December 2007

Out of Mind When I was a medical student in the mid-1990s, many of the newer generation antipsychotics used to treat schizophrenia, such as risperidone and olanzapine, were just coming on the market. My psychiatry rotation was at the famed Bellevue Hospital in New York, and half of the unit to which I was assigned was filled with patients in clinical trials of many of those drugs. In many cases, these were double-blinded, placebo controlled trials, but that was a bit of a f

The Disease ARTICLE EXTRAS Living with Schizophrenia Robin Cunningham Marianne Emanuel A Very Expensive Disease Schizophrenia in Childhood This year, some 600,000 people will be diagnosed with schizophrenia. That's 600,000 lives - and many times that when you consider their families - thrown into what some have described as a living hell. People with the disease are far more likely to be jobless, ill with other diseases, and commit suicide. So it is approp

A Very Expensive DiseaseBy Anne HardingFlaws in the system add to the tens of billions spent on schizophrenia every year, but advocates say there's little will to invest in fixing it. ARTICLE EXTRASThe DiseaseLiving with SchizophreniaRobin CunninghamMarianne EmanuelSchizophrenia in ChildhoodWhen Janet Edelman's brother became ill with schizophrenia, she and her parents went through a period of mourning for what they - and the rest of the world - had lost. "My brother should have been a profess

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53924/53924.swf", width:"520", height:"410", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Passive immunization and West Nile Virus By Edyta Zielinska In 1999, officials reported the first cases of West Nile Virus (WNV) in North America in eight New York City patients. Baxter Healthcare scientist Thomas Kreil realized that sera from infected patients might prote

1 This diagnosis is often difficult to confirm, because it is quite common for children to have magical thinking or beliefs, and they often report auditory hallucinations that occur upon waking or sleeping (hypnagogia or hypnopompia, respectively). In addition, children may not be able to articulate their psychotic symptoms as clearly as adolescents or adults, thus making the diagnosis less clear-cut. So, too, can other symptoms mistakenly resemble psychosis, including idiosyncratic thi

The EtiologyARTICLE EXTRASMolecular MysteriesGazing DownstreamSeeing SchizophreniaNeurotrailblazerPregnancy, Chromosomes, and ReceptorsAlthough science has made significant strides in the understanding of schizophrenia, in many ways its causes remain as mysterious today as they were when Eugen Bleuler coined the term in 1905. As Melinda Wenner describes in this section, the dopamine hypothesis that gave rise to a generation of antipsychotics has been forced to share the stage with a host of othe

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53927/organ.swf", width:"550", height:"500", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Engineering an organ By Alison McCook How Tengion builds autologous bladders Please download the Adobe Flash Player to view this content: Related Articles Betting on better organs What it takes to make an organ

What it takes to make an organ By Alison McCook Related Articles Betting on better organs Engineering an organ Two years ago, the first employees of Tengion walked into a 2,800 square meter warehouse in southeastern Pennsylvania that was full to the brim with office furniture, rising up to a 12-meter ceiling, and said: We'll take it. They cleared everything out and started to fill the empty space with rooms and equipment to automate something that had

The problem with plants By Bob Grant Related Articles Cataloging Life The Barcoding Factory Hiding in plain sight Slideshow: Barcoding the world Back pocket barcoder? Animal barcoders are on a tear. Every day they inch closer to completing a library of CO1 sequences from the planet's birds, fishes, mammals, and invertebrates. But researchers hoping to barcode Earth's plants are in a different boat. "Animal people are well on their way," sa

Back pocket barcoder? By Bob Grant Related Articles Cataloging Life The Barcoding Factory Hiding in plain sight Slideshow: Barcoding the world The problem with plants It was 2003, and University of Guelph researcher Paul Hebert was taking heat from an audience of taxonomists and phylogeneticists at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory seminar for suggesting that they barcode Earth's inhabitants using the CO1 mitochondrial gene. University of Pennsy

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplements/20071201/swf/infographic.swf", width:"520", height:"580", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); 1 There are also consistent reductions in the size of the medial temporal lobe and the left neocortical superior temporal gyrus in patients with schizophrenia; those areas are responsible for declarative memory and auditory processing, respectively. Some studies have also found that the

Cataloging Life Can a single barcode of DNA record biodiversity and keep us safe from poisons? By Bob Grant Related Articles 1 for soil nematodes, barcoding's genesis lies in a 2003 paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London2 by Paul Hebert, a Canadian researcher who some call "the father DNA barcoding," and colleagues. In that paper, Hebert's team proposed a universal animal barcode: a segment of roughly 650 base pairs of the mitochondria

Out of Mind When I was a medical student in the mid-1990s, many of the newer generation antipsychotics used to treat schizophrenia, such as risperidone and olanzapine, were just coming on the market. My psychiatry rotation was at the famed Bellevue Hospital in New York, and half of the unit to which I was assigned was filled with patients in clinical trials of many of those drugs. In many cases, these were double-blinded, placebo controlled trials, but that was a bit of a f

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53904/53904.swf", width:"530", height:"550", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Barcoding the world From Canada to Taiwan, barcoding is a truly global phenomenon. Researchers are conducting barcoding projects that aim to catalog Earth's trees, birds, and fish. Staff writer Bob Grant traveled to Taipei to attend the Second International Barcode of Life Conferen

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53903/plainsight.swf", width:"425", height:"575", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Hiding in Plain Sight DNA barcoding can help uncover new species that are morphologically indistinguishable from closely related species. In some cases, these look-alikes were misidentified for decades. Here are some examples of species whose barcodes differ enough to be co

Neurotrailblazer By Melinda Wenner Martha Shenton is pushing imaging boundaries in order to understand the schizophrenic brain © 2007 Jared Leeds ARTICLE EXTRAS The Etiology Molecular Mysteries Gazing Downstream Seeing Schizophrenia Pregnancy, Chromosomes, and Receptors Martha Shenton is what you might call a maverick. As the director of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory in Boston, s

The Barcoding Factory How one facility sequences 125,000 barcodes per year By Bob Grant Related Articles Cataloging Life Hiding in plain sight Slideshow: Barcoding the world Back pocket barcoder? The problem with plants On an October afternoon, I watch as Kate Crosby uses a DNA extraction robot to purify genetic material from frog tissues that a researcher had sent to the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) to be barcoded. She loads the

From kinase to cancer The story of discovering PI3 kinase, and what it means for a fundamental pathway in cancer. By Lewis Cantley In 1987 I attended a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor on phosphatidylinositol signaling that turned out to be pivotal for me. A few years earlier I'd helped show that a phosphatidylinositol (PI) kinase activity copurified with various oncoprotein tyrosine kinases, and that this association was critical for the ability of these oncoproteins to tran

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53942/pip.swf", width:"520", height:"780", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Putting the P in PIP by Lewis Cantley Click on the enzyme names or on the the arrows to follow the PIP pathway. Please download the Adobe Flash Player to view this content: Related Articles From Kinase to Cancer Following the PI 3-kinase

Watching Wolfson In 12 years, the UK institute has produced 600 papers, 6 spin-offs, and 31 patents. Does this mean its unique approach is working? By Stephen Pincock Related Articles 1 and new details on how a nitric oxide-cGMP-dependent pathway controls mitochondrial biogenesis and the body's energy balance.2,3 The standout feature of the institute is the way it has managed to achieve genuine interaction among researchers of different disciplines,

A Troubled History Antipsychotics are effective, but carry significant side effects and cost. What's on the horizon? ARTICLE EXTRAS The Treatments First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The Atypical Atypical? The next generation? The Lessons of CATIE Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Beyond Drugs Nonmedication Therapies Soon after antipsychotics entered the market in the 1950s, policymakers were so impressed with their benefits th

The Atypical Atypical? By Jonathan Scheff A new class of antipsychotics aims at NMDA receptors ARTICLE EXTRAS The Treatments A Troubled History First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The next generation? The Lessons of CATIE Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Beyond Drugs Nonmedication Therapies Until the 1980s, researchers didn't consider the excitatory amino acid N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) to be a receptor in mammalian brains. That began to c

First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs By Jonathan Scheff This table lists selected first-generation antipsychotic drugs. For a table of atypical agents, click here. For a table of the next generation of medications, click here. Drug Brand name(Manufacturer) Approval date Indications Mechanism Cost per 30-day supply* Contraindications/Adverse reactions Injection availability Other data Prochlorperazine October 1956 Seve

The next generation? ARTICLE EXTRAS The Treatments A Troubled History First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The Atypical Atypical? The Lessons of CATIE Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Beyond Drugs Nonmedication Therapies This table lists a selection of antipsychotics in the pipeline. For a story on a new class of drugs some are referring to as the "atypical atypicals," click here. For a table of first-generation drugs, click here. For a table of a

The Lessons of CATIE By Jonathan Scheff The landmark study found that older antipsychotics were just as effective as newer ones. Is anyone listening? ARTICLE EXTRAS The Treatments A Troubled History First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The Atypical Atypical? The next generation? Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Beyond Drugs Nonmedication Therapies When the results of the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) were

Spun out: Companies born at Wolfson The Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research was established to bring together the best of industry and academia, so it isn't surprising that several spinout companies have emerged from its walls in recent years. By Stephen Pincock Related Articles Watching Wolfson Ark Therapeutics (1997) has several products in late-stage clinical development, including a gene-based therapy for glioma with orphan drug sta

Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs This table lists the atypical antipsychotics. For a story on the lessons of the CATIE trial, click here. For a table of first-generation drugs, click here. For a table of drugs in the pipeline, click here. Drug Brand name(Manufacturer) Approval date Indications Mechanism Cost per 30-day supply* Contraindications/Adverse reactions Injection availability Other data Clozapine Clozaril (N

Beyond Drugs By Anne Harding People with schizophrenia need support systems, not just medications, to get well and stay healthy. ARTICLE EXTRAS The Treatments A Troubled History First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The Atypical Atypical? The next generation? The Lessons of CATIE Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Nonmedication Therapies Recovery from schizophrenia is much like being rescued from an island years after being shi

Nonmedication Therapies By Anne Harding Cognitive behavioral therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation may play a role in treatment ARTICLE EXTRAS The Treatments A Troubled History First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The Atypical Atypical? The next generation? The Lessons of CATIE Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Beyond Drugs Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is increasingly being recognized as a helpful approach for people with schizophren

How to get students to go into science.

To frame, or not to frame? Re: "The future of public engagement,"1 the first thing scientists need to do is abandon all talk of tentativeness, paradigms, and social construct when talking to the public about science. This model of science is appropriate in certain circles, but I see not a shred of evidence that it has improved public scientific literacy, and [I see] a great deal of evidence that it has been used by charlatans to dismiss scientific findings or push bogus alternativ

SIGNALING SYMPOSIA >> Lewis Cantley describes how he discovered a fundamental kinase in numerous cell signaling pathways (see "From Kinase to Cancer."). For more on signaling, check out symposia on the Architecture of Signaling Systems and the Geography of Signaling at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting in Washington, DC, December 1-5. Register at http://ascb.org/meetings. FILL UP ON BLADDERS >> Alison McCook writes about the quest to c

Joshua Tewksbury (left) hangs off the back of his truck as it rumbles from one field site to the next in southern Bolivia. At night, the team will be scanning these same roads for nightjars. Credit: Courtesy of Brendan Borrell" />Joshua Tewksbury (left) hangs off the back of his truck as it rumbles from one field site to the next in southern Bolivia. At night, the team will be scanning these same roads for nightjars. Credit: Courtesy of Brendan Borrell Ecologist Joshua Tewksbury and h

From a few human cases on the east coast in 2001, the West Nile virus rapidly spread west in 2002, the year represented in this map. Credit: Redrawn from CDC Map" />From a few human cases on the east coast in 2001, the West Nile virus rapidly spread west in 2002, the year represented in this map. Credit: Redrawn from CDC Map Eight years ago, a mysterious virus hit New York City. It caused encephalitis in eight patients at Flushing Hospital in Queens, who all lived within a two-mile ra

In late 2004, Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of biology at Butler University, was watching early media coverage of the Dover, Pa., intelligent design trial, which broadcast several fundamentalist ministers condemning evolution, and felt frustrated. What he saw was a war between science and religion, and science was losing. So Zimmerman decided to call for a truce. He asked a friend, a member of the clergy, to draft a letter to religious

Knockout mice perform just as well as wild type in learning and memory test. Credit: Courtesy of Valerie Galton" />Knockout mice perform just as well as wild type in learning and memory test. Credit: Courtesy of Valerie Galton About two years ago, Valerie Galton, a professor at Dartmouth College, was proceeding along a straightforward line of scientific inquiry. She and her colleagues had developed a knockout mouse deficient in type 2 deiodinase (D2), an enzyme that was thought to be

Used polyethylene knee bearings Credit: Courtesy of Dartmouth Biomedical Engineering Center for Orthopaedics (DBEC)." />Used polyethylene knee bearings Credit: Courtesy of Dartmouth Biomedical Engineering Center for Orthopaedics (DBEC). Inside a bright, freshly remodeled basement lab at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering, John Collier slides a small white rectangle of polyethylene plastic toward me. He and I, along with his colleague Michael Mayor, are sitting at a la

Heidi Elmendorf's passion for parasitology is matched only by her passion for teaching.

Credit: MethoxyRoxy / WIKIMEDIA" /> Credit: MethoxyRoxy / WIKIMEDIA The paper: D.C. Lie et al., "Wnt signaling regulates adult hippocampal neurogenesis," Nature, 437:1370-5, 2005. (Cited in 79 papers) The finding: After discovering neurogenesis in humans in 1998, Fred Gage's group at the Salk Institute in California went looking for signals that control the phenomenon in rodents. They found that overexpressing the signaling molecule Wnt increased neurogenesis, w

The enzyme AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) has been shown to be central to regulating several metabolic systems such as glucose uptake, oxidation of fatty acids, and insulin sensitivity, but the crystal structure of the mammalian enzyme remained elusive. Bing Xiao and others from the United Kingdom's National Institute for Medical Research used X-ray crystallography to map the structure of AMPK when bound to AMP and ATP, which the enzyme binds competitively,1 illuminating AMPK regul

While looking for regulators of neurogenesis, Hongjun Song at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues found that inhibiting the function of the gene disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) promoted neurogenic behavior.1 The gene is known as a susceptibility gene for mood disorders and schizophrenia, though this was not the focus of Song et al.'s research. They were interested in a previous observation that DISC1 is highly expressed in two areas of the adult brain that

Credit: © James Cavallini / Photo Researchers, Inc." /> Credit: © James Cavallini / Photo Researchers, Inc. J.C. Hermann et al., "Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function," Nature, 448:775-9, Aug. 16, 2007. The X-ray crystallographic structure of the gene product Tm0936 from the amidohydrolase superfamily, deposited by a structural genomics consortium, was used to dock, score, and sort a library of 22,500 high-energy intermediates

Credit: © 2007 Chris Lake Photography" /> Credit: © 2007 Chris Lake Photography Earlier this year, University of Chicago assistant professor Sean Crosson donned a cowboy hat and rode a giant foam bacterium across a stage as part of a student research presentation. The audience broke into laughter. While exploring the "hidden biology" of undescribed signaling pathways in the bacteria, Caulobacter crescentus, Crosson's group manages to share quite a few laughs, and the la

How one company helped seed San Diego's industry.