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DFG Establishes Nine New Collaborative Research Centers
Effective 1 July 2009, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) will establish nine new Collaborative Research Centres. This decision has just been made by the responsible Grants Committee of the DFG at its spring session in Bonn. The new centres will initially be funded for four years with a total of 73.6 million euros. In addition to this, the DFG will also provide 20 percent overhead funding for each centre for indirect costs incurred by the research projects.
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Obama Names NYC Health Commissioner Frieden Next CDC Director
President Obama on Friday named New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the New York Times reports. It has long been expected that Obama would select Frieden, an infectious disease specialist who is "widely admired" in the public health arena, according to the Times. In his seven years as health commissioner of New York City, Frieden pushed to establish HIV testing as a part of routine medical exams and defended a condom-distribution program that hands out more than 35 million condoms annually. Frieden is expected to take office in June and does not require Senate confirmation for the position. He will replace Richard Besser, the current acting director of CDC, who will return to his position as head of CDC"s coordinating office for terrorism preparedness and emergency response.The Times reports that Frieden will "inherit a host of immediate and long-term problems" at CDC, including organizational issues, low morale and the Obama administration"s health care reform agenda. "Health care reform also needs to be on his plate," Jeffrey Koplan, who served as CDC director from 1998 to 2002, said, adding, "There is a huge opportunity there to improve public health, and it"s one in which any CDC director will want to be a player." Several health care advocates praised the appointment, according to the Times. Dennis deLeon, president of the Latino Commission on AIDS in New York City said that Frieden is "willing to challenge the status quo in an effort to make a difference." Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the not-for-profit Trust for America"s Health, said Frieden is a "transformational leader" who "can take public health to a new place" (Harris/Hartocollis, New York Times, 5/15).
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Firm Looks For Health Start-Ups That Save Money
Chrysalis Ventures, a venture capital firm in Kentucky, is looking for health care start-ups that save money and betting that they will get a greater share of health dollars once reform takes shape, The New York Times reports. ""Whatever form health care reform takes, we believe companies that can improve the productivity and efficiency of improvement of health care services and avoidance of medical problems are going to prosper, and we"re putting our money behind that belief," (Chrysalis Ventures Chairman and Managing Director David) Jones said."
Mental Health

Researchers Edit Genes In Human Stem Cells

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have successfully edited the genome of human- induced pluripotent stem cells, making possible the future development of patient-specific stem cell therapies. Reporting this week in Cell Stem Cell, the team altered a gene responsible for causing the rare blood disease paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, or PNH, establishing for the first time a useful system to learn more about the disease. "To date, only about six genes have been successfully targeted or edited in human stem cells out of countless people and attempts that"s just not efficient enough if we want to move disease research and therapy forward," says Linzhao Cheng, Ph.D., an associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics and member of the Johns Hopkins Institute of Cell Engineering. "We"ve been able to improve gene targeting and editing in human embryonic stem cells more than 200 fold." Cheng"s lab and collaborators at Johns Hopkins study PNH, a condition where "friendly fire" kills patients" own blood cells and the body can"t replenish the lost blood cells due to loss of normal blood stem cells. PNH is an acquired disease that occurs only in adults, according to Cheng. "It"s a tough condition to study because we need to study it in blood stem cells and they"re difficult to grow in the lab. So for years we"ve been trying to develop another cell system to better understand and perhaps fix what"s going on in PNH." To establish a system for research, they used human embryonic stem cells which can be expanded unlimitedly in the laboratory, but they also had to create a mutation as found in a PNH patient. To target and remove the function of the one specific gene known to cause PNH, the research team improved on the standard approach of gene targeting, which can remove a functional gene or replace a dysfunctional gene. The gene targeting technology, first used successfully for mouse embryonic stem cells, won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007. Gene targeting exploits a cell"s own ability to repair broken DNA. When DNA breaks from exposure to mutagens or other agents like DNA-cutting enzymes, DNA-repairing enzymes in the cell find and re-join the two exposed DNA ends. However, if another piece of DNA with exposed ends is floating around, it effectively can be spliced into the broken DNA during repair, and replace the defective copy. The team"s technological improvement includes the use of custom-designed molecular scissors that are made by collaborators at Harvard University and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. These engineered DNA cutting enzymes make a precise break at specific locations in a cell"s DNA in this case in the gene that causes PNH. They added the molecular scissors and a fragment of DNA containing a gene that confers selection of rare targeted clones in both human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. The latter, also known as iPS cells, are very similar to embryonic stem cells in biological properties, but generated by using adult tissues such as skin. Of all the cells surviving selection, they picked and grew eight iPS cell lines to study further, and five of those contained a targeted insertion at the gene site. Further examination showed that the cells contained the correct number of chromosomes, no longer contained any trace of the molecular scissors and had characteristics as cells from PNH patients that lack a group of cell surface molecules. "I commend my team especially Dr. Jizhong Zou who spent three years with the help of many collaborators on this challenging project," says Cheng. "We"re very excited about this accomplishment; it will enable better studies for other blood diseases. But there"s still much to do before we can really use human iPS cells in clinical therapies." Cheng"s team will continue to improve on techniques and begin applying these techniques to iPS cells from patients. This study was funded by the Stem Cell Research Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering, the National Institutes of Health, a Maryland Stem Cell Research Postdoctoral Fellowship grant, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the Massachusetts General Hospital Pathology Service, the State of Texas and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. Authors on the paper are Jizhong Zou, Prashant Mali, Bin-Kuan Chou, Guibin Chen, Zhaohui Ye and Linzhao Cheng of Johns Hopkins; Morgan Maeder, Stacey-Thibodeau-Beganny and J. Keith Joung of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Shondra Pruett-Miller and Matthew Porteus of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; and In-Hyun Park and George Q. Daley of Children"s Hospital, Boston and Harvard Medical School. Johns Hopkins Medicine


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