SynBioFromLeukipposInstitute

 http://bit.ly/TTUQEi

"In their Policy Forum “Paying patients for their tissue: the legacy of Henrietta Lacks” (6 July, p. 37), R. D. Truog et al. overlook the L929 cell line, which, contrary to their statement about HeLa, was the first immortal cell line (1). Also overlooked are the commercial uses and questions of legal ownership first raised for normal human cell strains (2). WI-38, derived from the lung tissue of a surgically aborted fetus, has not only been used in research worldwide whenever a normal human cell is required, but has also been used as the substrate for the production of many of the world's human virus vaccines since the mid-1960s. About 2 billion people have directly benefitted from the use of WI-38 and similar strains (3). Although the commercial sales of vaccines produced in WI-38 cannot be accurately determined, it is certainly in the multiple billions of dollars. In the 1960s, I distributed WI-38 gratis to vaccine manufacturers and researchers worldwide because biological material could not be patented....."

by

Alberti C.

"Tissue engineering technologies are more and more expanding as consequence of recent developments in the field of biomaterial science and nanotechnology research. An important issue in designing scaffold materials is that of recreating the ECM (extra-cellular matrix) functional features - particularly ECM-derived complex molecule signalling - to mimic its capability of directing cell-growth and neotissue morphogenesis. In this way the nanotechnology may offer intriguing chances, biomaterial nanoscale-based scaffold geometry behaving as nanomechanotransducer complex interacting with different cell nanosize proteins, especially with those of cell surface mechanoreceptors. To fabricate 3D-scaffold complex architectures, endowed with controlled geometry and functional properties, bottom-up approaches, based on molecular self-assembling of small building polymer units, are used, sometimes functionalizing them by incorporation of bioactive peptide sequences such as RDG (arginine - glycine - aspartic acid, a cell-integrin binding domain of fibronectin), whereas the top-down approaches are useful to fabricate micro/nanoscale structures, such as a microvasculature within an existing complex bioarchitecture. Synthetic polymer-based nanofibers, produced by electrospinning process, may be used to create fibrous scaffolds that can facilitate, given their nanostructured geometry and surface roughness, cell adhesion and growth. Also bladder tissue engineering may benefit by nanotechnology advances to achieve a better reliability of the bladder engineered tissue. Particularly, bladder smooth muscle cell adhesion to nanostructured polymeric surfaces is significantly enhanced in comparison with that to conventional biomaterials. Moreover nanostructured surfaces of bladder engineered tissue show a decreased calcium stone production. In a bladder tumor animal model, the dispersion of carbon nanofibers in a polymeric scaffold-based tissue engineered replacement neobladder, appears to inhibit a carcinogenic relapse in bladder prosthetic material. Facing the future, a full success of bladder tissue engineering will mainly depend on the progress of both biomaterial nanotechnologies and stem cell biology research..."
http://1.usa.gov/QLINT9

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

"Andemariam Beyene sat by the hospital window, the low Arctic sun on his face, and talked about the time he thought he would die. Two and a half years ago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studying to be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, when Mr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.”

But the doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells.

Implanting such a “bioartificial” organ would be a first-of-its-kind procedure for the field of regenerative medicine, ....."

http://nyti.ms/OuNGzy

by

Lai YT, King NP, Yeates TO.

"In nature, many proteins have evolved to have self-complementary shapes. This drives them to assemble into supramolecular structures, sometimes of great complexity, and often carrying out sophisticated cellular functions. Designing novel proteins that can self-assemble into similarly complex structures is a longstanding goal in bioengineering. New ideas, combined with continually improving computer algorithms, are making it possible to advance on that goal, bringing wide-ranging applications in synthetic biology within reach. Prospective applications range from vaccine design to molecular delivery to bioactive materials. Recent strategies and examples of successfully designed protein cages, layers, and crystals are reviewed."

http://1.usa.gov/U7Cazj

UK Plans Synthetic Biology Knowledge and Innovation Center http://bit.ly/NZXLKz

Assemble 2012 Sept 20 at RIBA on advanced manufacturing, synthetic biology and the craft of surgery http://bit.ly/QFuhC1

by

Eric Gladstone, Ian Molineux and James Bull

"In prior work, adding a gene to phage T7 that degraded the host K1 capsule facilitated growth when plated on capsulated hosts. However, the transgenic protein (an endosialidase) is expressed as an exoenzyme, released from the cell at lysis but unattached to the phage particle. There is thus the possibility that the gene will be subject to a tragedy of the commons and be selected against, if the enzyme benefits other genomes. Results: This evolutionary perspective was supported in short term experiments. The genome carrying the endosialidase gene was favored on a capsulated host if grown in physical isolation of control genomes (lacking the gene) but was selected against otherwise. Conclusions: These results challenge efforts to engineer phages with exoenzymes that degrade biofilm polymers. If biofilms do not facilitate spatially structured phage growth, the transgenic enzymes may be rapidly eliminated from the phage population after release in the environment, even if the transgene benefits overall phage growth on the biofilm."

http://bit.ly/PatvcN

By Michael Eisen

"When the draft sequence of the human genome was finished in 2001, the accomplishment was heralded as marking the dawn of the age of “big biology”. The high-throughput techniques and automation developed to sequence DNA on a massive scale would be wielded to generate not just genomes, but reference data sets in all areas of biomedicine.

The NHGRI moved quickly to expand the universe of sequenced genomes, and to catalog variation within the human population with HapMap, HapMap 2 and 1000 genomes. But they also began to dip their toe into the murkier waters of “functional genomics”, launching ENCODE, a grand effort to build an encyclopedia of functional elements in the human genome. The idea was to simultaneously annotate the human genome and provide basic and applied scientists working on human disease with reference data sets that they would otherwise have had to generate themselves. Instead of having to invest in expensive equipment and learn complex protocols, they would often be able to just download the results, thereby making everything they did faster and better...."

http://bit.ly/NWk0ks