The Michigan State University Gets USDA Grant to aid Michigan's Fledgling Farmers

                                                                  Image Credit: MSU
Michigan State University has long been a resource for small farms in Michigan. Thanks to a $750,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture, MSU will be able to help even more fledgling farmers get their start.

“This grant will enhance and create a vibrant network of farmer training across Michigan to help them negotiate the first five years of their endeavor,” said Mike Hamm, C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture and Director of MSU Center for Regional Food Systems. “Our programs will cater to different perspectives and needs while moving everyone who desires to farm along the path of building a viable business."

As part of the grant, the MSU Student Organic Farm will expand its Organic Farmer Training Program. Without programs like this, burgeoning farmers like Joannee DeBruhl, farm manager of Stone Coop Farm, may not have ever gotten her start.

DeBruhl, who spent much of her career in the insurance business, was laid off in 2009. Looking for a major change, she gravitated toward community gardening and eventually enrolled in MSU’s Organic Farmer Training Program.

“The program was great; it gave me lots of hands-on training and showed that it was possible and not just a dream,” DeBruhl said. “I think the USDA grant will be a huge benefit for small farmers because there’s not much money out there to help them get started.”

Training and help with startup costs are crucial, and this grant will be managed well by MSU, she added.

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Key to the project is MSU’s partnership with Michigan Food and Farming Systems, which runs the Women in Agriculture Collective Farming Initiative at Genesys Health System in Genesee County. This partnership will develop site- and people-appropriate training programs that help beginning women farmers build a successful business.

In addition to women, the grant also will develop training programs for Hispanic farmers. The number of Hispanic farms in Michigan continues to grow, and MSU will assist this historically underserved farmer population through training and site development assistance at the Farmers on the Move Cooperative in Battle Creek.

MSU also will launch new, and improve existing, programs that target the biggest challenges facing small-farm viability – land access, capital access, market access, business planning and strategizing for scaling up production.

Additional MSU contributors helping with this grant include: Jeremy Moghtader, Shakara Tyler. Michelle Napier-Dunnings, with Michigan Food and Farming Systems, also will be contributing to these efforts.

Source: Michigan State University

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New Molecular Target Identified for Treating Cerebral Malaria

                                                             Mosquito Anopheles

A drug already approved for treating other diseases may be useful as a treatment for cerebral malaria, according to researchers at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. They discovered a novel link between food intake during the early stages of infection and the outcome of the disease, identifying two molecular pathways that could serve as new targets for treatment.

“We have known for a long time that nutrition can affect the course of infectious disease, but we were surprised at how rapidly a mild reduction in food intake could improve outcome in a mouse malaria model,” said senior author James Mitchell, associate professor of genetics and complex diseases. “However, the real importance of this work is the identification of unexpected molecular pathways underlying cerebral malaria that we can now target with existing drugs.”

The study appears online January 30, 2015 in Nature Communications.

Cerebral malaria — a severe form of the disease — is the most serious consequence of infection by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, resulting in seizures, coma, and death. Currently there is a lack of safe treatment options for cerebral malaria, particularly for use in children, who represent the majority of cases. Even patients who receive early treatment with standard antimalarial chemotherapeutic agents run a high risk of dying, despite clearance of the parasite. Moreover, around 25% of survivors develop neurological complications and cognitive impairment.

Lead authors Pedro Mejia and J. Humberto Treviño-Villarreal, both researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that leptin—a hormone secreted from fat tissue with roles in suppressing appetite, but also in activating adaptive immune and inflammatory responses—is increased upon infection in a mouse model of cerebral malaria, and turns out to be a major bad actor in promoting neurological symptoms and death. Remarkably, Mejia, Treviño-Villarreal and colleagues showed that reducing leptin using a variety of means, either genetically, pharmacologically, or nutritionally by reducing food intake during the first two days of infection, protected against cerebral malaria.

The researchers also found that leptin acted primarily on cytotoxic T cells by turning on the well-studied mTOR protein, for which pharmacologic inhibitors are readily available. In their animal model, treating mice with the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin protected them against the neurological complications of cerebral malaria. Protection was due in part to a preservation of the blood brain barrier, which prevented the entry of blood cells carrying the parasites into the brain. As rapamycin is already FDA-approved for use in humans, trials in humans for cerebral malaria treatment with this drug may be possible, according to the researchers.

This study was the result of an ongoing collaboration between the Mitchell lab in the Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases and the labs of Manoj Duraisingh and Dyann Wirth in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases. Other Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health authors included  Christopher Hine, Eylul Harputlugil, Samantha Lang, Ediz Calay and Rick Rogers.

This study was supported in part by grants from NIH (DK090629 and AG036712) and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research to J.R.M.; a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Yerby postdoctoral fellowship to Mejia, and financial support from the Universidad Auto´noma de Nuevo Leo´n to Treviño-Villarreal.

Source: Harvard

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Summer Restoration in a Bolivian Winter

                                 El Hospital Pietro Gamba in Anzaldo, Bolivia Credit: Duke

My biggest accomplishment this summer was being able to call the mountains of Bolivia home. Far away from the lecture halls of Duke, I encountered a profound, alternative education that included everything from learning traditional dances to working in a rural hospital laboratory to raising pigs.

Of course, living in Bolivia for two months had its challenges, like a diet in which potatoes were considered vegetables, repeated food poisoning from chicha, the local alcoholic drink consisting of fermented corn, lack of a consistent water source, many near-car accidents, and most of all a deep-seated machismo, but I feel that these were all almost inextricable aspects of a culture that left such a positive impression upon me.

Of course, the inextricability of such factors posed a problem for me as an intern at El Hospital Pietro Gamba encouraging sustainable development to promote public health. Although 80% of children had head lice, a vast majority contracted repeated gastrointestinal bacterial infections, and countless had scabies, the community seemed to get along contentedly. Regardless, with support from the Foundation for Sustainable Development and DukeEngage, my sponsor organizations, I leveraged the relatively new running water system, implemented only 25 years ago, to set in motion a comprehensive lice campaign, to obtain government funding of soap in public restrooms for at least two years, and to create preventative medicine informational materials.

The majority of my education, though, occurred outside the scope of my project. Most importantly, I’ve learned to openly embrace different forms of learning, like relaxation or soccer, that energize me to wholeheartedly pursue my rigorous biophysics career, which I am so fortunate to have at one of the best universities in the world.

The idea of the Aymara New Year illustrates my mentality poignantly: on the first day of the Aymara New Year, traditional Bolivians wish for health, prosperity, and happiness, just as we do in the United States. However, they have a deeper connection with Pachamama, or Mother Nature: on New Year’s Day, they wake up early in the morning to stand on the ground barefoot, awaiting the first rays of the sun. They believe that watching these rays rise above the horizon and light the earth will bring them energy for the entire year. In this, the Aymara New Year represents both personal aspiration and attenuation with the environment.

Similarly, I now aim to maintain a balance between self and surroundings: I hope to be more attuned to the world around me rather than single-mindedly submersing myself in quantum physics, as I believe that varied experiences will infuse me with energy in whatever I pursue. Now, back at Duke for the start of my junior year, I’m excited to begin blogging again and to continue my adventures and education here on campus.

Source: Duke University

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How an innovative grants program (and Belgian beer mixers) at Johns Hopkins fuels discoveries about the human brain

A neuroscientist, an electrical engineer, a surgeon, and an education researcher walk up to a bar.

This could be the start of a joke, or it could be a scene from a recent Science of Learning Institute event at Johns Hopkins University. At the institute's four-times-yearly Belgian Beer Events, scientists from far-flung fields—and often from far-flung parts of the university itself—present their research to each other in short, digestible chunks. Their creativity and conviviality stimulated by a cup of ale or lager, the researchers strike up conversations and form connections that range widely across disciplinary boundaries, from classroom learning to machine learning, from recovery from stroke to memory formation in the brain.

Such conversations can be all too rare at a university where faculty are spread not just across a campus but throughout a large city and beyond. The result, for an inherently interdisciplinary subject like the science of learning, is that projects that could address fundamental and important questions can be hard to conceive and get off the ground. And too often, promising basic research doesn't get translated into the settings where it could help real-world learners.

The Belgian Beer Events, conceived shortly after the institute launched in 2013, are helping change that. They provide an informal space where basic researchers can meet translators, where machine-learning experts can meet early-childhood educators, where cognitive scientists can meet smartphone app developers. The events rotate between locations: October's was at the School of Education, and December's was hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering; previous ones were held at the School of Medicine and in Homewood's Levering Hall. Computer scientist Greg Hager likens the events to "an intellectual mixing bowl."

Beyond generating lively conversation, the gatherings are sparking collaborations between researchers who otherwise might never have met. At an event in 2013, neurologist Bonnie Nozari presented her work on speech and language processing disorders. Computer scientist Raman Arora then spoke about his work on machine learning and speech recognition. Recognizing a mutual interest in speech, the two chatted. The next day, they began planning a joint project to see if computers can predict how humans will pronounce words, and then provide feedback to people seeking to learn a new language, or to relearn how to speak after a stroke.

It sounds like a lucky encounter, but in fact electrical engineer Sanjeev Khudanpur, a member of the institute's steering committee, was at work behind the scenes. He conceived the Belgian Beer Events, and he made sure that Arora, his colleague in the Whiting School of Engineering, would be speaking on the same day as Nozari, of the School of Medicine. Later, when the two were ready to apply for funding, Khudanpur encouraged their ultimately successful proposal for one of the institute's research grants. "I see myself as a matchmaker," he says.

"It's that kind of really innovative, different seeding of projects that I think we've done really well," says Barbara Landau, the institute's director and the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The institute funded eight projects in 2013 and eight more in 2014, with projects receiving an average of $140,000 spread over two years. Funding goes to hiring graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, developing software, purchasing equipment, and supplying other research needs. The grants are competitive; the review committee has received around 30 proposals a year. The funded projects address a broad range of learning settings, from the classroom to the operating room to distance learning that can take place anywhere. The learners are not limited to humans, either; many of the projects include a strong component of "machine learning"—harnessing computers to recognize patterns in data and use them to develop new human learning applications. Other projects focus on developing animal models that can be used to study human learning.

The grant program allows researchers to get support for projects that might not be quite ready for a proposal to a traditional funding agency like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, says Landau. Almost without exception, an NSF or NIH review panel will want to see at least preliminary data demonstrating that an idea is viable. With Science of Learning Institute funding, scientists can do exploratory research that will provide the data needed to support a larger proposal to a more traditional funding agency. "It allows people to do things that they wouldn't necessarily be able to accomplish by a standard grant," says Landau. "The granting agencies tend to be somewhat conservative, and we're looking for innovation."

Like Arora and Nozari's collaboration, many of the funded projects harness existing technological applications to improve learning, often in novel ways. For example, Khudanpur and Hager are working with Gyusung Lee, an instructor of surgery in the School of Medicine, to develop computer software that can help teach surgeons how to use the da Vinci robotic surgical platform. The project grew out of an existing effort called the Language of Surgery, developed by researchers in the Whiting School of Engineering's Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

Through this effort, which began in 2006, Hager, Khudanpur, and colleagues program computers to record and analyze the different kinds of movements that surgeons make while performing certain tasks with surgical robots. The researchers' goal was to find movements that could consistently be classified as either expertlike or novicelike. Novice surgeons are more likely to break a suture, for example, or to push or pull on tissue while using the robot to manipulate a surgical needle. The researchers were able to train computer software to recognize such expert and novice movements much as a surgical trainer would.

The next step is to have the assessment tool provide real-time feedback to surgical trainees. With the kind of application the researchers are envisioning, trainees could, in theory, receive an unlimited amount of individualized feedback on what skills they have mastered and where more work is needed. "We're putting the computer in the human learning loop," Khudanpur says. "The computer has certain abilities that are complementary to humans. [For example,] the computer doesn't get tired. The computer usually doesn't charge by the hour."

A few years ago, when the researchers applied for an NIH grant to develop such a learning application, the proposal was rejected because they had no data showing the idea had promise. Thanks to their Science of Learning Institute research award, the scientists are starting to collect that data. Backed by some preliminary results, they recently put in a new NIH proposal and are waiting to hear back.

Meanwhile, thanks to a talk Hager gave last fall, his team's research may soon spawn another effort, which would take Language of Surgery technology out of the operating room and into the classroom. Hager's presentation inspired Landau and Amy Shelton, a professor in the School of Education, who is also on the institute's steering committee, to wonder whether motion-tracking software could recognize the movements that young children make when learning to build toy towers out of blocks. Spatial skills like tower building, in addition to being important in their own right, are of interest to researchers because they often predict children's future abilities in math and other areas. Hager, Landau, and Shelton are now discussing a potential project to put motion sensors on blocks and use computers to track how children acquire manipulation skills, a tactic similar to the one Hager's team uses to assess the skills of aspiring surgeons.

Institute-funded collaborations between computer scientists and education researchers are also reaching far beyond traditional education settings like medical training. In a project funded in 2014, computer scientists Philipp Koehn and Jason Eisner are teaming with Chadia Abras in the School of Education's Center for Technology Education to develop a radically new way to learn a foreign language. The idea is based on macaronic language—a kind of text that mixes two languages into a Spanglish-like hybrid. While such mixing has traditionally been employed by novice speakers or for satirical purposes, Eisner realized that coupled with recent advances in machine translation, it could also help introduce learners to foreign vocabulary and syntax in a gentle and piecemeal way rather than all at once, as in a typical foreign text read laboriously with the aid of a dictionary.

To implement the idea, the researchers are developing software that translates a text progressively, with more and more of the text appearing in the foreign language as the reader's comprehension improves. For an English-to-German learner, for instance, the English phrase "a loaf of bread" could start to appear as "ein Loaf of Bread." When the reader is comfortable with reading the German word "ein" instead of the English "a," the program could progress to "ein Breadloaf," resembling German in syntax but retaining English words. The text would then become "ein Brot loaf," and finally the fully German "ein Brotlaib*." The program will intermittently assess the student's reading comprehension and ability, and tune the amount of foreign language presented to the reader's progress; readers also can direct the program to make the translation easier or harder.

Since the concept still needs to be proved, it makes an ideal Science of Learning Institute project, says Koehn. Eisner adds, "It's a bet that this will work out and will not, for example, confuse people or give them bad habits." The researchers plan to develop an English-to-German application and test it on the Web and in Johns Hopkins classes in combination with more traditional classroom and textbook instruction. If successful, the software could also be made available on the Internet for independent learners.

The project exemplifies how interdisciplinary teams can merge cutting-edge research in machine and human learning, says Kelly Fisher, the institute's assistant director and an assistant professor in the School of Education. "It's a software program that is learning itself, learning about the learner."

Institute-funded research also targets learners far beyond those who are acquiring skills for the first time. Learning is critical for the millions of people who lose skills when they suffer strokes and other neurological conditions and then need to regain them, often through lengthy and complex rehabilitation processes. Research on how to more efficiently relearn lost skills could make a huge difference in how quickly such people can return to work and fully participate in society again.

Cognitive scientist Michael McCloskey recently discovered a new, debilitating, and apparently very rare reading deficit known as alphanumeric visual awareness deficit, or AVAD. McCloskey, a professor in Cognitive Science, identified the condition based on two cases that came to him in one year. One of them, a 61-year-old Baltimore geologist with a neurological disease, could see fine in general, but when looking at letters or numbers, he saw only blurs. McCloskey and his colleagues found, however, that by teaching the patient new characters to use in place of the digits, they could restore his recognition abilities. The researchers developed a smartphone calculator app and modified the geologist's laptop to allow him to do math with the new symbols.

Seeking to build on this work, McCloskey assembled a team of neurologists and cognitive scientists to look for more people with AVAD in order to study the condition using brain imaging and other techniques, and to develop apps and other technology that would help affected people make sense of letters and numbers again. But the researchers have run into a roadblock: They haven't found a single other case of AVAD beyond the original two. A woman in North Carolina who seemed to have the deficit turned out to have a somewhat different condition. "On the one hand, it's interesting that [AVAD is] so rare; on the other hand, it's not what we were hoping for," McCloskey says.

So he and his team have reoriented their project, broadening the scope to include more-common character recognition disorders. For example, some people cannot recognize a number or letter when it is presented to them whole but can recognize a character if they watch it being drawn. Perhaps, says McCloskey, a smartphone app could be developed to read signs and other important text, and draw each character in sequence for people with this deficit. His team is also starting to collaborate with a software developer, MicroBLINK, to make an app that would identify characters and then read the text aloud.

In addition to potentially helping people regain lost abilities, many institute-funded projects such as McCloskey's are aimed at teasing apart the different brain regions and processes responsible for seemingly coherent learned skills like reading. Along these lines but focusing on an entirely different brain function, psychologist Marina Bedny, of the Krieger School's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, is heading a team that received an institute grant to study how the brain can retool its hardware when the original purpose of one of its regions is no longer needed. In sighted people, around a quarter of the brain is devoted to visual processing; in blind people, these brain regions get repurposed. How does this work? Bedny wondered.

To investigate this question, she and colleagues in the Krieger School's Department of Cognitive Science and in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the School of Medicine are combining language comprehension assessments with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. They hope to learn whether brain regions normally devoted to sight are needed for language processing in blind people. The researchers recently collected data at a National Federation of the Blind convention and are in the process of testing a control group of sighted people. This effort would have been impossible without a source of support for interdisciplinary projects, Bedny says. "You just can't do this kind of research without an interdisciplinary team because you need so many different kinds of expertise," from linguistics to neuroimaging to TMS. "We really needed the whole team to make it happen."

In another example of institute-funded brain research, neuroscientist David Foster, of the School of Medicine, is taking on perhaps the most basic of all aspects of learning: memory formation. Specifically, Foster is interested in how certain kinds of memories are formed in a brain region called the hippocampus. He has studied this process in detail in rat brains, using dozens of implanted electrodes to precisely record electrical signals as the rats' neurons fire in sequences that represent stored memories. Foster would like to carry out similar studies in humans, but he cannot just go sticking electrodes deep into people's brains. So he first needs to develop less-invasive procedures.

Foster and William Anderson, an associate professor of neurosurgery in the School of Medicine, are now developing such techniques, piggybacking on research that Anderson's group does on epilepsy patients wherein they collect and analyze electrical data gathered from the surface of the brain. By piloting their study on a small sample of patients, the researchers hope to strengthen their position for applying for a larger grant, possibly from the NIH.

Bedny and Foster, both assistant professors, say that institute funding has allowed them to take on projects that might have otherwise been too risky and uncertain for an untenured faculty member. "I probably would not do too much looking outside of my own area to collaborate if I wasn't pushed and incentivized to do so by this kind of mechanism," Foster says. "This allows me, and pays me, to invest in thinking outside of my own small area."

The research grant program is the Science of Learning Institute's first major initiative, and many of the projects from the initial funding round are close to reporting results. The institute plans to continue awarding grants for at least three more years, and possibly more, depending on funding. To assess the program's success, Landau and Fisher are tracking metrics such as publications that awardees produce and external awards that leverage institute-funded work.

The institute also just launched its second big initiative: the Distinguished Science of Learning Fellowship Program. This program will award around five postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships annually to students wanting to pursue interdisciplinary research in learning. Each fellow will have two advisers from different disciplines.

The fellows also will play a key role in the third prong of the institute's mission: translating and disseminating results beyond academia. Traditionally, much of the learning that occurs in the nation's formal classrooms and more informal settings is not as informed by research as it could be, says Fisher. To help change that, the Science of Learning Institute recently launched partnerships with the Port Discovery Children's Museum in Baltimore and the Children's Museum of Manhattan in New York to develop exhibits that are based on the research into the science of learning. The institute also plans to hire a dissemination expert to help translate research results into classrooms and other learning settings.

The Science of Learning Institute's stated mission is "to understand and optimize the most essential part of our human capital: the ability to learn." The mission makes the institute a crucial catalyst at a university—a place dedicated to learning—where all the pieces are already in place to make major progress on one of the most important scientific questions of our time, says Landau. "One of the goals of the Science of Learning Institute," she says, "is really to sew together the parts of the university that haven't yet interacted—to make it, in President Daniels' words, one university."

Source: JHU

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Johns Hopkins student's neuroscience major inspires her first novel

First-time author Marlene Kanmogne IMAGE: MARSHALL CLARKE

One night, Marlene Kanmogne had a dream. She dreamed that she could change reality and shift what was happening around her just by thinking about it.

When Kanmogne awoke, she was overcome by a feeling of power and control, emotion and energy that was so vivid and captivating that she didn't want it to end.

So the junior neuroscience major, who grew up in Cameroon and Oklahoma, decided to write it down. Over the next four years, she transferred the ongoing dream of the girl who could make things happen with her mind into a series of spiral notebooks.

"When I write, it's like there's a film in my head that I transcribe to paper as quickly as I can so that I don't lose the film," Kanmogne says.

It wasn't easy. When school was in session and there was class or volunteering or work with the African Students Association, she was far too busy to write as much as she wanted. But she persevered, completed her story, and this summer even got it published. "I'm a planner—I like to set goals and complete them," she says. "Not finishing was not an option."

The result is The Mind Wanderer (Solstice Press, 2014), a 305-page young adult novel about a 15-year-old girl named Melissa who realizes she has a powerful mind-transforming ability that's much bigger than she is and must adapt to it and accept its consequences.

Kanmogne, 20, hopes to become a physician. She always viewed the book as a personal project. Even after its publication, she has some difficulty accepting notice for being a novelist. Instead, she'd rather discuss the intricacies of the brain. "I do like writing—it's a great hobby of mine. But I think what really drives me is the mind part, the brain part. It all starts and ends with the brain," she says.

Yet, with a year and a half of college, medical school, and residency still ahead, she's not willing to leave her writing hobby behind. The Mind Wanderer, she says, is only book one of three.

"I still have dreams that further the story, and I know what Melissa will do," Kanmogne says. "I see the path of her life, and I want to follow it. And that just keeps picking at me to the point where I have to put it down on paper."

Source: JHU

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Use Social Media in Study of E-Cigarettes

Five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will support project that is as much about data-gathering methods as it is about public health. Credit: UA

When Facebook announced in September that it would use all that personal data it collects to roll out a new ad platform to rival Google, privacy advocates groaned and marketers grinned.

But what if all that intelligence could be used to crack open one of today’s most pressing — yet least understood — public health issues?

That’s precisely the vision of the University of Arizona’s Daniel Zeng, MIS professor at the Eller College of Management, and Scott Leischow, adjunct faculty in the UA College of Medicine and professor of health services research at Arizona’s Mayo Clinic.

Fusing cutting-edge informatics and public health, their plan to scrape social media to create the world’s best data on e-cigarette usage and marketing recently won a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The project will tackle four distinct goals. It will:

Create a massive, real-time and continuously growing data set of what consumers and marketers say about e-cigarettes on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as social media forums focused on e-cigarettes and "vaping."

Mine that content for insights into why people use e-cigarettes, how they believe they affect their health and whether they help them quit smoking.

Document the marketing landscape — all the ways brands and vendors use these channels to promote their products and how consumers respond.

Integrate all of that information in the world’s first one-stop resource for wide-ranging data on e-cigarettes as revealed through social media as a tool for other researchers, health care professionals and more.

While e-cigarettes are relatively new in the U.S. — they were introduced in 2007 — sales are doubling annually and were expected to reach $1 billion last year. Even so, any time public dollars fund research, two questions naturally arise: Why study this? And why study it this way?

"There’s so much we don’t know about e-cigarettes," Leischow says. "The scientific community has found mixed data on whether they’re helpful for smoking cessation. We have questions about how different flavorings impact use, particularly among minors. And many health professionals worry that e-cigarettes may ultimately lead to more young people taking up smoking. All of these blind spots around a product that is still totally unregulated make this a top-priority area for the FDA."

As for why it makes sense to study e-cigarettes in this way, Zeng’s MIS expertise holds the key.  By mining social media in real time, as Zeng and Leischow have proposed, there are a number of strategic advantages:

Data comes from people interacting naturally in their day-to-day lives, thus removing “presentation bias” problems intrinsic in surveys.

The data collection is automated, which means sample size is not constrained by how much money or how many eyeball hours researchers can muster.

The lack of constraint also makes anecdotal information scientifically relevant: One personal story is just that, but 10,000 or 100,000 personal stories over time equal robust statistical data.

Because content is processed by algorithms, not people, data is available in near real time, not months or even years after countless hours of labor-intensive review.

The world of e-cigarettes, like that of any niche product or interest, has its own specialized vocabulary of acronyms and slang, so the research team will first need to construct a base lexical dataset for “training” the computers that will collect and process content.

It’s also one thing to scrape words but a much more complex challenge to automate the process of extracting meaning, so that a computer can spot when someone cites a reason for using e-cigarettes or mentions how the products affect his or her health (both of which first require a computer to detect who is or isn’t a user) or correctly catalog the marketing strategy used in an advertisement.

"We basically will be creating a suite of novel technologies for this study using both established building blocks of informatics and methods that have yet to be developed," Zeng says, "including analysis and visualization tools that were developed here at the U of A. 
Beyond that, we’re relying on proven tools for pattern mining, group behavior prediction, social network analysis and a lot more, but in ways that have never been combined for this level of research and in this topic area."

For Leischow, the knowledge those tools will produce is invaluable.

"There are all kinds of messages out there, from how effective e-cigarettes can be to help smokers quit tobacco to how they’re totally harmless or taste like candy," he says. "It may be that e-cigarettes prove beneficial to public health, or they may be shown to do more harm than good. In either case, it often takes many years for experts to fully recognize how products are being used and how they impact well-being, and even longer for regulation to catch up.

"This time, it’s going to be different. This time, we’re getting out ahead."

Source: UA

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UA to Serve Up Fresh Approach to Health

The commitment of the Department of Nutritional Sciences to promoting and adapting Mediterranean diet principles will continue through all three areas of the University’s land grant mission: academic programs, research and Cooperative Extension outreach programs. Credit: UA

The Mediterranean diet has seen growing global popularity as researchers find that the dietary pattern can help prevent or reduce obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer.

Responsive to that popularity, the University of Arizona Department of Nutritional Sciences is hosting a series of events meant to explore and share current research related to the dietary pattern, which focuses on fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans and nuts, along with lesser amounts of lean fish, meats, dairy, olive oil and red wine.

"We want to emphasize how this pattern of eating has been demonstrated to contribute to disease prevention," said Donato Romagnolo, a professor in the Arizona Cancer Center and the nutritional sciences department, which is housed in the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. 

National Geographic Blue Zones speaker Rudy Maxa, a Washington Post reporter and columnist, and five Tucson-area celebrity chefs will kick off the Jan. 28 opening-night reception, "A Food, Wine and Healthy Living Event," at the Tucson Museum of Art.

The 6-8 p.m. event is open to the public and will feature food prepared by the chefs, award-winning wine provided by the Arizona Wine Growers Association and live flamenco and Spanish guitar.

Then the UA will will host the Jan. 29-30 "Health Benefits of the Mediterranean Diet – Bringing Science to the Plate (With an Arizona Twist!)" scientific conference at the Student Union Memorial Center.

Supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the conference is geared toward public health and nutrition professionals, nurses, physicians, physical therapists and chiropractors, and it is offered for continuing professional credit. The event is also open to students and features a student showcase.

A full agenda and registration for the conference are available online.

Promoting the health benefits of the Mediterranean lifestyle is just one of numerous initiatives sponsored by the UA Department of Nutritional Sciences to advance optimal health and well-being for Arizonans and to focus on ways of preventing and treating chronic diseases. 

After the conference, a four-part, hands-on cooking series will be offered to the public during February and March at the UA Cooperative Extension's Garden Kitchen, "The Many Faces of the Mediterranean Diet: Four Evenings," featuring the cuisines of Spain, France, Morocco and Italy. Information is available online. 

Also, the Mediterranean Diet and Health course will be offered for academic credit during summer 2015 (one week in Tucson and three weeks in Verona, Italy) for students through the UA Global Initiatives Study Abroad Program.

Much of the interest in the Mediterranean diet stems from evidence that it can reduce the risk of death associated with heart disease and cancer. Other research indicates that the diet can reduce the incidence of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

Romagnolo, also the program director of the Mediterranean Diet and Health Study Abroad Program, said the benefits are especially important given pervasive health concerns across the nation. He noted that about 60 percent of people in the U.S. are overweight and 30 percent are obese.

"The latter is a risk factor for diabetes, cancer and metabolic syndrome," Romagnolo said.
During the conference, more than 20 presenters from the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the UA College of Medicine, national and international universities, institutes and organizations will talk. 

Presenters will cover four general areas: the Mediterranean diet and regional trends; obesity, diabetes and healthy aging; cancer prevention and control; and methods for translating science to the plate.

Live demonstrations by Arizona growers, vendors and educators will provide attendees with tasting opportunities, meal preparation ideas and information on where to find local products that help make healthful eating easy in the Southwest.

Also, prominent diet researchers from Spain, France and Greece will present current research on the health benefits of the traditional Mediterranean diet and offer ways to adapt it using local agricultural ingredients and cooking techniques. Speakers include:

Lluis Serra-Majem of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, who will present the keynote address on "The Mediterranean Diet as an Intangible and Sustainable Food Culture."

Mariette Gerber of the INSERM-Institut du Cancer de Montpellier, France, who will discuss "Implementing the Mediterranean Diet: The French Perspective." 

Antonia Trichopoulou of the University of Athens, Greece, who will speak on "Mediterranean Diet and Longevity."

"The conference is an opportunity to present ideas and concepts that may be adopted by the food industry, nutritionists, researchers and policymakers to help reduce the burden of these chronic diseases," Romagnolo said. "We want to show people how they can do it on their own and apply the basic tenets of the diet here in Arizona."

Source: University of Arizona

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Cuba opens door to its health care system for visiting nursing students

Students and faculty from the UCLA School of Nursing visit Casa de Maternidad, where women with high-risk pregnancies can live to receive special care. Credit: UCLA

The timing couldn't have been better for 18 UCLA School of Nursing graduate students and two faculty members headed for Cuba on an educational mission. As they were boarding a flight to Havana from Miami on Dec. 17, big news was breaking: The U.S. was re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, mending a break that has lasted more than 50 years. 

One hour later, the UCLA group arrived in Havana, where they were greeted with exuberant hugs, kisses and tears of joy by an excited group of Cuban health leaders over the historic turn of events.

That was the auspicious beginning of a five-day, action-packed visit for the UCLA group. To learn about Cuba’s health care system, they met with physician-nurse teams, engaged in Pan American Health Organization-based discussions on major causes of illness and death, among other topics; and visited community-based consultorios, polyclinics and sex education centers as well as nursing and medical schools.

Eager to see different health care settings, they spent time at a home for seniors and a residence where women with high-risk pregnancies went to live to receive special care.

Ties between Westwood and Havana

This was not the first time that UCLA nurses have connected with their counterparts in Cuba. In 2011, Maria Elena Ruiz, assistant adjunct professor at the school, attended an International Health Conference in Cuba as a member of the American Public Health Association. Through those meetings, she saw firsthand how a first-world, prevention-focused primary health care system functions with third-world economics.

When she returned to UCLA, Ruiz, together with Adey Nyamathi, associate dean for international research and scholarly activities, developed a program that would provide similar experiences for nursing students, who would receive partial credit for a public health course, complete required readings, participate in pre- and post- conferences, and write daily reflective papers.

How do they do it?

Cuba, the UCLA nurses learned during their visit last December, is a third-world country with some impressive health outcomes, including an overall life expectancy that rivals that in the U.S. (78.4 years for Cubans versus 78.6 years for Americans), immunization rates that are nearly 100% and low infant mortality. Yet their health care costs per capita are nearly 15 times lower than that of the United States.

Primary care and an emphasis on prevention are key to the success of the Cuban health care system.  

“Their system shows how primary care really does work,” said student Vladimir Camarce.  “And when implemented correctly, you can see great outcomes. Historically, the U.S. system has been focused on acute and tertiary care, but we are now starting to see a shift with the Affordable Care Act.”

In Cuba, public service announcements about health are shown daily on television. “They don’t have traditional television commercials like we do here, so the government uses the opportunity to deliver messages about hygiene or reminders on vaccines,” observed student Stephanie Phan.

Another reason for Cuba’s success is its focus on personalized, community-based care. Doctors and nurses work as a team and live in the communities they serve.  They might see patients in a clinic in the morning, said graduate student John Scholtz, and then visit patients who can’t get to the clinic at home “to ensure that they are receiving their checkups and following through with the recommendations.”

The students also noted the personal nature of health care in Cuba. “Patients are referred to by name,” said Phan, “not by 'the patient in room 11' …  They told us, ‘They’re not patients, they’re people.”

There is also a strong integration of traditional, herbal and western medicine. It’s all considered good health care. “I believe we should find a way to incorporate that integration into our practices because we do get a lot of patients who use complementary therapies,” said Camarce.

What amazed the students was that the Cubans achieve all this with a scarcity of equipment and health resources. “They don’t have the equipment we have, the technology we have or the pharmaceutical industry,” noted student Jacqueline Marroquin. “They make do with so little, but they are able to accomplish so much.”

“What medical equipment is available resembles a scene from the old MASH television series,” said Ruiz. “And yet we were overwhelmed with the kindness and eagerness of our hosts to share their health experiences with us.”

Also surprising: On average, nurses and doctors make only $20-$30 a month.  But their education and housing are free or subsidized, and they don’t have student loans to pay off.

“In the U.S., you wouldn’t have a lot of people pursuing these professions for that kind of pay,” said Scholtz. “But in Cuba, you have a lot of people interested in being doctors or nurses. They go into it because they want to make a difference in their community.”

Part of the reason why the Cuban system works is the collectivist-based culture and the population perspective, the students said. Many things that have been adapted in Cuba, however, wouldn’t work in the U.S.  “We might be able to integrate some of the ideas in a micro-community,” suggested Marroquin.

Leaving hehind impressions — and hand sanitizers

While the students were there to learn, they also taught Cubans something about Americans.  “Our interactions showed them that we were open to ideas and willing to learn from them,” said Scholtz. On a more tangible note, the group left behind hand sanitizers.  And pens. Lots of them.  “There is a real need for basic hygienic supplies, everything we take for granted,” added Ruiz.

But more importantly, the UCLA visitors came away with a new resolve. “As nursing students, as nurses, we really need to understand what is going on across our borders,” said Marroquin.

Nyamathi added:  “These students are now motivated to make a difference, to learn more about other countries and to question our health system, health care costs, disparities, and what we can learn from others to improve health and health care in the U.S.” 

It’s also a hope that, with the dawning of warmer relationships with Cuba, the U. S. health care community may be able to learn a lot more from their neighbor, they said.

Source: UCLA

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Drug combo supresses growth of late-stage prostate cancer turmors

By Natalie van Hoose

Low doses of metformin, a widely used diabetes medication, and a gene inhibitor known as BI2536 can successfully halt the growth of late-stage prostate cancer tumors, a Purdue University study finds.

Prostate cancer causes the second-highest number of cancer-related deaths in men in the U.S., and methods of treating advanced prostate cancer are limited.

Xiaoqi Liu (pronounced zhow-CHEE' LEE'-oo), associate professor of biochemistry and cancer research, and fellow researchers found that the drugs metformin and BI2536 can work together to suppress the spread of prostate cancer that resists all other available treatments, potentially prolonging patients' lives.

"We've found a promising way to treat late-stage prostate cancer," Liu said. "By combining low levels of two well-tolerated drugs, the progression of this disease could be significantly delayed. Completely curing the cancer at the advanced stage is pretty much impossible, but this treatment might manage it for a while - that's exciting."

A number of treatments exist for the earlier stages of prostate cancer, which grows slowly compared with many other cancers. Because prostate cancer cells need the male sex hormone androgen to develop, one way to treat the disease is to suppress androgen - a process known as castration. If the cancer continues to spread, the patient often undergoes chemotherapy. As a last resort, drugs that block the synthesis of androgen by prostate cancer cells can be used, but these medications only extend a patient's lifespan for several months.

New approaches to treating the most persistent forms of prostate cancer are "urgently needed," Liu said.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that castration treatment can inadvertently encourage the cancer to get tougher. It can heighten oxidative stress on the prostate gland, which increases the expression of Plk1, a gene that has been linked to many cancers. Over-expression of Plk1 can also trigger the synthesis of androgen.

"The goal of castration is to block androgen synthesis," Liu said. "But cancer cells eventually become 'smart' enough to make androgen anyhow, which is why the cancer continues to grow."

Additionally, castration can disrupt the body's metabolism and lead to insulin resistance, which also can stimulate the production of androgen. The cancer will spread until both of these side effects are stopped, Liu said.

Previous studies showed that metformin - an inexpensive, antidiabetic drug that has been commonly used for more than 40 years - is particularly potent to prostate cancer tumors.

Working with fellow researchers from Purdue, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Indiana University School of Medicine, Liu found that a combination of low levels of metformin and BI2536, a drug that stifles the activity of Plk1, could work in tandem to slow the growth of prostate tumors too advanced for current treatments by promoting the self-destruction of cancer cells and preventing androgen synthesis.

The drugs did not impact healthy prostate cells, a "key finding," Liu said. "Ideally, cancer therapy will have minimal effects on normal cells."

Because metformin helps regulate metabolism, it may reverse some of the metabolic damage caused by castration, he said.

The researchers tested the drugs in a classical cell culture assay of prostate cancer cells and in advanced prostate tumors in mice. Low concentrations of the drugs significantly slowed the development of cancer in both trials. The mice tumors were grown from the tumor cells of a late-stage prostate cancer patient, suggesting that the treatment would prove effective in humans.

"Those results were amazing," Liu said. "These are the first data we've generated from a real patient, so I was almost jumping in the air when I saw that it worked."

Liu said that the next step in the research is to test the combination of drugs in clinical trials. Further research is also needed to understand the underlying mechanism of metformin and why it is effective at suppressing prostate cancer

Source: Purdue Univesity

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Small change in blood acidity could prove detrimental to kidney disease patients

A University of Manchester scientist has discovered that very small changes in the level of acidity in blood may have a detrimental impact on the health of patients with kidney disease.

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is common in the UK.  It is estimated that about one in five men and one in four women between the ages of 65 and 74 has some degree of CKD. The leading single cause of CKD is diabetes which is increasing so it’s expected that more patients will be diagnosed with CKD in the future.

Dr Donald Ward from the Faculty of Life Sciences has been studying the impact of kidney disease on the body. He has found that very small changes in the pH (acidity) level in the blood prevents the body from being able to accurately monitor calcium levels. This leads to too much of the hormone PTH being released which is likely to lead to a greater risk of calcium and phosphate from the bone damaging the arteries. This often proves fatal to patients with CKD. His research has been published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. 

Dr Donald Ward

He says: “It was not realised before that the blood pH changes we see in patients with kidney disease can have an impact on their ability to monitor blood calcium levels. My research has demonstrated that the effect of those changes may be more significant than previously thought and thus might need to be looked at more carefully by clinicians.”

Dr Ward’s research focussed on the high level of parathyroid hormone (PTH) in patients suffering from CKD. This causes the body to release calcium and phosphate from the bones which can then damage their blood vessels. 

Dr Ward explains why this is so harmful: “The diseased kidneys prevent the body getting rid of both excess phosphate and excess acidity. So if that acidity also causes the body to release more PTH then this could compound the problem by releasing further phosphate from the bone. This vicious circle might accelerate the potentially fatal calcification of the arteries.” 

He continues: “What is so important about this research is that we have demonstrated that changes in PTH release can be prompted by very small changes in blood pH level. Before, it was assumed that only a larger change in acidity would cause problems for patients.”

The research was funded by Kidney Research UK. Elaine Davies, Director of Research Operations, from the charity says: “Donald’s work has used novel pharmacological and molecular tools in generating these new findings which increase our knowledge about the complex balance that clinicians need to consider when treating patients with CKD.”

Dr Ward is hoping to take his research to the next step, testing for therapeutic targets that could lead to better treatments for CKD.

Source: Manchester University

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Stanford bioengineers develop tool for reprogramming genetic code

Stanford bioengineers have developed a new tool that allows them to preferentially activate or deactivate genes in living cells. VITSTUDIO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Biology relies upon the precise activation of specific genes to work properly. If that sequence gets out of whack, or one gene turns on only partially, the outcome can often lead to a disease.

Now, bioengineers at Stanford and other universities have developed a sort of programmable genetic code that allows them to preferentially activate or deactivate genes in living cells. The work is published in the current issue of Cell, and could help usher in a new generation of gene therapies.

The technique is an adaptation of CRISPR, itself a relatively new genetic tool that makes use of a natural defense mechanism that bacteria evolved over millions of years to slice up infectious virus DNA.

Standard CRISPR consists of two components: a short RNA that matches a particular spot in the genome, and a protein called Cas9 that snips the DNA in that location. For the purposes of gene editing, scientists can control where the protein snips the genome, insert a new gene into the cut and patch it back together.

Inserting new genetic code, however, is just one way to influence how the genome is expressed. Another involves telling the cell how much or how little to activate a particular gene, thus controlling how much protein a cell produces from that gene and altering its behavior.

It's this action that Lei Stanley Qi, an assistant professor of bioengineering and of chemical and systems biology at Stanford, and his colleagues aim to manipulate.

Influencing the genome
In the new work, the researchers describe how they have designed the CRISPR molecule to include a second piece of information on the RNA, instructing the molecule to either increase (upregulate) or decrease (downregulate) a target gene's activity, or turn it on/off entirely.

Additionally, they designed it so that it could affect two different genes at once. In a cell, the order or degree in which multiple genes are activated can produce different metabolic products.

"It's like driving a car. You control the wheel to control direction, and the engine to control the speed, and how you balance the two determines how the car moves," Qi said. "We can do the same thing in the cell by up- or downregulating genes, and produce different outcomes."

As a proof of principle, the scientists used the technique to take control of a yeast metabolic pathway, turning genes on and off in various orders to produce four different end products. They then tested it on two mammalian genes that are important in cell mobility, and were able to control the cell's direction and how fast it moved.

Future therapies
The ability to control genes is an attractive approach in designing genetic therapies for complex diseases that involve multiple genes, Qi said, and the new system may overcome several of the challenges of existing experimental therapies.

"Our technique allows us to directly control multiple specific genes and pathways in the genome without expressing new transgenes or uncontrolled behaviors, such as producing too much of a protein, or doing so in the wrong cells," Qi said. "We could eventually synthesize tens of thousands of RNA molecules to control the genome over a whole organism."

Next, Qi plans to test the technique in mice and refine the delivery method. Currently the scientists use a virus to insert the molecule into a cell, but he would eventually like to simply inject the molecules into an organism's blood.

"That is what is so exciting about working at Stanford, because the School of Medicine's immunology group is just around the corner, and working with them will help us address how to do this without triggering an immune response," said Qi, who is a member of the interdisciplinary Stanford ChEM-H institute. "I'm optimistic because everything about this system comes naturally from cells, and should be compatible with any organism."

Source: Stanford university

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HIV testing yields diagnoses in Kenya but few seek care

A sweeping effort in a rural region of Kenya to test all adults for HIV discovered 1,300 new infections, but few of the newly diagnosed people pursued treatment, a study in the journal Lancet HIV reports.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Between December 2009 and February 2011, health workers with the AMPATH Consortium sought to test and counsel every adult resident in the Bunyala subcounty of Kenya for HIV. A study in the journal Lancet HIV reports that the campaign yielded more than 1,300 new positive diagnoses, but few of those new patients sought health care.

“Home-based counseling and testing (HBCT) provided a diagnosis to nearly 40 percent of people living with HIV in this subcounty who otherwise most likely would not have gone for HIV testing,” said study lead author Becky Genberg, assistant professor (research) of health services, policy and practice in the Brown University School of Public Health. “They therefore would not have known about their HIV infection and not had the opportunity to change their behavior to protect others.”

AMPATH’s HBCT program is part of a strategy to identify all individuals living with HIV in the catchment area, start them on antiretroviral medication as soon as possible, and help them stay on their medications. Antiretroviral medication not only suppresses HIV infections for most patients but also reduces their ability to transmit the virus.

Genberg with co-author Edwin Sang “We are working on a variety of studies, all designed to understand the barriers facing the newly diagnosed, and to implement and evaluate strategies to increase their engagement and retention in HIV care over time.”

In Bunyala, home to about 66,000 people, the HBCT program tested about 32,000 adults. Among them, 3,482 had HIV. Of those, 2,122 already knew they were infected, but 1,360 did not know it yet.

A major finding of the study is that three years later only 15 percent of the newly diagnosed people had engaged in care for their infection. A likely reason why, Genberg said, is that newly diagnosed people typically don’t yet feel sick.

“That so few linked to care following HBCT is a call for innovative and creative strategies to work alongside HBCT to support the mostly healthy, asymptomatic newly diagnosed to engage with care in a way that is meaningful for them,” Genberg said.

In an editorial in the journal, Rashida Ferrand of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the study sounds a warning that home-based testing must be paired with effective ways to convince newly diagnosed patients to seek help.

“Unless paired with interventions targeted at hard-to-reach populations, the diagnosing of undiagnosed individuals in many settings will not be cost-effective and will have little effect on individual and population viral suppression,” she and colleagues wrote.

Genberg, who has been in Kenya this winter, said she is working with Kenyan collaborators on developing the needed interventions: “Right now we are working on a variety of studies, all designed to understand the barriers facing the newly diagnosed, and to implement and evaluate strategies to increase their engagement and retention in HIV care over time.”

In addition to Genberg the study’s authors are Joseph Hogan and Corey Duefield of Brown; Violet Naanyu, Juddy Wachira, and Samson Ndege of Moi University in Kenya; Edwin Sang, Monicah Nyambura, and Michael Odawa of AMPATH; and corresponding author Paula Braitstein of the University of Toronto.

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funded the study though USAID (grant AID-623-A-12-0001). Additional support came from the National Institutes of Health (K01MH099966) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Source: Brown University

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