designer
PHILADELPHIA - Even when their products are implicated in harm to patients, manufacturers of healthcare information technology (HIT) currently enjoy wide contractual and legal protection that renders them virtually "liability-free," writes Ross Koppel, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in the March 25th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.<
Described in an advance, online publication of the journal Nature Biotechnology on February 22, 2009, the team's general method could be adapted for detecting a wide variety of compounds, including many that are relevant to diagnostic medicine and environmental work.
The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies.
A critical benchmarking test indicates that a processing-in-memory chip designed and prototyped at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute is delivering the speedup designers hoped. A team of ISI computer scientists led by software specialist Mary Hall and chip designer Jeff Draper earlier this year successfully integrated the new PIM chip, called ''Godiva,'' into a Hewlett-Packard Long's Peak Server. The Godiva chip uses a DDR-DRAM interface and ''the server uses it as if it were standard memory,'' said Hall. The result: the measured throughput of the Godiva chip and the original-equipment Itanium chip is roughly the same. ''But our chip uses only one hundredth the electrical power of the Itanium,'' noted Draper.
After achieving international honors and accolades for building System X, the fastest supercomputer at any academic institution in the world (November, 2003 TOP500 List), Virginia Tech announced today that its rebuilt System X is now operating at 12.25 teraflops. ''Virginia Tech will learn of its new ranking when the list is unveiled in November of this year at SuperComputing 2004 in Pittsburgh,'' said Srinidhi Varadarajan, the lead designer of the system. ''We expect to do well.''
The man who designed the original spacecraft for Project Mercury and is credited with contributing to the designs of every U.S. human spacecraft from Mercury to the Space Shuttle has died. Dr. Maxime A. Faget, who in 1958 became part of the Space Task Group that would later evolve into the NASA Johnson Space Center, died Saturday at his home in Houston. He was 83 years old. ''Without Max Faget's innovative designs and thoughtful approach to problem solving, America's space program would have had trouble getting off the ground,'' said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. ''He also was an aeronautics pioneer. In fact, it was his work on supersonic flight research that eventually led to his interest in space flight. The thoughts and prayers of the entire agency are with his family.''
Scientists have corrected a flaw in cancer cells that lets them evade the normal cell-death process, and as a result they eliminated leukemia cells from mice. With this achievement, the researchers confirm that a key anti-cell-death molecule called BCL-2 is required by many types of cancer cells to survive, and that silencing it with designer drugs may prove to be an effective new avenue for cancer therapy. Using drugs to manipulate apoptosis, or ''programmed cell death'' in cancers ''is a new paradigm that hasn't been well explored yet.''
Some are cylindrical, some look like a double sandwich and some are continuous three-dimensional cubic structures. All are generated by a class of designer macromolecules that could lead to improvements in solar-cell and fuel-cell technology, as well as advances in ultra-miniaturization of electronic devices.
These synthesized molecules self-assemble themselves into structures with dimensions on the order of ten nanometers, an unusual process that mimics nature's most fundamental system of organizing living tissue. (One nanometer is about the width of three silicon atoms).
By making use of model compounds in drug design, chemists at the University of California, San Diego identified a class of molecules that could lead to treatments for a wide range of diseases, including cancer, arthritis, and heart disease.
Enzymes--protein catalysts--in the body that help break down connective tissue like collagen are important in growth and wound healing, but also play a role in many diseases. For example, these enzymes are overactive in arthritis and are used by cancer cells to migrate through connective tissue and spread. While a number of drugs have been designed to inhibit these enzymes, only one has made it through clinical trials because of a variety of drawbacks.
A new study confirms the ability of antimicrobial peptides to enter various bacterial and mammalian cell types, suggesting that the peptides might be used as drug-delivery vehicles. The researchers are also exploring the peptides' ability to deliver antigen to immune cells in an effort to explore whether the peptides could be used in a new vaccine approach.
Researchers have demonstrated that a chemical that permits plants to detoxify heavy metals can be transported from the roots to stems and leaves, a finding that brings the possibility of using plants to clean up soil contaminated with toxic metals such as lead, arsenic and cadmium one step closer to reality.
A young MIT professor's basic research on complex sugars has led to a cascade of potential medical applications that could, for example, significantly improve outcomes for patients undergoing major operations such as heart bypass surgery and impact a multi-billion dollar drug industry. In the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the week of January 13, a team led by the professor, Ram Sasisekharan, reports the creation of designer drugs for preventing the blood clots that can cause strokes and heart disease during surgery. The resulting drugs have major advantages over the conventional form they are based on, which has an annual market of $2-3 billion. Further, an additional drug based on Sasisekharan's work is presently in Phase III clinical trials for heart bypass patients.
With a high-tech fix for faulty cellular editing, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have moved a step closer to developing treatments for a host of diseases as diverse as breast cancer, muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibrosis. Many human diseases have been linked to defects in a cellular editing process called pre-messenger RNA splicing. Adrian Krainer, a molecular biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has spent years investigating this complex editing process, which takes the information coded in genes and makes it available for building proteins. In a new study published in the journal Nature Structural Biology, Krainer's team has devised a clever way to correct RNA splicing defects implicated in breast cancer and spinal muscular atrophy (a neurodegenerative disease). In principle, the technique could provide the ability to correct RNA splicing defects associated with any gene or disease.
