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
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