ARAb StAtES diSMAyEd At WESt'S cOMPlAcENcy - Kuwait Times

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2013
BOSTON: Carmen Blandin Tarleton, of Thetford,
Vermont, speaks with reporters at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston.— AP
US woman disfigured in
attack reveals new face
BOSTON: A Vermont woman has revealed her new face, six
years after her ex-husband disfigured her by dousing her
with industrial-strength lye, and said she went through “what
some may call hell” but has found a way to be happy. Carmen
Blandin Tarleton of Thetford had face transplant surgery at
Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in February and
spoke publicly for the first time at a news conference at the
hospital Wednesday. “I’m now in a better place, mentally and
emotionally, than I ever could have imagined six years ago,”
said Tarleton, a former transplant nurse. “I want to share my
experience with others, so they may find that strength inside
themselves to escape their own pain.” In 2007, the 44-yearold
mother of two was attacked by her then-husband,
Herbert Rodgers, who believed she was seeing another man.
Police say he went to the house looking for that man, then
went into a fury directed toward Tarleton, striking her with a
bat and pouring lye from a squeeze bottle onto her face.
When police arrived, Tarleton was trying to crawl to a
shower to wash away the chemical. It already had distorted
her face. In 2009, Rodgers pleaded guilty to maiming Tarleton
in exchange for a prison sentence of at least 30 years. “I
learned that ... forgiveness doesn’t condone anything he did
and it’s not about him - it’s about forgiving him, it’s forgiving
myself, it’s allowing myself to move forward and not getting
stuck in the tragedy of that night,” said Tarleton, who has
undergone 55 surgeries during the past five years.
During the face transplant surgery, more than 30 surgeons,
anesthesiologists and nurses worked for more than 15
hours to replace her skin, muscles, tendons and nerves, the
hospital said. The face donor was a Williamstown, Mass.,
woman named Cheryl Denelli Righter who died of a sudden
stroke, a hospital spokeswoman said. Righter’s daughter,
Marinda, told Tarleton on Wednesday that she looked beautiful,
adding she was certain her mother had somehow picked
Tarleton. —AP
LONDON: Is nanomedicine the next big
thing? A growing number of top drug companies
seem to think so. The ability to
encapsulate potent drugs in tiny particles
measuring billionths of a meter in diameter
is opening up new options for super-accurate
drug delivery, increasing precision hits
at the site of disease with, hopefully, fewer
side effects. Three deals struck this year by
privately held Bind Therapeutics, together
worth nearly $1 billion if experiments are
successful, highlight a new interest in using
such tiny carriers to deliver drug payloads
to specific locations in the body.
US-based Bind is one of several biotechnology
firms that are luring large pharmaceutical
makers with a range of smart drug
nanotechnologies, notably against cancer.
And nanomedicine is also being put to
work in diagnosis, with tiny particles used
to improve imaging in scanners, as well as
rapidly detecting some serious infections.
In future, researchers hope to combine
both treatment and diagnostics in a new
approach dubbed “theranostics” that
would allow doctors to monitor patients via
their medicines.
After much hype but limited clinical success,
scientists in the nanotechnology field
finally see a turning point. “We have been
hearing about the promise of nanomedicine
for a long time, but it is now really
starting to move,” said Dan Peer, who runs
a nanomedicine laboratory at Tel Aviv
University. “There is a new level of confidence
in this approach among the big
pharmaceutical companies ... We will see
more and more products in clinical testing
over the next few years and I think that is
very exciting.”
Nanoparticles made of polymers, gold
and even graphene - a newly-discovered
form of carbon - are now in various stages
of development. In cancer alone, 117 drugs
are being assessed using nanoparticle formulations,
though most have yet to be
tried on patients, according to Thomson
Reuters Pharma data. Other potential applications
include treatments for inflammatory
disorders, heart and brain diseases, and
pain.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Companies are increasingly focused on
better drug targeting to increase efficacy
and lessen the collateral damage caused by
medicinal “carpet bombing” - a particular
problem in cancer, where toxic compounds
are needed to kill tumors. The work on
drug-carrying nanoparticles parallels
advances in using so-called “armed antibodies”
to deliver drugs direct to cancer
cells - an approach championed by Roche.
The Swiss group won US approval in
February for Kadcyla, its first such antibodydrug
conjugate, which treats breast cancer
with fewer side effects like hair loss.
“All these developments have prompted
companies to look at new avenues
because the older ways of using drugs
haven’t worked so well,” said Robert
Langer, a pioneer of nanomedicine who
runs the world’s largest biomedical engineering
laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Having worked on
drug delivery since the 1970s, Langer has
seen plenty of ups and downs. The world’s
first nanomedicine was actually approved
back in 1995 when US regulators gave a
green light to Doxil for treating Kaposi’s sarcoma,
a cancer often associated with AIDS.
Doxil - a hollow fatty ball known as a
liposome with a cancer-killing drug inside it
- was a breakthrough. Yet few other
nanomedicines have followed. Recent scientific
advances have changed the game,
however. Bind’s nanoparticles, for example,
are programmed to reach the right
spot using targeting molecules that recognize
specific proteins linked to disease on
the surface of cells. They also have a stealth
covering that shields them from the
immune system, in order to minimize
adverse reactions.
Since January, Amgen, Pfizer and
AstraZeneca have all signed up to use
Bind’s technology, which comes from work
originally carried out in Langer’s lab. And
Bind is not the only game in town. Another
approach, using tiny particles of gold as
health
Big drugmakers think small
with nanomedicine deals
Nanomedicine promises
greater precision and monitoring
drug carriers, is being explored in a deal
that AstraZeneca signed in December with
CytImmune. “Anything you can do to
improve targeting of tumors rather than
normal tissue - whether that is through an
armed antibody or nanoparticle approach -
increases the chance of success,” said Susan
Galbraith, who leads AstraZeneca’s oncology
research.
PARALLEL APPROACHES
The work remains early stage and Peer
of Tel Aviv University says all the novel carriers
will have to be studied closely for
potential toxicity. However, experience
with liposomes is good and versions of
gold nanoparticles have also been used
safely for many years to treat rheumatoid
arthritis. Injecting patients with gold may
sound like a pricey option but with thousands
of nanoparticles fitting into the width
of a human hair, the amount of metal used
is tiny. Gold, unlike some other metals, is
not toxic and has been used in various
medical treatments for many years without
harmful effects. Bind CEO Scott Minick also
thinks his polymer technology will have
cost advantages over expensive antibody
drugs.
Further out, Kostas Kostarelos, professor
of nanomedicine at University College
London, has high hopes for graphene - a
one-atom-thick form of carbon. His team is
currently working with graphene nanomaterials
in pre-clinical experiments. “We will
see parallel development of different materials,
each offering something different
therapeutically,” he said. Other venturebacked
nanomedicine firms include
Cerulean Pharma, whose technology has
made a highly potent cancer drug tolerable
but which recently had disappointing
results in a clinical study, and two companies
looking at new vaccines.
Selecta Biosciences has a deal on food
allergy vaccines with Sanofi, while Liquidia
Technologies is allied with GlaxoSmithKline
on vaccines and inhaled products. MIT’s
Langer is convinced more Big Pharma companies
will think small in future. —Reuters
Fears for man-made bird flu bug
PARIS: Immunologists expressed concern
yesterday about the “dangerous” work of
scientists in China who created a hybrid
bird flu virus that can spread in the air
between guinea pigs, and now lives in a
lab freezer. The team from the Chinese
Academy of Agricultural Sciences and
Gansu Agricultural University wrote in the
journal Science they had created a new
virus by mixing genes from H5N1 “bird flu”
and H1N1 “swine flu”. H5N1, transmitted to
people by birds, is fatal in about 60 percent
of cases, but does not transmit between
humans-a characteristic that has prevented
a pandemic so far.
Some argue that hybrid studies like
these shed light on how the virus could
mutate in nature to cause a human epidemic,
and may help us prepare. Since
2003, H5N1 has infected 628 people, killing
374, according to the World Health
Organization. H1N1, which erupted in
Mexico, is highly transmissible and infected
a fifth of the world’s population in a
2009-10 pandemic, but is about as lethal as
ordinary flu. The new mutant virus was
easily transmitted between guinea pigs
through respiratory droplets-which the
Chinese team said proved the deadly H5N1
virus may need but a simple genetic mutation
to “acquire mammalian transmissibility”.
Flu hybrids can arise in nature when
two virus strains infect the same cell and
exchange genes in a process known as
reassortment, but there is no evidence that
H1N1 and H5N1 have done so yet. Some
observers fear that science is putting
mankind at risk by preemptively creating
such mutants. “These are manmade viruses,
they have never been made in Nature.
They are now sitting in a freezer,” virology
professor Simon Wain-Hobson of France’s
Pasteur Institute said.
He pointed to a laboratory leak of foot
and mouth, a cattle disease, which caused
an outbreak in Britain six years ago. It was
unclear how the flu hybrid, which is not
deadly in guinea pigs, would affect peoplebut
Wain-Hobson warned: “These could be
pandemic viruses. “That is, if there was
ever an error of they got out or there was a
leak or whatever, this could infect people
and cause anywhere between 100,000 and
100 million deaths.” Wain-Hobson and others
fear the risk may far outweight the scientific
value of the research. The findings
held little value for finding a vaccine or
treatment that would take years to develop-probably
long after an outbreak, they
argue.
“The record of containment in the highest
containment laboratories is not good.
There have been repeated leaks,” said
Robert May, a former president of Britain’s
Royal Society of science. “You do not do
these things unless there is some call of
extreme emergency,” he said. “We are
encountering a real and present danger
with extremely dubious benefits to the
public.” Virologist John Oxford from the
Queen Mary University of London, however,
said the experiment was a valuable
wakeup call. It showed that the two viruses,
both still infecting people around the
world, can swap genes.
“Mathematics will tell you that sooner
or later a person will get co-infected,” he
said-possibly leading to a hybrid virus “that
will start spreading”. “We need to get ourselves
reorganizes, relook our pandemic
plans and make sure we have H5N1 vaccine
stockpiles,” Oxford said. In January,
scientists in the United States and the
Netherlands resumed controversial
research into their own hybrid flu viruses
after taking a year-long break to allay fears
of the bug escaping the lab or falling into
terrorist hands.— AFP