A team of Israeli scientists offer hope in treating autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis.

Rachel Hirshfeld, May 10, 2012

A team of Israeli scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot may have achieved a breakthrough in treating autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue rather than invading germs.

The scientists managed to “trick” the immune systems of mice into targeting an enzyme known as MMP-9, one of a family of proteins essential for processes including healing wounds. When the enzyme gets out of control, however, MMP-9 facilitates autoimmune diseases as well as the spread of cancer.

President of the Israeli Biophysical Society Irit Sagi and her research group spent years looking for ways to block MMP-9. They first tried making a synthetic drug molecule targeting MMPs, attempting to mimic the body’s MMP inhibitors, known as TIMPs. However, the efforts proved largely ineffective and had extremely severe side effects.

Subsequently, Netta Sela-Passwell, a graduate student in Sagi’s lab, decided to work on a solution, whereby a vaccine was used to trick the immune system into creating natural antibodies against MMP-9. It works in the same way that a vaccine containing a dead virus induces the immune system to create antibodies ready to attack the live virus.

Together with Prof. Abraham Shanzer of the Weizmann’s organic chemistry department, the researchers created an artificial version of the metal zinc-histidine complex at the heart of MMP-9. They then injected these small, synthetic molecules into mice.

Blood tests done on the mice following the procedure showed the presence of antibodies the scientists dubbed “metallobodies,” which are similar to TIMPs in structure and function. In lab experiments, they saw that the metallobodies bound tightly to both the mouse and human versions of MMP-2 and MMP-9.

They then induced an inflammatory condition that mimics Crohn’s disease in mice, and watched how the metallobodies operated. To the scientists’ great delight, the Crohn’s symptoms were successfully prevented.

“We are excited not only by the potential of this method to treat Crohn’s, but by the potential of using this approach to explore novel treatments for many other diseases,” said Sagi, who is president of the Israeli Biophysical Society.

Yeda Research and Development Company, the technology transfer arm of the Weizmann Institute, has applied for a patent for the synthetic immunization molecules as well as the generated metallobodies.

www.israelnationalnews.com

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
30/04/2012, Jerusalem Post

Despite visa rejections, three cardiologists lecturing at Dubai conference say they were treated well.

The three Israeli cardiologists who lectured at a Dubai conference of the World Heart Federation a few weeks ago said that they were “treated well” by the United Arab Emirates authorities, even though over a dozen of their peers who were expected to participate but not speak were not given a visa at the last minute.
Prof. Sami Viskin, the director of cardiology at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said Sunday that the three cardiologists were allowed to leave the hotel and even given VIP tours of the city by a “friendly escort.”
He added, however, that he objected to the fact that the other Israelis who were invited by the federation were not told until the day before their scheduled departure that the Dubai authorities had not given them a visa.
Sourasky director-general Prof. Gabi Barbash, who also attended, agreed that he and his two colleagues had been treated well by the Dubai authorities.

Last week, The Jerusalem Post quoted Prof. Chaim Lotan, who heads the Israel Heart Society and the cardiology department at Hadassah University Medical Center, as saying that the three cardiologists who were there were “confined to their hotel” and that “their passports were confiscated” while they were there. Lotan did not attend the event because there was an Israeli conference the same week, but he was involved in the arrangements for his colleagues.
Yet Prof. Jacob Pe’er, the chief of ophthalmology at the Hadassah University Medical Center said that in February, there was an international congress in his field in February in which Israelis were “badly treated.”
Pe’er was one of the original organizers as a board member of the International Council of Ophthalmology.
Israel and its flag were not included anywhere. Five Israeli specialists were allowed to attend, but they felt like “thieves.” 

“They were limited in their movements and had guards at all times,” Pe’er said.
He felt so uncomfortable about how Israelis were handled before the conference convened that he canceled his trip and resigned from the International Council of Ophthalmology board.
“I am not willing to cooperate with discrimination against Israelis,” he stated. “International medical and scientific conferences must be open to all; regional ones as in Arab countries are entitled to invite whom they please.”

Reprinted from Daily Alert, Friday, April 20, 2012

Teachers from Rural U.S. on Educational Journey to Poland and Israel – Corinne Lestch
17 teachers from schools across the U.S. are still processing an emotionally powerful trip to Poland and Israel to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust, and bring back their experiences to the classroom. "We’re using the Holocaust as a lens to teach social justice, and we wanted to concentrate on teachers who have very little access to resources or survivors," said Sondra Perl, an English professor who helped create the Holocaust Educators Network at Lehman College.
    "They’re addressing local issues in their own home states around injustice, tolerance, bullying, racism. Most of them are not Jewish." "Poland broke my heart, and Israel blew my mind," Perl recalled a teacher from Idaho saying. (New York Daily News)

Free Israeli Cataract Clinics Treat 1,000 Ethiopians – Rivka Borochov (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
    When the seven-person crew from the Israeli volunteer organization Eye from Zion arrived in a remote region in Ethiopia in February to provide free cataract surgery, they were expecting several dozen patients. 1,400 showed up.
    The organization has performed the 20-minute procedure on thousands of people in Asian and African countries.
    After an initial 170 operations in the regions of Debark and Gondar, Eye from Zion founder Nati Marcus planned to return with another team of four eye doctors, a couple of nurses and a technician over the course of the year to finish the job for those on the waiting list.
    No one at Eye from Zion receives any money for their services.

Israeli Defense Firm to Add 100 Jobs in Maryland (Baltimore Sun)
    ELTA North America, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., has opened a location in Maple Lawn in Howard County, Md., where it plans to create 100 new jobs, the state Department of Business and Economic Development said Wednesday.
    Most of ELTA’s employees are scientists, engineers, programmers and technicians who develop products for the armed services.

New Israeli Technology to Recycle Cellulose in Sludge – Karin Kloosterman (Green Prophet)
    Refael Aharon, the CEO and founder of Applied Clean Tech, says his company has refined the process of turning the cellulose in sludge – toilet paper, fecal matter and washing machine lint – into new paper.
    The finished product has no odor and poses no biological hazard. "It’s a real recycled paper," Aharon says.
    The company is already using its cellulose-based raw material in envelopes.

U.S.-Israel 3-D Printer-Makers Merge, Form $1.4B Company – Nataleeya Boss (Twin Cities Business)
    Eden Prairie, Minn.-based 3-D printer manufacturer Stratasys, Inc., will soon merge with Objet, Ltd., a Rehovot, Israel-based company that also makes 3-D printers, the companies said Monday. The equity value of the combined company will total approximately $1.4 billion.

ANKARA – Anatolia News Agency

Everybody should learn a lesson from this donation made without any discrimination, patient Mehmet Burhan Gül says. AA photo

A Turkish leukemia patient, out of treatment options after 22 years, was matched with a bone marrow donor from Israel, resulting in a life-saving surgery against the backdrop of political tensions between their countries.
“Everybody should learn a lesson from this donation, which was made without any discrimination of religion, language or race,” the patient, Mehmet Burhan Gül, told Anatolia news agency.
“I am indebted to the woman who gave me her marrow, and I want to meet her someday. She gave me a second chance at life,” he said.
Gül was diagnosed with leukemia 22 years ago. Unable to find a donor match from his family, the 55-year-old man relied on medication until one day last year his doctors informed him that the medicines had stopped working and that a transplant was crucial for his survival. An international database of 15 million donors resulted in one match — a woman in Israel. 
Osman İlhan, the doctor who treated Gül at Ankara University’s Medical Faculty, said the transplant carried serious risks because the donor only matched nine out of 10 and was a female. Having no other choice, doctors went ahead with the surgery and gave Gül a 60 percent chance of survival. The transplant proved a success, and Gül recovered.

April/14/2012

Researchers found altering amount, timing of rest raised blood sugar levels, slowed metabolism

April 11, 2012 RSS Feed Print

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, April 11 (HealthDay News) — Sleep deprivation, in combination with disrupted "body clock" rhythms, could result in some of the changes to a person’s metabolism that can foreshadow both obesity and diabetes, researchers report.

Participants in the small study who were only allowed to sleep about six hours a night and who were subjected to shifting sleep-wake cycles had higher blood sugar levels and lower resting "metabolic rates," which is a term that describes how quickly your body burns calories for energy.

Elevated blood sugar levels can lead to diabetes. If diet and exercise aren’t changed, low resting metabolic rates can lead to obesity, which in turn elevates the risk for diabetes.

Previous research has shown that people who work the night shift or who continually get too little sleep have high fat levels in the blood and are more likely to be obese and have type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions that are associated with increased risk of heart disease), said Dr. Orfeu Buxton, lead author of the new study and an associate neuroscientist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Buxton’s research group had previously shown, in a laboratory setting, that people who sleep only five hours a night for a week have a greater risk of diabetes.

This latest study, published April 11 in Science Translational Medicine, involved 21 healthy adults who were sequestered in a laboratory for almost six weeks, their sleep cycles, diet and activities all controlled by researchers.

After an initial period of sleeping normally (about 10 hours a night), the participants had three weeks of restricted sleep (less than six hours per 24-hour period) along with a disruption of their body clock — or "circadian rhythm" — brought about by cycles of 28-hour days.

The schedule was similar to that of rotating shift workers.

The final portion of the study consisted of nine days of normal sleeping to "recover."

During the period of sleep deprivation and circadian rhythm disruption, participants’ resting metabolic rate decreased while their post-meal blood sugar levels rose, sometimes even to a level considered pre-diabetic. This was because the pancreas wasn’t producing enough insulin, said Buxton, who is also an assistant professor in the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Among these participants, the decrease in metabolic rate was enough to amount to about 10 added pounds over the course of a year, the researchers stated.

After the final nine-day rest-and-restoration period, these metabolic abnormalities returned to normal.

Although sleep restriction and chronic circadian rhythm disruption both impair glucose metabolism and increase diabetes risk, they do so in different ways, Buxton explained.

Sleep restriction alone doesn’t result in any changes in resting metabolic rate or in blood sugar levels, although it does lead to increased insulin resistance, meaning glucose is not efficiently ushered out of the bloodstream.

But, being aware of the risks inherent in shift work (and world travel) means that people can adjust to compensate.

"You might want to go to the trouble of adapting circadian rhythms on the schedule that’s imposed on you, not just the timing of sleep and light and dark periods, but also the teaming of meals so you’re not eating when your gut is shut down and not ready to process that food," Buxton said.

Commenting on the study, Dr. Loren Wissner Greene, a clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, said: "This shows that you can control your own destiny in some way by disordering your own sleep. People could make beneficial or harmful modifications that might affect their own metabolism."

Greene cautioned, however, that the study was a small one and that the connection between metabolic changes and diabetes in this context is far from certain. Also, none of the participants exercised during the study, something which could have altered the findings.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more on circadian rhythms.

Megan Brooks

April 5, 2012 — A new brain imaging study shows that the human brain is wired in a simple and orderly 3-dimensional grid, akin to a checkerboard, with no diagonal paths.

"Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric," Van J. Wedeen, MD, from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and Harvard Medical School in Boston, explained in a statement. "This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species," he added.

The highly detailed images were obtained with the Connectom diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner installed at MGH’s Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging last fall. The scanner can visualize the networks of crisscrossing fibers in 10-fold higher detail than can conventional scanners.

Detail from DSI scan shows fabric-like 3-dimensional grid structure of connections in monkey brain. Van Wedeen, MD, Martinos Center and Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University Medical School

"This one-of-a-kind instrument is bringing into sharper focus an astonishingly simple architecture that makes sense in light of how the brain grows," Dr. Wedeen said.

Their report is published online March 30 in Science.

A Landmark in Human Neuroanatomy

In a statement, Thomas R. Insel, MD, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health said, "Getting a high resolution wiring diagram of our brains is a landmark in human neuroanatomy. This new technology may reveal individual differences in brain connections that could aid diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders."

As reported in the Science paper, Dr. Wedeen’s team scanned the brains of living humans and the postmortem brains of 4 types of monkeys: rhesus, owl, marmoset, and galago. They found that the wiring of the mature brain appears to mirror 3 primal pathways established in embryonic development.

During early development, the researchers explain, the brain’s connections form along perpendicular pathways, running horizontally, vertically, and transversely. This grid structure appears to guide connectivity as do lane markers on a highway. This structure may help enforce a more efficient, orderly way for the fibers to find their proper connections, and for the structure to adapt through evolution, the researchers say.

Obtaining highly detailed images of these pathways in the human brain has long eluded scientists, in part because the many folds, nooks, and crannies in the human cortex obscure the structure of its connections.

Dr. Wedeen’s team is part of the Human Connectome Project Harvard/MGH-University of California, Los Angeles, consortium that aims to optimize MRI technology to more accurately and precisely image the human brain.

Converging Lines of Evidence

This paper is "very interesting," Olivier Coulon, PhD, CNRS research fellow in the Laboratory for Information Science and Systems in Marseilles, France, told Medscape Medical News. "To my knowledge, it’s the first that reports such organization at the whole brain level," he pointed out.

The findings are consistent with observations made in a previous paper, he said, "although in that paper only the medial frontal cortex was studied and the orthogonal organization of fibers was described at a gross scale without any notion of the fine grid described by Wedeen et al."

"What is interesting," he added, "is the fact that it is consistent with how we think cortical sulci or folds are organized. There have been a few papers describing the cortical folds as organized according to an orthogonal grid.

"We recently published a short conference paper in which such organization becomes clearer thanks to a flat angle-preserving projection of the cortex on a rectangular domain," he added. "A longer paper should follow this year."

"All these papers," Dr. Coulon said, "are converging to propose evidence that there is a genetically-driven organization, which could help to find an invariant structure beyond the apparent great variability of the brain (cortex and fibers). Developmental studies and the improvement of fetal MRI acquisitions should help to clarify all these ideas in the future," he concluded.

Dr. Coulon is principal investigator in the BrainMorph Project, which is funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche and dedicated to the development and validation of surface-based brain morphometrics methods.

Dr. Wedeen’s research was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Human Connectome Project. The authors have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Science. Published online March 30, 2012. Abstract

Medscape Medical News © 2012 WebMD, LLC
Send comments and news tips to news@medscape.net.

Zosia Chustecka

April 5, 2012 — Five common cancer procedures and tests have been identified that are not supported by evidence and should no longer be used, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Oncologists should stop the unnecessary use of chemotherapy in patients with advanced cancers who are unlikely to benefit, and should limit their use of colony-stimulating factor (CSF) drugs in patients undergoing chemotherapy.

They should also curb their use of advanced costly imaging technologies for staging of early breast and prostate cancers, and for detecting breast cancer recurrences.

These recommendations, compiled after an extensive review of the literature and with input from more than 200 ASCO members, were published online April 3 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The move is part of the Choose Wisely campaign, organized by the American Board of Internal Medicine, in which many different medical specialties identified tests and procedures that could be skipped. In total, 45 procedures and tests were deemed unsupportable by evidence.

This campaign started when Howard Brody, MD, PhD, professor of family medicine at the University of Texas in Galveston, challenged each medical specialty to take a critical look at its field and identify 5 practices that are commonly performed despite a lack of evidence (N Engl J Med. 2010;362:283-285).

"At ASCO, we took that challenge to heart," lead author Lowell Schnipper, MD, from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, and chair of the ASCO Cost of Care Task Force, said in a statement

"By tackling the overuse of treatments and tests for some of the most common cancers, we hope to achieve substantial improvements in the quality of cancer care in the United States," he added.

Avoiding treatments that have little or no benefit means that "we also do our part to address the unsustainable cost increases that threaten our nation’s healthcare," said Michael Link, MD, president of ASCO.

Stop Chemotherapy

Perhaps the most controversial of the new proposals is the recommendation to stop using or to withhold chemotherapy in patients with advanced solid tumors who are unlikely to benefit, and to focus instead on symptom relief and palliative care.

This whole area has stirred fierce debate in recent years, and attempts in the United States to introduce legislation for end-of-life discussions were stalled after accusations that this was a form of "soft euthanasia" and that these were "death panels" to persuade people not to use medical resources.

In their paper, Dr. Schnipper and colleagues emphasize that stopping chemotherapy is recommended only for a specific subgroup of patients with advanced solid tumors — those with low performance states (3 or 4) who are not eligible for a clinical trial, and in whom there was no benefit from previous evidence-based interventions and no strong evidence supporting the clinical value of further anticancer treatment.

"If a patient’s cancer has grown during 3 different regimens, the likelihood of treatment success is so poor and toxicity so high that further anticancer treatment is not recommended," the authors write.

They cite results from the largest series of patients with nonsmall-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, which showed that only 2% had a documented response to third-line chemotherapy, and 0% had a response to fourth-line chemotherapy (Lung Cancer. 2003;39:55-61).

However, despite the evidence for lack of effect, administering nth-line chemotherapy is common, the authors note. They cite several studies showing that many NSCLC patients receive 4 lines of chemotherapy, and that many patients with solid tumors are still being given chemotherapy within days of death. "This practice is not being driven by profit, but by a desire to help patients," the authors note, and "by the inability of patients, families, and their oncologists to make end-of-life transitions."

Oncologists admit that they find this difficult, as previously reported by Medscape Medical News. Stopping chemotherapy can feel like failure and "giving up," and sometimes patients or their relatives can demand more — in one instance, because the "chemotherapy cheers her up."

"Stopping anticancer treatment should always be accompanied by appropriate palliative and supportive care and referral to a hospice," the authors state.

"Best practice would be continuation of palliative care started concurrently at the time of diagnosis for ‘any patient with metastatic cancer and/or high symptom burden," they add. This reiterates the recent provisional clinical opinion issued by ASCO.

Limit Use of G-CSF Products

Another recommendation related to chemotherapy is to cut down on the use of granulocyte CSF (G-CSF) products for the primary prevention of the chemo-induced adverse effect of febrile neutropenia.

Two G-CSFs are available in the United States: filgrastim (Neupogen) and sargramostim (Leukine).

ASCO guidelines state that G-CSFs are recommended in patients who have "a high risk" (more than 20%) of developing febrile neutropenia as a complication of chemotherapy.

In practice, however, there is a "clear overuse of these agents." Use is inconsistent; the products are used both appropriately and inappropriately, the authors write. They note that these products are "costly" and should be used only in patients who are at high risk of developing febrile neutropenia, as specified in the guidelines.

Stay Away From High-Tech Imaging

The remainder of the new recommendations steer oncologists away from using advanced imaging technology in specific groups of cancer patients.

One instance is patients with early-stage prostate cancer and early-stage breast cancer, who have a low risk for metastasis. In these cases, advanced imaging technologies, such as positron emission technology (PET), computed tomography (CT), and radionuclide bones scans, should not be used to determine whether the cancer has spread, the authors note.

"These tests are often used in staging evaluation of low-risk cancers, despite a lack of evidence suggesting that they detect metastatic disease or survival," the authors state. "Unnecessary imaging can lead to harm through unnecessary invasive procedures, overtreatment, and misdiagnosis."

In addition to the potential harm from unnecessary exposure to ionizing radiation, as well as anxiety, there is also a huge monetary cost from such scans, the authors note.

The list price of a fluorodeoxyglucose PET with concurrent CT scan is around $2500 to $5000, depending on the scan and location. In many instances, patients are directly responsible for a portion of these costs.

The other instance where advanced imaging is discouraged is in patients who have been treated for breast cancer with curative intent who are now asymptomatic.

"The majority of patients with breast cancer diagnosed today present with early-stage, node-negative disease that is found on screening mammography," the authors write.

"As a result of earlier diagnosis and the efficacy of adjuvant therapies…most of these women have a normal life expectancy and a low risk of recurrence."

Several studies have now shown that in such patients, there is no benefit from routine imaging with PET, CT, or radionuclide bone scans, or from serial measurement of serum tumor markers, including CEA, CA 15-3, and CA 27-29, the authors state.

In addition to no benefit, there might be harm from false-positive results, leading to unnecessary invasive procedures, overtreatment, and misdiagnosis, they add.

Instead, such patients should be followed with mammography, with careful attention paid to patient history and physical examination, they suggest. Breast magnetic resonance imaging is not recommended for routine surveillance, because it has a high-false positive rate.

Lower Cost to Patients and Society

Reconsidering the use of these top 5 cancer treatments, tests, and procedures is likely to improve the value of cancer care, the authors note. This means achieving the desired clinical outcome at the lowest cost to the patient and society.

At the same time, each patient with a life-threatening disease is a challenge. In each case, the oncologist must take the unique features of each individual into consideration when making decisions on the management of their cancer, they add.

Dr. Schnipper reports serving as a consultant for ITA partners. Several of his coauthors report consultancy agreements with a number of pharmaceutical companies. Coauthor Douglas Blayney, MD, from Stanford Cancer Center in California, reports owning stock in Abbott, Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Express Scripts, Johnson & Johns, and United Healthcare.

J Clin Oncol. Published online April 3, 2012. Abstract

Medscape Medical News © 2012 WebMD, LLC

In the largest study of its kind, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered five new genetic mutations associated with Crohn’s disease in Jews of Eastern European descent, also known as Ashkenazi Jews. The findings are the first step in an attempt to explain why the prevalence of Crohn’s disease is nearly four times higher in Ashkenazi Jews than in other populations.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 09, 2012

In the largest study of its kind, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered five new genetic mutations associated with Crohn’s disease in Jews of Eastern European descent, also known as Ashkenazi Jews. The findings, which appear in the March 8 online edition of PLoS Genetics, are the first step in an attempt to explain why the prevalence of Crohn’s disease is nearly four times higher in Ashkenazi Jews than in other populations.

Crohn’s disease was first characterized in 1932 by Mount Sinai physician Burrill B. Crohn, MD. It is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks healthy tissue in the gastrointestinal track, causing chronic inflammation. Inga Peter, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, led the international research team to search for unique genetic risk factors in Ashkenazi Jews.

Previous studies had identified 71 genetic variants of Crohn’s disease risk in individuals of European ancestry. Dr. Peter and her team conducted a two-step genome-wide association study comparing 1,878 Ashkenazi Jews with Crohn’s disease to 4,469 Ashkenazi Jews without the disease, using DNA samples to evaluate their genetic make-up. The research team found 12 of the known risk variants, but also discovered five new genetic risk regions on chromosomes 5q21.1, 2p15, 8q21.11, 10q26.3, and 11q12.1.

“This is the largest study to date, and the first to discover the unique risk factors of Crohn’s disease in the Ashkenazi Jewish population,” said Dr. Peter. “The prevalence of this disease is so much higher in Ashkenazi Jews, and the involvement of genetic variants predominant in this population might help understand why that is.”

The research team also evaluated previous findings in non-Jewish Europeans with Crohn’s disease and found that the genetic architecture of the novel regions associated with Crohn’s disease risk in the Ashkenazi Jewish group was much less diverse than that of non-Jewish Europeans.

“Not only did we discover different risk factors for Ashkenazi Jews, but we found that some previously known risk factors are more potent to this population,” said Dr. Peter. “Armed with this new information, we can begin to analyze the specific signals in order to pinpoint causal genetic mutations, discover why they are malfunctioning, and eventually develop novel treatment approaches.”

Since Dr. Crohn and his colleagues first described this disease, Mount Sinai has been at the forefront of research and treatment for digestive diseases. Today, Mount Sinai specialists care for more patients with inflammatory bowel disease than any other medical center in the United States.

Funding for this research was provided by the New York Crohn’s Disease Foundation.

About The Mount Sinai Medical Center
The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Established in 1968, Mount Sinai School of Medicine is one of the leading medical schools in the United States. The Medical School is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service. It has more than 3,400 faculty in 32 departments and 14 research institutes, and ranks among the top 20 medical schools both in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and by US News and World Report.

The Mount Sinai Hospital, founded in 1852, is a 1,171-bed tertiary- and quaternary-care teaching facility and one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most-respected voluntary hospitals. In 2011, US News and World Report ranked The Mount Sinai Hospital 16th on its elite Honor Roll of the nation’s top hospitals based on reputation, safety, and other patient-care factors. Of the top 20 hospitals in the United States, Mount Sinai is one of 12 integrated academic medical centers whose medical school ranks among the top 20 in NIH funding and US News and World Report and whose hospital is on the US News and World Report Honor Roll. Nearly 60,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients last year, and approximately 560,000 outpatient visits took place.
For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org/.

Find Mount Sinai on:
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For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/3/prweb9267207.htm

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/business/press-releases/article/Mount-Sinai-Researchers-Discover-Five-Biomarkers-3394323.php#ixzz1oqv173ct

Cleantech Group, World Wildlife Fund release first-ever global cleantech innovation ranking. Denmark, Israel and Sweden dominate top-three slots

Reprinted from YNet News, March 1, 2012

Going green, going strong: Israel is among the top-three nations worldwide that provide the best conditions for clean technology startup companies, a recent ranking by the CleanTech Group stated. Topping the list was Denmark, followed by Israel, Sweden, Finland and the United States.

“Coming Clean: The Global Cleantech Innovation Index 2012,” is a first-of-its-kind ranking, complied by the CleanTech Group and the World Wildlife Fund. It listed the top 38 countries worldwide to offer clean energy projects the most favorable conditions.

The report explored clean energy opportunities in each of the 38 countries. The evaluation was based on a 15-indicators scale, which reviewed the creation and commercialization of cleantech start-ups according their potential in relation to their economic size, and innovation projections for the next 10 years.

In 2011, Israel was ranked the world’s fourth-leading nation in cleantech investments.

“Israel leads the pack in its capacity to produce new innovative cleantech companies per capita,” The report said.

According to the report, the two factors that kept Israel out of the top spot are its small domestic market, and “the lack of government support for cleantech development.”

“The global macro-economic landscape is shifting; fostering entrepreneurial start-ups and growth companies with clean technology solutions will be an increasingly important part of countries’ competitiveness on the world stage,” Richard Youngman, of the Cleantech Group said.

“This index shows that several countries are on the right track, but clearly much more needs to be done if we are to properly address climate change and achieve a transition towards a global 100% renewable future,” Samantha Smith of the WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative, said.

Washington, Feb 23, 2012, PTI :

Reprinted from Deccan Herald

Researchers have identified an anti-ageing protein that can extend life span of mice by 16 per cent, a finding they say also offers hope for humans.
A team at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that the protein called sirtuin helped male mince live about 16 per cent longer than average, the first such advance for mammals in a field that has so far offered the blessings of extended life span only to yeast, nematodes and fruit flies.
Although the scientists, who detailed their findings in the journal Nature, cannot explain why female mice didn’t also live longer like the males, their research has been hailed as remarkable that has brought the anti-ageing research to a new level of maturity, LiveScience reported.
Mammals, including humans, have seven types of sirtuins, called SIRT1 to SIRT7. Scientists are not sure what these proteins do, although there is some evidence suggesting that they might help prevent chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Sirtuin was first came to news in 1999, when researchers found that a certain sirtuin called Sir2 could extend life span in yeast by 30 percent. Studies that followed on worms and flies have had mixed results, and some researchers have started to question whether sirtuins could control life span in more complicated life forms.

The Israeli researchers, led by Yariv Kanfi, now focused on SIRT6. The team had previously found that mice genetically bred to have lots of SIRT6 could get fat on rich diets yet show no signs of heart disease, fatty liver disease and other diseases associated with obesity.
So, they simply let the SIRT6 enhanced mice to live a natural life and found that male mice lived longer, about 16 per cent longer on average, than regular mice kept in the same conditions. But, the female mice with the SIRT6 gene didn’t live longer than regular mice.