Translational medicine. The concept was invoked frequently last week at the Days of Molecular Medicine Conference (DMM). It’s an approach to medicine in which researchers are urged to take the data they have collected in the laboratory and find a way to apply it directly to patients. The term also suggests that researchers and doctors must work together, and that collaboration among researchers in different fields is essential if medicine is to advance.

Our group in front of the Karolinska Institute

The Marshall Protocol epitomizes translational medicine, which is why, in my opinion, our poster presentations at the Conference were, for the most part, viewed with great interest and optimism.

The researchers who filled the lecture and poster halls at DMM had travelled to Sweden from the most prestigious universities in the world. It didn’t take long to realize that many of them have spent their entire careers looking for faulty genes that might be able to cause mental illnesses such as autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Read more

Several recent reports have made it abundantly clear that until drug companies understand the infectious pathogenesis of chronic disease, they will continue to churn out dangerous drugs with numerous side effects – drugs that only offer “Band–Aids” for symptoms at the cost of billions of dollars to the consumer.

A few days ago, researchers at Stanford University released the results of a study that tracked the effects of a drug called Sutent on patients with kidney cancer or gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST). Sutent, which is widely being tested for the treatment of several other cancers, works by starving tumors — stopping them from growing blood vessels to feed themselves.

Fifteen percent of study subjects taking Sutent developed heart failure, a chronic condition in which the heart loses its ability to pump blood properly. Sutent, made under the generic name sunitinib by Pfizer, has also been shown to damage heart cells.

Read more

What do Microsoft and medical research have in common?

Let’s start with the simple fact that they have both been wildly successful. Microsoft has 79,000 employees, global annual revenue in the year 2007 exceeding $51 billion, and has made more than 12,000 of its employees millionaires simply by increases in stock valuation. Additionally, Microsoft’s market share for the operating systems on desktop computers, by one 2003 estimate, is 90%. Not bad for a garage startup.

In the United States alone spending on medical research is at or near the $100 billion mark in the year 2007. That’s about $300 for every man, woman, and child and more than doubles what was spent just a decade ago. According to Dan Fox, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, a philanthropic group that works on health policy issues, the data in a recent JAMA review makes it plain that “we are spending huge amounts of money, more than any other country, to develop new drugs and devices and other treatments.”

Read more

Over the course of the past few decades, researchers have tested everything from seizure medications to Viagra on mice. Scientists have bred special strains or “lines” of rats specifically for experimentation, with names such as the albino Wistar rat, the Sprague Dawley rat, and the Lister black-hooded rat. Because they are quick to reach sexual maturity and are easily kept and bred in captivity, rodents have been praised as prime experimental subjects. But an increasing number of studies, including a wide body of molecular modeling research, have revealed substantial differences between the immune systems of rats and the immune systems of humans. These studies provide a novel line of reasoning on age-old questions - How many of our experiments are valid? Are men simply tall mice without tails? Can we really take the data derived from experiments on rats and apply it to human beings?

Mice have been used in labs for decades.

The answers to the above questions are important for anyone who hopes to fully understand chronic inflammatory disease. “Unraveling the intricacies of human [Vitamin] D metabolism is often made extremely difficult by the intermingling of murine [mouse] and human biologies in the literature,” says biomedical researcher Trevor Marshall PhD. Armed with an understanding of the differences between humans and mice, we can better determine the accuracy of the studies we are presented with, and detect the flaws in studies that do not support the correct model of chronic disease.

Read more

During the 1960s, a large number of studies began to point to the idea that estrogen therapy might ease the pangs of menopause. In a best selling book called Feminine Forever, a Brooklyn gynecologist named Robert Wilson argued that menopause was an illness rather than a natural state associated with aging. Soon, an increasing number of older women began to take supplemental estrogen in an effort to replace the hormones that their own bodies had stopped secreting. The treatment, known as hormone replacement therapy or HRT, became one of the most popular medical treatments in America.

The American Heart Association, the American College of Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists all agreed that a sufficient number of studies had been done to prove that HRT was unequivocally helpful in helping older women ward off heart disease and osteoporosis. By 2001, 15 million women were taking HRT, including 5 million elderly women.

Then, in 1998, a clinical trial concluded that estrogen therapy actually increases the likelihood that women with heart disease will suffer a second heart attack. It was followed by a trial in 2002 which concluded that HRT puts postmenopausal women at a greater risk for heart disease, stroke, blood clots, breast cancer and even dementia. Suddenly, It became painfully clear that HRT may offer a benefit to women who begin to use it early in life, but for those who start the treatment in their later years, it can be very dangerous.

Gary Taubes writes in The New York Times Magazine, “The question of how many women may have died prematurely or suffered strokes or breast cancer because they were taking a pill that their physicians had prescribed to protect them against heart disease lingers unanswered. A reasonable estimate would be tens of thousands.”

Read more