Barsana, India (AFP) Nov 8, 2024
Venerated as incarnations of Hindu deities, India's sacred cows are also being touted as agents of energy transition by a government determined to promote biogas production to cut its dependence on coal. It is an understatement to say that Nakul Kumar Sardana is proud of his new plant at Barsana, in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state. Firstly, says the vice-president of a biomass joint

Actor Tony Todd, known for his haunting portrayal of a killer in the horror film Candyman and roles in many other films and television shows, has died, says his longtime manager.

Le syndicat des facteurs de Postes Canada a remis un préavis de grève de 72 heures à l’employeur, qui a répliqué aussitôt avec un avis de lock-out.

Florence et Marianne seront finalement au concert de leur idole, vendredi, à Toronto, mais elles ont eu toute une frousse.

Donald Trump va nommer la représentante Elise Stefanik, républicaine du nord de l’État de New York, ambassadrice des États-Unis à l’ONU.

Supporters say the Supreme Court of Canada's so-called Jordan ruling in 2016 has sped up proceedings and strengthened Charter rights for prompt justice. But some victims say the time limits for trials work in criminals' favour and cases continue to collapse because those limits are breached. 

The family of the late Murray Sinclair remember his life as they are joined by members of the public, the Canadian Governor General and prime minister during a commemorative service at Winnipeg's Canada Life Centre to honour his legacy Sunday afternoon.

The Subject Expert Committee (SEC), which advises the national drug regulator on approval of new drugs and clinical trials, has recommended grant of market authorisation for Dr Reddy's Laboratories' Siponimod

The Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR), under the ministry of commerce and industry, has released a list of registered interested parties regarding the ongoing Second Sunset Review anti─dumping

Two exclusive conferences focusing on "Reference Material (RM) Producers" organized by National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) are scheduled to be held on January 10,

Gerresheimer, an innovative system and solution provider, received a Red Dot Design Concept award for its Gx Inbeneo autoinjector platform.

Peytant has announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted marketing authorisation (clearance to market in the United States as a Class II device) for the AMStent Tracheobronchial Covered Stent System, a therapy platform.

It is difficult to disentangle Russian and Chinese scientists from international science cooperation. That is a good thing

<p> <b>BIOSIMILAR RED TAPE ELIMINATION ACT (S2305):</b><br /> <b><i>Weakening FDA Regulatory Standards for Biosimilars, Undermining Physician Confidence and Jeopardizing Patient Health</i></b><br /><b>31 October 2024&nbsp;|&nbsp;</b><b><a href="https://youtu.be/X6-dYZ7fjhM" target="_blank">WATCH REPLAY</a></b></p>

A new type of drug that targets chemotherapy directly to cancer cells reduces the risk of death from the most common type of bladder cancer by 30%, a phase III trial in the New England Journal of Medicine has suggested.

Novartis recently announced the acquisition of Mariana Oncology, an emerging biotech focused on advancing a radioligand therapeutics platform, for up to $1.75 billion in upfronts and future milestones. The capstone of its three short years of operations, this acquisition represents

The post Mariana Oncology’s Radiopharm Platform Acquired By Novartis appeared first on LifeSciVC.

A judge in New York has ruled that hundreds of clinical trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov are breaking the law by not reporting results. The ruling came in a court case launched against the US Department of Health and Human Services by two plaintiffs, a family doctor and a professor of journalism. The case focused on […]

The good folks down at eyeforpharma have asked me to write a few blog posts in the run-up to their Patient Centered Clinical Trials conference in Boston this September. In my second article -Buzzword Innovation: The Patient Centricity “Fad” and the Token Patient - I went over some concerns I have regarding the sudden burst of enthusiasm for patient centricity in the clinical trial world.

Apparently, that hit a nerve – in an email, Ulrich Neumann tells me that “your last post elicited quite a few responses in my inbox (varied, some denouncing it as a fad, others strongly protesting the notion, hailing it as the future).”

In preparing my follow up post, I’ve spoken to a couple people on the leading edge of patient engagement:

• Abbe Steel, CEO of HealthiVibe, which is focused on bringing greater patient input into the earliest stages of trial design through focus groups and patient surveys
• Casey Quinlan, co-founder of Patients for Clinical Research, which aims to be a force in patient education and engagement for clinical trials

To get a better idea of what other folks think of the idea, I am sending out a little ad hoc survey. Only 4 questions (so people hopefully do it). Added benefit: There is a massive 50% one-time discount for completed surveys until Friday connected to it as an incentive).

1. Complete the survey and share your thoughts
2. Come to the conference and tell us all exactly what you think

Maybe those pesky sites are good for something after all. 

It's been six years since Pfizer boldly announced the launch of its "clinical trial in a box". The REMOTE trial was designed to be entirely online, and involved no research sites: study information and consent was delivered via the web, and medications and diaries were shipped directly to patients' homes.

Despite the initial fanfare, within a month REMOTE's registration on ClinicalTrials.gov was quietly reduced from 600 to 283. The smaller trial ended not with a bang but a whimper, having randomized only 18 patients in over a year of recruiting.

Still, the allure of direct to patient clinical trials remains strong, due to a confluence of two factors. First, a frenzy of interest in running "patient centric clinical trials". Sponsors are scrambling to show they are doing something – anything – to show they have shifted to a patient-centered mindset. We cannot seem to agree what this means (as a great illustration of this, a recent article in Forbes on "How Patients Are Changing Clinical Trials" contained no specific examples of actual trials that had been changed by patients), but running a trial that directly engages patients wherever they are seems like it could work.

The less-openly-discussed other factor leading to interest in these DIY trials is sponsors' continuing willingness to heap almost all of the blame for slow-moving studies onto their research sites. If it’s all the sites’ fault – the reasoning goes – then cutting them out of the process should result in trials that are both faster and cheaper. (There are reasons to be skeptical about this, as I have discussed in the past, but the desire to drop all those pesky sites is palpable.)

However, while a few proof-of-concept studies have been done, there really doesn't seem to have been another trial to attempt a full-blown direct-to-patient clinical trial. Other pilots have been more successful, but had fairly lightweight protocols. For all its problems, REMOTE was a seriously ambitious project that attempted to package a full-blown interventional clinical trial, not an observational study.

In this context, it's great to see published results of the TAPIR Trial in vasculitis, which as far as I can tell is the first real attempt to run a DIY trial of a similar magnitude to REMOTE.

TAPIR was actually two parallel trials, identical in every respect except for their sites: one trial used a traditional group of 8 sites, while the other was virtual and recruited patients from anywhere in the country. So this was a real-time, head-to-head assessment of site performance.

And the results after a full two years of active enrollment?

• Traditional sites: 49 enrolled
• Patient centric: 10 enrolled

More people are getting cancer in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and surviving, thanks to rapid advancement in care. Many will have decades of life ahead of them, which means they face greater and more complex challenges in survivorship. Lourdes Monje is navigating these waters at age 29.

Imagine you’re a baby cocoa plant, just unfurling your first tentative roots into the fertile, welcoming soil.

Somewhere nearby, a predator stirs. It has no ears to hear you, no eyes to see you. But it knows where you are, thanks in part to the weak electric field emitted by your roots.

It is microscopic, but it’s not alone. By the thousands, the creatures converge, slithering through the waterlogged soil, propelled by their flagella. If they reach you, they will use fungal-like hyphae to penetrate and devour you from the inside. They’re getting closer. You’re a plant. You have no legs. There’s no escape.

But just before they fall upon you, they hesitate. They seem confused. Then, en masse, they swarm off in a different direction, lured by a more attractive electric field. You are safe. And they will soon be dead.

If Eleonora Moratto and Giovanni Sena get their way, this is the future of crop pathogen control.

Many variables are involved in the global food crisis, but among the worst are the pests that devastate food crops, ruining up to 40 percent of their yield before they can be harvested. One of these—the little protist in the example above, an oomycete formally known as Phytophthora palmivora—has a US $1 billion appetite for economic staples like cocoa, palm, and rubber.

There is currently no chemical defense that can vanquish these creatures without poisoning the rest of the (often beneficial) organisms living in the soil. So Moratto, Sena, and their colleagues at Sena’s group at Imperial College London settled on a non-traditional approach: They exploited P. palmivora’s electric sense, which can be spoofed.

All plant roots that have been measured to date generate external ion flux, which translates into a very weak electric field. Decades of evidence suggests that this signal is an important target for predators’ navigation systems. However, it remains a matter of some debate how much their predators rely on plants’ electrical signatures to locate them, as opposed to chemical or mechanical information. Last year, Moratto and Sena’s group found that P. palmivora spores are attracted to the positive electrode of a cell generating current densities of 1 ampere per square meter. “The spores followed the electric field,” says Sena, suggesting that a similar mechanism helps them find natural bioelectric fields emitted by roots in the soil.

That got the researchers wondering: Might such an artificial electric field override the protists’ other sensory inputs, and scramble their compasses as they tried to use plant roots’ much weaker electrical output?

To test the idea, the researchers developed two ways to protect plant roots using a constant vertical electric field. They cultivated two common snacks for P. palmivora—a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and a legume often used as a livestock feed plant—in tubes in a hydroponic solution.

Two electric-field configurations were tested: A “global” vertical field [left] and a field generated by two small nearby electrodes. The global field proved to be slightly more effective.Eleonora Moratto

In the first assay, the researchers sandwiched the plant roots between rows of electrodes above and below, which completely engulfed them in a “global” vertical field. For the second set, the field was generated using two small electrodes a short distance away from the plant, creating current densities on the order of 10 A/m². Then they unleashed the protists.

With respect to the control group, both methods successfully diverted a significant portion of the predators away from the plant roots. They swarmed the positive electrode, where—since zoospores can’t survive for longer than about 2 to 3 hours without a host—they presumably starved to death. Or worse. Neil Gow, whose research presented some of the first evidence for zoospore electrosensing, has other theories about their fate. “Applied electrical fields generate toxic products and steep pH gradients near and around the electrodes due to the electrolysis of water,” he says. “The tropism towards the electrode might be followed by killing or immobilization due to the induced pH gradients.”

Not only did the technique prevent infestation, but some evidence indicates that it may also mitigate existing infections. The researchers published their results in August in Scientific Reports.

The global electric field was marginally more successful than the local. However, it would be harder to translate from lab conditions into a (literal) field trial in soil. The local electric field setup would be easy to replicate: “All you have to do is stick the little plug into the soil next to the crop you want to protect,” says Sena.

Moratto and Sena say this is a proof of concept that demonstrates a basis for a new, pesticide-free way to protect food crops. (Sena likens the technique to the decoys used by fighter jets to draw away incoming missiles by mimicking the signals of the original target.) They are now looking for funding to expand the project. The first step is testing the local setup in soil; the next is to test the approach on Phytophthora infestans, a meaner, scarier cousin of P. palmivora.

P. infestans attacks a more varied diet of crops—you may be familiar with its work during the Irish potato famine. The close genetic similarities imply another promising candidate for electrical pest control. This investigation, however, may require more funding. P. infestans research can be undertaken only under more stringent laboratory security protocols.

The work at Imperial ties into the broader—and somewhat charged—debate around electrostatic ecology; that is, the extent to which creatures including ticks make use of heretofore poorly understood electrical mechanisms to orient themselves and in other ways enhance their survival. “Most people still aren’t aware that naturally occurring electricity can play an ecological role,” says Sam England, a behavioral ecologist with Berlin’s Natural History Museum. “So I suspect that once these electrical phenomena become more well known and understood, they will inspire a greater number of practical applications like this one.”

The teachings of Mahatma Gandhi were arguably India’s greatest contribution to the 20th century. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar has borrowed some of that wisdom to devise a frugal new form of innovation he calls “Gandhian engineering.” Coming from humble beginnings, Mashelkar is driven to ensure that the benefits of science and technology are shared more equally. He sums up his philosophy with the epigram “more from less for more.” This engineer has led India’s preeminent R&D organization, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and he has advised successive governments.

What was the inspiration for Gandhian engineering?

Raghunath Anant Mashelkar: There are two quotes of Gandhi’s that were influential. The first was, “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” He was saying that when resources are exhaustible, you should get more from less. He also said the benefits of science must reach all, even the poor. If you put them together, it becomes “more from less for more.”

My own life experience inspired me, too. I was born to a very poor family, and my father died when I was six. My mother was illiterate and brought me to Mumbai in search of a job. Two meals a day was a challenge, and I walked barefoot until I was 12 and studied under streetlights. So it also came from my personal experience of suffering because of a lack of resources.

How does Gandhian engineering differ from existing models of innovation?

Mashelkar: Conventional engineering is market or curiosity driven, but Gandhian engineering is application and impact driven. We look at the end user and what we want to achieve for the betterment of humanity.

Most engineering is about getting more from more. Take an iPhone: They keep creating better models and charging higher prices. For the poor it is less from less: Conventional engineering looks at removing features as the only way to reduce costs.

In Gandhian engineering, the idea is not to create affordable [second-rate] products, but to make high technology work for the poor. So we reinvent the product from the ground up. While the standard approach aims for premium price and high margins, Gandhian engineering will always look at affordable price, but high volumes.

The Jaipur foot is a light, durable, and affordable prosthetic.Gurinder Osan/AP

What is your favorite example of Gandhian engineering?

Mashelkar: My favorite is the Jaipur foot. Normally, a sophisticated prosthetic foot costs a few thousand dollars, but the Jaipur foot does it for [US] $20. And it’s very good technology; there is a video of a person wearing a Jaipur foot climbing a tree, and you can see the flexibility is like a normal foot. Then he runs one kilometer in 4 minutes, 30 seconds.

What is required for Gandhian engineering to become more widespread?

Mashelkar: In our young people, we see innovation and we see passion, but compassion is the key. We also need more soft funding [grants or zero-interest loans], because venture capital companies often turn out to be “vulture capital” in a way, because they want immediate returns.

We need a shift in the mindset of businesses—they can make money not just from premium products for those at the top of the pyramid, but also products with affordable excellence designed for large numbers of people.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Gandhi Inspired Inventor.”

Three ways health plans can engage, connect with, and delight their pregnant members to nurture goodwill, earn long-term trust, and foster loyal relationships that last.

The post Pregnant and Empowered: Why Trust is the Latest Form of Member Engagement appeared first on MedCity News.

The Pew Charitable Trusts today commended Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D), state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R), and Lee Chatfield (R)—whose term as state House Speaker ended last month—for passing and signing a bipartisan package of bills aimed at protecting public safety while reducing the number of people in county jails.

U.S. feared another LeT attack in India in mid-2009, and sought Pakistan's help to ‘disrupt and prevent' it

The victims were identified as Shamshad and Faizan Qasri from Bihar's Batya Zila

National parties’ unknown income rose from 66% to 71% in the three years before and after the scheme’s introduction

Jul 10, 2023

The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University launched today a major research and outreach initiative to reduce global methane emissions. The initiative seeks meaningful and sustained progress in global methane-emissions reductions through research and effective engagement with government policymakers — and with key stakeholders in business, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions.

Dec 13, 2023

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA) assembled a panel of leading academics and government officials to discuss strategies for achieving significant methane emissions reductions at relatively low costs at an official COP 28 Side Event last Wednesday (Dec. 6). The event, titled “Reducing Global Methane Emissions: Imperatives, Opportunities, and Challenges,” was moderated by HPCA Director Robert Stavins.

Feb 22, 2024

Authors Narayanamurti and Tsao propose a new architecture for how technoscientific knowledge advances, which maps to the actual operational practice of research and development nurtured at the iconic Bell Labs.

Jun 5, 2024

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Leah Stokes, Anton Conk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara, to discuss how the historic Inflation Reduction Act succeeded where so many previous climate bills failed.

Jun 10, 2024

Two and a half decades [after 9/11], Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, is sounding similar alarms. His discussions within the Biden administration are private, but his testimony to Congress and other public statements could not be more explicit. Testifying in December to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wray said, “When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment.” Yet after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he added. In speaking about those threats, Wray has repeatedly drawn attention to security gaps at the United States’ southern border, where thousands of people each week enter the country undetected.

Jun 20, 2024

Matthew Bunn argues that governments need help from scientists and engineers both in understanding the dangers that nuclear weapons continue to pose and in finding paths to reduce them.

Mar 18, 2024

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Jahi Wise, Senior Adviser to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to discuss the design and implementation of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a historic investment in American clean energy technology finance.

May 8, 2024

Electric vehicles (EVs) can challenge or support electricity systems depending on how they are charged. Controlled charging that combines technical solutions with heterogenous EV user behaviors can reduce peak demand to avoid grid constraints and support the integration of renewable energy.

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Anand Mahindra First Indian to be Honoured With Harvard Medal

Bill White, VP of Real Estate Lending for NASA FCU, speaks to current housing market conditions, as well as the new Family Mortgage and other options from NASA FCU.

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