RPT-Laptop ban, protectionism hang over booming air travel industry
CANCUN, Mexico, June 2 Air travel is heading for a bumper year, but global airline leaders meeting in Mexico are concerned about the impact of an escalating row over laptop bans and rising protectionism.
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BRIEF-Myriad Genetics announces results from a large 2000 patient clinical utility study of its myRisk Hereditary ... - Reuters
Jonathan Drachman, Seattle Genetics CMO
Late last year investigators for Bristol-Myers Squibb $BMY and Seattle Genetics $SGEN turned up at ASH with some stellar pilot data from a Phase I/II combination study matching Opdivo with Adcetris. In addition to a 90% objective response rate in a small group of patients, the team also tracked a 62% complete response rate among treatment-resistant patients for classical Hodgkin lymphoma.
Now the partners want to see if they can get similar results in a pivotal Phase III matchup.
The two companies headed to ASCO this morning with an announcement that theyll be pushing into the Phase III soon, which will compare the combo against Adcetris as a monotherapy.
The move into Phase III comes as the first wave of hundreds of Phase I/II exploratory studies have begun to deliver a trove of data about the potential of these new combos. This week EP Vantage highlighted 765 combination studies in the industry pipeline as cancer combos become one of the hottest tickets in drug R&D. And a new slate of Phase III studies including a recently announced slate of pivotal tie-ups for Incyte point to the near-term introduction of new, more effective therapies.
The addition of Adcetris and Opdivo helps illustrate the potential. Opdivo, like 4 other approved PD-(L)1s, dismantles a brake cancer cells have been able to put on an attack by immune cells. Adcetris is a targeted attack. And theres a large second wave of PD-(L)1s coming through the pipeline.
This is just the first of what could potentially prove to be a series of late-stage studies for these two companies, which have also been running through trials on a range of indications focused on relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and CD30-expressing relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphomas. The studies include T-cell lymphomas, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), and other rare subtypes of B-cell malignancies, including mediastinal B-cell lymphoma and mediastinal gray zone lymphoma.
Seattle Genetics CMO Jonathan Drachman said:
We are evaluating Adcetris in novel combinations in order to identify optimal treatment regimens for patients with CD30-expressing lymphomas. We are pleased to expand this collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb to evaluate Adcetris compared to the combination of Adcetris and Opdivo in a pivotal phase 3 study in relapsed Hodgkin lymphoma.
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Bristol-Myers and Seattle Genetics move a promising flagship combo into PhIII - Endpoints News
This story starts with Rollins A. Emerson, born in Upstate New York in 1873, who moved as a child to Nebraska, where his family homesteaded near Kearney. He obtained a bachelor of science degree from the Agricultural College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1895, with the eminent botanist Charles E. Bessey as his mentor.
Emerson worked in Washington, D.C., for several years as a horticultural editor with the U.S. Department of Agricultures Office of Experiment Stations before returning to Lincoln in 1899 as the horticulturalist with the Nebraska Experiment Station and professor and head of the Horticulture Department, where he began his distinguished career in genetic research, concentrating first on the common bean.
Emerson was one of the first American scientists to embrace the ideas of Gregor Mendel, also referred to as Mendelian genetics. These principles state that certain genetic traits are inherited or passed on to progeny from their parents, and were derived after carefully conducted experiments with garden peas.
After publishing his results in an obscure Austrian journal in 1866, Mendels work went unnoticed until 1900, when his publication was rediscovered independently by four scientists: Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries; German botanist and geneticist Carl Correns; Austrian agronomy graduate student Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg; and American wheat breeder and economist William Jasper Spillman.
Emerson was awarded a Ph.D. in 1912 and became interested in corn research, moving to Cornell University in 1914 to head the Department of Plant Breeding. It was here over the next three decades that he achieved world renown as a pioneer corn geneticist. He eventually built a corn breeding and genetics dynasty, mentoring many brilliant young scientists who later became accomplished geneticists (as both researchers and teachers) in their own rights.
It is also very possible that Emerson might have become even more universally famous and recognized for his work had he been better-versed in the German language. Wayne F. Keim (another University of Nebraska and Cornell Plant Breeding alumnus) related a story to me that was told to him personally by Emerson.
Keim
Wayne Keim is the son of F. D. Keim, the namesake for Keim Hall, the building on East Campus now housing the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture. Although Emerson had retired before the elder Keim started graduate school at Cornell in 1947, he did meet and visit with Emerson on several occasions. On one of those encounters, Emerson informed Keim that he had seen Mendels paper on the landmark pea experiments in the late 1890s while still at Nebraska, but due to his lack of mastery of German, he was unable to fully understand the significance of Mendels paper published 35 years earlier.
Based on this conversation with Emerson, Keim then pondered: How close was Rollins A. Emerson and the University of Nebraska College of Agriculture to being the first discoverers rather than the three Europeans?
Keim grew up on a farm near Hardy, Nebraska. After graduating from Davenport High School, he attended Peru State Normal (now known as Peru State College), a school designed to train elementary- and secondary-school teachers.
He taught for several years in high schools in southeastern Nebraska before entering the College of Agriculture at the University of Nebraska, where he earned the Bachelor of Science degree in 1914. He completed a Master of Science degree in 1918, while also working as a full-time assistant in agronomy.
During his undergraduate years Keim encountered Emerson, prior to Emersons move to Cornell. Emerson stimulated his lifelong interest in genetics, and encouraged Keim to pursue a Ph.D. at Cornell University.
Because Keim was now a full-time member of the faculty and did not want to give up his position in Lincoln, he made use of annual leaves and sabbaticals to complete the Ph.D. gradually, finishing it in 1927. All of his research and writing of the dissertation was done in Lincoln.
By all accounts, Keim was an outstanding teacher, always eager to identify outstanding students and assign them special tasks assisting him like grading papers and tests, or conducting research projects and greenhouse work, in the effort to spur their interest in genetics and agriculture at the academic level. His recruiting methods were often biased toward Cornell and their plant breeding program.
Keims influence was so strong that he continued advising many of his protgs throughout their careers wherever they ended up. Many went on to play key roles nationally as teachers, researchers, administrators, and in industry positions.
Two of Keims more prominent undergraduate mentees were George F. Sprague and George W. Beadle. Both additionally attended and completed Ph.D.s with Emerson at Cornell in the plant breeding department, Sprague in 1930 and Beadle in 1931.
Sprague and Beadle
Sprague went on to a long, distinguished and internationally recognized career as a corn breeder and geneticist with both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Iowa State University. Many students he trained afterward listed him as their primary influence and mentor. He was additionally elected into the National Academy of Sciences.
After the Ph.D. and several postdoctoral positions, Beadle went on to a brilliant career as a geneticist on the faculty of three institutions (Harvard, California Institute of Technology, and Stanford) before serving as both Chancellor and President of the University of Chicago.
While at Stanford, he teamed with the biochemist E. L. Tatum investigating biochemical genetics using the bread mold fungus Neurospora crassa as the model organism. In this system, they discovered the role of certain genes in producing enzymes that regulate biochemical pathways in cells, referred to as the one gene-one enzyme theory, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958.
Beadle was additionally honored in 1994 when the University of Nebraskas Center for Biotechnology was named after him (George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials Research).
Srb and Keim
Adrian Srb, son of Frank Keims UNL agricultural faculty colleague Jerome Srb, was inspired to pursue the Ph.D. after completing his bachelors degree at Nebraska. He attended Stanford, working with Beadle in genetics. After completion of his doctorate, he took a job at Cornell in the plant breeding department.
This story comes full circle with F.D. Keims son, Wayne. After completing his fathers course in genetics (and a B.S. in agronomy), he was also encouraged by his father to attend Cornell and work with Srb.
Wayne related that Adrian Srb was the individual responsible for him to seek a career in plant breeding, with an emphasis on teaching genetics to undergraduate students. Keim then spent 45 years at Purdue University and Colorado State University before retiring in 1992. Quite an impressive academic pedigree originally initiated in Nebraska by Rollins A. Emerson.
Your intelligence is partly due to hard work, nutrition, and education. But you can also thank (or blame) your genes for your mental abilities.
Decades of work on twin studies suggest that genes account for roughly half of variations in IQ seen across a population. And a meta-analysis published [recently] in Nature on nearly 80,000 people has identified 40 specific genes that affect intelligence. The one study more than quadrupled the number of genes scientists know of that shape intelligence, bringing the total number to 52.
[However,] there are hundreds of genes that play a role in intelligence [that] are yet to be discovered.
But plenty of people are anxious about scientists heading down that path, and what will happen when they reach the end of itIt presents an uncompromising but disquieting truth: That some people will just never be as intelligent as others, simply because of their genetics.
In an editorial, the authors of the study acknowledge the controversyand say many concerns derive from racist eugenic practices of the past. But the genetics of intelligence is complex and subtleand simply doesnt support prejudiced theories of racial superiority. In fact, they argue, better understanding the genetics underlying intelligence will disprove racist theories of eugenicists.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:A massive new study lays out the map of our genetic intelligence
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Intelligence definitively linked to genetics: Does this open doors to racism? - Genetic Literacy Project
UCLA researchers discovered that individuals with certain brain structures and genetics are at a higher risk of autism and schizophrenia.
The researchers found that certain chromosomal abnormalities can increase individuals risk of schizophrenia and autism. These findings could help explain the biology behind these neuropsychiatric disorders and help researchers understand their causes at a cellular level, said Carrie Bearden, the lead author of the study.
Bearden, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, found that children missing specific sections of genetic material on chromosome 22 are at greater risk for schizophrenia.
Bearden also found that children with 22q gene duplication are at greater risk for autism and learning delays but are at a lower risk for schizophrenia.
The genetic differences also result in different brain structures, and brain anatomy can be related to psychiatric disorders, Bearden said. After running MRI scans of 143 study participants, the researchers found that the children with 22q deletion had a smaller brain surface area but thicker gray matter, while people with 22q duplication had a larger brain surface area and thinner gray matter.
Bearden added that while these genetic brain differences alone do not cause schizophrenia and autism, they will help researchers understand these disorders. She said the research team will continue to study the different brain structures and see how the participants in the study change over time.
The next question is, How does brain anatomy and brain function relate to psychiatric outcomes? These findings provide a snapshot, Bearden said in a statement. (Our follow up studies) are the puzzle pieces that are next on our list to disentangle.
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UCLA researchers link genetics, brain morphology to autism, schizophrenia - Daily Bruin
May 31, 2017 16:05 ET | Source: Myriad Genetics, Inc.
SALT LAKE CITY, May 31, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Myriad Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:MYGN), a leader in molecular diagnostics and personalized medicine, announced today that Mark C. Capone, president and CEO, is scheduled to present at the William Blair Growth Stock Conference at 12:40 p.m. CDT on June 14, 2017, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
The presentation will be available to interested parties through a live audio webcast accessible through a link in the investor information section of Myriads website at http://www.myriad.com.
About Myriad Genetics Myriad Genetics Inc., is a leading personalized medicine company dedicated to being a trusted advisor transforming patient lives worldwide with pioneering molecular diagnostics. Myriad discovers and commercializes molecular diagnostic tests that: determine the risk of developing disease, accurately diagnose disease, assess the risk of disease progression, and guide treatment decisions across six major medical specialties where molecular diagnostics can significantly improve patient care and lower healthcare costs. Myriad is focused on three strategic imperatives: transitioning and expanding its hereditary cancer testing markets, diversifying its product portfolio through the introduction of new products and increasing the revenue contribution from international markets. For more information on how Myriad is making a difference, please visit the Company's website: http://www.myriad.com.
Myriad, the Myriad logo, BART, BRACAnalysis, Colaris, Colaris AP, myPath, myRisk, Myriad myRisk, myRisk Hereditary Cancer, myChoice, myPlan, BRACAnalysis CDx, Tumor BRACAnalysis CDx, myChoice HRD, EndoPredict, Vectra, GeneSight and Prolaris are trademarks or registered trademarks of Myriad Genetics, Inc. or its wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States and foreign countries. MYGN-F, MYGN-G.
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Myriad Genetics to Present at the 2017 William Blair Growth Stock Conference - GlobeNewswire (press release)
Hillsboro native Dr. Nancy J. Cox was honored this spring as the first recipient of the Richard M. Caprioli Research Award. Dr. Cox is currently the director of the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute in Nashville, TN.
The daughter of the late Gene and Helen Cox, she is a 1974 graduate of Hillsboro High School and was selected as the second Hillsboro Education Foundation Distinguished Alumni Award recipient in 2002.
Dr. Cox earned her bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of Notre Dame in 1978 and her doctorate in human genetics from Yale University in 1982.
She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in genetic epidemiology at Washington University and was a research associate in human genetics at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1987, she was hired at the University of Chicago. She was appointed full professor in the departments of medicine and human genetics in 2004 and chief of the section of genetic medicine the following year.
In 2012, she was named a University of Chicago Pritzker Scholar. In 2015, Dr. Cox was hired at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine as the Mary Phillips Edmonds Gray Professor of Genetics, founding director of the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute and director of the Division of Genetic Medicine in the Department of Medicine. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Throughout her career as a quantitative geneticist, Dr. Cox has sought to identify and characterize the genetic component to common human diseases and clinical phenotypes like pharmacogenomics traits (how genes affect drug response).
Her work has advanced methods for analyzing genetic and genomic data from a wide range of complex traits and diseases, including breast cancer, diabetes, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, stuttering and speech and language impairment.
Through the national Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, Dr. Cox also contributed to the development of genome predictors of the expression of genes, and she also has investigated the genetics of cardiometabolic phenotypes such as lipids, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
With colleagues at the University of Michigan, Dr. Cox is generating content for the Accelerating Medicine Partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Food and Drug Administration, biopharmaceutical companies and non-profit organizations. The goal of the partnership is to identify and validate promising biological targets, increase the number of new diagnostics and therapies for patients, and reduce the cost and time it takes to develop them.
Dr. Cox is co-principal investigator of an analytic center within the Centers for Common Disease Genomics, another NIH initiative that is using genome sequencing to explore the genomic contributions to common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke and autism. A major resource for the Cox lab is Vanderbilts massive biobank, BioVU, which contains DNA samples from more than 230,000 individuals that are linked to de-identified electronic health records.
Dr. Cox is the author or co-author of more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles. She is former editor-in-chief of the journal Genetic Epidemiology, and is the current president of the American Society of Human Genetics.
For developing new methods that have aided researchers worldwide in identifying and characterizing of the genetic and genomic underpinnings of diseases and complex traits, Dr. Cox is the first recipient of the inaugural Richard M. Caprioli Research Award.
Dr. Cox and her husband, Dr. Paul Epstein live in Nashville, TN, and have two grown daughters, Bonnie Epstein and Carrie Epstein.
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Hillsboro Native Earns Honors At Vanderbilt - thejournal-news.net
Your intelligence is partly due to hard work, nutrition, and education. But you can also thank (or blame) your genes for your mental abilities.
Decades of work on twin studies suggest that genes account for roughly half of variations in IQ seen across a population. And a meta-analysis published this week in Nature on nearly 80,000 people has identified 40 specific genes that affect intelligence. The one study more than quadrupled the number of genes scientists know of that shape intelligence, bringing the total number to 52.
Theres still a long way to go. The currently known genes are thought to account for just 4.8% of variations in IQ, meaning that there are hundreds of genes that play a role in intelligence and are yet to be discovered.
But plenty of people are anxious about scientists heading down that path, and what will happen when they reach the end of it. Perfectly understanding the genetics behind intelligence could guide practices like designer babies and IQ-based eugenics, raising major ethical questions. It also presents an uncompromising but disquieting truth: That some people will just never be as intelligent as others, simply because of their genetics.
Ive written before about how the science of behavioral genetics makes many people uncomfortable, and several researchers told me theyve met people who refuse to accept that genes do have a powerful effect on educational success.
But these genetic scientists insist that concerns about their field are misplaced, and that their research has many potential benefits. In an editorial also published in Nature shortly following the meta-analysis, the authors of the study acknowledge the controversyWhy are psychology undergraduates denied tuition in what is surely one of the most central and influential human traits? they writeand say many concerns derive from racist eugenic practices of the past. But the genetics of intelligence is complex and subtle, as Natures editorial says, and simply doesnt support prejudiced theories of racial superiority. In fact, they argue, better understanding the genetics underlying intelligence will disprove racist theories of eugenicists.
Meanwhile concerns of biological determinismthat understanding the genetics of intelligence could lead to a world where some people are given more education or opportunities than others based on their innate abilitiesare unfounded, as genes certainly arent the only factor that influences intelligence. Education, nutrition, and other childhood circumstances are just as crucial to variations in IQ. In other words, nurture has just as much of an effect as nature, and education and lifestyle will never stop being massively important.
And though designer babies are a dystopian possibility, theyre a long way off. You certainly wouldnt be able to design a baby based on the current knowledge, Danielle Posthuma, statistical geneticist at the Free University of Amsterdam and lead author of the meta-analysis study, told the Guardian.
There are potentially nefarious uses for all kinds of scientific advances, but this shouldnt prevent researchers from furthering scientific knowledge. Understanding the genetics behind intelligence could lead to personalized educational techniques depending on someones genes, or potentially be used to treat cognitive impairments in old age. And, ultimately, unraveling what actually makes us intelligent would be far more useful than the existing myths and misinformation around the subject.
For now, we know that intelligence is partly hereditary, meaning that you can thank your parents for the way you think. But theyre not the only ones who deserve credit.
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A massive new study lays out the map of our genetic intelligence - Quartz
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The team of scientists has recovered and analysed ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies dating from approximately 1400 BC to 400 AD - and they discovered they were genetically similar to people from the Mediterranean.
Researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, conducted the first study to establish a proper genetic database to study the ancient past.
The study, published in Nature Communications, found that modern Egyptians share more ancestry with Sub-Saharan Africans than ancient Egyptians did.
They also discovered ancient Egyptians were found to be most closely related to ancient people from the Near East.
Egypt is a promising location for the study of ancient populations, because it was a world-wide trading hub.
Recent advances in the study of ancient DNA present an intriguing opportunity to test existing understandings of Egyptian history using ancient genetic data.
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Max Planck Director for the Science of Human History and senior author Johannes Krause said: "The potential preservation of DNA has to be regarded with scepticism.
The potential preservation of DNA has to be regarded with scepticism
Johannes Krause of Max Planck
"The hot Egyptian climate, the high humidity levels in many tombs and some of the chemicals used in mummification techniques, contribute to DNA degradation and are thought to make the long-term survival of DNA in Egyptian mummies unlikely."
The ability of the authors of this study to extract nuclear DNA from such mummies and to show its reliability is a breakthrough that opens the door to further direct study of mummified remains.
The team sampled 151 mummified individuals from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq, along the Nile River in Middle Egypt, from two anthropological collections hosted and curated at the University of Tuebingen and the Felix von Luschan Skull Collection at the Museum of Prehistory of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz.
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In total, the authors recovered mitochondrial genomes from 90 individuals, and genome-wide datasets from three individuals.
They were able to use the data gathered to test previous hypotheses drawn from archaeological and historical data, and from studies of modern DNA.
Prof Alexander Peltzer, from the University of Tuebingen, said: "In particular, we were interested in looking at changes and continuities in the genetic makeup of the ancient inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq.
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"We wanted to test if the conquest of Alexander the Great and other foreign powers has left a genetic imprint on the ancient Egyptian population."
The team wanted to determine if the investigated ancient populations were affected at the genetic level by foreign conquest and domination during the time period under study, and compared these populations to modern Egyptian comparative populations.
The study found that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations in the Levant (modern day Syria, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon), and were also closely related to Neolithic populations from the Anatolian Peninsula and Europe.
Fellow researcher Wolfgang Haack, group leader at the Max Planck Institute, added: "The genetics of the Abusir el-Meleq community did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300 year timespan we studied, suggesting that the population remained genetically relatively unaffected by foreign conquest and rule."
The data shows that modern Egyptians share approximately eight per cent more ancestry on the nuclear level with Sub-Saharan African populations than with ancient Egyptians.
They are proud that they managed to prove Egyptian mummies can be a reliable source of ancient DNA, and can greatly contribute to a more accurate and refined understanding of Egypt's population history.
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Ancient Egyptian DNA analysis reveals THIS about their genetics - Express.co.uk
In a first for precision medicine, a cancer drug has won regulatory approval based on the genetic characteristic of tumors, rather than their location in the body.
On [May 23], the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it had approved Keytruda, an immunotherapy, for patients who have genetic glitches in so-called mismatch repair genes.
Keytruda is the first that can be given to anyone who harbors one of two relatively rare genetic abnormalities, and is suffering from a solid tumor, such as pancreatic or lung cancer. Olivier Lesueur, managing partner at Bionest Partners, a consulting firm, calls the approval a breakthrough in the way we see and define cancer.
Keytruda works by unleashing the bodys immune system to attack tumors, and was first approved to treat advanced skin cancer in 2014. Such drugs, called checkpoint inhibitors, have had remarkable success, including saving the life of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The downside of immunotherapy is that not all patients seem to benefit, for reasons that remain uncertain.
The new approval only applies to patients for whom traditional treatment, like chemotherapy, has already failed. But genetic tests to identify patients with mismatch repair genes are widely available and cost $300 to $600Keytruda itself costs around $150,000 a year.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:Drug Is First to Treat Cancer Based on Genetics, Not Location
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Keytruda drug treats cancer based on tumor's genetics rather than its location - Genetic Literacy Project