“MUST READ”
o Langer came to believe that one way
to enhance well-being was to use all sorts of placebos. Placebos aren’t just
sugar pills disguised as medicine, though that’s the literal definition; they
are any intervention, benign but believed by the recipient to be potent, that
produces measurable physiological changes.
DISRUPTION,
REVOLUTION
o Last week, US tech giants Google
made a splash in the media, announcing plans to develop new
‘disease-detecting magnetic nanoparticles’.
o But when we tried to dig deeper into
the detail behind the story, things remained pretty light on actual context and
detail. So we spoke to Professor Duncan Graham – a UK-based nanoscientist from
University of Strathclyde and expert advisor to Cancer Research UK – to get his
take on the announcement.
TOOLS/TECHNIQUES
o Herein, we tested four cDNA
synthesis and Illumina library preparation protocols on a simplified
mixture of total RNA extracted from four bacterial species. In parallel,
RNA from each microbe was tested individually. cDNA synthesis was performed on
rRNA depleted samples using the TruSeq Stranded Total RNA Library
Preparation, the SMARTer Stranded RNA-Seq, or the Ovation RNA-Seq V2
System.
o
When
targeting genes, drug developers may opt for knockdown via CRISPR or silencing
via RNAi. These weapons, however, may fit different battle plans.
o Recent progress in probing gene
function via the RNAi and CRISPR methods were a strong theme of the Discovery On
Target conference, which took place last month in Boston. Both methods enable
researchers to impair the function of a targeted gene.
HEALTH/MEDECINE
o
Studies
have found that changes in our microbiome accompany medical problems from
obesity to diabetes to colon cancer.
As these correlations have unfurled,
so has the hope that we might fix these ailments by shunting our bugs toward
healthier states. The gigantic probiotics industry certainly wants you to think
that, although there is little evidence that swallowing a few billion
yogurt-borne bacteria has more than a small impact on the trillions in our
guts.
COMPANIES
o Cell-free protein expression, as is
called the method Invenra and Sutro use, still requires all the “goo” —the
protein-making machinery—from inside cells as the growing medium. But it
doesn’t require the cells themselves. Once the right mix is in place, the next
key ingredient to add is the DNA of the desired protein.
Much
faster than conventional cell-based methods, cell-free expression has been
available to researchers for years, but Sutro is likely the first biotech to
scale it up into what could be a major therapeutic platform
o When we last left Jonathan Rothberg,
the entrepreneur who first throttled DNA sequencing onto its Moore’s
Law-beating path, he was leaving behind his genetics work in the tangle of
Thermo Fisher’s $14 billion purchase of Life Technologies Life Technologies,
which had previously bought his startup, Ion Torrent.
Rothberg,
one of the most colorful entrepreneurs in biotech, went strangely quiet for
eighteen months. Now he’s back with a new incubator (called 4Combinator) and a
new startup, Butterfly Network, into which he has put $20 million of his own
money and $80 million more from investors to develop a device that sounds like
it’s right out of Star Trek: an ultrasound scanner that can give vivid
images quickly and cheaply, and that will eventually be able to use beams of
concentrated sound to perform some types of surgical procedures.
SOMETHING DIFFERENT
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