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Archive for the ‘Genetics & Pharmaceutical’ Category

p53 mutation – Li-Fraumeni Syndrome – Likelihood of Genetic or Hereditary conditions playing a role in Intergenerational incidence of Cancer

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Updated on 07/08/2021 

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-cancer-wider-access-immunotherapy.html

THIS ARTICLE IS RECOMMENDED READING TO ALL OUR e-Readers

because it is a REAL story of a high school student fighting Brain Cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM)

it presents the FRONTIER OF GENOMICS, PRECISION MEDICINE, Interventional Radiology and Interventional ONCOLOGY at

Stanford University, Canary Center at Stanford for Early Cancer Detection, Stanford Medical Center and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital

I was exposed to Li-Fraumeni Syndrome in the following article:

‘And yet, you try’ – A father’s quest to save his son

http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2016fall/milan-gambhirs-li-fraumeni-syndrome.html

Li-Fraumeni syndrome

Other Names for This Condition

  • LFS
  • Sarcoma family syndrome of Li and Fraumeni
  • Sarcoma, breast, leukemia, and adrenal gland (SBLA) syndrome
  • SBLA syndrome

LFS is a rare disorder that greatly increases the risk of developing several types of cancer, particularly in children and young adults.

The cancers most often associated with Li-Fraumeni syndrome include breast cancer, a form of bone cancer called osteosarcoma, and cancers of soft tissues (such as muscle) called

Soft tissue sarcoma forms in soft tissues of the body, including muscle, tendons, fat, blood vessels, lymph vessels, nerves, and tissue around joints.


(small hormone-producing glands on top of each kidney). Several other types of cancer also occur more frequently in people with Li-Fraumeni syndrome.

A very similar condition called Li-Fraumeni-like syndrome shares many of the features of classic Li-Fraumeni syndrome. Both conditions significantly increase the chances of developing multiple cancers beginning in childhood; however, the pattern of specific cancers seen in affected family members is different.

Genetic Changes

The CHEK2 and TP53 genes are associated with Li-Fraumeni syndrome.

More than half of all families with Li-Fraumeni syndrome have inherited mutations in the gene. TP53 is a tumor suppressor gene, which means that it normally helps control the growth and division of cells. Mutations in this gene can allow cells to divide in an uncontrolled way and form tumors. Other genetic and environmental factors are also likely to affect the risk of cancer in people with TP53 mutations.

A few families with cancers characteristic of Li-Fraumeni syndrome and Li-Fraumeni-like syndrome do not have TP53 mutations, but have mutations in the CHEK2 gene. Like the TP53 gene, CHEK2 is a tumor suppressor gene. Researchers are uncertain whether CHEK2 mutations actually cause these conditions or are merely associated with an increased risk of certain cancers (including breast cancer).

Inheritance Pattern

Li-Fraumeni syndrome is inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, which means one copy of the altered gene in each cell is sufficient to increase the risk of developing cancer. In most cases, an affected person has a parent and other family members with cancers characteristic of the condition.

Diagnosis and Management

These resources address the diagnosis or management of Li-Fraumeni syndrome:

References on LFS

SOURCE

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/li-fraumeni-syndrome

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Reporter and Curator: Dr. Sudipta Saha, Ph.D.

 

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a group of small non-coding RNA molecules that play a major role in posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression and are expressed in an organ-specific manner. One miRNA can potentially regulate the expression of several genes, depending on cell type and differentiation stage. They control every cellular process and their altered regulation is involved in human diseases. miRNAs are differentially expressed in the male and female gonads and have an organ-specific reproductive function. Exerting their affect through germ cells and gonadal somatic cells, miRNAs regulate key proteins necessary for gonad development. The role of miRNAs in the testes is only starting to emerge though they have been shown to be required for adequate spermatogenesis. In the ovary, miRNAs play a fundamental role in follicles’ assembly, growth, differentiation, and ovulation.

 

Deciphering the underlying causes of idiopathic male infertility is one of the main challenges in reproductive medicine. This is especially relevant in infertile patients displaying normal seminal parameters and no urogenital or genetic abnormalities. In these cases, the search for additional sperm biomarkers is of high interest. This study was aimed to determine the implications of the sperm miRNA expression profiles in the reproductive capacity of normozoospermic infertile individuals. The expression levels of 736 miRNAs were evaluated in spermatozoa from normozoospermic infertile males and normozoospermic fertile males analyzed under the same conditions. 57 miRNAs were differentially expressed between populations; 20 of them was regulated by a host gene promoter that in three cases comprised genes involved in fertility. The predicted targets of the differentially expressed miRNAs unveiled a significant enrichment of biological processes related to embryonic morphogenesis and chromatin modification. Normozoospermic infertile individuals exhibit a specific sperm miRNA expression profile clearly differentiated from normozoospermic fertile individuals. This miRNA cargo has potential implications in the individuals’ reproductive competence.

 

Circulating or “extracellular” miRNAs detected in biological fluids, could be used as potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of several disease, such as cancer, gynecological and pregnancy disorders. However, their contributions in female infertility and in vitro fertilization (IVF) remain unknown. Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a frequent endocrine disorder in women. PCOS is associated with altered features of androgen metabolism, increased insulin resistance and impaired fertility. Furthermore, PCOS, being a syndrome diagnosis, is heterogeneous and characterized by polycystic ovaries, chronic anovulation and evidence of hyperandrogenism, as well as being associated with chronic low-grade inflammation and an increased life time risk of type 2 diabetes. Altered miRNA levels have been associated with diabetes, insulin resistance, inflammation and various cancers. Studies have shown that circulating miRNAs are present in whole blood, serum, plasma and the follicular fluid of PCOS patients and that these might serve as potential biomarkers and a new approach for the diagnosis of PCOS. Presence of miRNA in mammalian follicular fluid has been demonstrated to be enclosed within microvesicles and exosomes or they can also be associated to protein complexes. The presence of microvesicles and exosomes carrying microRNAs in follicular fluid could represent an alternative mechanism of autocrine and paracrine communication inside the ovarian follicle. The investigation of the expression profiles of five circulating miRNAs (let-7b, miR-29a, miR-30a, miR-140 and miR-320a) in human follicular fluid from women with normal ovarian reserve and with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and their ability to predict IVF outcomes showed that these miRNAs could provide new helpful biomarkers to facilitate personalized medical care for oocyte quality in ART (Assisted Reproductive Treatment) and during IVF (In Vitro Fertilization).

 

References:

 

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-31973-5_12

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.12276/abstract;jsessionid=F805A89DCC94BDBD42D6D60C40AD4AB0.f03t03

 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009279716302241

 

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10815-016-0657-9

 

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep24976

 

 

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Real Time Coverage and eProceedings of Presentations on 9/19-9/21 @CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

2.1.5.11

2.1.5.11   Real Time Coverage and eProceedings of Presentations on 9/19-9/21 @CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 2: CRISPR for Gene Editing and DNA Repair

LIVE 9/19 8AM – 10AM USING CRISPR/Cas9 FOR FUNCTIONAL SCREENING at CHI’s 2nd Annual Symposium CRISPR: Mechanisms and Applications @CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/19/live-919-8am-10am-using-crisprcas9-for-functional-screening-at-chis-2nd-annual-symposium-crispr-mechanisms-and-applications-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222/

LIVE 9/19 9:40 – noon CRISPR Engineering Lymphoma Lines & Will Interference from CRISPR Silence RNAi? CHI’s 2nd Annual Symposium CRISPR: Mechanisms and Applications @ CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/19/live-919-940-noon-crispr-engineering-lymphoma-lines-will-interference-from-crispr-silence-rnai-chis-2nd-annual-symposium-crispr-mechanisms-and-applications-chis-14th/

LIVE 9/19 1:40 – 3:20 EMERGING APPLICATIONS OF CRISPR/CAS9 at CHI’s 2nd Annual Symposium CRISPR: Mechanisms and Applications @ CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/19/live-919-140-320-emerging-applications-of-crisprcas9-at-chis-2nd-annual-symposium-crispr-mechanisms-and-applications-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016/

LIVE 9/19 4PM – 5:30PM NK CELL-BASED CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY @CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/19/live-919-4pm-530pm-nk-cell-based-cancer-immunotherapy-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016-westin-boston-waterfront-boston/

LIVE 9/20 8AM to noon GENE THERAPIES BREAKTHROUGHS at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/20/live-920-8am-to-noon-gene-therapies-breakthroughs-at-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016-westin-boston-waterfront-boston/

LIVE 9/20 2PM to 5:30PM New Viruses for Therapeutic Gene Delivery at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/20/live-920-2pm-to-530pm-new-viruses-for-therapeutic-gene-delivery-at-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016-westin-boston-waterfront-boston/

LIVE 9/21 8AM to 10:55 AM Expoloring the Versatility of CRISPR/Cas9 at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/21/live-921-8am-to-1055-am-expoloring-the-versatility-of-crisprcas9-at-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016-westin-boston-waterfront-boston/

LIVE 9/21 8AM to 2:40PM Targeting Cardio-Metabolic Diseases: A focus on Liver Fibrosis and NASH Targets at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/21/live-921-8am-to-240pm-targeting-cardio-metabolic-diseases-a-focus-on-liver-fibrosis-and-nash-targets-at-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016-westin-boston-waterfront-b/

LIVE 9/21 12:50 pm Plenary Keynote Program at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/21/live-921-1250-pm-plenary-keynote-program-at-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919-9222016-westin-boston-waterfront-boston/

LIVE 9/21 3:20PM to 6:40PM KINASE INHIBITORS FOR CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY COMBINATIONS & KINASE INHIBITORS FOR AUTOIMMUNE AND INFLAMMATORY DISEASES at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/09/21/live-921-320pm-to-640pm-kinase-inhibitors-for-cancer-immunotherapy-combinations-kinase-inhibitors-for-autoimmune-and-inflammatory-diseases-at-chis-14th-discovery-on-target-919/

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LIVE 9/20 2PM to 5:30PM New Viruses for Therapeutic Gene Delivery at CHI’s 14th Discovery On Target, 9/19 – 9/22/2016, Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston

http://www.discoveryontarget.com/

http://www.discoveryontarget.com/crispr-therapies/

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group is a

Media Partner of CHI for CHI’s 14th Annual Discovery on Target taking place September 19 – 22, 2016 in Boston.

In Attendance, streaming LIVE using Social Media

Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Editor-in-Chief

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com

#BostonDOT16

@BostonDOT

 

COMMENTS BY Stephen J Williams, PhD

Gene Therapy Breakthroughs

New Strategies for Better Specificity and Delivery

 

2:05  Chairman’s Remarks

Joseph Gold, Ph.D. Director Manufacturing Center for Biomedicine and Genetics, Beckman Research Institute City of Hope

 

  • CBG (center for biomedicine and Genetics) 20000 sq feet
  • CTPC (center therapy production) mainly CART
  • CBG 16 years operation do all stem cells and >400 products
  • New stem cell Beta cell progenitor
  • Do oncolytic VSV
  • CTPC is investigator driven CART islet cells,
  • Like to do novel work so work with CIRM
  • Banking of modified stem cells
  • Adherent scale out limitations: cost,inefficient; solution can be suspension
  • Establish hESC; plate on CELLstart > Accutase>StemPRO SFM>differentiation process; defined reagents — they use this for cardiomyocyte differentiation: they are functional (inotropy, chronotropy response to isoproterenol) can freeze back cells
  • Create a bank of intermediate cells and when you need it for surgery they will put on their matrix, enrich, expand and ship out
  • Allogeneic cells: project where take allogeneic neural stem cells to deliver a chemotherapy payload as they like to migrate to brain tumors
  • Allogeneic cells: for ALS modified to express GDNF
  • HIV resistance with engineered CCR5 negative blood stem cells
  • Release assay considerations: viability, sterility, if cryopreserved then can determine identity, viral insertions, VSV-G copy number, endotoxin and potency (FDA is wanting phase I potency assays) for CART potency is % transduced
  • Good in vivo activity of the neural stem cells loaded with chemotherapeutic

 

ALS  

  • If deliver GDNF to muscle  using genetically modified myoblasts
  • Best to use fetal stem cells – less issues

 

Canavan disease: progressive fatal neurologic disorder that begins in infancy and don’t make it past teenage years

  • Rossbach is taking autologous cells reprogramming generating iPS cells and then modifying by CRISPR but the CRISPR issues of off target effects persist as well the time required for process and verification; also don’t want to use a selectable marker and put in patients; so you can differentiate the cells and hit them with a lentiviral vector system

 

They have been named a PACT Center Production Assistance for Cell Therapy where you can apply for a project grant.  Applicable for startups up to larger mature companies

www.pactgroup.net

 

They do a standard panel of tests for viral infections.

They work with investigators or companies at all stages of manufacturing processes.

 

@BeckmanInst

@cityofhope

 

2:15 Large-Scale Production of Cell Therapies for Regenerative Medicine

Joseph Gold, Ph.D. Director Manufacturing Center for Biomedicine and Genetics, Beckman Research Institute

 

2:45  Directed Evolution of New Viruses for Therapeutic Gene Delivery

David Schaffer, Ph.D.  Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, BioEngineering, Molecular and Cell Biology and Neuroscience;

 

AAV is very safe as many people already infected with it

 

  • Spark (Leber’s cogenital anaurosis
  • Hemophilia B
  • Lipoprotein lipase deficiency
  • Spinal muscular atrophy
  • Challenges: are we just getting the ‘low hanging fruit’ eg Spark therapy must be injected after retinal therapy, hemo B needs to be given at high doses
  • Their theory was AAV had been evolving for its own purposes so hence the limitations of AAV;
  • Utilized 25 different techniques to generate variants of AAV in a library then packaged (each will have its own barcode)
  • Broad platform technology: retina, lung, brain and spinal cord

Retinal:  AAV may be too large to get through layers of the eye, problems; subretinal injections and damage or retinal detachment.  Then they used their whole library in an in-vivo screen (as hard to recapitulate the multi cell layers of the retina).  

 

Cystic Fibrosis

  • AAV2H22 variant worked very well to supply the CFTR gene in pig model of cystic fibrosis and increases chloride transport and reduce bacterial load
  • Then found pig variant AAV did not work well on human tissue so designed a human variant and worked well in human tissues
  • The variant AAV2.5T surrounds sialic acid binding pockets and increases binding and endocytosis

 

Brain and Spinal Cord:  Sanfilippo B trial  8 holes drilled into skull followed by 16 AAV injections

 

  • Injected a generated AAV variant (by evolution process) : engineered AAV2 is 100 fold better getting through blood brain barrier… novel variant undergoes retrograde transport to cortex ; made a cas9 to remove a tdTomato gene overexpressed in mouse and found 90% knockdown
  • Also interesting point: the porcine variant did not work in human and the human variant did not work in porcine.  Implication for FDA safety and efficacy testing must do in monkeys

They started a spinout 4D Molecular Therapeutics

 

4:25 Lentiviral Vectors for Gene Therapy

 

Munapaty Swani, Ph.D. Texas Tech Health Science Center

 

  • Can express multiple shRNA under a separate promoter but toxic so if expressed in miRNA backbone could be safer under a pol II
  • How much of flanking sequence is needed?
  • 30 nt flanking sequence is enough for Drosha processing
  • Constructed 1 to 7 shRNA-miR targeting CCR5 and 6 viral genes; all constructs were functional
  • Problem with pol ii promoter
  • These 7 shRNA miRNA protect against HIV entry if against CCR5 and the 7 viral elements
  • Used the non-integrating lentivirus for transient to see if infect T cells or not versus integrating lentivirus ; results non-integrating lentivirus did not infect t cells so safer to use
  • CCR5 disruption reduced HIV infection in T cells in vitro;
  • ZFN treatment of HIV+ PBMC prevents activation of HIV
  • Encapsulted CAS9 within LV; cas9 protein is incorporated within LV and is functional
  • First transduce then come in with the Cas9 so made all in one lentivirus with Cas9 and an sgRNA expression vector *******
  • This shows that it is possible to put all in a nanoparticle based lentivirus and an all in one may make it easier and safer (supposedly)

 

4:55 AAV Capsid Design

Miguel Seria Esteves, PhD Associate Professor Neurology, Gene Therapy Center University of Massachusetts Medical School

 

-AAV replication dependent no known human disease with native AAV

  •  Multiple barriers to get across blood brain barrier
  • AAV9 preferentially target neonatal neurons and adult astrocytes
  • Multiple capsids can be used for AAV9 infection in brain but not complete
  • Can we design better capsids to give it better tropic properties and better penetration to blood brain barrier
  • Using a polyalanine in the 5’ end of the caspid was most efficeint
  • Increases gene transfer efficiency especially IN SELECT CELL TYPES; Glial transduction and increased in striatum: increase is structure specific so little in thalamus but good in cerebellum and spinal cord
  • AAV9 tranduces also in peripheral tissues with or without modified capsid

 

Huntington’s Disease

  • Polyglutamate disease polyy glu on huntingtin protein
  • They get a 40 to 50% reduction of huntingtin but not significant between capsid design
  • They did a directed evolution of AAV capsid and generated capsid gene delivery diversity: DNA shuffling and in vivo selection
  • AAV-B1 is a new tropic capsid showing transduction of different structures
  • Five fold reduction in tropism to the liver but massive increases in muscle and beta exocrine cells and lung
  • Presence of neutralizing antibodies is a problem with AAV therapy
  • In conclusion unknown mechanisms by whivh a highly hydrophobic string of 19 alanines modifies the CHS tropism of AAV9 kvariants
  • Chimeric capsids identified from in vivo screen can reveal interesting patterns of tropism

12:45 PM Screening with shRNA and CRISPR

Ryan Raver, PhD Global Product Manager, Functional Genomics, MilliporeSigma

  • KO – Knock Out
  • KD – Knock Down
  1. RNAi -KD
  2. CRISPR-Cas9 – KO

NEW STRATEGIES FOR BETTER SPECIFICITY AND DELIVERY

2:05 Chairperson’s Remarks

Joseph Gold, Center for Biomedicine and Genetics Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope

2:15 Large Scale Production of cell Therapies for Regenerative Medicine: COmbination Cell and Gene Therapy products

Joseph Gold, Center for Biomedicine and Genetics Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope

  • Biological & Cellular GMP manufacturing Core at COH
  • Establishing scalable hESC suspension Culture
  • Optimized small molecule concentration, induction timing, stirring rates
  1. Almost Xeno free
  2. defined
  3. very good reproducibility
  4. high purity and yield:
  • Immuno-staining,
  • FACS – cTnT, sMHC, Alpha-actinin
  • Cryopreservation, Multi-electrode Array (MEA)
  • hESC-RPE monolayer on synthetic substrate

Combination cell/gene therapy products at COH

  1. CAR T CCR5-inactivated CD34+ HSPC – Target: AIDS
  • adoptive immunotherapy using CAR-Engineering T cells – glioblastoma

2. HIV resistance with engineering CCR5-negative blood stem cells: gene KO by ZFNs

  • assay considerations 0 If cryopreservation : Identify, viral insertion, endotoxin, residual beads Potency: CAR T- % transduced cells, CCR5-?-CD34 cells: HIV resistance

3. Glioblastoma

4.  In vivo activity of transduced NSCs: Assay consideration – viability, sterility, mycobatom,

5.  ALS: degeneration of neurones

  • Embryonic stem cells
  • Fetal neural stem cells
  • Adult stem cells – human Proginetor neural cells

6.  Canavan Disease – Y.Shi – ASPA gene mutations cause Canavan disease

Strategy: autologous iPSC-derived, modified neural progenitors: DIferentiate to neural progenitors

Gene therapy: Correction (Off-taregt effects, correct individual cell lines)  or Over expression (Copy number, selection, transduce iPSC)

  • release assay consideration
  • identity – markers and HLA, contaminants, Potency: in vivo efficacy modified autologous
  • production Assistance for Cell therapy
  • cell therapy manufacturing development
  • roles of Biobanks

 

2:45 Directed Evolution of New Viruses for Therapeutic Gene Delivery

David Schaffer, Ph.D., Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bioengineering, Molecular and Cell Biology, and Neuroscience; Director, Berkeley Stem Cell Center, University of California, Berkeley

Adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors have been increasingly successful in clinical trials; however, viruses face many delivery barriers that limit their efficacy for most disease targets. We have developed directed vector evolution – the iterative genetic diversification of a viral genome and functional selection for desired properties – to engineer novel, optimized AAV vectors for efficient, selective delivery for a range of tissue and disease targets.

  • DNA (gene therapy and editing) >> RNAi (antisense) >> Protein: Small molecules and monoclonal antibodies
  • Dlivery
  • Adeno Associated Viral Vectors Adenoviral helper genes
  • AAV2, efficacy in Leber’s Congenital samaurosis (AAV)
  • Spinal muscular, lipolrotein lipase deficiency (AAV)

Gene Delivery

  1. neutralization of pre-esisting antibodies
  2. target tissue – deep penetration
  3. Inefficient transduction to target cells
  4. target specific cells

Fitness as Therapy – virus evolutionary: Tropism and immunity

  • AAV directed Vector evolution : Input /sequence >> Diversity/generation >> Packaging
  • Retinoschisis Model – Eye therapeutic gene to protect vision – AAV – transduction of retinal cell, vitreas in Human different scale — eventually Macualr degeneration Therapy for: Photo receptor is the target for therapy
  • Dog: Fundus Imaging of Engineered AAV: Variant Expression GFP Pool Carrying

Lung- Cystic Fibrosis (mucus production amplifies (enhanced transduction) due to MAC3 translation error) – Gene Therapy – cilia function to restore ability to clear mucos: Variant evolved on Human airway epithelia – AA  particles

  1. AAV2>>> AAV%>> T mutation
  • efficacy must be improved

Brain and Spinal Cord

  1. Scull – 8 drills followed by 16 AAV injections
  2. Spinal cord: injuction in muscle

Synthetic version of AAV — Engineered AAV for enhanced Retrograde Transport

  • AAV2-retrograded transport – Noval variant Undergoes Transport along multiple Projections
  • Cas9 – Retrograde Delivery of Cas9 to cortex of mouse – KD –

Summary

  • Virus as gene delivery mechanism
  • designer AAV variants

 

3:15 Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)

3:45 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing and Poster Competition Winner Announced

4:25 Lentiviral Vectors for Gene Therapy

Manjunath N. Swamy, MD, Professor of Biomedical Sciences and Co-DIrector of the Center of Emphasis in Infectious Diseases. Paul L Foster School of Medicine, Texas Tech University Health Science Center

  • RNAi targets for HIV
  • Expression of multiple shRNAs
  • COnstruction od 7 shRNA-miR targeting CCR5 and 6 viral genes – protect against both 5 ans x4 tropic HIV-1
  • shRNA expression does not decrease with distance from promoter
  • Lentiviral vector to express ZFNs: HIV envelop – ZFN-mediated CCR5 gene editing in Primary T cells
  • ZFN treatment of HIV+PBMC prevents activation of HIV
  • Strategy to encapsulate Cas9 Protein wihtin LV : AIm to deliver Cas9 protein deliver sgRNA expression vector. A Lentiviral
  • Gene editing by all-in-one Lentivirus = to prepack

 

4:55 AAV Caspid Engineering

Miguel Sena Esteves, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Neurology, Gene Therapy Center, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Adeno-associated virus vectors have become the leading platform for development of in vivo gene therapies for neurological diseases. We have developed new AAV vectors for widespread gene delivery to the CNS through vascular infusion in adult animals through peptide grafting and in vivo library selection. These new neurotropic AAVs have achieved CNS-wide silencing of gene expression using gene-specific microRNAs.

  • Adeno-associated virus – Paravovirus family
  • Recombinant AAV vectors carry gene expression cassette of choice flanked by two
  • CNS – route of gene delivery
  • Crossing BBB
  • Systemic delivery of AAV9 vectors: IV
  • Peptide grafting – in vivo selection of novel CNS: DIstribution of GFP transduced cells – robust neuronal transducture with transduction AAV-AS
  • motor cortex, Straiatum, thalamus, motor cortex, ventral horn of spinal cord, cerebelum, liver, muscle, oculomotor nerve, nucleus of oculomotor nerve

Huntington’s Disease > 40 CAG vs <26 CAG in normal – Peptide grafting of AAV vectors for CNS

  • DNA shuffling and in vivo selection: Brain vs Liver

Next generation of AAV vectors for CNS 

  • Liver, pancreas, lung — same pattern

neural transduction after vascular delivery

  • AAV-B1 caspid vs AAV8 – 19 amino acids

Conclusion

New capsids with improved CNS tropism

19 alanines modifies the CNS tropism of AAV9 variants

Chimeric caspids identified from in vivo screens

 

5:25 Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

 

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Milestones in Physiology & Discoveries in Medicine and Genomics: Request for Book Review Writing on Amazon.com

physiology-cover-seriese-vol-3individualsaddlebrown-page2

Milestones in Physiology

Discoveries in Medicine, Genomics and Therapeutics

Patient-centric Perspective 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B019VH97LU 

2015

 

 

Author, Curator and Editor

Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP

Chief Scientific Officer

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence

Larry.bernstein@gmail.com

Preface

Introduction 

Chapter 1: Evolution of the Foundation for Diagnostics and Pharmaceuticals Industries

1.1  Outline of Medical Discoveries between 1880 and 1980

1.2 The History of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology in the late 19th and 20th Century

1.3 The Classification of Microbiota

1.4 Selected Contributions to Chemistry from 1880 to 1980

1.5 The Evolution of Clinical Chemistry in the 20th Century

1.6 Milestones in the Evolution of Diagnostics in the US HealthCare System: 1920s to Pre-Genomics

 

Chapter 2. The search for the evolution of function of proteins, enzymes and metal catalysts in life processes

2.1 The life and work of Allan Wilson
2.2  The  evolution of myoglobin and hemoglobin
2.3  More complexity in proteins evolution
2.4  Life on earth is traced to oxygen binding
2.5  The colors of life function
2.6  The colors of respiration and electron transport
2.7  Highlights of a green evolution

 

Chapter 3. Evolution of New Relationships in Neuroendocrine States
3.1 Pituitary endocrine axis
3.2 Thyroid function
3.3 Sex hormones
3.4 Adrenal Cortex
3.5 Pancreatic Islets
3.6 Parathyroids
3.7 Gastointestinal hormones
3.8 Endocrine action on midbrain
3.9 Neural activity regulating endocrine response

3.10 Genomic Promise for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Dementias, Autism Spectrum, Schizophrenia, and Serious Depression

 

Chapter 4.  Problems of the Circulation, Altitude, and Immunity

4.1 Innervation of Heart and Heart Rate
4.2 Action of hormones on the circulation
4.3 Allogeneic Transfusion Reactions
4.4 Graft-versus Host reaction
4.5 Unique problems of perinatal period
4.6. High altitude sickness
4.7 Deep water adaptation
4.8 Heart-Lung-and Kidney
4.9 Acute Lung Injury

4.10 Reconstruction of Life Processes requires both Genomics and Metabolomics to explain Phenotypes and Phylogenetics

 

Chapter 5. Problems of Diets and Lifestyle Changes

5.1 Anorexia nervosa
5.2 Voluntary and Involuntary S-insufficiency
5.3 Diarrheas – bacterial and nonbacterial
5.4 Gluten-free diets
5.5 Diet and cholesterol
5.6 Diet and Type 2 diabetes mellitus
5.7 Diet and exercise
5.8 Anxiety and quality of Life
5.9 Nutritional Supplements

 

Chapter 6. Advances in Genomics, Therapeutics and Pharmacogenomics

6.1 Natural Products Chemistry

6.2 The Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance

6.3 Viruses, Vaccines and immunotherapy

6.4 Genomics and Metabolomics Advances in Cancer

6.5 Proteomics – Protein Interaction

6.6 Pharmacogenomics

6.7 Biomarker Guided Therapy

6.8 The Emergence of a Pharmaceutical Industry in the 20th Century: Diagnostics Industry and Drug Development in the Genomics Era: Mid 80s to Present

6.09 The Union of Biomarkers and Drug Development

6.10 Proteomics and Biomarker Discovery

6.11 Epigenomics and Companion Diagnostics

 

Chapter  7

Integration of Physiology, Genomics and Pharmacotherapy

7.1 Richard Lifton, MD, PhD of Yale University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Recipient of 2014 Breakthrough Prizes Awarded in Life Sciences for the Discovery of Genes and Biochemical Mechanisms that cause Hypertension

7.2 Calcium Cycling (ATPase Pump) in Cardiac Gene Therapy: Inhalable Gene Therapy for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension and Percutaneous Intra-coronary Artery Infusion for Heart Failure: Contributions by Roger J. Hajjar, MD

7.3 Diagnostics and Biomarkers: Novel Genomics Industry Trends vs Present Market Conditions and Historical Scientific Leaders Memoirs

7.4 Synthetic Biology: On Advanced Genome Interpretation for Gene Variants and Pathways: What is the Genetic Base of Atherosclerosis and Loss of Arterial Elasticity with Aging

7.5 Diagnosing Diseases & Gene Therapy: Precision Genome Editing and Cost-effective microRNA Profiling

7.6 Imaging Biomarker for Arterial Stiffness: Pathways in Pharmacotherapy for Hypertension and Hypercholesterolemia Management

7.7 Neuroprotective Therapies: Pharmacogenomics vs Psychotropic drugs and Cholinesterase Inhibitors

7.8 Metabolite Identification Combining Genetic and Metabolic Information: Genetic association links unknown metabolites to functionally related genes

7.9 Preserved vs Reduced Ejection Fraction: Available and Needed Therapies

7.10 Biosimilars: Intellectual Property Creation and Protection by Pioneer and by

7.11 Demonstrate Biosimilarity: New FDA Biosimilar Guidelines

 

Chapter 7.  Biopharma Today

8.1 A Great University engaged in Drug Discovery: University of Pittsburgh

8.2 Introduction – The Evolution of Cancer Therapy and Cancer Research: How We Got Here?

8.3 Predicting Tumor Response, Progression, and Time to Recurrence

8.4 Targeting Untargetable Proto-Oncogenes

8.5 Innovation: Drug Discovery, Medical Devices and Digital Health

8.6 Cardiotoxicity and Cardiomyopathy Related to Drugs Adverse Effects

8.7 Nanotechnology and Ocular Drug Delivery: Part I

8.8 Transdermal drug delivery (TDD) system and nanotechnology: Part II

8.9 The Delicate Connection: IDO (Indolamine 2, 3 dehydrogenase) and Cancer Immunology

8.10 Natural Drug Target Discovery and Translational Medicine in Human Microbiome

8.11 From Genomics of Microorganisms to Translational Medicine

8.12 Confined Indolamine 2, 3 dioxygenase (IDO) Controls the Homeostasis of Immune Responses for Good and Bad

 

Chapter 9. BioPharma – Future Trends

9.1 Artificial Intelligence Versus the Scientist: Who Will Win?

9.2 The Vibrant Philly Biotech Scene: Focus on KannaLife Sciences and the Discipline and Potential of Pharmacognosy

9.3 The Vibrant Philly Biotech Scene: Focus on Computer-Aided Drug Design and Gfree Bio, LLC

9.4 Heroes in Medical Research: The Postdoctoral Fellow

9.5 NIH Considers Guidelines for CAR-T therapy: Report from Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee

9.6 1st Pitch Life Science- Philadelphia- What VCs Really Think of your Pitch

9.7 Multiple Lung Cancer Genomic Projects Suggest New Targets, Research Directions for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

9.8 Heroes in Medical Research: Green Fluorescent Protein and the Rough Road in Science

9.9 Issues in Personalized Medicine in Cancer: Intratumor Heterogeneity and Branched Evolution Revealed by Multiregion Sequencing

9.10 The SCID Pig II: Researchers Develop Another SCID Pig, And Another Great Model For Cancer Research

Epilogue

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metabolomics-seriesdindividualred-page2

Metabolic Genomics & Pharmaceutics

2015

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B012BB0ZF0

 

Author, Curator and Editor

Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP

Chief Scientific Officer

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence

Larry.bernstein@gmail.com

Chapter 1: Metabolic Pathways

1.1            Carbohydrate Metabolism

1.2            Studies of Respiration Lead to Acetyl CoA

1.3            Pentose Shunt, Electron Transfer, Galactose, more Lipids in brief

1.4            The Multi-step Transfer of Phosphate Bond and Hydrogen Exchange Energy

1.5            Diabetes Mellitus

1.6            Glycosaminoglycans, Mucopolysaccharides, L-iduronidase, Enzyme Therapy

Chapter 2: Lipid Metabolism

2.1            Lipid Classification System

2.2            Essential Fatty Acids

2.3            Lipid Oxidation and Synthesis of Fatty Acids

2.4            Cholesterol and Regulation of Liver Synthetic Pathways

2.5            Sex hormones, Adrenal cortisol, Prostaglandins

2.6            Cytoskeleton and Cell Membrane Physiology

2.7            Pharmacological Action of Steroid hormone

Chapter 3: Cell Signaling

3.1            Signaling and Signaling Pathways

3.2            Signaling Transduction Tutorial

3.3            Selected References to Signaling and Metabolic Pathways in Leaders in Pharmaceutical Intelligence

3.4            Integrins, Cadherins, Signaling and the Cytoskeleton

3.5            Complex Models of Signaling: Therapeutic Implications

3.6            Functional Correlates of Signaling Pathways

Chapter 4: Protein Synthesis and Degradation

4.1            The Role and Importance of Transcription Factors

4.2            RNA and the Transcription of the Genetic Code

4.3            9:30 – 10:00, 6/13/2014, David Bartel “MicroRNAs, Poly(A) tails and Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation

4.4            Transcriptional Silencing and Longevity Protein Sir2

4.5            Ca2+ Signaling: Transcriptional Control

4.6            Long Noncoding RNA Network regulates PTEN Transcription

4.7            Zinc-Finger Nucleases (ZFNs) and Transcription Activator–Like Effector Nucleases (TALENs)

4.8            Cardiac Ca2+ Signaling: Transcriptional Control

4.9            Transcription Factor Lyl-1 Critical in Producing Early T-Cell Progenitors

4.10            Human Frontal Lobe Brain: Specific Transcriptional Networks

4.11            Somatic, Germ-cell, and Whole Sequence DNA in Cell Lineage and Disease

Chapter 5:  Sub-cellular Structure

5.1            Mitochondria: Origin from Oxygen free environment, Role in Aerobic Glycolysis and Metabolic Adaptation

5.2            Mitochondrial Metabolism and Cardiac Function

5.3            Mitochondria: More than just the “Powerhouse of the Cell”

5.4            Mitochondrial Fission and Fusion: Potential Therapeutic Targets?

5.5            Mitochondrial Mutation Analysis might be “1-step” Away

5.6            Autophagy-Modulating Proteins and Small Molecules Candidate Targets for Cancer Therapy: Commentary of Bioinformatics Approaches

5.7            Chromatophagy, A New Cancer Therapy: Starve The Diseased Cell Until It Eats Its Own DNA

5.8           A Curated Census of Autophagy-Modulating Proteins and Small Molecules Candidate Targets for Cancer Therapy

5.9           Role of Calcium, the Actin Skeleton, and Lipid Structures in Signaling and Cell Motility

Chapter 6: Proteomics

6.1            Proteomics, Metabolomics, Signaling Pathways, and Cell Regulation: a Compilation of Articles in the Journal http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com

6.2            A Brief Curation of Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Metabolism

6.3            Using RNA-seq and Targeted Nucleases to Identify Mechanisms of Drug Resistance in Acute Myeloid Leukemia, SK Rathe in Nature, 2014

6.4            Proteomics – The Pathway to Understanding and Decision-making in Medicine

6.5            Advances in Separations Technology for the “OMICs” and Clarification of Therapeutic Targets

6.6           Expanding the Genetic Alphabet and Linking the Genome to the Metabolome

6.7            Genomics, Proteomics and Standards

6.8            Proteins and Cellular Adaptation to Stress

6.9            Genes, Proteomes, and their Interaction

6.10           Regulation of Somatic Stem Cell Function

6.11           Scientists discover that Pluripotency factor NANOG is also active in Adult Organism

Chapter 7: Metabolomics

7.1            Extracellular Evaluation of Intracellular Flux in Yeast Cells

7.2            Metabolomic Analysis of Two Leukemia Cell Lines Part I

7.3            Metabolomic Analysis of Two Leukemia Cell Lines Part II

7.4            Buffering of Genetic Modules involved in Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle Metabolism provides Homeomeostatic Regulation

7.5            Metabolomics, Metabonomics and Functional Nutrition: The Next Step in Nutritional Metabolism and Biotherapeutics

7.6            Isoenzymes in Cell Metabolic Pathways

7.7            A Brief Curation of Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Metabolism

7.8            Metabolomics is about Metabolic Systems Integration

7.9             Mechanisms of Drug Resistance

7.10           Development Of Super-Resolved Fluorescence Microscopy

7.11            Metabolic Reactions Need Just Enough

Chapter 8.  Impairments in Pathological States: Endocrine Disorders; Stress Hypermetabolism and CAncer

8.1           Omega3 Fatty Acids, Depleting the Source, and Protein Insufficiency in Renal Disease

8.2             Liver Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress and Hepatosteatosis

8.3            How Methionine Imbalance with Sulfur Insufficiency Leads to Hyperhomocysteinemia

8.4            AMPK Is a Negative Regulator of the Warburg Effect and Suppresses Tumor Growth InVivo

8.5           A Second Look at the Transthyretin Nutrition Inflammatory Conundrum

8.6            Mitochondrial Damage and Repair under Oxidative Stress

8.7            Metformin, Thyroid Pituitary Axis, Diabetes Mellitus, and Metabolism

8.8            Is the Warburg Effect the Cause or the Effect of Cancer: A 21st Century View?

8.9            Social Behavior Traits Embedded in Gene Expression

8.10          A Future for Plasma Metabolomics in Cardiovascular Disease Assessment

Chapter 9: Genomic Expression in Health and Disease 

9.1            Genetics of Conduction Disease: Atrioventricular (AV) Conduction Disease (block): Gene Mutations – Transcription, Excitability, and Energy Homeostasis

9.2            BRCA1 a Tumour Suppressor in Breast and Ovarian Cancer – Functions in Transcription, Ubiquitination and DNA Repair

9.3            Metabolic Drivers in Aggressive Brain Tumors

9.4            Modified Yeast Produces a Range of Opiates for the First time

9.5            Parasitic Plant Strangleweed Injects Host With Over 9,000 RNA Transcripts

9.6            Plant-based Nutrition, Neutraceuticals and Alternative Medicine: Article Compilation the Journal

9.7            Reference Genes in the Human Gut Microbiome: The BGI Catalogue

9.8            Two Mutations, in the PCSK9 Gene: Eliminates a Protein involved in Controlling LDL Cholesterol

9.9            HDL-C: Target of Therapy – Steven E. Nissen, MD, MACC, Cleveland Clinic vs Peter Libby, MD, BWH

Summary 

Epilogue


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genomicsinpersonalizedmedicinecovervolumeone

Content Consultant: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP

2.1.5.12

2.1.5.12   Genomics Orientations for Personalized Medicine: Request for Book Review Writing on Amazon.com, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 2: CRISPR for Gene Editing and DNA Repair

Genomics Orientations for Personalized Medicine

Volume One

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018DHBUO6

electronic Table of Contents

Chapter 1

1.1 Advances in the Understanding of the Human Genome The Initiation and Growth of Molecular Biology and Genomics – Part I

1.2 CRACKING THE CODE OF HUMAN LIFE: Milestones along the Way – Part IIA

1.3 DNA – The Next-Generation Storage Media for Digital Information

1.4 CRACKING THE CODE OF HUMAN LIFE: Recent Advances in Genomic Analysis and Disease – Part IIC

1.5 Advances in Separations Technology for the “OMICs” and Clarification of Therapeutic Targets

1.6 Genomic Analysis: FLUIDIGM Technology in the Life Science and Agricultural Biotechnology

Chapter 2

2.1 2013 Genomics: The Era Beyond the Sequencing of the Human Genome: Francis Collins, Craig Venter, Eric Lander, et al.

2.2 DNA structure and Oligonucleotides

2.3 Genome-Wide Detection of Single-Nucleotide and Copy-Number Variation of a Single Human Cell 

2.4 Genomics and Evolution

2.5 Protein-folding Simulation: Stanford’s Framework for Testing and Predicting Evolutionary Outcomes in Living Organisms – Work by Marcus Feldman

2.6 The Binding of Oligonucleotides in DNA and 3-D Lattice Structures

2.7 Finding the Genetic Links in Common Disease: Caveats of Whole Genome Sequencing Studies

Chapter 3

3.1 Big Data in Genomic Medicine

3.2 CRACKING THE CODE OF HUMAN LIFE: The Birth of Bioinformatics & Computational Genomics – Part IIB 

3.3 Expanding the Genetic Alphabet and linking the Genome to the Metabolome

3.4 Metabolite Identification Combining Genetic and Metabolic Information: Genetic Association Links Unknown Metabolites to Functionally Related Genes

3.5 MIT Scientists on Proteomics: All the Proteins in the Mitochondrial Matrix identified

3.6 Identification of Biomarkers that are Related to the Actin Cytoskeleton

3.7 Genetic basis of Complex Human Diseases: Dan Koboldt’s Advice to Next-Generation Sequencing Neophytes

3.8 MIT Team Researches Regulatory Motifs and Gene Expression of Erythroleukemia (K562) and Liver Carcinoma (HepG2) Cell Lines

Chapter 4

4.1 ENCODE Findings as Consortium

4.2 ENCODE: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Complex Genetic Diseases

4.3 Reveals from ENCODE Project will Invite High Synergistic Collaborations to Discover Specific Targets  

4.4 Human Variome Project: encyclopedic catalog of sequence variants indexed to the human genome sequence

4.5 Human Genome Project – 10th Anniversary: Interview with Kevin Davies, PhD – The $1000 Genome

4.6 Quantum Biology And Computational Medicine

4.7 The Underappreciated EpiGenome

4.8 Unraveling Retrograde Signaling Pathways

4.9  “The SILENCE of the Lambs” Introducing The Power of Uncoded RNA

4.10  DNA: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but there is no JUNK after all

Chapter 5

5.1 Paradigm Shift in Human Genomics – Predictive Biomarkers and Personalized Medicine – Part 1 

5.2 Computational Genomics Center: New Unification of Computational Technologies at Stanford

5.3 Personalized Medicine: An Institute Profile – Coriell Institute for Medical Research: Part 3

5.4 Cancer Genomics – Leading the Way by Cancer Genomics Program at UC Santa Cruz

5.5 Genome and Genetics: Resources @Stanford, @MIT, @NIH’s NCBCS

5.6 NGS Market: Trends and Development for Genotype-Phenotype Associations Research

5.7 Speeding Up Genome Analysis: MIT Algorithms for Direct Computation on Compressed Genomic Datasets

5.8  Modeling Targeted Therapy

5.9 Transphosphorylation of E-coli Proteins and Kinase Specificity

5.10 Genomics of Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses

Chapter 6

6.1  Directions for Genomics in Personalized Medicine

6.2 Ubiquinin-Proteosome pathway, Autophagy, the Mitochondrion, Proteolysis and Cell Apoptosis: Part III

6.3 Mitochondrial Damage and Repair under Oxidative Stress

6.4 Mitochondria: More than just the “Powerhouse of the Cell”

6.5 Mechanism of Variegation in Immutans

6.6 Impact of Evolutionary Selection on Functional Regions: The imprint of Evolutionary Selection on ENCODE Regulatory Elements is Manifested between Species and within Human Populations

6.7 Cardiac Ca2+ Signaling: Transcriptional Control

6.8 Unraveling Retrograde Signaling Pathways

6.9 Reprogramming Cell Fate

6.10 How Genes Function

6.11 TALENs and ZFNs

6.12 Zebrafish—Susceptible to Cancer

6.13 RNA Virus Genome as Bacterial Chromosome

6.14 Cloning the Vaccinia Virus Genome as a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome 

6.15 Telling NO to Cardiac Risk- DDAH Says NO to ADMA(1); The DDAH/ADMA/NOS Pathway(2)

6.16  Transphosphorylation of E-coli proteins and kinase specificity

6.17 Genomics of Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses

6.18  Diagnosing Diseases & Gene Therapy: Precision Genome Editing and Cost-effective microRNA Profiling

Chapter 7

7.1 Harnessing Personalized Medicine for Cancer Management, Prospects of Prevention and Cure: Opinions of Cancer Scientific Leaders @ http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com

7.2 Consumer Market for Personal DNA Sequencing: Part 4

7.3 GSK for Personalized Medicine using Cancer Drugs Needs Alacris Systems Biology Model to Determine the In Silico Effect of the Inhibitor in its “Virtual Clinical Trial”

7.4 Drugging the Epigenome

7.5 Nation’s Biobanks: Academic institutions, Research institutes and Hospitals – vary by Collections Size, Types of Specimens and Applications: Regulations are Needed

7.6 Personalized Medicine: Clinical Aspiration of Microarrays

Chapter 8

8.1 Personalized Medicine as Key Area for Future Pharmaceutical Growth

8.2 Inaugural Genomics in Medicine – The Conference Program, 2/11-12/2013, San Francisco, CA

8.3 The Way With Personalized Medicine: Reporters’ Voice at the 8th Annual Personalized Medicine Conference, 11/28-29, 2012, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

8.4 Nanotechnology, Personalized Medicine and DNA Sequencing

8.5 Targeted Nucleases

8.6 Transcript Dynamics of Proinflammatory Genes

8.7 Helping Physicians identify Gene-Drug Interactions for Treatment Decisions: New ‘CLIPMERGE’ program – Personalized Medicine @ The Mount Sinai Medical Center

8.8 Intratumor Heterogeneity and Branched Evolution Revealed by Multiregion Sequencing[1]

8.9 Diagnosing Diseases & Gene Therapy: Precision Genome Editing and Cost-effective microRNA Profiling

Chapter 9

9.1 Personal Tale of JL’s Whole Genome Sequencing

9.2 Inspiration From Dr. Maureen Cronin’s Achievements in Applying Genomic Sequencing to Cancer Diagnostics

9.3 Inform Genomics Developing SNP Test to Predict Side Effects, Help MDs Choose among Chemo Regimens

9.4 SNAP: Predict Effect of Non-synonymous Polymorphisms: How Well Genome Interpretation Tools could Translate to the Clinic

9.5  LEADERS in Genome Sequencing of Genetic Mutations for Therapeutic Drug Selection in Cancer Personalized Treatment: Part 2

9.6 The Initiation and Growth of Molecular Biology and Genomics – Part I

9.7 Personalized Medicine-based Cure for Cancer Might Not Be Far Away

9.8 Personalized Medicine: Cancer Cell Biology and Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS)

 Chapter 10

10.1 Pfizer’s Kidney Cancer Drug Sutent Effectively caused REMISSION to Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)

10.2 Imatinib (Gleevec) May Help Treat Aggressive Lymphoma: Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL)

10.3 Winning Over Cancer Progression: New Oncology Drugs to Suppress Passengers Mutations vs. Driver Mutations

10.4 Treatment for Metastatic HER2 Breast Cancer

10.5 Personalized Medicine in NSCLC

10.6 Gene Sequencing – to the Bedside

10.7 DNA Sequencing Technology

10.8 Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak Previews his Plenary Keynote for Drug Discovery Chemistry

Chapter 11

11.1 mRNA Interference with Cancer Expression

11.2 Angiogenic Disease Research Utilizing microRNA Technology: UCSD and Regulus Therapeutics

11.3 Sunitinib brings Adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) to Remission – RNA Sequencing – FLT3 Receptor Blockade

11.4 A microRNA Prognostic Marker Identified in Acute Leukemia 

11.5 MIT Team: Microfluidic-based approach – A Vectorless delivery of Functional siRNAs into Cells.

11.6 Targeted Tumor-Penetrating siRNA Nanocomplexes for Credentialing the Ovarian Cancer Oncogene ID4

11.7 When Clinical Application of miRNAs?

11.8 How mobile elements in “Junk” DNA promote cancer. Part 1: Transposon-mediated tumorigenesis,

11.9 Potential Drug Target: Glycolysis Regulation – Oxidative Stress-responsive microRNA-320

11.10  MicroRNA Molecule May Serve as Biomarker

11.11 What about Circular RNAs?

Chapter 12

12.1 The “Cancer Establishments” Examined by James Watson, Co-discoverer of DNA w/Crick, 4/1953

12.2 Otto Warburg, A Giant of Modern Cellular Biology

12.3 Is the Warburg Effect the Cause or the Effect of Cancer: A 21st Century View?

12.4 Hypothesis – Following on James Watson

12.5 AMPK Is a Negative Regulator of the Warburg Effect and Suppresses Tumor Growth In Vivo

12.6 AKT signaling variable effects

12.7 Rewriting the Mathematics of Tumor Growth; Teams Use Math Models to Sort Drivers from Passengers

12.8 Phosphatidyl-5-Inositol signaling by Pin1

Chapter 13

13.1 Nanotech Therapy for Breast Cancer

13.2 BRCA1 a tumour suppressor in breast and ovarian cancer – functions in transcription, ubiquitination and DNA repair

13.3 Exome sequencing of serous endometrial tumors shows recurrent somatic mutations in chromatin-remodeling and ubiquitin ligase complex genes

13.4 Recurrent somatic mutations in chromatin-remodeling and ubiquitin ligase complex genes in serous endometrial tumors

13.5 Prostate Cancer: Androgen-driven “Pathomechanism” in Early onset Forms of the Disease

13.6 In focus: Melanoma Genetics

13.7 Head and Neck Cancer Studies Suggest Alternative Markers More Prognostically Useful than HPV DNA Testing

13.8 Breast Cancer and Mitochondrial Mutations

13.9  Long noncoding RNA network regulates PTEN transcription

Chapter 14

14.1 HBV and HCV-associated Liver Cancer: Important Insights from the Genome

14.2 Nanotechnology and HIV/AIDS treatment

14.3 IRF-1 Deficiency Skews the Differentiation of Dendritic Cells

14.4 Sepsis, Multi-organ Dysfunction Syndrome, and Septic Shock: A Conundrum of Signaling Pathways Cascading Out of Control

14.5  Five Malaria Genomes Sequenced

14.6 Rheumatoid Arthritis Risk

14.7 Approach to Controlling Pathogenic Inflammation in Arthritis

14.8 RNA Virus Genome as Bacterial Chromosome

14.9 Cloning the Vaccinia Virus Genome as a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome

Chapter 15

15.1 Personalized Cardiovascular Genetic Medicine at Partners HealthCare and Harvard Medical School

15.2 Congestive Heart Failure & Personalized Medicine: Two-gene Test predicts response to Beta Blocker Bucindolol

15.3 DDAH Says NO to ADMA(1); The DDAH/ADMA/NOS Pathway(2)

15.4 Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor (PPAR-gamma) Receptors Activation: PPARγ Transrepression for Angiogenesis in Cardiovascular Disease and PPARγ Transactivation for Treatment of Diabetes

15.5 BARI 2D Trial Outcomes

15.6 Gene Therapy Into Healthy Heart Muscle: Reprogramming Scar Tissue In Damaged Hearts

15.7 Obstructive coronary artery disease diagnosed by RNA levels of 23 genes – CardioDx, a Pioneer in the Field of Cardiovascular Genomic  Diagnostics

15.8 Ca2+ signaling: transcriptional control

15.9 Lp(a) Gene Variant Association

15.9.1 Two Mutations, in the PCSK9 Gene: Eliminates a Protein involved in Controlling LDL Cholesterol

15.9.2. Genomics & Genetics of Cardiovascular Disease Diagnoses: A Literature Survey of AHA’s Circulation Cardiovascular Genetics, 3/2010 – 3/2013

15.9.3 Synthetic Biology: On Advanced Genome Interpretation for Gene Variants and Pathways: What is the Genetic Base of Atherosclerosis and Loss of Arterial Elasticity with Aging

15.9.4 The Implications of a Newly Discovered CYP2J2 Gene Polymorphism Associated with Coronary Vascular Disease in the Uygur Chinese Population

15.9.5  Gene, Meis1, Regulates the Heart’s Ability to Regenerate after Injuries.

15.10 Genetics of Conduction Disease: Atrioventricular (AV) Conduction Disease (block): Gene Mutations – Transcription, Excitability, and Energy Homeostasis

15.11 How Might Sleep Apnea Lead to Serious Health Concerns like Cardiac and Cancers?

Chapter 16

16.1 Can Resolvins Suppress Acute Lung Injury?

16.2 Lipoxin A4 Regulates Natural Killer Cell in Asthma

16.3 Biological Therapeutics for Asthma

16.4 Genomics of Bronchial Epithelial Dysplasia

16.5 Progression in Bronchial Dysplasia

Chapter 17

17.1 Breakthrough Digestive Disorders Research: Conditions Affecting the Gastrointestinal Tract.

17.2 Liver Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress and Hepatosteatosis

17.3 Biomarkers-identified-for-recurrence-in-hbv-related-hcc-patients-post-surgery

17.4  Usp9x: Promising Therapeutic Target for Pancreatic Cancer

17.5 Battle of Steve Jobs and Ralph Steinman with Pancreatic cancer: How We Lost

Chapter 18

18.1 Ubiquitin Pathway Involved in Neurodegenerative Disease

18.2 Genomic Promise for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Dementias, Autism Spectrum, Schizophrenia, and Serious Depression

18.3 Neuroprotective Therapies: Pharmacogenomics vs Psychotropic Drugs and Cholinesterase Inhibitors

18.4 Ustekinumab New Drug Therapy for Cognitive Decline Resulting from Neuroinflammatory Cytokine Signaling and Alzheimer’s Disease

18.5 Cell Transplantation in Brain Repair

18.6 Alzheimer’s Disease Conundrum – Are We Near the End of the Puzzle?

Chapter 19

19.1 Genetics and Male Endocrinology

19.2 Genomic Endocrinology and its Future

19.3 Commentary on Dr. Baker’s post “Junk DNA Codes for Valuable miRNAs: Non-coding DNA Controls Diabetes”

19.4 Therapeutic Targets for Diabetes and Related Metabolic Disorders

19.5 Secondary Hypertension caused by Aldosterone-producing Adenomas caused by Somatic Mutations in ATP1A1 and ATP2B3 (adrenal cortical; medullary or Organ of Zuckerkandl is pheochromocytoma)

19.6 Personal Recombination Map from Individual’s Sperm Cell and its Importance

19.7 Gene Trap Mutagenesis in Reproductive Research

19.8 Pregnancy with a Leptin-Receptor Mutation

19.9 Whole-genome Sequencing in Probing the Meiotic Recombination and Aneuploidy of Single Sperm Cells

19.10 Reproductive Genetic Testing

Chapter 20

20.1 Genomics & Ethics: DNA Fragments are Products of Nature or Patentable Genes?

20.2 Understanding the Role of Personalized Medicine

20.3 Attitudes of Patients about Personalized Medicine

20.4  Genome Sequencing of the Healthy

20.5   Genomics in Medicine – Tomorrow’s Promise

20.6  The Promise of Personalized Medicine

20.7 Ethical Concerns in Personalized Medicine: BRCA1/2 Testing in Minors and Communication of Breast Cancer Risk

 20.8 Genomic Liberty of Ownership, Genome Medicine and Patenting the Human Genome

Chapter 21

Recent Advances in Gene Editing Technology Adds New Therapeutic Potential for the Genomic Era:  Medical Interpretation of the Genomics Frontier – CRISPR – Cas9

Introduction

21.1 Introducing CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing Technology – Works by Jennifer A. Doudna

21.1.1 Ribozymes and RNA Machines – Work of Jennifer A. Doudna

21.1.2 Evaluate your Cas9 gene editing vectors: CRISPR/Cas Mediated Genome Engineering – Is your CRISPR gRNA optimized for your cell lines?

21.1.3 2:15 – 2:45, 6/13/2014, Jennifer Doudna “The biology of CRISPRs: from genome defense to genetic engineering”

21.1.4  Prediction of the Winner RNA Technology, the FRONTIER of SCIENCE on RNA Biology, Cancer and Therapeutics  & The Start Up Landscape in BostonGene Editing – New Technology The Missing link for Gene Therapy?

21.2 CRISPR in Other Labs

21.2.1 CRISPR @MIT – Genome Surgery

21.2.2 The CRISPR-Cas9 System: A Powerful Tool for Genome Engineering and Regulation

Yongmin Yan and Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer, Houston, USADaoyan Wei*

21.2.3 New Frontiers in Gene Editing: Transitioning From the Lab to the Clinic, February 19-20, 2015 | The InterContinental San Francisco | San Francisco, CA

21.2.4 Gene Therapy and the Genetic Study of Disease: @Berkeley and @UCSF – New DNA-editing technology spawns bold UC initiative as Crispr Goes Global

21.2.5 CRISPR & MAGE @ George Church’s Lab @ Harvard

21.3 Patents Awarded and Pending for CRISPR

21.3.1 Litigation on the Way: Broad Institute Gets Patent on Revolutionary Gene-Editing Method

21.3.2 The Patents for CRISPR, the DNA editing technology as the Biggest Biotech Discovery of the Century

2.4 CRISPR/Cas9 Applications

21.4.1  Inactivation of the human papillomavirus E6 or E7 gene in cervical carcinoma cells using a bacterial CRISPR/Cas 

21.4.2 CRISPR: Applications for Autoimmune Diseases @UCSF

21.4.3 In vivo validated mRNAs

21.4.6 Level of Comfort with Making Changes to the DNA of an Organism

21.4.7 Who will be the the First to IPO: Novartis bought in to Intellia (UC, Berkeley) as well as Caribou (UC, Berkeley) vs Editas (MIT)??

21.4.8 CRISPR/Cas9 Finds Its Way As an Important Tool For Drug Discovery & Development

Summary

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New York Times Articles on Cancer Immunotherapy and Cancer Treatment Options

Curators: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN, Stephen J Williams, PhD and Tilda Barliya, PhD

The following articles, 

Here are some ways cancer can thwart the new immunotherapy drugs

Laurie McGinley July 13, 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/07/13/here-are-some-ways-cancer-can-thwart-the-new-immunotherapy-drugs/

and

The list of cancers that can be treated by immunotherapy keeps growing

By Laurie McGinley April 19

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/04/19/breakthrough-cancer-therapy-shows-growing-promise/?tid=a_inl

were brought to my attention by Tilda Barliya, PhD, on our R&D Team, DrugDiscovery @LPBI Group, it stimulated the following curation in several Parts:

This article has three parts:

  • Part One: LPBI Group: A Key Opinion Leader (KOL) in Cancer and Genomics
  • Part Two: History of Cancer Immunotherapy
  • Part Three: New York Times Articles on Cancer Immunotherapy and Cancer Treatment Options

 

Part One:

LPBI Group: A Key Opinion Leader (KOL) in Cancer and Genomics

 

Immune System Stimulants: Articles of Note @pharmaceuticalintelligence.com

Immune-Oncology Molecules In Development & Articles on Topic in @pharmaceuticalintelligence.com

Curators: Stephen J Williams, PhD and Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/01/11/articles-on-immune-oncology-molecules-in-development-pharmaceuticalintelligence-com/

Cancer Biology & Genomics for Disease Diagnosis, on Amazon since 8/11/2015

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013RVYR2K

Genomics Orientations for Personalized Medicine, on Amazon since 11/23/2015

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018DHBUO6

Genomics Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS & BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/biomed-e-books/genomics-orientations-for-personalized-medicine/volume-two-genomics-methodologies-ngs-bioinformatics-simulations-and-the-genome-ontology/

Cancer Volume Two: Cancer Therapies: Metabolic, Genomics, Interventional, Immunotherapy and Nanotechnology in Therapy Delivery

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/biomed-e-books/series-c-e-books-on-cancer-oncology/volume-2-immunotherapy-in-oncology/

Part Two:

History of Cancer Immunotherapy

Pioneers of Cancer Cell Therapy:  Turbocharging the Immune System to Battle Cancer Cells — Success in Hematological Cancers vs. Solid Tumors

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/08/19/pioneers-of-cancer-cell-therapy-turbocharging-the-immune-system-to-battle-cancer-cells-success-in-hematological-cancers-vs-solid-tumors/

In 1987, researchers identified cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4, or CTLA-4. Allison found that CTLA-4 prevents T cells from attacking tumor cells. He wondered whether blocking CTLA-4 would allow the immune system to make those attacks. In 1996, Allison showed that antibodies against CTLA-4 allowed the immune system to destroy tumors in mice.[2] In 1999, biotech firm Medarex acquired rights to the antibody. In 2010, Medarex acquirer Bristol-Myers Squibb reported that patients with metastatic melanoma lived an average of 10 months on the antibody, versus 6 months without it. It was the first time any treatment had extended life in advanced melanoma in a randomized trial.[2]

In the early 1990s, a biologist discovered a molecule expressed in dying T cells, which he called programmed death 1, or PD-1 and which he recognized as another disabler of T cells. An antibody that targeted PD-1 was developed and by 2008 produced remission in multiple subjects across multiple cancer types. In 2013, clinicians reported that across 300 patients tumors shrunk by about half or more in 31% of those with melanoma, 29% with kidney cancer and 17% with lung cancer.[2]

In 1997 rituximab, the first antibody treatment for cancer, was approved by the FDA for treatment of follicular lymphoma. Since this approval, 11 other antibodies have been approved for cancer; alemtuzumab (2001), ofatumumab (2009) and ipilimumab (2011).

In 2003 cytokines such as interleukin were administered.[3] The adverse effects of intravenously administered cytokines[4] led to the extraction, in vitro expansion against a tumour antigen and reinjection of the cells[5] with appropriate stimulatory cytokines.

However, with both anti–CTLA-4 and anti–PD-1, some tumors continued to grow before vanishing months later. Some patients kept responding after the antibody had been discontinued. Some patients, developed side effects including inflammation of the colon or of the pituitary gland.[2]

The first cell-based immunotherapy cancer vaccine, sipuleucel-T, was approved in 2010 for the treatment of prostate cancer.[6][7]

After success harvesting T cells from tumors, expanding them in the lab and reinfusing them into patients reduced tumors, in 2010, Steven Rosenberg announced chimeric antigen receptor therapy, or CAR therapy. This technique is a personalized treatment that involves genetically modifying each patient’s T cells to target tumor cells. It produced complete remission in a majority of leukemia patients, although some later relapsed.[2]

By mid 2016 the FDA had approved one PD-L1 inhibitor (atezolizumab) and two PD-1 inhibitors (nivolumab and pembrolizumab).

SOURCE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunotherapy

Part Three:

New York Times Articles on Cancer Immunotherapy and Cancer Treatment Options

 

  1. What Is Immunotherapy? The Basics on These Cancer Treatments

    Some of the most promising advances in cancer research in recent years involve treatments known as immunotherapy. These advances are spurring billions of dollars in investment by drug companies, and are leading to hundreds of

  2. Immunotherapy Offers Hope to a Cancer Patient, but No Certainty

    declared him in remission. It was a result that put him at the vanguard of a new generation of cancer treatment called immunotherapy that casts into sharp relief the harshness of how we have long treated cancer and the less grueling

  3. Have You Received Immunotherapy Treatment for Cancer?

    The New York Times would like to hear from doctors and patients who have experience giving or receiving immunotherapy treatment for cancer.

  4. Immunotherapy Drug Fails Lung Cancer Trial

    The hot new field of immunotherapy got a shock on Friday when a best-selling new drug failed as an initial treatment for lung cancer in a clinical trial. Bristol-Myers Squibb said Friday that the drug, Opdivo, had not slowed the

  5. F.D.A. Approves Immunotherapy Drug for Treatment of Bladder Cancer

    The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a newimmunotherapy drug from Roche to treat bladder cancer, a form of cancer for which there have been no significant new medicines in years. The drug, called Tecentriq, is the

  6. Sean Parker, a Facebook and Napster Pioneer, to Start CancerImmunotherapy Effort

    media as the early president of Facebook. Now he wants to pioneer in a field that is already jumping with activity: cancer immunotherapy. Mr. Parker is announcing Wednesday that he is donating $250 million to a new effort that will

  7. Harnessing the Immune System to Fight Cancer

    Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, recommended an experimental treatment: immunotherapy. Rather than attacking the cancer directly, as chemo does, immunotherapy tries to rally the patient’s own immune

  8. Cancer-Drug Ads vs. Cancer-Drug Reality

    She also took part in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins for Opdivo, an immunotherapy drug made by the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb. Briefly stated, immunotherapy is a recently developed, highly

  9. Sean Parker on Cancer Research

    Sean Parker discusses his support of immunotherapy research.

  10. Paid Notice: Deaths SPRAYREGEN, NICHOLAS (NICK)

    family and many friends. Contributions in his memory may be made to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Melanoma and Immunotherapy Research under Dr. Jedd Wolchok. 1/3

    11. Paid Notice: Deaths SPRAYREGEN, NICHOLAS (NICK)

    St. and Amsterdam Ave. Contributions in his memory may be made to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Melanoma and Immunotherapy Research under Dr. Jedd Wolchok. 1/3

    12. Setting the Body’s ‘Serial Killers’ Loose on Cancer

    Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. This radical, science-fictionlike therapy differs sharply from the more established type of immunotherapy, developed by other researchers. Those off-the-shelf drugs, known as checkpoint inhibitors,

SOURCE

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection&region=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage#/immunotherapy/since1851/allresults/2/

 Additional Readings:

More women with cancer in one breast are having double mastectomies

Medicare considers overhaul of doctors’ payments for cancer drugs

Paul Allen announces $100 million gift to expand “frontiers of bioscience”

Life sciences a priority for Sean Parker’s new $600 million foundation

Cornell study finds some people may be genetically programmed to be vegetarians

Mom’s and — surprise! — dad’s pre-pregnancy caffeine intake may affect miscarriage risk, NIH study warns

Read Full Post »

CancerBase.org – The Global HUB for Diagnoses, Genomes, Pathology Images: A Real-time Diagnosis and Therapy Mapping Service for Cancer Patients – Anonymized Medical Records accessible to anyone on Earth, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

CancerBase.org – The Global HUB for Diagnoses, Genomes, Pathology Images: A Real-time Diagnosis and Therapy Mapping Service for Cancer Patients – Anonymized Medical Records accessible to anyone on Earth

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

UPDATED on 10/29/2019

Pan-cancer computational histopathology reveals mutations, tumor composition and prognosis

Yu Fu1, Alexander W Jung1, Ramon Viñas Torne1, Santiago Gonzalez1,2, Harald Vöhringer1, Mercedes Jimenez-Linan3, Luiza Moore3,4, and Moritz Gerstung#1,5 # to whom correspondence should be addressed 1) European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, UK. 2) Current affiliation: Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Parc Científic de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. 3) Department of Pathology, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK. 4) Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK 5) European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Genome Biology Unit, Heidelberg, Germany.

Correspondence:

Dr Moritz Gerstung European Molecular Biology Laboratory European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) Hinxton, CB10 1SA UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 494636 E-mail: moritz.gerstung@ebi.ac.uk

Abstract

Pan-cancer computational histopathology reveals mutations, tumor composition and prognosis

Here we use deep transfer learning to quantify histopathological patterns across 17,396 H&E stained histopathology image slides from 28 cancer types and correlate these with underlying genomic and transcriptomic data. Pan-cancer computational histopathology (PC-CHiP) classifies the tissue origin across organ sites and provides highly accurate, spatially resolved tumor and normal distinction within a given slide. The learned computational histopathological features correlate with a large range of recurrent genetic aberrations, including whole genome duplications (WGDs), arm-level copy number gains and losses, focal amplifications and deletions as well as driver gene mutations within a range of cancer types. WGDs can be predicted in 25/27 cancer types (mean AUC=0.79) including those that were not part of model training. Similarly, we observe associations with 25% of mRNA transcript levels, which enables to learn and localise histopathological patterns of molecularly defined cell types on each slide. Lastly, we find that computational histopathology provides prognostic information augmenting histopathological subtyping and grading in the majority of cancers assessed, which pinpoints prognostically relevant areas such as necrosis or infiltrating lymphocytes on each tumour section. Taken together, these findings highlight the large potential of PC-CHiP to discover new molecular and prognostic associations, which can augment diagnostic workflows and lay out a rationale for integrating molecular and histopathological data.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/813543v1

 

Key points

● Pan-cancer computational histopathology analysis with deep learning extracts histopathological patterns and accurately discriminates 28 cancer and 14 normal tissue types

● Computational histopathology predicts whole genome duplications, focal amplifications and deletions, as well as driver gene mutations

● Wide-spread correlations with gene expression indicative of immune infiltration and proliferation

● Prognostic information augments conventional grading and histopathology subtyping in the majority of cancers

 

Discussion

Here we presented PC-CHiP, a pan-cancer transfer learning approach to extract computational histopathological features across 42 cancer and normal tissue types and their genomic, molecular and prognostic associations. Histopathological features, originally derived to classify different tissues, contained rich histologic and morphological signals predictive of a range of genomic and transcriptomic changes as well as survival. This shows that computer vision not only has the capacity to highly accurately reproduce predefined tissue labels, but also that this quantifies diverse histological patterns, which are predictive of a broad range of genomic and molecular traits, which were not part of the original training task. As the predictions are exclusively based on standard H&E-stained tissue sections, our analysis highlights the high potential of computational histopathology to digitally augment existing histopathological workflows. The strongest genomic associations were found for whole genome duplications, which can in part be explained by nuclear enlargement and increased nuclear intensities, but seemingly also stems from tumour grade and other histomorphological patterns contained in the high-dimensional computational histopathological features. Further, we observed associations with a range of chromosomal gains and losses, focal deletions and amplifications as well as driver gene mutations across a number of cancer types. These data demonstrate that genomic alterations change the morphology of cancer cells, as in the case of WGD, but possibly also that certain aberrations preferentially occur in distinct cell types, reflected by the tumor histology. Whatever is the cause or consequence in this equation, these associations lay out a route towards genomically defined histopathology subtypes, which will enhance and refine conventional assessment. Further, a broad range of transcriptomic correlations was observed reflecting both immune cell infiltration and cell proliferation that leads to higher tumor densities. These examples illustrated the remarkable property that machine learning does not only establish novel molecular associations from pre-computed histopathological feature sets but also allows the localisation of these traits within a larger image. While this exemplifies the power of a large scale data analysis to detect and localise recurrent patterns, it is probably not superior to spatially annotated training data. Yet such data can, by definition, only be generated for associations which are known beforehand. This appears straightforward, albeit laborious, for existing histopathology classifications, but more challenging for molecular readouts. Yet novel spatial transcriptomic44,45 and sequencing technologies46 bring within reach spatially matched molecular and histopathological data, which would serve as a gold standard in combining imaging and molecular patterns. Across cancer types, computational histopathological features showed a good level of prognostic relevance, substantially improving prognostic accuracy over conventional grading and histopathological subtyping in the majority of cancers. It is this very remarkable that such predictive It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. bioRxiv preprint first posted online Oct. 25, 2019; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/813543. The copyright holder for this preprint signals can be learned in a fully automated fashion. Still, at least at the current resolution, the improvement over a full molecular and clinical workup was relatively small. This might be a consequence of the far-ranging relations between histopathology and molecular phenotypes described here, implying that histopathology is a reflection of the underlying molecular alterations rather than an independent trait. Yet it probably also highlights the challenges of unambiguously quantifying histopathological signals in – and combining signals from – individual areas, which requires very large training datasets for each tumour entity. From a methodological point of view, the prediction of molecular traits can clearly be improved. In this analysis, we adopted – for the reason of simplicity and to avoid overfitting – a transfer learning approach in which an existing deep convolutional neural network, developed for classification of everyday objects, was fine tuned to predict cancer and normal tissue types. The implicit imaging feature representation was then used to predict molecular traits and outcomes. Instead of employing this two-step procedure, which risks missing patterns irrelevant for the initial classification task, one might directly employ either training on the molecular trait of interest, or ideally multi-objective learning. Further improvement may also be related to the choice of the CNN architecture. Everyday images have no defined scale due to a variable z-dimension; therefore, the algorithms need to be able to detect the same object at different sizes. This clearly is not the case for histopathology slides, in which one pixel corresponds to a defined physical size at a given magnification. Therefore, possibly less complex CNN architectures may be sufficient for quantitative histopathology analyses, and also show better generalisation. Here, in our proof-of-concept analysis, we observed a considerable dependence of the feature representation on known and possibly unknown properties of our training data, including the image compression algorithm and its parameters. Some of these issues could be overcome by amending and retraining the network to isolate the effect of confounding factors and additional data augmentation. Still, given the flexibility of deep learning algorithms and the associated risk of overfitting, one should generally be cautious about the generalisation properties and critically assess whether a new image is appropriately represented. Looking forward, our analyses revealed the enormous potential of using computer vision alongside molecular profiling. While the eye of a trained human may still constitute the gold standard for recognising clinically relevant histopathological patterns, computers have the capacity to augment this process by sifting through millions of images to retrieve similar patterns and establish associations with known and novel traits. As our analysis showed this helps to detect histopathology patterns associated with a range of genomic alterations, transcriptional signatures and prognosis – and highlight areas indicative of these traits on each given slide. It is therefore not too difficult to foresee how this may be utilised in a computationally augmented histopathology workflow enabling more precise and faster diagnosis and prognosis. Further, the ability to quantify a rich set of histopathology patterns lays out a path to define integrated histopathology and molecular cancer subtypes, as recently demonstrated for colorectal cancers47 .

Lastly, our analyses provide It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

bioRxiv preprint first posted online Oct. 25, 2019; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/813543.

The copyright holder for this preprint proof-of-concept for these principles and we expect them to be greatly refined in the future based on larger training corpora and further algorithmic refinements.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/10/25/813543.full.pdf

 

July 27, 2016
world map illustration
Illustration by Tricia Seibold and iStock/liuzishan

During his 2016 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called on Vice President Joe Biden – who had months earlier lost his son Beau to brain cancer – to head a “moonshot” to significantly accelerate research into the disease. The president said he wanted to harness the spirit of American innovation that took us from zero to landing a man on the moon in a decade to similarly find new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer.

One of those intrigued by that call to action was Stanford’s Jan Liphardt, an associate professor of bioengineering who specializes in biophysics, the tumor microenvironment and data analysis. Stanford Engineering talked to Liphardt about how he came to be involved with the moonshot and his approach to using data and the voice of patients to better understand cancer and how it can be treated, and how sharing information can better inform the course of cancer research.

How did you get involved in the National Cancer Moonshot?

In March, after the president’s charge, the vice president challenged scientists, doctors, industry and patients to give their best ideas to the moonshot. The White House also reached out to a few outsiders, myself included. The White House instructions were unusual: “Do something big and different. There is no money and you have 87 days. Go.”

I like a challenge, and this was a chance to serve, even in the face of administrative hurdles. So I looked for advice, teammates and support. Russ Altman, a colleague at Stanford, suggested it was time to give patients a way to volunteer their own health data in order to help find cures. I collaborated with Peter Kuhn, a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, who’s known for carefully listening to cancer patients, advocates and their supporters. In short order we had links with advocates like AnneMarie Ciccarella, Sonja Durham, Lori Marx-Rubiner, Jack Whelan and Jack Park. That’s how we got to CancerBase.org.

What’s the idea the team came up with?

We thought for about a week: What would matter to the patients that Stanford and other research institutions serve? What would scale? Well, we’re not going to run a clinical trial, go near protected health information, invent a new drug or write a research proposal. There’s no time for that. Whatever it was, it had to be useful, scalable, legal and different. That pointed to data, the web, patients and decisions.

One thing jumped out: Right now, there’s significant friction in medical data sharing. People all over the world can already effortlessly share other kinds of information – pictures, movies, ideas, stories, tweets. Increasingly, they are using the same tools to share personal medical information. It’s remarkable what cancer patients already share: diagnoses, genomes, pathology images. But that information is not yet widely used to understand where they are with their diseases.

Ideally, everyone, including scientists and doctors, would have as much information as possible at their fingertips. Many patients think when they give data for research, magically scientists all over the world can dig into this information, find patterns and help. The practical reality is that it’s nearly impossible for any one scientist to access the amounts of data they would like.

So that’s the simple idea: A global map and give patients the tools they need to share their data – if they want to. They can donate information for the greater good. In return, we make a simple promise: When you post data, we’ll anonymize them and make them available to anyone on Earth in one second. We plan to display this information like real-time traffic data. HIPAA doesn’t apply to this direct data-sharing. The patients can give us whatever information they want, and they can tell us what they want us to do with it. We’re a conduit. Their data belong to them, not to us.

How does it work?

Today we ask just five basic questions. Over time we will add more. You join, give some information, and we’ll put you on a global map. Right now, some of the things we don’t know about cancer are incredibly simple: Where is everyone on Earth with cancer? How old are they? What is their diagnosis? Did their cancers metastasize? Global, instantaneous data sharing is the story.

In a second phase, we are going to see if we can plot all the information just like Waze does for traffic. Our role is to synthesize the information and plot it in ways that ordinary people can understand. Think of it this way – patients want to be able to chart their treatment path. Who went straight, who went left? People just getting on the highway are curious about what people did who came before them, and what happened to those people. Did they arrive at the destination easily and promptly? We’re a real-time diagnosis and therapy mapping service for cancer.

You say that giving patients a way to share their health data is important to help finding cures. Why?

Let me give you a specific example. At Stanford, I’m part of a team of cancer biologists and clinicians funded by the Stanford Cancer Institute to think about the next generation of screening for breast cancer in the U.S. Every year, the U.S. uses mammography to screen more than 40 million women for breast cancer. In this project, it quickly became clear that there is currently no central, easy-to-access repository of mammograms for research use.

That’s a major lost opportunity – our nation spends billions on screening, but we don’t store, share and analyze this information in a scalable and simple manner. In the traditional approach, our team would spend several hundred thousand dollars, and about three years, to assemble perhaps 1,000 mammograms. We would then use this tiny dataset to try to find something interesting, but since the dataset is so small, we would be blind to rare features of breast cancer and its predictors. It clearly makes a lot more sense to compare and explore 100 million images.

This sounds completely impossible until you realize that Instagram users upload 58 million images every day. Once you start to think about supposedly intractable research problems from a web or social networking perspective, new possibilities open. Imagine, for example, if there were a simple way for every single woman on Earth to upload and share her de-identified mammogram? Or more generally, imagine a world in which patients have the tools to globally share de-identified health data, if they want to. That’s exactly the idea behind CancerBase – let’s just give people those tools and see what happens.

How much data and how many people are needed to make this viable?

We think we are going to need several tens-of-thousands of members. There are approximately 50 million people on Earth with a cancer diagnosed in the last five years, and 200 million more people have an immediate family member with cancer. Almost 2 billion people are active on Twitter and Facebook – a quarter of the world’s population. If just a few percent of those people sign up, we could do something no one on Earth has done before.

Are there hopes to create a “developer community,” people who find ways to use your data that you didn’t even think about or have the time to work on?

Definitely. As much as we think we can predict what these data are useful for, we don’t really know. By making the anonymized data available to everyone within one second, they might start to do things that we never dreamed of. The more eyes look at these data, the better off everyone will be. The dream is to have cancer-relevant medical data flow unimpeded around the world in seconds, so that everyone, wherever they are, can see and use this information.

SOURCE

https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/how-data-can-help-us-understand-cancer-and-its-treatment

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Genetic Testing incorporation in Medical Practice: Online Program aimed at Educating Physicians and other Health Care Professionals – Initiative by American Medical Association (AMA), in partnership with Scripps Translational Science Institute (Scripps) and The Jackson Laboratory (JAX)

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

JAX, AMA, Scripps Launch Genomic Education for Physicians

By Clinical Informatics News Staff

July 14, 2016 | The American Medical Association (AMA), in partnership with Scripps Translational Science Institute (Scripps) and The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), have announced a new online program aimed at educating physicians and other health care professionals on the benefits and limitations of genetic testing and when it is appropriate to incorporate it into their practices.

“For the very first time we’re moving into translational education—that is, we’re doing continuing medical education and doing it quite well,” Edison Liu, President and CEO of the Jackson Laboratory, told Clinical Informatics News. “What we have found is that there is an ever-widening gulf that is widening on a year by year basis between the practitioners of the art of medical medicine and the academic practitioners who use and experiment in genomics.”

The first educational module of the 12-part series, “Precision Medicine for Your Practice”, launched last week and focuses on expanded carrier screening. The module is designed to help physicians who provide prenatal care to understand the benefits and limitations of using expanded genetic screening panels to estimate whether expectant and prospective parents risk passing on to their children dozens of conditions.

Eleven additional modules, all carrying CME credit, will be released over the next year, and will focus on other applications of genetic testing, including targeted therapy in oncology, genomic sequencing, cardiogenomics, neurogenomics, pharmacogenomics, and ethics in precision medicine. In each module, clinicians will have the opportunity to practice applying genetic information to patient cases, assess the utility of genetic information, and learn about benefits and limitations of new genetic tests.

Liu said physicians will have the opportunity to combine online and experiential instruction. “Our fundamental belief… is that the most impactful education is combined, blended online and experiential. But it has to be blended in a way that accommodates the schedule of a busy physician,” he said.

JAX and its partners have been experimenting with online introductions to vocabulary and principles, and then day-long practicums at the JAX facility in Maine, “usually a Friday afternoon and Saturday morning,” Liu explained. JAX is also developing post-course communities, to connect physicians to resources, experts, and each other.

“Genomics is racing away in complexity; the technologies are just beyond belief,” Liu said. “We have found there’s really a growing misunderstanding by very smart practicing physicians on what genomics can or can’t deliver. What we are wanting to do is close that gap.”

SOURCE

http://www.clinicalinformaticsnews.com/2016/07/14/jax-ama-scripps-launch-genomic-education-physicians.aspx

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