One year ago, researchers at the National Cancer Institute published a paper that linked Chronic Fatigue Syndrome with an obscure retrovirus known as XMRV. The article caused a stir because 4% of the supposedly healthy people in the study were infected with the virus. That could mean nearly 12 million Americans are infected with a poorly understood virus that potentially causes a poorly understood disease.

There has followed a mad dash to commercialize a blood test for XMRV, since arguably, the nation’s blood supply needs to be screened for the virus. Unfortunately, progress on this endeavor has been slow.

Like HIV-the virus that causes AIDS-XMRV is a retrovirus. XMRV has also been associated with prostate cancer, although no one really knows whether the virus causes diseases of any kind in humans.

Labs involved the effort to develop an XMRV blood test include those at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute, as well private sector programs at Roche, Abbott and Gen-Probe.

Scientists at Abbott are working with the Cleveland Clinic and Emory University. They have created unequivocally positive blood samples from monkeys that were deliberately infected with XMRV. The infected monkeys produced antibodies to 3 proteins on the surface of the virus, but blood levels of these antibodies became undetectabe within weeks after the infection. Tests based on these antibodies can therefore generate false negative results. False negative results can also be caused by the unusually long delay between the time the monkeys were infected with the virus and the time the antibodies appeared.

Even if these issues can be overcome and the antibody test subsequently proven to be useful on human blood, there would remain additional challenges in commercializing the test. For example, the elapsed time between when the blood is obtained and when it is tested could impact test results.

“When there is a new agent that we don’t know a lot about, it’s always a process,” Michael Busch lamented in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Bush is the director of San Francisco’s Blood Systems Research Institute and a participant in the working group tasked by the Feds to study the potential impact of XMRV on the nation’s blood supply.

Final Thought: It’s hard to criticize a proactive effort to commercialize a blood test for a virus that could be contaminating our nation’s blood supply, but it sure would be nice to know that XMRV actually causes human disease, and that it actually can be transmitted through a blood transfusion. #CartBeforeTheHorse?

It’s beginning to look like chocolate, especially dark chocolate, really and truly is a heart healthy snack, though only if it’s consumed in small quantities.

A delectable taste of this news came last spring, in the form of a study by German scientists which appeared in the European Heart Journal. It was a retrospective study of nearly 20,000 people, and it showed that folks in the highest quartile for chocolate consumption (meaning they consumed 7.5 grams of chocolate per day—the equivalent of 2 to 3 small squares of a Hershey bar), had lower blood pressure, a 27% lower risk of heart attack, and a 48% lower risk of stroke than those in the lowest quartile (about 1.7 grams per day).

Now, a study in Cardiovascular Pharmacology has lent credence to those findings by suggesting a mechanism through which chocolate reduces blood pressure.

In the new study, Ingrid Persson and colleagues at Linkoping University showed that dark chocolate inhibits the activity of the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE). This enzyme helps regulate fluids and salt metabolism in the body. It is the target of many well-known antihypertensive drugs including captopril, lisinopril and enalopril.

To reach these conclusions, Persson’s team somehow managed to recruit 16 volunteers who were between the ages of 20 and 45, and convinced them to eat 75 grams (about 2 1/2 ounces) of dark chocolate which had a cocoa content of 72%. The team measured ACE activity in the subjects’ blood before they consumed the treat, and again 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 3 hours later.

The scientists found that 3 hours after the intreprid volunteers consumed the chocolate, ACE activity was 18% lower than the baseline established before they had the treat. That’s about the same level of ACE inhibition generated by those prescription drugs!

“I was surprised by the great effect,” Persson told MyHealthNewsDaily.

One caveat here as we approach the holidays and the overwhelming urge to overeat that they generate in most of us. The benefits of chocolate are achieved after consuming small amounts of chocolate—we’re talking about 100 calories-worth. No further benefits accrue to those who gobble down more than that, and of course those calories add up quickly. In no way do these studies suggest that consuming large quantities of chocolate is healthy, and certainly chocolate should not be substituted for other healthy foods like fruits, veggies and whole grains. Efforts to maintain a healthy body weight are still of paramount importance. And exercise is, too.

Still, with chocolate, it’s looking more and more like a little bit, consumed on a regular basis, can go a long way toward improving heart health. Make mine Lindt!

Scientists know that our perceptions about taste and texture drive our food preferences. They know quite a lot about the role of taste in this regard, and the results of some recent experiments have shed new light on the role of texture as well, particularly as it relates to foods containing starch.

Starch is a major component of potatoes, rice, corn, wheat and the enormous variety of foods derived from them. It is also added to many other products from maple syrup to pudding. In fact starch accounts for 40-60% of the calorie content in the average Western diet, and more than that in many Asian and third-world diets. 

Humans begin digesting starch in the mouth, where the salivary glands secrete an enzyme known as amylase. This enzyme breaks down starch and other complex carbohydrates into simpler sugar molecules which end-up being absorbed from the small intestine into the bloodstream.

For years, scientists knew that people’s DNA contains between 2 and 15 copies of AMY1, the gene that codes for amylase. Recently, Abigail Mandel and colleagues at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia hypothesized that the number of copies of the AMY1 gene that a person has might impact the speed with which that person breaks down starch in his or her diet. This in turn might affect the way that person perceives the texture of starchy foods, and ultimately his or her preferences for that food.

To test their theory, Mandel’s team determined the number of AMY1 genes and the amount and activity of salivary amylase in 62 healthy volunteers. Sure enough, the team found that people with more AMY1 genes produced more salivary amylase. Then, the team asked the volunteers to swish-and-swirl starch-containing solutions in their mouths and rate the “runniness” of these solutions after 60 seconds. The high-amylase producers found the solutions to be “more runny” than the low amylase producers.

So what, you ask? Well, Mandel’s team believes this finding helps explain why people experience starch-containing foods as creamy vs. slimy, or sticky vs. watery. In the case of ice cream and hard chocolate for example, Mandel’s team had shown in a separate study that people who really dig these treats seem to be particularly enthralled by creamy sensations that start off as “solid” and then subsequently melt away in the mouth.

“We all have had the experience of liking a food that someone else complains is too tacky, or slippery, or gritty, or pulpy,” Breslin explained to the Wall Street Journal. “This is why a given line of product often comes in different textural forms,” like orange juice with and without pulp, he added.

Of course, an abundance of salivary amylase is just a part of a much larger food preference story. Scientists have, for example, identified another gene that renders bitter tastes more intense and shown that people who have this gene tend not to consume bitter-tasting vegetables like kale and spinach. And learned phenomena also play a role: people who don’t initially like scotch for example, can wind up enjoying it with “practice.”

Breslin’s amylase study appears in PLoS ONE.

It’s hard to know whether Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Hereafter, prompted a recent surge in interest concerning near-death experiences, or whether the flick simply tapped into the surge. Regardless, an otherworldly 15 million American adults claim to have had a near-death experience, according to the results of 1997 survey. That number might be a lot higher now that automatic external defibrillators have become commonplace.
 
It’s also hard to know what to make of these claims from a scientific standpoint, but there’s no denying that near-death experiences are described in stunningly similar ways by people with diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, and across all age groups, right down to toddlers.

People typically describe a near-death experience as a sensation of floating above one’s body, and/or moving through a tunnel towards a light. Often, there are associated feelings profound of joy and peace, and visions of past experiences or deceased acquaintances. The experience usually ends with a realization that it’s not time to die, and a return to one’s injured or failing body.

Some people who’ve experienced the phenomenon and then manage to recover their health undergo personality changes that they attribute to the experience. Others, as is the case with the lovely French reporter played by Cecile de France in Hereafter, become convinced there is an afterlife.

What have scientists learned about the physiologic underpinnings of near-death experiences? The answer, as you might guess, is not much.

The traditional explanation, first promulgated 25 years ago by British neuroscientist Susan Blackmore, was that cerebral oxygen deprivation caused the experience. She noted that astronauts and fighter pilots experience visual disturbances and cognitive abnormalities during high altitude maneuvers in oxygen-poor environments, and their experiences mimic near-death experiences. Alas, a recent study seemed to contradict her theory by showing that people who had near-death experiences actually had higher oxygen levels in their blood than those who did not.

Earlier this year, a study of cardiac-arrest patients in the Journal of Critical Care reported finding high blood levels of carbon dioxide in patients who had near-death experiences. This condition is known to cause hallucinations and out-of-body experiences, even in people who are not on death’s door.

A second study of dying patients in the Journal of Palliative Medicine found that EEG patterns in dying patients revealed a spike in electrical activity just before they passed away. The surge began in one part of the brain and spread in wave-like fashion to other regions. The study authors postulated that such activity could trigger visual and auditory experiences consistent with near-death experiences.

Other scientists have proposed that areas of the brain which control memory could become activated by severe physiologic abnormalities, and that could explain the recollections some people have as a part of their near-death experience. Similar abnormalities could trigger the release of endorphins which could in turn evoke feelings of joy and euphoria.

As for the actual existence of an afterlife, we’ll leave that discussion to others.

After assuming control of the House in the mid-term elections, Republicans vowed to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, the health reform law signed by the Big O last March. Thank heavens therefore, that the Boehners were too busy congratulating themselves to even notice those federal helicopters dumping $1 billion in cash on some needy biotech companies just as the election results were being tallied.

Yep, it happened. Federal disbursements in the form of grants and tax credits were made last week, as required by a provision in the reform law known as the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project Program. According to the terms of this Program, biotech and life sciences companies with less than 250 employees could apply for federal funds to cover research costs they had incurred in the last 2 years, so long as the research focused on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of chronic diseases.

The Program amounted to nod by the Feds to biotech and life sciences, 2 industries that had been battered to near oblivion by the Great Recession of 2008-2010. Biotech and life sciences fared worse than most industries because the core of their business, research and development, consumes enormous capital early-on and there are long delays before these projects hit pay-dirt–if they ever do. Early-stage companies in these industries are therefore high risk investments, the sort VCs steer clear from when the going gets tough.

Unfortunately for the targeted industries, the Program turned out to be a small nod, indeed. It attracted 5,600 applications, far more than expected, and by rule all 4,600 that met congressional requirements had to be funded. With the pool capped at a bil, qualifying projects attracted far fewer dollars than requested.

The maximal allowed disbursement was supposed to be $5 million per project. As it turned out, no project received more than $244,000 (some firms received more than this because they submitted proposals for multiple projects). 

The grant requests were reviewed by the National Institutes of Health and Internal Revenue Service. “It was an indication of the great opportunity and interest that there were so many applications received,” NIH Director Francis Collins told the Washington Post.

“Of course, with a $1 billion total amount of money available and with so many of the applicants being judged appropriate for this program, it was not possible to make awards as large as $5 million.”

The Fallout
Biotech CEOs are thankful for the pittance, but they’re back on the street, in search of serious cash. For many of them, it’s already too late.

The Pelosis are kicking themselves for not allocating more than $1 billion to fund the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project Program in the first place. It’s the same mistake they made with the stimulus package–they underfunded that one too, by golly.

The Boehners, are, arms crossed, not permitting any more “government handouts” like this. Not on their watch. It doesn’t matter that biotech and life sciences are among the few industries in which the US maintains a competitive advantage over international economic rivals. It doesn’t matter that firms in these industries can serve as a legitimate source of job creation for decades to come…if only they can survive the Great Recession and that may only happen with, you guessed it, federal support.

A right-minded idea, yet it seems nobody’s happy with the outcome. Back to the drawing board!

Amid the burgeoning worldwide epidemic of obesity, scientists and pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop drugs to help people lose weight. The effort has failed spectacularly so far, and 2 recent setbacks have fueled increasing pessimism that things will change for the better anytime soon. 

The first setback occurred last month when the FDA put the kibosh on Arena Pharmaceuticals’ New Drug Application for lorcaserin, an investigational weight loss drug. In rejecting the application, the FDA  cited several concerns including low efficacy and the results of animal studies which suggested that it increased the risk of breast cancer.

In its letter to the San Diego-based drug company, the FDA said “the weight loss efficacy of lorcaserin in overweight and obese individuals without type 2 diabetes is marginal.” The letter also said the regulatory agency needed more information from a study that is now underway before considering the matter further, and that if Arena could not provide data to “alleviate concern regarding clinical relevance of the tumor findings in rats, additional clinical studies may be required to obtain a more robust assessment of lorcaserin’s benefit-risk profile.”

The FDA’s snub of lorcaserin was followed in short order by an announcement by Abbott Laboratories that it was withdrawing the diet drug Meridia from the market. Abbott’s decision was prompted by FDA findings that showed the drug’s limited efficacy was outweighed by significant risks associated with the drug.

Meridia had long-since been known to increase blood pressure, but the death knell came in the form of a European study which showed it was associated with a 16% increased risk of cardiovascular problems including heart attacks, strokes and death.

Nearly 100,000 Americans take Meridia at the moment. The FDA advised all of them to stop taking the drug, and instructed physicians to stop prescribing it. European regulators had taken Meridia off the market in January.

“It’s been very frustrating,” Jennifer Lovejoy, the incoming president of the Obesity Society told the Washington Post. “We desperately need safe new drugs so we can begin to have something effective against this public health epidemic.”

Meanwhile, experts continue to emphasize that the best way to stay healthy is to avoid gaining weight in the first place by eating well and exercising regularly…

A team of scientists at the Mars candy company announced recently that it has almost completed a project to sequence the genome of the cacao tree, whose seeds are used to produce chocolate. The team hopes its contributions will help scientists create cacao trees that are less vulnerable to disease and easier to grow.

Mars makes all-time favorite candies like Snickers and M&Ms. The company spent nearly $10 million on the project, yet it intends to make its findings public once the work is done.

“The information is so rich and so accurate we felt there was no reason to hold back,” Howard-Yana Shapiro, Mars’ global staff officer of plant science and research told the Washington Post.

Traditional cacao tree breeding methods involve a time-consuming, hit-or-miss process in which plant scientists try to find the trees with the best traits (for example, producing the sweetest chocolate or a tendency to be disease-free) and reproduce them. That process can require 15 years to complete because it takes that long to be sure the tree can defend itself against diseases.

But once the cacao tree’s DNA has been sequenced, scientists hope they can complete this process in 2-3 years. For example, by studying the genetic code from a young tree, they can find out quickly whether it possesses genes that can help it fend off diseases.

It’s possible the Mars group’s discovery might lead to better-tasting chocolate as well. According to Shapiro, the amount of fatty acids in the cocoa is key to the taste of the end-product. “Now finally, we have insight on how to stabilize it and raise it over time,” Shapiro told the Post.

Nearly 70% of the world’s chocolate comes from the cacao trees of West Africa, particularly Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

In a common version of the “Ultimatum Game,” Player A is asked to dole out $40 to himself and Player B. He can distribute the loot in either a $35-$5 split, or in a $25-$15 split. If Player B accepts the payout, both parties keep their cash, but if Player B says no, both players go home empty.

Theoretically, Player B should accept either offer: five dollars is, after all, better than nothing. It turns out though, that fairly often Player B will reject the lowball offer, presumably because he finds it insulting.

In a fascinating riff on this observation back in 2007, Harvard University professor Terry Burnham measured testosterone levels in a cohort of men that had volunteered to play the Ultimatum Game. Burnham observed that only 7% of Player B’s with below-average testosterone rejected the $5 offer, whereas 45% of Player B’s with above average testosterone rejected the offer.

Recently, a team of scientists led by Maurice Levi of the University of British Columbia wondered whether the notorious male sex hormone might similarly affect business outcomes from corporate take-over attempts. Merger-and acquisition deals are indeed similar to the Ultimatum Game with one important exception: companies that receive a takeover bid can negotiate a better price. And of course, stock price shifts, regulatory matters and a host of other variables often complicate matters.

Still, what the heck?

The researchers studied 357 takeover bids that took place between 1997 and 2007. Not being able to measure testosterone levels of the involved CEOs retrospectively, they used the age of the CEO as a proxy, since it is a known fact that testosterone levels decline with age.

Lo and behold they found that young (high-testosterone) CEOs who launched takeover bids were 20% more likely to withdraw their bids later after initially being rebuffed by the target company. They postulated that withdrawing the bid altogether rather than negotiating a higher price was a way for the young, high-testosterone bidder CEO to demonstrate “dominance.”

Maybe the Securities and Exchange commission should require publicly traded companies to disclose their CEOs’ testosterone levels in their quarterly reports…

With things in Washington as politically charged as they are nowadays, it’s unlikely that any kind of tax legislation will be passed before the mid-term elections. That’s unfortunate, since many key parts of our tax code are governed by laws that will expire at the end of this year. The combination of expiring tax laws and legislative gridlock makes it tough for people and businesses to plan for things like, oh say, their future.

As an example, take President Obama’s suggestion that Congress should permanently extend the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit.

The Big O wants the credit increased by 20% for eligible US-based projects, a move that would save companies over $100 billion during the next decade. If passed, the bump would be by far the largest increase since the credit was introduced in 1981.

The Research and Experimentation Tax Credit had been extended 13 times since 1981. Last year however, Congress allowed the credit to lapse amid unprecedented partisan bickering.

“Making this provision permanent would give businesses the certainty they need to accelerate R&E investments to create jobs today and in the future,” said the White House in a press release.

Trade groups representing the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries support the R&E tax credit, but venture capitalists that fund life sciences companies are far less sanguine. In part, this is because the companies they back, who need R&E funding the most, don’t see any near-term benefits from the credit, since they typically don’t have tax liabilities to offset.

But it’s actually much worse than that for venture investors. See, the administration’s proposal pays for the credit by changing the way “carried interest” is taxed. For 30 years, carried interest has been taxed at the long term capital gains tax rate. The new proposal calls for it to be treated as ordinary income, a huge negative for venture investors. The Big O’s proposal is in effect extracting a pound of flesh from VCs in order to create a credit for companies that are attempting to kill the companies they back.

“This policy would essentially double the taxes for venture capitalists — our country’s job creators, discouraging investment in new companies at a time when Congress should be doing all it can to support the start-up ecosystem,” said the National Venture Capital Association.

A single small dose of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression for up to 6 months in terminal cancer patients, according a report by Los Angeles-based scientists.

To reach these conclusions, Charles Grob and colleagues at UCLA Medical Center performed a small study involving 12 subjects with Stage IV cancer and anxiety that was attributed to their underlying condition. Each subject had 2 therapeutic sessions, one involving psilocybin and the other involving niacin, a drug that provokes flushing and nausea but has no psychological effects.

The drugs were administered in an inpatient clinical research unit. During the 6 hours after drug administration, subjects were asked to relax in bed, wear sunglasses and listen to music. They were monitored closely throughout.

Subjects received a low dose of psilocybin, 0.2 mg/kg. Every single one of them reported that their mood improved for at least 2 weeks after administration of the hallucinogen. In some cases, objective tests of mood and anxiety revealed significant improvements 6 full months after treatment. Most also said they needed to take fewer narcotic pain medications after receiving the drug. There were no adverse reactions.

“This is a landmark study in many ways,” Stephen Ross, clinical director of the Center of Excellence on Addiction at New York University‘s Langone Medical Center told the LA Times. “This is the first time a paper like this has come out in a prestigious psychiatric journal in 40 years.”

However, Grob, Ross and others involved in psilocybin research strongly advised cancer patients against experimenting with psilocybin on their own. The drugs “are dangerous…people can have fearful reactions, panic reactions, engage in dangerous behavior and do great harm to themselves,” they explained.

The write-up appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry.