Which is more important for universities and colleges-Teaching or Research?

In universities here, research is the main criterion for appointment as well as promotion and  good researchers generally pay less attention to teaching. However, I feel one cannot remain abreast with recent developments in the field without being involved in research and the teaching will be very dogmatic. Also, only researchers can infuse a spirit of enquiry and innovation in their students.So, there is a need to balance the 2, not their separation. Quality of teaching must be an equal, if not more important, criterion for grading and promotion of teachers. What do you say?

Effects of glycemic load on metabolic risk markers... [Am J Clin Nutr. 2010] - PubMed result

A recent study suggests that diet with a decreased Glycemic Load does not ameliorate metabolic risk markers such as fasting plasma glucose, insulin , serum total cholesterol , LDL-cholesterol , HDL-cholesterol ,triacylglycerol, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, monocyte chemoattractant protein and prothrombotic plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 in overweight subjects. This means that such subjects should concentrate on reducung weight and cholesterol rather than restricting sugar intake. Effects of glycemic load on metabolic risk markers... [Am J Clin Nutr. 2010] - PubMed result

New antioxidants extracted from cellwalls of fruits

Check out this link for detailed information on Drugs.com: http://www.drugs.com/news/fruit-even-healthier-than-thought-study-19704.html
The website is http://www.drugs.com/, which has a database of over 24,000 drugs, plus a Drug Interactions checker and a pictorial Pill Identifier.

New screening method for Anticancer drugs

Many researchers believe tumour growth is driven by cancerous stem cells that, for reasons not yet understood, are highly resistant to standard treatments. Chemotherapeutic agents may kill off 99 percent of the cells in a tumor, but the stem cells that remain can make the cancer recur or spread to other tissues in the body to cause new cancers.

Stem cells, unlike mature cells, can constantly renew themselves and are thought to be the source of cancers when, through mutations in their DNA, they throw off their natural restraints.
a team at the Broad Institute devised a way of screening for drugs that attack cancer stem cells but leave ordinary cells unharmed.

Cancer stem cells are hard to maintain in sufficient numbers, but the Broad Institute team devised a genetic manipulation to keep breast cancer stem cells trapped in the stem cell state.

The team, led by Piyush B. Gupta, screened some 16,000 chemicals, including all known chemotherapeutic agents approved by the FDA. The team reported in the Cell that 32 of the chemicals selectively went after cancer stem cells. The screening system proves for the first time that it is possible to single out cancer stem cells with drugs that leave ordinary cells alone. Only one of the 32 chemicals is approved as a drug for cancer.

Another approach to concentrating on cancer stem cells, based on the use of antibodies, was reported this month by OncoMed Pharmaceuticals.

The cancer stem cell theory has been thrust into the spotlight in the last five years with the discovery of stem cells in many types of solid tumors, including those of the breast, brain, prostate, colon, bladder and pancreas.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/research/14cancer.html?_r=1&8au&emc=au

Online access results in more citations?

Science 20 February 2009:Vol. 323. no. 5917, p. 1025DOI: 10.1126/science.1154562

Brevia
Open Access and Global Participation in Science

James A. Evans and Jacob Reimer
Previous investigations into the impact of open-access journals on subsequent citations confounded open and electronic access and failed to track availability over time. With new data, we separated these effects. We demonstrate that a journal receives a modest increase in citations when it comes online freely, but the jump is larger when it first comes online through commercial sources. This effect reverses for poor countries where free-access articles are much more likely to be cited. Together, findings suggest that free Internet access widens the circle of those who read and make use of scientists' investigations.

Free online availability of scientific articles increases the likelihood of papers getting cited, especially in the developing world and in the biomedical sciences, according to this new study published in Science.
The question of whether open access drives citations has been hotly contested among scientists, policymakers, and editors, with several recent studies coming down on different sides of the debate. In the most extensive study to date -- covering around 26 million articles from more than 8,000 journals published from 1998 to 2005 -- University of Chicago sociologist James Evans, together with neurobiology grad student Jacob Reimer, found that making an article freely available on the internet increased the number of citations, but only by about 8%, which was far less than some previous claims. When the authors looked just at poorer countries, however, they found that the influence of open access was more than twice as strong. For example, in Bulgaria and Chile, researchers cited nearly 20% more open access articles, and in Turkey and Brazil, the number of citations rose by more than 25%. Free online availability "is not a huge driver of science in the first world, but it shapes parts of science in the rest of world," Evans told The Scientist. "Scientists and scholars in poorer countries are disproportionately citing articles that are freely available to them." "The results make a lot of sense," Gunther Eysenbach, a health policy and e-health researcher at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research, told The Scientist. "In countries with lower income, the [open access] effect is bigger than in countries where researchers have access to the literature anyway -- that's quite intuitive." Stevan Harnad, an open access advocate and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Quebec at Montreal who was not involved with the study, said that the authors should have compared public and private institutions closer to home to test whether the same effect was true in the developed world. "[Evans] looked at the big picture, but he could have cut the cake a bit finer and found the same effects if he compared the Harvards and the have nots," Harnad told The Scientist. "It's a shame that with such rich data he didn't look at other such important and pressing questions." Free online access conferred the greatest citation advantage in the life sciences, and no significant influence in three areas -- chemistry, physics and the social sciences -- which the authors chalked up to a culture of pre-print databases and personal archiving. Although open access had a modest overall influence, commercial online availability had an even greater effect. This indicates that most researchers are turning to the internet to find papers, though they may rely largely on institutional subscriptions, said Evans. "The larger influence is of things being online," whether commercially or not. Philip Davis, a Cornell University grad student in science communications who also studies the effects of open access on citation records, praised the article's size and breadth, but noted that Evans "can't measure the article-level details, he can only look at the journal level." The study lumped together articles from entire journal volumes, which overlooks author-pay models that make some but not all articles in a journal freely available, Davis noted.

What is translational Pharmacology?

Rather than going through the well worked phrases of science that goes ‘from bench to bedside’ or from ‘mouse to man’, a more accurate definition might be ‘the application of biomedical research (pre-clinical and clinical), conducted to support drug development, which aids in the identification of the appropriate patient for treatment (patient selection), the correct dose and schedule to be tested in the clinic (dosing regimen) and the best disease in which to test a potential agent (disease segment)’. A challenge to say, let alone do, but it is fast becoming one of the most exciting research areas for pharmacologists to work in, as they get to see the translation of their hypotheses into the clinic for testing. 

Translational pharmacology (TP) can answer some simple questions once a drug candidate has emerged from a screening cascade. These include: 

   

• What disease might this agent work in? By testing in a number of pre-clinical models of human disease and working out whether this is predictive of disease in man some direction can be provided pre-clinically. 

• What dosing schedule can we test in the clinic for maximum therapeutic benefit with minimum toxicity, based upon the scientific profile of the molecule and data from pre-clinical models? 

• Can we use pharmacodynamic ‘biomarker(s)’ (measures of biological effect in man) to determine whether the compound blocks or stimulates the target receptor or enzyme in man as it does in animals (commonly known as proof of mechanism)? What effect does modulating the target have on the cellular phenotype that we might be trying to modulate (known as proof of principle, or proof of biology)? Does induction of this phenotypic change result in therapeutic benefit to the patient, and at what dose does this occur in the patients (proof of concept)? 

• Can we identify patients from within a disease population who might benefit from the agent, either by a gene mutational change or an over/under-expression of the protein target receptor or enzyme as examples? 

• If an agent is being developed as second or third in the market place (usually termed a ‘best in class’ agent), what differentiating pharmacology might this compound require in order to encourage regulatory agencies, physicians, and patients to test it? 

  Frankly speaking, TP is only a journey, not a specific scientific technique.

source: Netrum

How Much Are Our Decisions Affected By the Subconscious Mind?

A new study has revealed that subtle messages and subconscious images, which are invisible to the naked eye (or rather, those we notice but fail to register), play a major role in our decision-making process. Researchersled by Joel Voss of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, showed volunteers 12 kaleidoscope images for 2 seconds each. In the mean time, the participants were also made to perform an unrelated number task to distract them from consciously committing the images to memory. After one minute, volunteers were asked to look at pairs of similar-looking images and choose the one they had seen before. They were also asked whether they were sure, had "a feeling" they were right, or were just guessing. Those who took a shot in the dark were as successful as the rest. "They were 70 to 80 per cent accurate; it would be only 50 per cent if it was chance," New Scientist magazine quoted Voss as saying. 

First available oral fungicidal agent.

Kishor Wasan, a pharmacologist at the University of British Columbia, needed a negative control. It was 2000, and he was investigating a new way to deliver anti-fungal drugs in pill form, generally cheaper and easier to administer than intravenous injections. "I said, 'Let's take a drug I know doesn't work'," Wasan recalls. He turned to amphotericin B, an antifungal membrane disruptor that Wasan had studied a decade earlier for his PhD, and is not normally absorbed by the body when administered orally. He embedded amphotericin B and a batch of other drugs into his newly devised lipid-based delivery vehicle, and fed them to rats. This turned out to be perhaps one of the worst negative control experiments ever - but a lucky break for Wasan.

Compared to the other drug treatments, the rats on amphotericin B had the highest blood levels and lowest kidney levels of the drug, indicating that the body more readily absorbed amphotericin B than any other drug. What's more, oral amphotericin B seemed to bypass the renal toxicity normally associated with intravenous forms of the drug (Antimicrob Agents Chemother, 47:3339-42, 2003).

Wasan was bewildered: "I thought, what the heck is going on?" Further experiments showed the drug was actually working: Amphotericin B fed to rats wiped out Aspergillus fumigatus infections (Drug Dev Ind Pharm, 33:703-7, 2007), and 90% ofCandida albicans kidney infections, which is similar to the 95% success rate seen with intravenous delivery. All with no renal toxicity. "The fact that we've got an oral formulation that's mimicking IV - that's a major finding," Wasan says.

"Amp-B is basically the best antifungal agent we have; the problem with it is that it has to be given IV and it's toxic," says David Stevens, a clinical mycologist at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif. Eliminate the need for IV and "they've got half the battle solved," he adds. "And if it's less toxic, it's a home run."

Amphotericin B in poppable pill form could treat systemic fungal infections, particularly in patients with cancer or HIV/AIDS. This may make it highly profitable in the developed world, but it can also combat parasitic infections, such as trypanosomiasis and visceral leishmaniasis, that are more prevalent in developing nations. "We've got a first-world need where we can make money," says Wasan, "and a third-world need where you can sell the drug at a subsidized cost."

To commercialize his formulation, in 2007 Wasan teamed up with the UBC chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, an international organization that aims to improve access to medicines and research on neglected diseases at academic research institutions. In May 2008, Wasan licensed his oral amphotericin B formulation to iCo Therapeutics, a Vancouver-based biotech company, which agreed to make the drug available at a subsidized cost to combat leishmaniasis in developing nations. It's a "win-win" situation, says John Clement, iCo's chief business officer.

Wasan's amphotericin B formulation could prove to be the world's first available oral fungicidal agent. (Pfizer's oral antifungal Diflucan (fluconazole) stops fungal growth but does not kill the infectious agent.) But Raleigh, NC-based BioDelivery Sciences International (BDSI) has its own oral formulation of amphotericin B based on its patented Bioral delivery technology, which wraps the drug in a coiling structure of alternating lipid layers, currently in phase I trials. (Clearly, amphotericin B is more 'oral-izable' than originally believed.) Still, Wasan thinks his drug, in preclinical trials, should have an advantage. His formulation solubilizes the drug in a glyceride-based liquid, whereas Bioral relies on a liposomal suspension, which can be difficult to bring up to a commercial scale, he notes.

Raphael Mannino, BDSI's chief scientific officer, disagrees. "This is a very simple manufacturing process," he says. What's more, BDSI's formulation is effective, nontoxic, and "even in suspension, we have very long stability of our product," he says.

The irony of Wasan's drug discovery, he notes, is that he didn't even want to study amphotericin B again after finishing his PhD; he only resorted to the drug because he expected it to fail. "Am I lucky as hell? Yes. Did I think it was going to work? No. Am I fully believing it? Well, human studies will be needed to play this out."

Becoming a scientist

What qualities do you need to succeed in biomedical research? Some of the world's most prominent biomedical researchers may surprise you with their answers. As you'll see in their video responses, they say that intelligence alone is insufficient; success in science also depends on several other qualities.
Visit http://www.hhmi.org/becoming/