HIDDEN VALLEY LAKE, Calif. – The Circle for Life Challenging Illness support group meets every Thursday in Hidden Valley Lake.
The group gets together from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Hidden Valley Community Church, 18160 Spruce Grove Extension.
The group is offered through St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake.
For more information contact Amber Warner, MSW, at 707-995-5817 or Colleen Winters, LCSW, at 707-967-5791.
Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in genetically engineering algae to produce a complex and expensive human therapeutic drug used to treat cancer.
Their achievement, detailed in a paper in this week’s early online issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, opens the door for making these and other “designer” proteins in larger quantities and much more cheaply than can now be made from mammalian cells.
“Because we can make the exact same drug in algae, we have the opportunity to drive down the price down dramatically,” said Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology or SD-CAB, a consortium of research institutions that is also working to develop new biofuels from algae.
Their method could even be used to make novel complex designer drugs that can’t be produced in any other systems – drugs that could be used to treat cancer or other human diseases in new ways.
“You can’t make these drugs in bacteria, because bacteria are incapable of folding these proteins into these complex, three-dimensional shapes,” said Mayfield. “And you can’t make these proteins in mammalian cells because the toxin would kill them.”
The advance is the culmination of seven years of work in Mayfield’s laboratory to demonstrate that Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a green alga used widely in biology laboratories as a genetic model organism, can produce a wide range of human therapeutic proteins in greater quantity and more cheaply than bacteria or mammalian cells.
Mayfield and his colleagues achieved their first breakthrough five years ago when they demonstrated they could produce a mammalian serum amyloid protein in algae. The following year, they succeeded in getting algae to produce a human antibody protein.
In 2010, they demonstrated that more complex proteins – human therapeutic drugs, such as human vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF, used to treat patients suffering from pulmonary emphysema—could be produced in algae ( http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/03-08TherapeuticProteins.asp ).
Then in May of this year, Mayfield’s group working with another team headed by Joseph Vinetz from UC San Diego’s School of Medicine, engineered algae to produce an even more complex protein – a new kind of vaccine that, preliminary experiments suggest, could protect billions of people from malaria, one of the world’s most prevalent and debilitating diseases ( http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/uc_san_diego_biologists_produce_potential_malarial_vaccine_from_algae/ ) .
“What the development of the malarial vaccine showed us was that algae could produce proteins that were really complex structures, containing lots of disulfide bonds that would still fold into the correct three-dimensional structures,” said Mayfield. “Antibodies were the first sophisticated proteins we made. But the malarial vaccine is complex, with disulfide bonds that are pretty unusual. So once we made that, we were convinced we could make just about anything in algae.”
In their latest development, the scientists genetically engineered algae to produce a complex, three-dimensional protein with two “domains” – one of which contains an antibody, which can home in on and attach to a cancer cell and another domain that contains a toxin that kills the bound cancer cells.
Such “fusion proteins” are presently created by pharmaceutical companies in a complex, two-step process by first developing the antibody domain in a Chinese hamster, or CHO, cell. The antibody is purified, then chemically attached to a toxin outside of the cell. Then the final protein is repurified.
“We have a two-fold advantage over that process,” said Mayfield. “First, we make this as a single protein with the antibody and toxin domains fused together in a single gene, so we only have to purify it one time. And second, because we make this in algae rather than CHO cells, we get an enormous cost advantage on the production of the protein.”
The fusion protein the researchers in his laboratory produced from algae is identical to one that is under development by pharmaceutical companies with a proposed cost of more than $100,000. This same protein could be produced in algae for a fraction of that price, they report in their paper.
The UCSD researchers – Miller Tran, Christina Van, Dan Barrera and Jack Bui at the UC San Diego Medical School – confirmed that the compound worked like the more expensive treatment: it homed in on cancer cells and inhibited the development of tumors in laboratory mice.
Mayfield said such a fusion protein could not have been produced in a mammalian CHO cell, because the toxin would have killed it. But because the protein was produced in the algae’s chloroplasts – the part of algal and plant cells where photosynthesis takes place—it did not kill the algae.
“The protein was sequestered inside the chloroplast,” Mayfield said. “And the chloroplast has different proteins from the rest of the cell, and these are not affected by the toxin. If the protein we made were to leak out of the chloroplast, it would have killed the cell. So it’s amazing to think that not one molecule leaked out of the chloroplasts. There are literally thousands of copies of that protein inside the chloroplasts and not one of them leaked out.”
Mayfield said producing this particular fusion protein was fairly straightforward because it involved fusing two domains – one to recognize and bind to cancer cells and another to kill them.
But in the future, he suspects this same method could be used to engineer algae to produce more complex proteins with multiple domains.
“Can we string together four or five domains and produce a designer protein in algae with multiple functions that doesn’t exist in nature? I think we can?” he added. “Suppose I want to couple a receptor protein with a series of activator proteins so that I could stimulate bone production or the production of neurons? At some point you can start thinking about medicine the same way we think about assembling a computer, combining different modules with specific purposes. We can produce a protein that has one domain that targets the kind of cell you want to impact, and another domain that specifies what you want the cell to do.”
The research project was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and The Skaggs Family Foundation.
Children who had in-utero exposure to ischemic-hypoxic conditions, situations during which the brain is deprived of oxygen, were significantly more likely to develop attention deficit hyperactivity disorder later in life as compared to unexposed children, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the journal Pediatrics.
The findings suggest that events in pregnancy may contribute to the occurrence of ADHD over and above well-known familial and genetic influences of the disorder.
The population-based study examines the association between IHC and ADHD. Researchers examined the electronic health records of nearly 82,000 children ages 5 years old and found that prenatal exposure to IHC – especially birth asphyxia, neonatal respiratory distress syndrome, and preeclampsia – was associated with a 16 percent greater risk of developing ADHD.
Specifically, exposure to birth asphyxia was associated with a 26 percent greater risk of developing ADHD, exposure to neonatal respiratory distress syndrome was associated with a 47 percent greater risk, and exposure to preeclampsia (high blood pressure during pregnancy) was associated with a 34 percent greater risk.
The study also found that the increased risk of ADHD remained the same across all race and ethnicity groups.
“Previous studies have found that hypoxic injury during fetal development leads to significant structural and functional brain injuries in the offspring,” said study lead author Darios Getahun, MD, PhD, of the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation. “However, this study suggests that the adverse effect of hypoxia and ischemia on prenatal brain development may lead to functional problems, including ADHD.”
Researchers also found that the association between IHC and ADHD was strongest in preterm births and that deliveries that were breech, transverse (shoulder-first) or had cord complications were found to be associated with a 13 percent increased risk of ADHD.
These associations were found to be the case even after controlling for gestational age and other potential risk factors.
“Our findings could have important clinical implications. They could help physicians identify newborns at-risk that could benefit from surveillance and early diagnosis, when treatment is more effective,” said Getahun. “We suggest future research to focus on pre- and post-natal conditions and the associations with adverse outcomes, such as ADHD.”
During critical periods of fetal organ development, IHC may result in a lack of oxygen and nutrient transport from the mother’s blood to fetal circulation.
The result may be compromised oxygen delivery to tissues and cerebrovascular complications. However, this study suggests that the adverse effect of hypoxia on prenatal brain development may lead to functional problems, including ADHD.
In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated the annual cost of ADHD-related illness in children under 18 years of age to be between $36 billion and $52.4 billion, making the condition a public health priority.
In 2010, approximately 8.4 percent of children ages 3 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD. For about half the affected children, the disease persists into adulthood, according to CDC statistics. Symptoms of ADHD in children may include attention problems, acting without thinking, or an overly active temperament.
This study is part of Kaiser Permanente’s ongoing research to understand the relationship between prenatal conditions and adverse medical outcomes.
Earlier this year, Kaiser Permanente researchers found that in-utero exposure to relatively high magnetic field levels was associated with a 69 percent increased risk of being obese or overweight during childhood compared to lower in-utero magnetic field level exposure.
A Kaiser Permanente study conducted last year found exposure to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors anti-depressants in early pregnancy may modestly increase the risk of autism spectrum disorders.
Fit kids aren’t only first picked for kickball. New research from Michigan State University shows middle school students in the best physical shape outscore their classmates on standardized tests and take home better report cards.
Published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, it’s the first study linking children’s fitness to both improved scores on objective tests and better grades, which rely on subjective decisions by teachers.
The study also is among the first to examine how academic performance relates to all aspects of physical fitness – including body fat, muscular strength, flexibility and endurance – according to lead researcher Dawn Coe.
“We looked at the full range of what’s called health-related fitness,” said Coe, who conducted the research as a doctoral student in MSU’s kinesiology department and is now an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Kids aren’t really fit if they’re doing well in just one of those categories.”
Coe and colleagues gathered their data from 312 students in sixth through eighth grade at a West Michigan school.
They gauged the kids’ fitness with an established program of push-ups, shuttle runs and other exercises.
Then they compared those scores to students’ letter grades throughout the school year in four core classes and their performance on a standardized test.
The results showed the fittest children got the highest test scores and the best grades, regardless of gender or whether they’d yet gone through puberty.
The findings suggest schools that cut physical education and recess to focus on core subjects may undermine students’ success on the standardized tests that affect school funding and prestige, said co-author James Pivarnik, who advised Coe on the project.
“Look, your fitter kids are the ones who will do better on tests, so that would argue against cutting physical activity from the school day,” said Pivarnik, an MSU professor of kinesiology. “That’s the exciting thing, is if we can get people to listen and have some impact on public policy.”
Making fitness a bigger part of children’s lives also sets them up for future success, Pivarnik added.
“Fit kids are more likely to be fit adults,” he said. “And now we see that fitness is tied to academic achievement. So hopefully the fitness and the success will both continue together.”