By Heather Hobbs BRINGING YOU THE LATEST RESEARCH & EVENTS NEWS FROM THE SCIENCE INDUSTRY New Centre Heralds Age of Precision Medicine
A new phenotyping research centre in London aims to help doctors diagnose illness more efficiently and choose the best treatments for patients based on their individual metabolic and physiological characteristics.
The Imperial Clinical Phenome Centre, based at St Mary's Hospital, includes technologies based on mass spectrometry which are deployed in the operating theatre to give surgeons useful diagnostic information in real-time. One of the tools, being developed by Dr Zoltan Takats, is the "intelligent knife", which analyses the smoke produced when the electrically heated surgical blade cuts into tissue during an operating procedure. Research has shown that the profile of the chemicals in the smoke provides detailed information about the disease state of the tissue, such as whether it is cancerous, otherwise diseased or non-viable.
Other projects at the Centre will develop diagnostic methods based on tissue samples and fluids such as blood and urine. Profiles obtained can provide information of disease classification and severity and inform doctors of its progression in individuals and how patients respond to a particular drug..
The Centre is jointly funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre and industrial partners including the Waters Corporation and Bruker Spectrospin
GMbH. It will be equipped with three nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers and six mass spectrometers plus a new research staff core.
This is the second phenotyping research centre to be established at Imperial this year, and both are the first of their type in the world. The new Centre will be closely linked with the MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, a collaboration between Imperial and King's College London, which is more focussed on population screening and is due to open in early 2013 at Imperial's Hammersmith campus.
A major Metabolic Phenotyping Research Centre which has been running for many years at Imperial's South Kensington campus provides research and development, data processing and international training support for the two new Phenome Centres.
Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, said: "These analytical technologies are now very mature and are immensely powerful for telling us about someone's physical condition and disease state. Bringing them fully into the clinical setting will help doctors make a more informed diagnosis, choose the best treatment based on the individual characteristics of the patient, and monitor their progress more precisely. It is the dawn of a new age of 'precision medicine'."
Find out more info. 507 UK Physicists Share World’s Biggest Science Prizes
UK physicists are among the recipients of two $3 million special prizes awarded by the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation.
One of the prizes has been awarded to Professor Stephen Hawking (University of Cambridge) for his discovery of Hawking radiation from black holes and for his deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.
The other prize has been awarded to seven senior scientists instrumental in the design, construction and operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), ATLAS and CMS experiments, and whose leadership led to the discovery of the new Higgs-like particle earlier this year.
Dr Lyn Evans celebrating the LHC science at the STFC LHC on Tour exhibition at the Welsh Senedd (Credit STFC)
Professor Jim Virdee was one of the five physicists who first proposed the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle physics experiment at CERN. The CMS is one of two large detectors linked to the LHC and is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions.
“In conceiving, constructing and operating the CMS experiment, and with the discovery of the Higgs-like boson, we have advanced science. For me, it is an honour and privilege to be associated with this advance."
Project Leader of the Large Hadron Collider accelerator during the construction period, Dr Lyn Evans said: “It’s fantastic news. We have been acknowledged as the team that led the design, construction and commissioning of the LHC project. In the LHC collider, the accelerator, and the ATLAS and CMS experiments are so inter-related that it has required close cooperation throughout the whole 16 years of construction. The tremendous performance of ATLAS, CMS and the LHC is witness to the skill and dedication of our many collaborators which we are very proud to represent”.
The prizes are funded by the Milner Foundation.
Professor Jim Virdee in front of the CMS magnet. (Credit: CERN)
Find out more info. 508 Lethal Weapon: Bacteria’s High-Risk Suicide Strategy
Research has shown that some bacterial cells carry a molecular ‘suicide complex’ to kill themselves in the event of lethal infection by viral parasites. Such ‘altruistic suicide’ prevents or limits viral replication and protects the rest of the bacterial population from subsequent infection. In the longer term, the discovery could be exploited to enable the development of new small molecule antibacterial drugs. Bacteria accomplish this through a high-risk strategy in which their lethal weapon is kept to hand at all times, but is neutralised until viral infection of the bacterial cell triggers its release from inhibition.
The ‘suicide complex’ ToxIN.
Credit: Francesca Short
The mechanism was discovered in the bacterial plant pathogen by researchers led by Professors George Salmond and Ben Luisi in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry. Their work, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Dec) shows that a suicide complex, ToxIN, is not induced but exists all the time in the bacterial cell; to avoid killing the bacterial cell, it is held in a suppressed, inert form until viral infection triggers the release of a protein toxin (ToxN) from an RNA antitoxin (ToxI) partner. The toxin then causes the death of both the bacterium and the infecting virus.
The success of the antiviral system therefore depends heavily on maintaining a very strong inhibition or suppression of the toxin by its RNA antitoxin, to ensure that the host cell is not damaged in the absence of invading viruses or other stresses. Small RNAs have multiple essential roles in bacteria, but examples of naturally occurring RNA molecules that act as direct protein inhibitors are rare.
Professor George Salmond, Deputy Head at the Department of Biochemistry, said: “The results present a picture of ToxIN as an addictive, self-assembling – and potentially lethal – molecular machine, which can drive remarkable adaptive advantages in populations of bacterial hosts, including those under threat from lethal viral predation.”
The research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), explores the powerful ToxN-inhibiting activity of the ToxI RNA. It shows that the ToxI RNA ‘neutralises’ its toxin partner through the self-assembly of a triangular ToxI-ToxN macromolecular complex, previously observed by earlier BBSRC-funded crystallographic studies published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology in 2011.
Find out more info. 509
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