mutations - a way to overcome a major problem associated with current cancer therapies. "Such therapies can"t be used a second time if a cancer tumor returns, because the tumor has mutated the target gene to avoid the drug binding," said Dowdy. "But since the synthetic siRNA is designed to bind to a single mutation and only that mutation on the genome, it can be easily and rapidly changed while maintaining the delivery system - the PTD-DRBD fusion protein." "Cancer is a complex, genetic disease that is different in every patient," Dowdy added. "This is still in early stages, but I believe the siRNA-induced RNAi approach to personalized cancer treatment is the only thing on the table." Additional contributors to the paper include Akiko Eguchi, Bryan R. Meade, Yung-Chi Chang, Craig T. Fredrickson, and Karl Willert of the UC San Diego School of Medicine; and Nitin Puti, Life Technologies, Austin, Texas. The work was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Elsa U. Pardee Foundation, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Dowdy is the scientific founder of Traversa Therapeutics located in La Jolla, CA, that has licensed the exclusive rights to commercialize this technology. Debra Kain University of California - San Diego


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