Tuesday, October 27, 2009

“ACROSS the BIG SKY - Great Falls Tribune” plus 4 more

“ACROSS the BIG SKY - Great Falls Tribune” plus 4 more

ACROSS the BIG SKY - Great Falls Tribune

Posted: 27 Oct 2009 03:55 AM PDT

Study finds bears feast on city's apples

MISSOULA — A partially completed wildlife study has found that black bears enter yards in Missoulaat night to feast on apples.

The three-year study by University of Montana wildlife biology student Jerod Merkle and the state Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks is at its midpoint.

Merkle said radio-collar mapping of 10 bears shows they mostly stay in the mountains but come to town in August for apple season.

He also said bears are usually active in the morning and evenings, but Missoula bears are changing their lifestyle and becoming nocturnal for the opportunity to dine on urban food.

Experts said bear problems in the city spiked in the 1990s when a tough food year drove bears out of the forests and into town. Biologists said bears that survived learned how to navigate city life and then taught their cubs.

Alcohol breath tests headed for state

BILLINGS — Two mobile breath alcohol testing vehicles intended to help reduce the number of alcohol-related fatalities on tribal lands are headed for Montana.

Officials say the BAT-mobiles that cost $300,000 each will be delivered to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Justice Services in Billings in early November.

BIA officials said they will coordinate use of the vehicles with tribal law enforcement departments. The vehicles will be used at traffic checkpoints.

Matthew Pryor, special agent in charge for the BIA Office of Justice Services in District V, said the BIA will house the vehicles but they will spend most of their time on reservation roads.

The Montana Department of Transportation said Native Americans comprise 6.2 percent of the state's population but account for 25 percent of alcohol-related fatalities.

Billings Food Bank almost finished

BILLINGS — The executive director of the BillingsFood Bank said a new $5 million facility for the nonprofit is poised to open soon.

Sheryle Shandy said construction crews are putting the finishing touches on the 54,000-square-foot facility, which will include an operations center and warehouse.

In September 2008, the old Food bank building was demolished to make room for the new building, and food has been stored at a temporary spaces during the past year.

Shandy said bad weather delayed the opening of the facility from last April to this fall, when completion of a new home for the food bank was further pushed back because of complications with inspections and permitting.

Man gets 40 years for sexual abuse

BILLINGS — A 32-year-old Ashlandman has been sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for sexually abusing two young girls.

Gerhard C. Stern was sentenced last week after being found guilty of aggravated sexual abuse. Prosecutors said the abuse of the girls, ages 4 and 5, was disclosed in March 2008.

Stern had a prior conviction for sexual abuse as a juvenile and served time at the Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility in Miles City.

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Prairie View A&M Suspends All Pledging Activities Following Students ... - KBTX.com

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 12:04 AM PDT

Prairie View A&M University says the Hempstead Police Department is investigating the death of a Prairie View A&M University student. University officials say 20-year-old Donnie Wade from Dallas died Tuesday after experiencing difficulty during an early morning run at Hempstead High School.

Prairie View A&M Campus police will work in conjunction with the Hempstead police during the probe. Additionally, The PVAMU Office of Student Affairs is conducting a separate investigation, including examining alleged incidents of hazing. Wade was a prospective member of Phi Beta Sigma, a registered student organization.

Pending investigation results, Prairie View A&M President George C. Wright has suspended all pledging activities. "The University is taking this situation very seriously. It is imperative that we discontinue all fraternity and sorority membership intake activities until we receive a full account of events that led up to the death of Mr. Wade," said President Wright. "The entire Prairie View A&M community is saddened by Donnie's death. We extend our condolences to his family and friends during their time of bereavement."

Grief counseling and assistance is available to university students, faculty and staff at the PVAMU Owens-Franklin Health Center. Wake and funeral arrangements are pending and will be announced at a later date.

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Eastern philosopher stresses biology of happiness - Medford Mail Tribune

Posted: 27 Oct 2009 02:00 AM PDT

Eastern philosophy guru Deepak Chopra says he has one way to reform our sorry state of health care: by reconnecting with our spiritual side.

Once we do that, he said, we'll alter the structure of our brains, optimize our genetic functioning and stop taking so many unnecessary medications.

Chopra calls this the biology of happiness and expounds on it in his latest book, "Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul."

In a phone interview, Chopra said that what we think and how we feel physically change our brains and bodies.

He pointed to research on neuropeptides, which are protein-like molecules used by brain cells to communicate information to one another.

Thinking a thought or feeling an emotion, he said, causes a synapse to fire neuropeptides, not just to other brain cells, but to cells throughout the body including the immune system. Once a cell receives a neuropeptide, he added, its information changes that cell down to the genetic level.

"Now we're starting to see that how you behave, how you think, your personal relationships, social interactions, environment, diet, stress levels, they all modulate the activities of your genes," he said. "So what you think can change your genes and the structure of your brain."

Our relationship with time also affects our brains and bodies, because if you think you're running out of time your biological clock speeds up, he says. Connecting with our souls through love, passion, kindness, joy and so on does more than any drug to improve our health, because it "optimizes and up-regulates genes." Meditating helps with this, he says.

Chopra maintains that each year, Americans spend $700 billion on meds they don't need and surgeons perform 5 million unnecessary surgeries.

"If we just paid attention to those two things we could end the health care reform debate and stop filling out insurance forms," he said. "We, the supplier, create our own demand."

Chopra is a medically trained endocrinologist and former chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital during the 1970s. He said he quit traditional medicine because "we were acting like legalized drug pushers and prolonging suffering."

Since then, he's written 50 books, many of which have become best-sellers, and has built a loyal following including several celebrities. In a 1996 feature story, Time Magazine lauded him as having "done more than anyone else in the U.S. to create a vocabulary for the intersection of faith and medicine."

But Chopra also has critics. Dr. Stephen Barret, author of "The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America," has noted that Chopra's theories aren't up for peer-review.

Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, recently told NBC News that what Chopra does bothers a lot of scientists.

"It isn't his summary of recent scientific findings that is the problem," Shermer said. "It is in the extrapolation from recent data and tentative conclusions that scientists cautiously draw from those data where Deepak goes too far."


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UT leads collaborative initiative for innovative cancer research - Genetic Engineering News

Posted: 27 Oct 2009 09:17 AM PDT

Oct 27 2009, 12:00 PM EST

UT leads collaborative initiative for innovative cancer research

EUREKALERT

Contact: Robert Cahill
Robert.Cahill@uth.tmc.edu
713-500-3030
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

A consortium led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston has been awarded a major grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to establish a center to conduct innovative cancer research. The center will receive $2.4 million during the first year and could receive funds totaling $11.6 million over a 5-year period. The new center is called the Center for Transport Oncophysics (CTO).

The CTO is one of the first 12 Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers (PS-OCs) being created by the NCI in an effort to bring a new cadre of theoretical physicists, mathematicians, chemists and engineers to the study of cancer. The consortium also includes The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Rice University and Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital.

Ultimately, through coordinated development and testing of novel approaches to studying cancer processes, the network of PS-OCs is expected to generate new bodies of knowledge in order to identify and define critical aspects of physics, chemistry and engineering that operate at all levels in cancer processes.

"By bringing a fresh set of eyes to the study of cancer, these new centers have great potential to advance, and sometimes challenge, accepted theories about cancer and its supportive microenvironment," said NCI Director John E. Niederhuber, M.D. "Physical scientists think in terms of time, space, pressure, heat, and evolution in ways that we hope will lead to new understandings of the multitude of forces that govern cancer-and with that understanding, we hope to develop new and innovative methods of arresting tumor growth and metastasis."

"The Center for Transport Oncophysics will focus on understanding how biological molecules and drugs are transported in cancer and healthy tissues. This will allow a new vision, a new prism through which to look at cancer and exploit its weaknesses to mount decisive attacks against its most damaging forms, such as metastatic and locally advanced disease," said Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., who is the CTO's principal investigator and who has faculty appointments at all the consortium institutions in Texas.

"The CTO is a broadly interdisciplinary quest, which links world-famous clinicians and cancer biologists at M. D. Anderson with nanomedicine, biomathematics, imaging and drug-delivery experts at the UT Health Science Center at Houston, Rice, UT Austin and Harvard. It is a great team that can achieve unprecedented results. It is a coronation of the concept of collaborations beyond institutional and disciplinary boundaries - another great success of the Alliance for NanoHealth," Ferrari said.

Ferrari serves as professor and chairman of the Department of NanoMedicine and Biomedical Engineering at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, a part of the UT Health Science Center.

In addition to research traditionally focused on the biology of tumors, CTO researchers aim to investigate the differences in transport phenomena that characterize neoplastic disease and to establish methods for the exploitation of these differentials for advances in the diagnosis and therapy of cancer.

CTO investigators will focus on research projects targeting liver cancers. The researchers believe primary liver cancer and cancer that spreads to the liver from tumors that originate in other parts of the body will help them learn more about the spread of tumors in general. Research projects include learning more about the biobarriers that keep cancer therapeutic agents from reaching tumors and investigating how to concentrate more agent at the site of a tumor.

Co-leading the consortium is Steven Curley, M.D., professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Surgical Oncology. "This novel collaboration will help us sharpen a promising potential therapy that destroys tumors by using radio waves to heat up gold nanoparticles embedded inside them," Curley said.

This approach was invented by the late John Kanzius, an entrepreneur, former radio station owner and M. D. Anderson patient who knew that radio waves, which usually pass harmlessly through the body, will cook any metal in their path. "The key to making this work is to so precisely target nanoparticles to the tumor that you destroy the tumor with radio waves while sparing other tissue," Curley said. "The CTO will address that central issue."

Nicholas Peppas, Sc.D., one of the project leaders of the grant, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UT Austin and the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in Engineering, said, "I am delighted to collaborate with my colleagues at the UT Health Science Center on this extremely important research. Our work will provide advanced forms of oral delivery of chemotherapeutic agents and will identify cellular mechanisms that will improve the administration of drugs for cancer treatment to specific sites."

Other CTO senior project leaders and faculty investigators include M. D. Anderson Cancer Center researchers: Isaiah J. Fidler, D.V.M., Ph.D., professor of the Department of Cancer Biology; Wadih Arap, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and cancer biology; and Renata Pasqualini, Ph.D., professor of medicine and cancer biology. CTO researchers from Rice University include Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering, and Lon J. Wilson, Ph.D., professor of chemistry. CTO members from the UT Health Science Center include: Vittorio Cristini, Ph.D., professor of health informatics, and Paolo Decuzzi, Ph.D., associate professor of health informatics. Representing the Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital is Seok-Hyun "Andy" Yun, Ph.D. , assistant professor of dermatology.

"Cancerous cells and tissues interact with light differently than healthy tissues, and our lab works to develop minimally invasive technologies that recognize these differences," said Richards-Kortum, one of the core leaders of CTO and a researcher in Rice's new BioScience Research Collaborative. "Through the Center for Oncophysics, we hope to develop and test new imaging technologies that better detect the optical signatures of cancer and help monitor the delivery of targeted agents to detect and treat cancers - technologies that could ultimately help save lives with earlier diagnoses and more effective therapy."

Ferrari serves as professor of experimental therapeutics at M. D. Anderson, adjunct professor of bioengineering at Rice University, adjoint professor of biomedical engineering at UT Austin, adjunct professor of mathematics and mechanical engineering at the University of Houston and president of the Alliance for NanoHealth, Houston. Ferrari serves as the UT Health Science Center chair of the inter-institutional Department of Biomedical Engineering formed in collaboration with M.D. Anderson and UT Austin College of Engineering.

NCI has awarded grants to centers, which will be the focal points of a research network that will span the country. The 12 institutions are:

Arizona State University, Tempe
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, Fla.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, Cambridge
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York
Northwestern University, Chicago
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif.
University of California-Berkeley
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
UT Health Science Center

More information about the Physical Science-Oncology Centers program can be found at http://physics.cancer.gov

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SkinMedica To License NYU Technology - Happi

Posted: 27 Oct 2009 07:15 AM PDT

SkinMedica, Inc. and New York University have entered into a global license agreement to develop novel products to address skin hyperpigmentation based on technology invented atNew York University.

"Our scientific discovery involves natural products that act by an entirely novel mechanism to modulate skin pigmentation," said Seth J. Orlow, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at NYU, and Director of the Program in Cutaneous Biology and NYU Langone Medical Center's Center of Excellence in Cancers of the Skin. "The treatment of hyperpigmentation remains a major unmet need, and we are especially pleased to partner with SkinMedica to advance new products to address this problem."

Under the terms of the agreement, SkinMedica has licensed exclusive rights to develop and market products based on the NYU technology, with a range of applications in the modulation of skin pigmentation.

"Dr. Orlow has a long history of innovation and invention in dermatology and skin biology, and we are proud to partner with him and NYU to deliver novel products for pigmentation." said Mary Fisher, SkinMedica president and chief executive officer."Hyperpigmentation is a very common problem worldwide, with limited treatment options.We look forward to advancing this program, which has enormous global market potential."

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