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

Living with Schizophrenia By Anne Harding Hallucinations are just the beginning: Negative symptoms and lowered expectations make for a tough day-to-day struggle. ARTICLE EXTRAS The Disease Robin Cunningham Marianne Emanuel A Very Expensive Disease Schizophrenia in Childhood Lina Sorenson, 49, knows when it's time for her to start taking her Stelazine for her schizophrenia. It begins with thinking she can control other people's thoughts a

Robin Cunningham By Anne Harding He shows it's possible to survive, and thrive, with schizophrenia. © Dustin FensterMacher | Wonderful Machine ARTICLE EXTRAS The Disease Living with Schizophrenia Marianne Emanuel A Very Expensive Disease Schizophrenia in Childhood Robin Cunningham's grandfather had schizophrenia and hung himself in a state hospital. His uncle met exactly the same fate, while his aunt tried to k

Marianne Emanuel By Anne Harding A nurse who cares for the whole person - body, and spirit. © Dustin FensterMacher | Wonderful Machine ARTICLE EXTRASThe DiseaseLiving with SchizophreniaRobin CunninghamA Very Expensive DiseaseSchizophrenia in ChildhoodMarianne Emanuel was ready to give up on nursing in 1991. At 37, she'd worked in numerous settings, including hospitals, intensive care units, and doctor's offices. "After

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

1,2 "They have positive symptoms, they have negative symptoms, they have cognitive deficits that look very much like what you see in schizophrenia," says NYU's Javitt. For example, NMDA receptors are involved in the formation of memories but not in the retention of old memories; similarly, patients with schizophrenia have trouble forming, but not retaining, memories, Javitt says. NMDA receptors are also involved in pitch matching in the auditory cortex and in certain visual tasks, and schiz

Betting on Better Organs © 3D4medical.com Will you soon be able to buy your own bladder? By Alison McCook Related Articles 1 Patients are left with less tissue to function as intestine, which can complicate things even further. Some studies have also linked the procedure to a slightly higher risk of cancer. Performing this procedure in older adults, who have relatively fewer years left to develop complications, is one thing. But what

1While no one really knows what causes the GAD67 abnormalities - they might be due to variants in the gene for GAD67, problems with gene expression, or both - the ultimate cause may not really matter, says Lewis, since drugs might be able to regulate neuronal activity by targeting these downstream problems directly.His lab has discovered that GAD67 abnormalities affect only a subset of neurons: those that produce parvalbumin and somatostatin.2 Of note, these cells are also involved in certain ty

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

From kinase to cancer The story of discovering PI3 kinase, and what it means for a fundamental pathway in cancer. By Lewis Cantley Related Articles 1 I suspected that this enzyme might be placing a phosphate on the 3 position of the inositol ring to produce phosphatidylinsitol-3-phosphate (PI-3-P), but I realized that this would be heretical to the field and would require rigorous chemical proof, since PI-3-P had not been previously described. So, at the Col

1 However, a systematic statistical meta-analytic approach indicates less evidence for DISC1 and RGS4 (see 2 In the past the interpersonal environment of the family was thought to play a role in susceptibility, but this does not appear to be the case. Nonetheless, some differences in expressed emotion within families are associated with differences in severity of illness in the patients. The second half of the 20th century also saw the development of biochemical hypotheses for schizophrenia

Following the PI 3-kinase pathway By Lewis Cantley Phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI 3K) acts upstream of myriad cellular pathways, including those that regulate protein synthesis and tumorigenesis. In this example, PI 3K phosphorylates the lipid PI -4,5-P2 to PI -3,4,5- P3, also known as PIP 3. PIP 3 binds to serine/threonine kinase (AKT) and recruits it to the membrane where PDK1 phosphorylates the kinase and sets it into action. Among a number of targets, AKT phosphor

The Treatments ARTICLE EXTRAS A Troubled History First-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs The Atypical Atypical? The next generation? The Lessons of CATIE Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs Beyond Drugs Nonmedication Therapies When you add up the direct costs of treating patients with schizophrenia, it is a staggering number: $22 billion in the United States alone. As effective as many of them are, antipsychotic drugs are costly, and many have signific

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

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53929/tree.swf", width:"510", height:"550", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); The Hybritech Family Tree By Kelly Rae Chi Hybritech was funded by venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a well known firm in Silicon Valley that has gone on to fund Amazon, Google, and hundreds of other information and biotechnology firms. Among Hybritech's b

In 1985, as a professor of physiology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Lewis Cantley and his colleagues discovered the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway that determined much of his later career. Now, as a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, Cantley continues to investigate PI3K, the biochemical pathways that regulate normal mammalian cell growth, and the defects that cause cell transformation. In "From Kinase to Cancer," he discusses how the past two

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Schematic drawing depicting Dr. J.J. Woodward's mechanism for taking photographs through a microscope. Inset: Histological preparations photographed by J.J. Woodward, circa 1876 Credit: Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine, AFIP, Photo: © Jason Varney | Varneyphoto.com" />Schematic drawing depicting Dr. J.J. Woodward's mechanism for taking photographs through a microscope. Inset: Histological preparations photographed by J.J. Woodward, circa 1876 Credit: Otis His