The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| US breakthrough in live cancer cells Posted: 20 Dec 2011 07:13 AM PST  US researchers announced they have discovered how to keep tumour cells alive in the lab. – Photo by shutterstock.com Until now, scientists have been unable to make cancer cells thrive for very long in the laboratory in a condition that resembles the way they look and act in the body. Doctors have largely relied on biopsied tissue that is frozen or set in wax to diagnose and recommend treatment. The advance has sparked new hope that someday doctors may be able to test a host of cancer-killing drugs on a person's own tumour cells in the lab, before returning to the patient with a therapy that is likely to be a good match. "This would really be the ultimate in personalised medicine," said lead author Richard Schlegel, chairman of the department of pathology at Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "The therapies would be exactly from their tissues. We would get normal tissue and tumour tissue from a particular patient and specifically match up their therapies," Schlegel said. "We are really excited about the possibilities of testing what we can do with this." The method, described in the online edition of the American Journal of Pathology, borrows on a simple method used in stem cell research, experts said. Lung, breast, prostate and colon cancers were kept alive for up to two years using the technique, which combines fibroblast feeder cells to keep cells alive and a Rho kinase (ROCK) inhibitor that allows them to reproduce. When treated with the duo, both cancer and normal cells reverted to a "stem-like state," Schlegel said, allowing researchers to compare the living cells directly for the first time. The two elements have previously been used separately in stem cell research, according to Yale University pathology professor David Rimm, who wrote a commentary that accompanies the article. "No individual technique was new, as far as I know. It was in some sense a very clever combination that led to this success," Rimm said. Rimm cautioned that more labs need to show they can do it too, and that attempts to try different therapies to kill the cancer cells are just "speculation" now, but described the initial results as "pretty compelling." "One of my senior scientists went down to Georgetown for a week and she got it to work. She got pancreatic cells to work, which is impossible. Even they were having trouble with that one," he said. "So that just further served to stoke my enthusiasm, rather than generate skepticism." If other scientists can replicate the technique – and three university labs in the United States are already working on it – the advance could herald a long-awaited transformation in the way cancer cells are studied. The study was published after two years of research in collaboration with National Institutes of Health scientists and was funded by the NIH, the Department of Defense, Georgetown University and the National Cancer Institute. "A tumour from one patient is different from a cancer from another patient, even though they appear to be the same under a pathologist's microscope, and really that is one important reason why so many clinical trials fail," said Marc Symons, investigator at the Center for Oncology and Cell Biology at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York. "I think it is fair to say this may revolutionize the way we think of cancer treatment," added Symons, who was not involved in the study. Cancer is the leading cause of death in the world, killing 7.6 million people in 2008 according to the latest data from the World Health Organization. Mark Friedman, who works in the department of pathology at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, said the real gain for patients could be reducing the harmful effects of chemotherapy that may not be suited for various tumours. "This would be a tremendous benefit for the patient because you would be minimising toxicity while maximizing the benefit of the treatment," said Friedman, who was not part of the study. Karen Anderson, of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, was one of the scientists who recently completed training in the method at Georgetown. She said the process took three days to learn. "It is actually surprisingly straightforward... I am optimistic about it but we have to confirm whether or not the cells that are growing are really going to be the things we want to be able to study," she said. "But I think it is pretty exciting." – AFP Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| How renewable energy may be Edison’s revenge Posted: 20 Dec 2011 04:09 AM PST  US inventor Thomas Alva Edison poses in this photograph taken in 1914. The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who made the incandescent light bulb viable for the mass market, also built the world's first electrical distribution system, in New York, using 'direct current' electricity. – Reuters/NPS/Thomas Edison But today, helped by technological advances and the need to conserve energy, Edison may finally get his revenge. The American inventor, who made the incandescent light bulb viable for the mass market, also built the world's first electrical distribution system, in New York, using "direct current" electricity. DC's disadvantage was that it couldn't carry power beyond a few blocks. His Serbian-born rival Tesla, who at one stage worked with Edison, figured out how to send "alternating current" through transformers to enable it to step up the voltage for transmission over longer distances. Edison was a fiercely competitive businessman. Besides staging electrocutions of animals to discredit Tesla's competing system, he proposed AC be used to power the first execution by electric chair. But his system was less scalable, and it was to prove one of the worst investments made by financier J. Pierpont Morgan. New York's dominant banker installed it in his Madison Avenue home in the late 19th century, only to find it hard to control. It singed his carpets and tapestries. So from the late 1800s, AC became the accepted form to carry electricity in mains systems. For most of the last century, the power that has reached the sockets in our homes and businesses is alternating current. Now DC is making a comeback, becoming a promising money-spinner in renewable or high-security energy projects. From data centres to long-distance power lines and backup power supplies, direct current is proving useful in thousands of projects worldwide. "Everyone says it's going to take at least 50 years," says Peter Asmus, a senior analyst at Boulder, Colorado-based Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm in global clean technology. But "the role of DC will increase, and AC will decrease." FROM CLOUD TO MICROGRID The main factor driving demand is the need to conserve energy and produce more of it from renewable sources. Alternating current is generated by rotating engines, but renewable sources such as wind and solar produce DC power. To use it, because of the way our buildings are wired, we first convert it to AC. Another thing that's happened since Edison's time is the advent of the semiconductor. Semiconductors need DC power, and are increasingly found in household appliances. These have to convert the AC supply back to DC, which is a waste of energy and generates heat. In the early years of industrialisation this wasn't an issue, but today it's important, especially in the huge and fast-growing business of cloud computing. The companies that handle our information traffic are racking their brains to boost efficiency and cut carbon emissions from their plants. Pike Research expects the green data centre business to be worth US$41 billion (RM130.25 billion) annually by 2015, up from US$7.5 billion now. That will be just under a third of all spending on data centres. Finnish information technology company Academica, for instance, has a data centre in a granite cave beneath Helsinki's Uspenski cathedral. It uses Baltic sea water to cool the plant and feeds surplus heat to the city's homes. IBM has designed a solar array to power its Bangalore data centre. Microsoft has filed a patent application for a wind-powered data centre. Direct current may be one way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Right now, outside a handful of universities, it's not the first thing people are thinking of because there are more basic things to do, says Eric Woods, Research Director for Smart Industry at Pike. But for companies on the leading edge, "it's sort of coming out of the research ghetto". Pike has not put a figure on how big the DC component of the green data centre market will be. Swiss-Swedish engineering firm ABB, a big DC advocate, says about 35 per cent of demand for green data centres will come from the United States, 30 per cent from Europe, and the rest spread globally. Every day, says ABB, we all send more than 300 billion emails and 250 million tweets globally. The centres to handle all this data are growing by 10 per cent each year and already consume 80 million megawatt-hours of energy annually – almost 1.5 times the amount of electricity used by the whole of New York City. They're also responsible for about 2 per cent of global carbon emissions. DC power could help. At low voltages it has long been used in data centres but will be "game-changing" at higher voltages, ABB says.  An Edison electric light bulb is displayed at Christie's auction house in London in this file photo of December 8, 2006. – Reuters pic "In our view the market (for microgrids) is about to take off," said Pike Research's Asmus, who also sees demand for microgrids in countries that aren't densely covered by AC grids, such as Australia and India, and in developing countries looking to replace costly and wasteful diesel generators. SMART GRIDS And it's not just "island mode". Thanks to power electronics – semiconductor switching devices – DC can now be transmitted at high voltage over very long distances, longer than AC. It can be easily used in cables, over ground or under the sea. High voltage direct current (HVDC) systems are the backbone of plans for smart grids, or supergrids, which aim to channel energy from places where power sources such as sunlight and hydropower are abundant to countries where it is scarce. Siemens, which vies with ABB for market leadership in HVDC transmission, says demand is increasing fast. "By 2020, I'm expecting to see new HVDC transmission lines with a total capacity of 250 gigawatts. That is a dramatic increase," says Udo Niehage, CEO of the Power Transmission Division in Siemens' Energy Sector. "In the last 40 years, we've only installed 100 gigawatts worth of HVDC transmission lines." Emerging markets have been the main drivers. ABB has installed a 2,000-km line in China that operates DC power; a 2,375-km HVDC project under construction in Brazil will be the world's longest transmission line when it comes online in 2013. But Europe is also important. HVDC is now used in a power connection between Britain and the Netherlands. The island of Majorca, whose tourists push up power demand every summer, was hooked up to the Spanish mainland in September. The HVDC system can transmit 30 to 40 per cent more energy than with conventional overhead lines carrying alternating current. Jochen Kreusel, the head of ABB's Smart Grid programme, says smart grid demand will put Europe at the forefront of HVDC growth over the next 10 years. "At the moment, based on the number of projects, I'm quite sure it's the strongest market," he said. Pike in November 2010 estimated HVDC investment would reach US$12.1 billion by 2015. The bulk of this DC knowhow is currently with European companies, although Chinese firms are joining in. Besides ABB, Siemens and France's Alstom are the main players. NOT THERE YET There are plenty of obstacles to all these developments. People in some places worry about the environmental damage from laying new grids, others point to a lack of standards and say DC still has technological limitations that need to be fixed. Public fears about the potential danger of high voltage cables could also be an issue, especially in the United States where standard voltages are already much lower than in Europe. There are practical limitations, such as a shortage of cable-making capacity. If the economic climate does not improve, cash may also be a constraint. Countries such as Spain and the Netherlands have already cut subsidies to renewable energy projects. ABB's Kreusel says the economic crisis will have an impact on the market, but he still expects DC to become "an evolutionary add-on" to AC grids over the next 20 years. How would Edison see all this? He might even have foreseen it. "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy," he reportedly told his associates Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone in the 1930s. "What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that." – Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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