Michael Graham Richard

What are metabolomics?

Genes are similar to the plans for a house; they show what it looks like, but not what people are getting up to inside. One way of getting a snapshot of their lives would be to rummage through their rubbish, and that is pretty much what metabolomics does. [...]

Metabolomics studies metabolites, the by-products of the hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that continuously go on in every cell of the human body. Because blood and urine are packed with these compounds, it should be possible to detect and analyse them. If, say, a tumour was growing somewhere then, long before any existing methods can detect it, the combination of metabolites from the dividing cancer cells will produce a new pattern, different from that seen in healthy tissue. Such metabolic changes could be picked up by computer programs, adapted from those credit-card companies use to detect crime by spotting sudden and unusual spending patterns amid millions of ordinary transactions.

This could be used for traditional medicine, both to prevent pathologies and to detect those that are already present so they can be treated. But another use would be as part of an early-detection system to defend against pandemics and biological attacks. As mentioned previously, network-theory can help us better use vaccines. But once you have a cure or antidote, you also need to identify people that are already infected but haven’t died yet, and the earlier you can do that after the infection, the more chances they have to live.

Once the techniques of metabolomics are sufficiently advanced and inexpensive to use, they might provide better data than simply relying on reported symptoms (might be too late by then), and might scale better than traditional detection methods (not sure yet - something else might make more economic sense). It’s a bit too early to tell, but it’s a very promising field.

For more information, see Douglas Kell’s site or Wikipedia: Metabolomics.

Source: The Economist. See also Lifeboat’s BioShield program.

This was cross-posted on the Lifeboat Foundation blog.

If a pandemic strikes and hundreds of millions are at risk, we won’t have enough vaccines for everybody, at least not within the time window where vaccines would help. But a new strategy could help use the vaccines we have more effectively:

Researchers are now proposing a new strategy for targeting shots that could, at least in theory, stop a pandemic from spreading along the network of social interactions.Vaccinating selected people is essentially equivalent to cutting out nodes of the social network. As far as the pandemic is concerned, it’s as if those people no longer exist. The team’s idea is to single out people so that immunizing them breaks up the network into smaller parts of roughly equal sizes. Computer simulations show that this strategy could block a pandemic using 5 to 50 percent fewer doses than existing strategies, the researchers write in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.

So you break up the general social network into sub-networks, and then you target the most important nodes of these sub-networks and so on until you run out of vaccines. The challenge will be to get good information about social networks, something not quite as easy as mapping computer networks, but there is progress on that front.

In one of the most dramatic illustrations of their technique, the researchers simulated the spread of a pandemic using data from a Swedish study of social connections, in which more than 310,000 people are represented and connected based on whether they live in the same household or they work in the same place. With the new method, the epidemic spread to about 4 percent of the population, compared to nearly 40 percent for more standard strategies, the team reports.

Source: ScienceNews. See also Lifeboat’s BioShield program.

This was cross-posted on the Lifeboat Foundation blog.

The Economist has a piece on the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI):

Dr [Nathan] Wolfe, [a virologist at the University of California, Los Angeles], is attempting to create what he calls the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI). This is still a pilot project, with only half a dozen sites in Africa and Asia. But he hopes, if he can raise the $50m he needs, to build it into a planet-wide network that can forecast epidemics before they happen, and thus let people prepare their defences well in advance. [...]

The next stage of the project is to try to gather as complete an inventory as possible of animal viruses, and Dr Wolfe has enlisted his hunters to take blood samples from whatever they catch. He is collaborating with Eric Delwart and Joe DeRisi of the University of California, San Francisco, to screen this blood for unknown viral genes that indicate new species. The GVFI will also look at people, monitoring symptoms of ill health of unknown cause and trying to match these with unusual viruses.

More here. See also the Lifeboat Foundation’s BioShield program.

This was cross-posted on the Lifeboat Foundation blog.

One hundred years ago, a large meteoroid or comet exploded in the sky over Tunguska, Siberia. We don’t know that much about it: Estimates on size vary from 30 to 1,200 meters in diameter, and estimates on the force of the blast are in a range of 3 to 30 megatons of TNT (”about 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima”). But we do know that the explosion leveled trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles)…

Photograph from the Soviet Academy of Science 1927 expedition led by Leonid Kulik. Public domain.

To coincide with this anniversary, the Planetary Society has launched the Target Earth project, a year-long focus on “on Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and the hazards that marauding space-rocks pose to our planet.”

Target Earth encompasses The Planetary Society’s three-pronged approach to NEO research: funding researchers who discover and track asteroids, advocating greater NEO research funding by the government, and helping spur the development of possible ways to avert disaster should a potentially dangerous asteroid be discovered.

You can learn more about the Gene Shoemaker NEO Grants here. Some quick facts:

(more…)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gave a $540,000 grant to researchers from Rice University to do a fast-tracked 9-month study on a new anti-radiation drug based on carbon nanotubes:

“More than half of those who suffer acute radiation injury die within 30 days, not from the initial radioactive particles themselves but from the devastation they cause in the immune system, the gastrointestinal tract and other parts of the body,” said James Tour, Rice’s Chao Professor of Chemistry, director of Rice’s Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory (CNL) and principal investigator on the grant. “Ideally, we’d like to develop a drug that can be administered within 12 hours of exposure and prevent deaths from what are currently fatal exposure doses of ionizing radiation.” [...]

The new study was commissioned after preliminary tests found the drug was greater than 5,000 times more effective at reducing the effects of acute radiation injury than the most effective drugs currently available. [...]

The drug is based on single-walled carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders of pure carbon that are about as wide as a strand of DNA. To form NTH, Rice scientists coat nanotubes with two common food preservatives — the antioxidant compounds butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) — and derivatives of those compounds.

An interesting side benefit of the drug might be that it could also potentially help cancer patients who are undergoing radiation treatment.

Source: Feds fund study of drug that may prevent radiation injury

See also: Creating a Technological Immune System

This piece was cross-posted on the Lifeboat Foundation Blog.

Photo by Prateek Karandikar. GFDL and Creative Common (BY-SA) licenses.

Using already existing networks to create inexpensive and vast early-detection systems is simply brilliant.

Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons.

Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. [...]

Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach said. [...]

“It’s impossible to completely shield a weapon’s radioactive material without making the device too heavy to transport,” Jenkins said.

Of course, participation would need to be voluntary for it to be ethical, but I’m sure that there would be more than enough volunteers to make it work.

Think of the possibilities of such a vast network of sensors: How about detecting certain chemicals? With the right technology, it could even detect biological and viral threats. I know they’re already working on sensors that can monitor air quality. What else can we think of?

Sources:

• Physorg
• Lifeboat Foundation Blog

See also:

• Promising Anti-Radiation Drug Based on Carbon Nanotubes
• Nanotube-Based Chemical Sensors to Defend Against Chemical Attacks