Posts Tagged ‘Gates Foundation’
Science Policy Around the Web October 25th, 2019
By Andrew Wright BSc
NIH and Gates Foundation lay out ambitious plan to bring gene-based treatments for HIV and sickle cell disease to Africa
Following the launch of an initiative to boost gene therapy treatments of sickle cell disease last month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have announced a joint funding agreement of at least $100 million over the next four years to expedite a cure for both sickle cell disease and HIV and make it available in Africa.
The current medical intervention for sickle cell disease is a bone marrow transplant, a treatment that is limited by the availability of genetically compatible donors and can be risky for adult patients. This new partnership aims to build on funding towards more effective treatments that are less restricted and more cost effective. While genetic intervention is being used in a limited clinical setting, it is still necessary to destroy a patient’s stem-cells via chemotherapy before reintroducing the patient’s genetically modified ones. Using burgeoning gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR, researchers for this initiative hope to modify targeted genes with a process more similar to a blood transfusion using replication-deficient viruses or nanoparticles to carry the molecular tools to where they need to be. This should theoretically make treatments much less expensive and more available to regions that have limited medical infrastructure and a high incidence of sickle cell disease such as sub-Saharan Africa.
Since there is also a high incidence of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, this initiative also aims to tackle HIV in the region using similar techniques. The current standard for treating HIV is anti-retroviral therapy, which can allow patients to live a normal life, but also must be taken every day, is expensive ($429-$10,896 per month), and does not eliminate the disease. The drive behind genetic intervention strategies comes from serendipitous case-studies when two men were cured of HIV following stem cell transplants that intentionally had white-blood cells with a weakened protein to treat their blood cancers. The NIH-Gates funding initiative will focus on strategies to weaken these proteins (called CCR5 receptors) and to directly destroy HIV genetic material.
(Jon Cohen, Science)
Evidence links poliolike disease in children to a common type of virus
Since 2014 more than 570 children have experienced a condition known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) where some suddenly lost limb control, had trouble swallowing or breathing, or ended up paralyzed. These symptoms routinely followed symptoms of a common cold, like a runny nose or fever. Up until now, the route cause behind AFM was not well understood, but recent studies of patients’ spinal fluid suggest the culprit is enterovirus. Infections from enteroviruses are common and rarely cause severe symptoms (although they can cause respiratory illness in asthmatic populations).
Previous studies into the cause of AFM had examined enterovirus but found no trace of it in the central nervous system, where it would need to be in order to lead to loss of motor control. In the most recent study conducted by the University of California San Francisco, researchers sampled for elevated levels of antibodies in the central nervous system rather than the virus itself. They found that 69% of AFM patients had elevated antibodies against enteroviruses. There are still questions as to why only some children experience AFM when infected by enterovirus when most only experience typical symptoms.
Unfortunately, enterovirus-AFM is currently untreatable beyond post-infection physical therapy, although the lead author of the study suggests that immunoglobin therapy may help reduce the worst symptoms. Ultimately, the only way to completely prevent enterovirus-AFM infections, referred to by some as ”the new polio“, will be a vaccine.
(Kelly Servick, Science)
Science Policy Around the Web – November 20, 2018
By: Andrew Wright, B.S.
Source: Wikimedia
Habitat Loss Threatens All Our Futures, World Leaders Warned
Recent reports have suggested that humanity has only 12 years to avoid catastrophic environmental collapse due to 1.5⁰C of industrial warming. While solutions to the threat of runaway climate change have been given a new sense of urgency by these findings, there exists a commensurate and oft less visited issue, that of rapid declines in global biological diversity. Driven primarily by agricultural land conversion of terrestrial and marine ecosystems (via forest clearing and river damming, respectively), vertebrate species have declined by 60% on average since 1970 according to the World Wildlife Fund’s most recent Living Planet Report . While this decline appears strongest in South and Central America and in freshwater habitats, the report joins a compendium of literature suggesting holistic declines in biodiversity among birds, insects, fish, and terrestrial vertebrates as part of an ongoing anthropogenic mass extinction event.
To address some of the issue, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is currently meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt to discuss progress on the Aichi biodiversity targets for 2020. These targets came out of The Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral treaty signed in 1992 focused on preserving biodiversity, sustainable use of biological resources, and equitable sharing of resources. The Aichi biodiversity targets specified that people would be aware of risks to biodiversity, and that biodiversity values would be adopted by public, private, and governmental entities by 2020. Given the rapidity, intensity, and ubiquity of the decline in species, most, if not all, of these targets will likely be missed. As such, the delegates from the 196 signatory nations will also work on creating new biodiversity targets to be finalized at the next CBD meeting in China.
Since a comprehensive solution seems necessary given the increasingly global nature of trade, authors of the new targets hope to garner a greater deal of international attention, and intend to make the case that government commitment to reversing or pausing biodiversity loss should receive equivalent weight as action on climate change.
(Jonathan Watts, The Guardian)
The Ethical Quandary of Human Infection Studies
The United States has greatly improved its ability to soundly regulate the ethics of clinical studies since the infamous malfeasance of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Most significantly, the National Research Act of 1974 established the Institutional Review Board to address how to adequately regulate the use of human subjects by adhering to the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.
The National Research Act provided a substantial step forward and provided a clear requirement for universal informed consent. However, the expansion of clinical studies to new international regions of extreme poverty, due in part to the influx of private money from large charitable organizations, has come with novel ethical considerations. In these newly explored populations where income, education, and literacy levels may be lower, emphasis is now being place on how to recruit volunteers without implicitly taking advantage of their circumstances.
One area of concern is compensation levels. While compensation in a malaria infection study in Kenya was tied to the local minimum wage, the number of volunteers recruited far surpassed expectations. This may have been due to the fact that payment during this study was guaranteed and consistent, in contrast to local work.
Aware of the concern, two of the largest private medical research funding organizations, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and the Wellcome Trust have recently instituted ethical guidelines putatively reinforcing the principle of beneficence, placing special emphasis on maximizing benefits over risk. It is an open question whether these protections will be sufficient, but at the very least it is important that rules to be put in place proactively rather than as a reaction.
(Linda Nordling, Undark/Scientific American)
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Science Policy Around the Web – November 14, 2017
By: Saurav Seshadri, PhD
source: pixabay
Alzheimer’s Disease
Bill Gates sets his sights on neurodegeneration
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has announced a new funding initiative for research into Alzheimer’s Disease, starting with a personal donation of $50 million to the Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF). The DDF is a UK-based, public-private collaboration, launched in 2015 and designed to encourage innovative research into treatments for dementia, of which Alzheimer’s Disease is a leading cause. Initial investment in the DDF, which came from the pharmaceutical industry and government entities, was $100 million, meaning Gates’ contribution will be significant. Gates says his family history makes him particularly interested in finding a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. The DDF has already taken steps in this direction: its first investment was in the biopharma company Alector, which is moving forward with immune system-related research to combat Alzheimer’s Disease.
Gates is already famous for his philanthropy through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds efforts to fight poverty and disease throughout the world. However, the Foundation has traditionally focused on infectious diseases, such as HIV and malaria, making Alzheimer’s Disease Gates’ first foray into neuroscience. In this regard, he has some catching up to do to match philanthropic contributions and business pursuits by other tech billionaires. These include his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who started the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences with $100 million in 2003. The Allen Institute provides a range of tools for basic researchers using mouse models, generating comprehensive maps of brain anatomy, connectivity and gene expression. More recently, Tesla founder Elon Musk started Neuralink, a venture which aims to enhance cognitive ability using brain-machine interfaces. Kernel, founded by tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, has a similar goal. Finally, while the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (started by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2015) doesn’t explicitly focus on neuroscience, its science program is led by acclaimed neuroscientist Cori Bargmann.
As pointed out by former National Institutes of Mental Health Director Tom Insel, this infusion of money, as well as the fast-moving, results-oriented tech mindset behind it, has the potential to transform neuroscience and deliver better outcomes for patients. As government funding for science appears increasingly uncertain, such interest and support from private investors is encouraging. Hopefully the results will justify their optimism.
(Sanjay Gupta, CNN)
Physics
Elusive particles create a black hole for funding
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) enabled a scientific breakthrough in 2012 when it was used to produce evidence for the Higgs boson, a physical particle that endows matter with mass. In the wake of the worldwide excitement generated by that discovery, physicists finalized plans for a complementary research facility, the International Linear Collider (ILC), to be built in Japan. While the LHC is circular and collides protons, the ILC would collide positrons and electrons, at lower energy but with more precise results. Unfortunately, anticipated funding for the $10 billion project from the Japanese government has failed to materialize. Following recent recommendations by Japanese physicists, the group overseeing the ILC has now agreed on a less ambitious proposal, for a lower energy machine with a shorter tunnel. Though physicists remain optimistic that the ILC will still provide useful data, it will no longer be able to produce high-energy quarks (one of its planned uses), and will instead focus on previously detected particles and forces. The ILC’s future is currently in limbo until the Japanese government makes a concrete financial commitment, and it is unlikely to be completed before 2030.
After the Higgs boson, the LHC struggled to find proof of the existence of other new particles. One such high-profile disappointment was the search for dark matter. When dark matter was hypothesized to be the source of unexplained gamma radiation observed with NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, the search for a dark matter particle became a top priority for the LHC’s second run. Such evidence would also have supported supersymmetry, a key theory in particle physics. However, these efforts, as well as multiple others using different detectors, have thus far failed to find any signs of dark matter. These unsuccessful experiments certainly contributed to scaling back the ILC, and illustrate larger problems with setting realistic expectations and/or valuing negative results among scientists, government officials, and the public. As a result, in order to advance our understanding of the basic building blocks of our universe, particle physicists will now have to do more with less.
(Edwin Cartlidge, Nature News)
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Science Policy Around the Web – February 17, 2017
By: Thaddeus Davenport, PhD
Source: pixabay
CRISPR
Decision in the CRISPR-Cas9 Patent Dispute
This week, Heidi Wedford from Nature News reported that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) made a decision on the disputed patents for the gene editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The CRISPR-Cas9 system has been widely publicized, and this publicity is arguably not out of proportion with the potential of this technology to simplify and accelerate the manipulation of DNA of both microbial (prokaryotic) and higher order (eukaryotic) cells for research and therapy. A simplified, programmable version of CRISPR-Cas9 for use in gene editing was initially described by Charpentier and Doudna, and it was rapidly translated for use in eukaryotic cells by Zhang and colleagues at the Broad Institute in parallel with Doudna, Charpentier, and others.
The USPTO decision follows a dramatic and ongoing dispute over whether the patent application submitted by the University of California on behalf of Doudna and Charpentier – which was submitted before that of the Broad Institute, and described the technology in broad terms as a method of cutting desired DNA sequences – was sufficient to protect the CRISPR-Cas9 intellectual property when the Broad Institute later filed a fast-tracked patent application describing the use of CRISPR-Cas9 for use in eukaryotic cells. Because the Broad Institute’s application was expedited, it was approved before the University of California’s application. In January of 2016, the University of California filed for an ‘interference’ proceeding, with the goal of demonstrating to the USPTO that Doudna and colleagues were the first to invent CRISPR-Cas9, and that the patent application from the Broad Institute was an ‘ordinary’ extension of the technology described in the University of California application.
On February 15th of this year, the USPTO ruled that the technology described in the Broad Institute’s application was distinct from that of the University of California’s. The importance of this decision is that the patents granted to the Broad Institute for the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in mammalian cells will be upheld for now. It also creates some complexity for companies seeking to license CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Because of the overlapping content of the CRISPR-Cas9 patents held by the University of California and the Broad Institute, it is possible that companies may need to license the technology from both institutions. The University of California may still appeal the USPTO’s decision, but this is a significant victory for the Broad Institute for the time being. For many scientists, this dispute is a dramatic introduction to the inner workings of the patent application process. We would do well to familiarize ourselves with this system and ensure that it works effectively to accurately reward the discoveries of our fellow scientists and to facilitate the transfer of technology to those who need it most, without imposing undue economic burden on companies and consumers. (Heidi Wedford, Nature News)
Scientific Publishing
Open Access to Gates Foundation Funded Research
Also this week, Dalmeet Singh Chawla reported for ScienceInsider that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had reached an agreement with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that will allow researchers funded by the Gates Foundation to publish their research in the AAAS journals Science, Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. This agreement follows an announcement in January in which the Gates Foundation decided that research funded by the foundation would no longer be allowed to be published in subscription journals including Nature, Science, and New England Journal of Medicine, among others, because these journals do not meet the open access requirements stipulated by the new Gates open-access policies. The new Gates Foundation policy requires its grant recipients to publish in free, open-access journals and to make data freely available immediately after publication for both commercial and non-commercial uses. A similar policy is being considered by the nascent Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
In the agreement with AAAS, the Gates Foundation will pay the association $100,000 in order to make Gates-funded published content immediately freely available online. Convincing a journal as prominent as Science to make some of its content open-access is a step in the right direction, but it is perhaps more important as a symbol of a changing attitude toward publishing companies. Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) open-access journals, was interviewed for the ScienceInsider article and noted, “[t]he future is with immediate publication and post-publication peer review, and the sooner we get there the better.” This sentiment seems to be increasingly shared by researchers frustrated with the hegemony of the top-tier journals, their power over researchers’ careers, and the constraints that subscription-based journals impose on the spread of new information. Funding agencies including the Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Institutes of Health are in a unique position to be able to dictate where the research they fund may be published. A collective decision by these agencies to push the publishing market towards an improved distribution of knowledge – through open-access publishing and post-publication peer review – and away from the historical and totally imagined importance of validation through high-tier journal publication would enrich the scientific ecosystem and accelerate innovation. In this regard, the efforts by the Gates Foundation are laudable and should be extended further. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, ScienceInsider)
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Science Policy Around the Web – December 2, 2014
By: Amanda Whiting, Ph.D
Federal Funding and Dual Use Research of Concern
U.S. urged to clarify extent of funding moratorium on risky virus research
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has called upon the US government to clarify its position and urged it to give guidelines to scientists affected by a recent funding moratorium on certain types of infectious disease research. The NSABB statement was intended to give voice to some of the concerns of scientists and uncertainty surrounding the October 17th announcement and ask for “clear definitions and pathways to exceptions where they are needed” said NSABB Chair Samuel Stanley, president of Stony Brook University, New York. The pause in new federal funding applies to gain-of-function (GOF) research on influenza, MERS and SARS viruses that could potentially make these pathogens more transmissible in mammals or more pathogenic. The moratorium on new research is intended to give experts, such as those at NSABB, a year to advise on and help formalize a U.S. government-wide policy for reviewing the risk and benefits of GOF studies. Researchers whose studies are already funded or have non-U.S. support are encouraged to join a voluntary moratorium while the policy is under development. Concerns over the possible misuse of viral research arose in 2012, after the publication of two NIH-funded studies of H5N1 transmissibility and pathogenesis in ferrets. (David Malakoff, ScienceInsider)
Open Access Publishing
Gates Foundation announces world’s strongest policy on open access research
Beginning January 1st, 2015, researchers with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be required to agree to some very, very open access publishing requirements! According to the open access policy announced on November 20th, authors funded in whole or in part by the foundation, must make their resulting papers and underlying data-sets open with unrestricted access immediately upon publication and allow reuse of their data for commercialization. During a two year transition period, authors may still apply for a 12-month embargo on the open publication of their data. This year-long delay in open access is similar to other life sciences funding sources, such as the NIH. However, after 2017, this option will no longer be available and could potentially prevent Gates Foundation researchers from publishing in top-tier journals such as Science and Nature, which currently make the delay mandatory. The ability to re-use data for commercial purposes also goes far beyond what is required by most open access policies. The Gates Foundation has taken a major stance on open access – and time will see just how far journals will go to continue to publish and distribute research or who else might follow suit. (Richard Van Noorden, Nature News Blog)
Public Health Policy
More public health interventions required to tackle grim reaper of ‘lifestyle’ diseases
A new paper published in the journal Critical Public Health, pushes the idea that public health policy should focus more breaking the (bad) habits of the public on the whole, rather than focus on an individual’s behavior as a way to better overall public health. Common behaviors, such as eating while watching TV or walking the dog after dinner, represent “social practices” that could be targeted for potential intervention with policy. The lead author, Dr. Stanley Blue says, “Smoking, exercise and eating are fundamentally social practices, therefore we need to re-shape what is deemed socially acceptable and normal in order to change them.” The authors cite changed attitudes towards smoking as one example of practice-oriented public health – as the social relationship with smoking changed, public health policies emerged that target the “practice” of smoking such as bans on smoking in restaurants or bars or in cars with children. “Current public health policy is dominated by the presumption that individuals are capable of making ‘better’ choices for themselves on the basis of information given to them by the government or other agencies. This does not account for the fact that practices like those of smoking and eating have histories of their own. Public health policy will have to find the courage to break away from its traditional mold if it is to stand a chance of confronting the grim reaper of lifestyle diseases.” (Science Daily)
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Science Policy For All 
