Experts Said it Wouldn’t Work, But Rescue Dog and Dying 4-yr-old Proved Them Wrong

The 2012 Scenario, BZ Riger, February 11, 2012

Michelle Leifer, Vetstreet.com Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Experts Said it Wouldn’t Work, But Rescue Dog and Dying 4-yr-old Proved Them Wrong 

As nearly anyone who has adopted a pet from a shelter can attest, there’s something special about a rescued animal; it’s as if they can sense they’ve been given a second chance at life. That’s certainly the case with Juno, a Belgian Malinois who was adopted just days before she was to be euthanized. But since coming to live with her family in Alcoa, Tenn., she now has taken on the role of rescuer to a dying boy whom experts believed was not suited for any service dog.

Four-year-old Lucas Hembree suffers from Sanfilippo syndrome, an inherited, metabolic disease that causes children to lose the ability to speak, walk and eat. The disease also causes severe neurological damage that leads to aggressive behavior, hyperactivity and seizures.

With no cure or treatment currently available, Lucas isn’t expected to live past the age of 15 and may be in a vegetative state by the time he is eight. Realizing that every moment is extra precious, Chester and his wife, Jennifer, wanted their son to experience as much as he could while still having the capacity to enjoy life.

A Faith-filled Shelter Visit

When the disease started to take a toll on Lucas’ joints, Chester looked into getting a service dog to keep Lucas steady when he walked.

“I was told that a service dog would cost at least $15,000, and that Lucas wasn’t a good candidate because of his deteriorating abilities and his behavior,” Chester says. “I refused to accept this answer.”

A combination of prayer and persistence led Chester to Juno. “I came across a posting about her on a rescue group’s website,” he says. “I had the feeling in my gut that I had to go see this dog.”

The whole family made the two-hour trip to meet Juno, who was being held at an east Tennessee shelter. “She was emaciated, and was days away from being euthanized,” Chester says. “She had been surrendered to the shelter because her previous owners didn’t understand the breed.”

Fortunately, Chester did. He’d gotten to know and love the Belgian Malinois while working as a law enforcement officer years earlier.

“I used to help with the training of police K-9s, and our dogs were Belgian Malinoises,” he says. “I loved their desire to work and their ‘never quit’ attitude.”  In addition to being a popular choice for police dogs, the breed is often used in combat. In fact, it’s believed that the dog which helped Navy SEALs take down Osama bin Laden was a Belgian Malinois.

Juno Proved a Winner

But while the breed has proven its prowess on patrol and in combat, Chester needed to be sure Juno would be a suitable service dog for his little boy. “I put her on a loose leash and she walked with me and never pulled,” Chester says. “Next came the Lucas test. They took to each other immediately, like kindred spirits.”

The Hembrees brought Juno home and showered her with love and affection.

“I wanted to make sure she had plenty of time to adjust to the family before I started the formal training,” Chester says. Yet, from the beginning there seemed to be something instinctive about their relationship. One day, Chester noticed Juno circling Lucas while he was in his wheelchair. “She was whining and nudging him with her nose,” Chester says. “I checked his oxygen levels and they were very low.” After giving him oxygen, Lucas returned to normal and Juno greeted him with licks and affection.

“That’s when I knew she had the ability to pick up on his neurological changes,” Chester says. “Now she alerts us when Lucas is about to have a seizure or if his oxygen levels drop really low. She has saved him several times.”

Juno has become a literal shoulder for Lucas to lean on when walking, and a calming influence when he became agitated. And while Chester makes sure that Juno gets time off, he says that it’s hard to get Juno to leave Lucas’ side. “You don’t see one without the other close by,” he says. “It really feels like it was meant to be.”

To learn more about Lucas you can go to the Facebook page his dad writes about Lucas.

Vetstreet.com is a pet website written by top veterinarians, pet health experts and professional journalists dedicated to giving you the most accurate information possible, so you can keep your dogs and cats healthy. The key is a well-informed owner and an expert veterinary care team.

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ACTA: more than just an illegal download ban

RNW, 10 February 2012, by Willemien Groot    

(Photo: The Javorac)

     

A new wave of protests in defence of internet freedom is on its way. On Saturday, demonstrators will target the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement or ACTA for short. The agreement is aimed at setting a worldwide standard in the protection of intellectual property rights, covering everything from music to medicine. In Europe, doubts are beginning to grow.

ACTA was initially designed to halt the dangerous trade in counterfeit medicines. Following lengthy negotiations, held largely behind closed doors, the agreement has now been submitted to the United States, Australia and the European Union for approval.

Under pressure from the United States, the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement has been expanded to combat online piracy. The main focus of the protests is the threat to an open internet, the ban on free downloading and the prospect of providers, search engines and users being vulnerable to prosecution.

Monopoly

But the consequences go much further, warn aid organisations such as the IDA Foundation. IDA campaigns for affordable, good quality medicines for developing countries. Managing Director Edwin de Voogd believes ACTA serves only the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and violates previous agreements.

“This agreement has the potential to block the legal trade in medicines from a producer in India or China to a poor country. All to defend the interests of the pharmaceutical industry: its patent rights and the monopoly they create.”

The World Health Organisation previously agreed conditions under which countries (mainly India and China) are permitted to produce and export generic medicines to developing countries, even if the patent has not yet expired. These include products such as malaria tablets and AIDS medicines. Pharmaceutical companies have given this deal their blessing.

Dubious pills

In addition to this legal trade, there is a much shadier circuit. Developing countries are flooded with dubious pills, powders and potions which do nothing to improve public health. In the West, this problem tends to be limited to the online sale of fake Viagra made in China. Paul Wouters of Nefarma, a Dutch association geared towards innovation in medicine, insists we need ACTA to tackle such abuses.

“If we’re not careful, counterfeit medicines could also end up in the regular circuit. We are not talking about good quality copies that happen to come from a different factory. Many of these products are bad and even contain ingredients that can be fatal to patients. If you want to monitor the chain effectively, it’s important to protect intellectual property.”

Black market

Wouters acknowledges that pharmaceuticals are a billion-dollar industry and that ACTA is needed to safeguard that revenue. It costs millions to develop new medicines and the industry recoups its outlay through patents. Things go wrong when manufacturers and recipient countries sell medicine from countries such as India in the West.

“It’s sad but true. In developing countries too, there are people who unscrupulously pocket medicines intended to help people so that they can trade in them. It’s an unfortunate reality that we cannot ignore.”

Wouters is calling for aid organisations to redouble their efforts. “They have to ensure good infrastructure that prevents these medicines being re-routed to wealthy countries.”

Strict customs

Eighty percent of the cheap HIV/AIDS medicines that Médecins Sans Frontières gives to patients in Africa come from India. But the patent-protecting measures contained in ACTA jeopardise this production and trade, says Aziz Rehman of MSF.

“ACTA provides additional rules under which the import of those medicines can be stopped. The customs authorities in different ACTA countries can stop drugs on the basis of suspicion. They can say that drugs being imported from India apparently violate certain patent rights or trademark rights. On the basis of those allegations they can stop and seize those drugs in their country.”

Rehman says it can be weeks before a bona fide consignment is released. In some cases, the authorities destroy a medicine without even waiting for the results of the investigation. A handful of Indian manufacturers are already thought to be considering shutting down their operations.

MSF is convinced that, in practice, ACTA removes the possibility of producing cheap and effective medicines for poor countries. Ironically, this will drive up the price of medicines. And higher prices encourage counterfeit production.

Secrecy

The wording of the agreement is the result of years of secret negotiations between Japan, the US and the European Union. Talks even took place beyond the confines of the World Trade Organisation. Civil society organisations were shunned, while major companies were able to have their say. Developing countries were also kept at arm’s length. But as ACTA emerges into the open, this closed circuit approach may yet backfire.

The anti-piracy proposals have prompted protests
across Europe 

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Chemotherapy Negatively Impacts Genetic Coding for Future Generations

Natural Society, Andre Evans, February 6, 2012

Chemotherapy is an accepted method by the mainstream medical establishment as a means to fight against cancer, but its effectiveness and reliability is highly in question. Now, research even brings into question the effect chemotherapy has on your entire hereditary line, with researchers linking chemotherapy drug usage with DNA mutations that extend to your offspring.

You probably know somebody who has undergone some cancer treatment at one point or another. The effects of chemotherapy on the body are highly destructive, and often leave the cancer patient in a worse state than they were in before.

Unfortunately, using an unnatural chemical substance to effectively blast the cancer cells has the same effect on the healthy functioning cells as well. As a result, most chemotherapy patients are highly damaged by the process and sometimes sustain injuries that are irrevocable.

Three common drugs used for chemotherapy have been found to cause DNA mutations within the users. This is already highly dangerous, but according to new research, this damage may have the ability to pass into future generations. These findings shed light on the long term negative effects pharmaceuticals are having on our bodies. If the bodily effects were not enough to cope with, the use of these treatments may actually have a long term effect on the health of those to come afterward.

Considering the complex and awesome nature of DNA itself,  any manipulation of genetic material — intentionally or not — is highly volatile and dangerous. It is a realm still largely unknown, and taking pokes in the dark is not the way to go.

Other cancer drugs such as imatanib (a leukemia drug that goes by the brand name Gleevec) and sunitinib (a drug for gastrointestinal tumors — brand name Sutent), have even been shown to cause tumors to ‘metasize’ aggressively. Although tumors initially reduce in size, they come back much stronger and grow much larger than their original size.

It is interesting that a majority of doctors who prescribe chemotherapy would not subject themselves to the same treatment, knowing the horrible effects it has on human health. Not only do mainstream doctors avoid drugs like chemotherapy, but they actually prefer alternative medicine in general.

The medical industry makes a large amount of money from using ineffective treatment measures. Drug makers simply would not profit if the mass population were to truly realize that health-promoting substances beat out over-priced pharmaceuticals and medical interventions. These expensive drugs don’t even address the underlying root cause of illness.

Symptoms are a signal the body sends telling you that you need to change something fundamentally. If your car is overheating, do you address the underlying root cause, or simply try to blow away the smoke? Without finding and solving the root cause, the car will forever overheat and a ‘solution’ will always be needed. The mindset of band aid fixes and temporary relief does little in the pursuit of maintaining optimal health.

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Drug companies join forces to combat deadliest tropical diseases

Bill Gates gets pharmaceutical giants to promise drug giveaways and unprecedented pledge to share research on new antidotes

The Guardian, Sarah Boseley, health editor, Monday 30 January 2012

A Guinea worm is extracted by a health worker from a child's foot in
 Savelugu, Ghana. The new initiative is likely to see the disease given
the $60m  the Carter Foundation says it needs to eradicate it completely. Photograph: Olivier Asselin/AP

The heads of 13 of the world's biggest drug companies, brought together by Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men, have agreed to donate more medicines and, unprecedentedly, to work together to find new ones in a bid to end many neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) that kill and maim some of the poorest people on the planet.

The 10 diseases targeted affect 1.4 billion people. They include lymphatic filariasis, river blindness, schistosomiasis and Chagas disease. Often the treatments that exist are ineffective and sometimes they even kill the patient.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting in $363m (£231m) over five years to help with the control and elimination of these diseases, while the Department for International Development has announced £195m until 2015. USAid and the World Bank are also committing money and help.

"Today, we have joined together to increase the impact of our investments and build on the tremendous progress made to date," said Gates. "This innovative approach must serve as a model for solving other global development challenges and will help millions of people build self sufficiency and overcome the need for aid."

The most likely disease to be eliminated is Guinea worm, which has been the target of the Carter Foundation for decades. Last year, the former US president Jimmy Carter said they needed just $60m more to finish the job in the single remaining endemic country – South Sudan. That money will now be available.

The biggest contribution of the pharmaceutical companies, including Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, the US giants Pfizer and Abbott and many others, is in drug donations. Those that already had donation programmes are extending them to 2020. Millions of tablets will now be distributed.

Unusually, some of the companies have agreed to co-operate to try to develop badly needed new drugs. Abbott, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer are working together, under the direction of the public/private partnership DNDi (Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative), on new drugs for worm infections, particularly those causing river blindness and lymphatic filariasis.

All 11 companies have agreed to open up their compound libraries – details of potential drug treatments that have gone through some tests but not found a commercial use – to DNDi, which hopes better drugs for neglected tropical diseases may be discovered.

The initiative is a response to a World Health Organisation blueprint – a plan to tackle these diseases that impede development by preventing the poorest children from accessing education as well as limiting adults' ability to work. WHO's director general, Margaret Chan, set an ambitious timetable during the launch at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

"These ancient diseases are now being brought to their knees with stunning speed," she said. "With the boost to this momentum being made today, I am confident almost all of these diseases can be eliminated or controlled by the end of this decade." Some experts were less optimistic, however, and critical of the drug donation focus.

Medécins sans Frontières (MSF), the volunteer doctors' group that helped found DNDi, said while it was delighted neglected diseases were now getting the attention they deserved, it wanted to highlight what was missing. Chagas disease, sleeping sickness, and visceral leishmaniasis were slated for elimination by 2020, but the WHO and others were underplaying the difficulties, it said.

MSF cited sleeping sickness, caused by the bite of the tsetse fly, as an example. New diagnostic tools – to catch the disease before it becomes very hard to treat — as well as new drugs that could be used by healthcare workers with only basic training in remote areas of Chad, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

Drugs were not the only topic on the agenda. "In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where about three-quarters of reported cases of sleeping sickness have been detected, there is a strong national control programme. However the funding for this programme, provided by the Belgian government since 1997, will be withdrawn by next year. Nothing offered at the London NTD meeting on 30 January 2012 will address this looming crisis," MSF said. In the Central African Republic, the national programme consisted of four people for the entire country.

In a letter to the Lancet, Dr Tim Allen from the London School of Economics and Dr Melissa Parker from Brunel University also said that simply providing more drugs was not enough. They said there were problems with mass drug handouts designed to prevent disease such as schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, and soil-transmitted helminth infections.

"These include the undermining of already fragile and overstretched healthcare systems with the introduction of large, internationally-funded, vertical programmes rolling out free drugs to adults and children, irrespective of their infective status; difficulties with relying on volunteers to assist with the distribution of drugs in targeted communities; limits in knowledge surrounding the safety and efficacy of combining drugs for some NTDs; and a growing tendency for those promoting mass drug administration programmes to overlook the fact that the evidence base for how effective they are is more limited than often suggested."

Their own work in some communities had found that take-up of free drugs in some villages was much higher than others, because of political, economic and social circumstances. In some places, people refused out of the belief that the drugs were intended to harm them. "We are concerned by the way in which competition for multimillion-dollar grants is closing off debate and restricting critical analysis of what is actually occurring on the ground," they wrote.

Alternative healer cures breast cancer with leeches

Antara News, Thu, January 26 2012

Pekanbaru (ANTARA News) - A practitioner of alternative medicine claims he has cured hundreds of women of breast cancer with the help of a most unorthodox medium - leeches.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

H Ismail who runs an alternative medicine clinic at his modest home on Jalan Hangtuah here told Antara his cure for breast cancer makes it possible for women with the disease to recover without undergoing surgery that often implies the loss of one or both of the organs.

"I have not kept a record of the numbers but I think I have treated hundreds of women over the years and most of them were cured," Ismail said.

Ismail`s standard method of treating breast cancer is putting two leeches on the diseased breast and allowing them to remain there for some time. At the initial stage, the procedure must be repeated by the patient herself three consecutive times.

Then, the patient can take a break of three days and undergo a medical check to see if there is any change in her condition. If there is a change but no complete cure yet, the patient must continue the leech therapy while taking vitamins to keep fit.

"In most cases , it is not enough to do the therapy only three times. Often, it has to be repeated many more times and the patient must exercise patience," he said.

Editor: B Kunto Wibisono

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Red = don't reanimate!

RNW, 24 January 2012, by Maike Winters

 (Photo: albert schweitzer ziekenhuis)

              

An unusual experiment is due to start in February in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in the Dutch town of Dordrecht. Patients who do not want to be reanimated will be given red wristbands.

Specialist Valentijn Drexhage explains the problem:

“The patient’s wishes are normally noted in the medical file, except sometimes when it has been forgotten. If the file isn’t in the room where the patient needs reanimating, it’s an acute situation. It’s a question of split seconds and you can’t waste time looking for a file. That’s the dilemma. We have sometimes started something that later we regretted, not to mention the patient, of course, and the family members.”

Patients have a variety of reasons to elect not to be reanimated. Old people are sometimes no longer so keen to continue living and some patients are fearful about the risks of reanimation. A spokesperson for the hospital points out that the impact of reanimation of the patient and close relatives is serious: “The majority of patients suffer lasting damage from being reanimated.”

Vegetable

One patient in the oncology department of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital is all in favour of the experiment. She is opposed to reanimation for religious reasons. The advantage of the wristband is that doctors can see right away what to do:

“It’s usually a hectic situation when something happens and when they have to decide whether or not to act. Life after reanimation is pretty grim. I have no desire to live like a vegetable.”

Playing safe

Patients aren’t always recognised at the critical moment and if there was the slightest doubt doctors have, understandably, always played safe and gone for reanimation. Patients are normally asked on admission whether they have any objection to reanimation. Drexhage:

“Sometimes the problem was with patients who came to us from the outpatient clinic and have passed from one department to another, but we now have departmental secretariats which will keep a closer eye on this in future.”

Sensitivity

The experiment will continue until mid-May then a decision will be taken whether to continue. A spokesperson for the Dordrecht hospital is enthusiastic:

“We were worried there would be too much sensitivity about this kind of system, but it looks as though the opposite is true.”

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Afghan mother in 'extremely rare' sextuplets birth

BBC News, 24 January 2012

Doctors say that the six babies - who have not been named yet -
are well but under-weight

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An Afghan mother has given birth to six children at a hospital in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The woman was not aware she was carrying more than one child and had not received fertility treatment.

Doctors say the mother arrived in hospital on Monday and gave birth on the same day to three boys and three girls. It was her first pregnancy.

Doctors say that having six children without fertility treatment is extremely rare.

Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world.

'Brave'

The mother, named as Sharah, 24, arrived in Mazar-e-Sharif hospital from a remote village in Balkh province. 

Sharah is exhausted after the
unexpected birth of her six children

Provincial Health Director Mirwais Rabi told the BBC that all six babies are well but under-weight, with one only weighing about 700g (25oz).

Mr Rabi said the sextuplets were being kept inside incubators and a special team of nurses and doctors are looking after them.

The mother is said to be in good health but exhausted.

Doctors say that had they been aware that she was carrying six children, she would have been in hospital at least several days in advance.

The BBC's Bilal Sawary in Kabul says Sharah's story has made headlines on Afghan television and radio stations.

"She is brave, she is amazing," one resident said, "I don't know how she carried six children. The government should help her now."

A 2010 survey revealed that infant and under-fives mortality rates appeared to be decreasing.

Experts say that despite recent improvements, Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a pregnant woman or a young child.

One in 10 children in Afghanistan still dies before they are five years old, the survey said.

First patients shown to improve with embryonic stem cells

Reuters, by Sharon Begley, NEW YORK, Mon Jan 23, 2012

(Reuters) - Before treatment, the 51-year-old graphic artist was legally blind, unable to read a single letter on a standard eye chart. She has suffered from Stargardt's disease, the most common form of macular degeneration in young patients, since she was a teenager, and it was getting progressively worse.

A second patient, aged 78, suffered from dry macular degeneration - the leading cause of blindness in the elderly -and could not even see well enough to go shopping.

But after being treated with stem cells from a donated human embryo, both women have improved dramatically, researchers said on Monday. Stem cells are master cells that can differentiate into any of the 200 kinds of cells in the human body.

Their results are the first-ever report of the medical use of stem cells taken from human embryos, making them crucial barometers of whether the controversial technique will ever find widespread therapeutic uses.

In a paper published online in The Lancet on Monday, physicians at the University of California, Los Angeles, and scientists at biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology report that the first two patients in the clinical trial suffered no adverse health effects from the treatment and seem to have benefited from it.

A week after having cells derived from a days-old embryo injected into her eye, the graphic artist could count fingers, and after one month she could read the top five letters on the eye chart. She can see more color and contrast, has started using her computer, and for the first time in years can read her watch and thread a needle. The macular degeneration patient recently went to the mall for the first time in years.

The safety findings, not any vision improvement, is what people should focus on, said Dusko Ilic, senior lecturer in stem cell science at Kings College London, who was not involved in the work.

"If everyone expects that the blind patients will see after being treated ... it will end up as disaster," he said.

Nevertheless, advocates for the blind are already hailing the results. "At last we are seeing fruits of human embryonic stem cell research entering clinical trials," said Peter Coffey, Director of the London Project to Cure Blindness.

OBJECTIONS AND RISKS

Using human embryonic stem cells for research or treatment has incited controversy for ethical and medical reasons. Some opponents argue that because removing stem cells from days-old human embryos almost always destroys the embryo, the technique amounts to murder.

ACT is the only company currently testing human embryonic stem cells in study patients. Last November, stem-cell pioneer Geron announced that it was halting what had been the first-ever clinical trial of the cells-testing them in patients with spinal cord injuries-and leaving the field.

When Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of ACT, approached ophthalmic surgeon Steven Schwartz of UCLA about leading the clinical trial, Schwartz asked for ethical advice from two of his patients: elderly nuns. They gave him the go-ahead, he said last year.

Even scientists who support stem cell research argue that they could be dangerous to use therapeutically. The very property that makes them so valuable in research - stem cells can morph into any of the kinds of cells in the human body - also makes them risky.

They can form teratomas, a type of tumor that arises when stem cells differentiate into a profusion of cell types.

Another concern is that transplanting cells derived from human embryos could be rejected by the patient's immune system. The ACT team got around that by targeting the eye, which is an "immunoprivileged" site that does not produce a strong immune response to foreign tissue.

In the study, physicians led by Schwartz injected what are called retinal epithelial cells into one eye of each patient. RPE cells lie at the back of the eye and bathe the retina's rods and cones in substances called growth factors. When RPE cells die, as they do in macular degeneration, so do the photoreceptors, eventually causing blindness.

Transplanting RPE cells grown from stem cells, Lanza reasoned when he began this research almost a decade ago, might rejuvenate the eye's rods and cones, restoring lost vision.

To produce RPE cells, Lanza and his colleagues arranged to obtain days-old embryos created by in vitro fertilization. The parents, who no longer wanted the embryos, donated them for research. The scientists then removed a single stem cell from one embryo, grew it in the lab to obtain millions of cells, and differentiated them into RPE cells.

The primary purpose of the clinical trial was to determine whether the implanted cells caused any harm. So far, neither patient has experienced inflammation, an indication that their immune system is not attacking the foreign cells.

And there is no evidence that a teratoma formed in either patient. Researchers also found that the RPE cells still survive after being implanted four months ago.

NOT A CURE FOR THE BLIND

The goal of the study was to determine safety and, at most, see whether the therapy can slow down or arrest vision loss, not restore it. "The fact that we're seeing measurable improvements in their vision, persisting for more than four months, is a bonus," Lanza said in an interview.

Although rods and cones cannot be brought back from the dead, he explains, "until you lose them completely you can rescue them." He believes that the transplanted RPE cells both bathed the deteriorating rods and cones in nourishing growth factors and gobbled up fragments of dead rods and cones, keeping the retinal environment healthier for the survivors.

The UCLA physicians plan to enroll a total of 12 Stargardt's patients and 12 macular degeneration patients in the ongoing clinical trial, with groups of three patients each receiving a different number of retinal epithelial cells.

The two patients being reported on Monday each received the smallest dose, 50,000 cells. Other patients will receive at least twice that many. The trial is also expanding across the Atlantic: the first patient was treated at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London last Friday. In a later trial, they hope to treat patients with earlier-stage disease, before so much of their vision has been lost.

David Prentice of the Family Research Council, a pro-life group that has opposed the use of human embryos for research, says the results will require more scrutiny.

"You have to follow the patients longer to know if it's safe," he told Reuters. "People will also want to know if there are other routes to the same end," using sources of stem cells other than human embryos.

Lanza is planning just that. He believes that skin cells "re-programmed" to revert to embryonic status might prove just as good a source or RPE and other specialized cells as human embryonic stem cells. Called IPS (for "induced pluripotent stem") cells, they can be derived from a patient's own skin cells and pose no risk of immune rejection.

"I think we can be up and running in the clinic with IPS cells in one or two years," Lanza says.

(Additional reporting by Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Cynthia Osterman)

(Photo: Urban don)

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Magic mushrooms may help with depression, say leading scientists

Active ingredient could allow sufferers to relive happier times, says team including former government adviser David Nutt

guardian.co.uk, Sarah Boseley, health editor, Monday 23 January 2012 

Magic mushrooms' active ingredient psilocybin enables users to
experience more vivid recollections. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

A drug derived from magic mushrooms could help people with depression by enabling them to relive positive and happy moments of their lives, according to scientists including the former government drug adviser, Professor David Nutt.

Two studies, for which scientists struggled to find funding because of public suspicion and political sensitivity around psychedelic drugs, have shed light on how magic mushrooms affect the brain.

Nutt, from Imperial College London, was sacked as a government drug adviser after claiming tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than cannabis and psychedelic drugs such as ecstasy and LSD.

He believes prejudice and fear have prevented important scientific work on psychedelic drugs. Research began in the 1950s and 60s but was stopped by the criminalisation of drugs and stringent regulations which made the work costly.

"Everybody who has taken psychedelics makes the point that these can produce the most profound changes in the state of awareness and being that any of them have experienced," said Nutt.

The drugs had been used for millennia, he said, since psychedelic mushrooms grew in the Elysian fields of Greece. Aldous Huxley wrote The Doors Of Perception about the insight such drugs gave him into the life of the mind.

The studies, led by Robin Carhart-Harris, also of Imperial College, looked at the effect that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has on the brain through the use of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The first study on healthy volunteers, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), surprised the researchers. They had assumed the drug might increase activity in certain parts of the brain. Instead, it decreased it in the "hub" regions which link different areas.

"This loss of connectivity might mean consciousness is less constrained by inputs from the outside world via the senses, which could explain why people can imagine things very vividly," said Nutt.

The 10 men and five women who volunteered experienced changes in visual perception, extremely vivid imaginings and changes in their perception of time and of size and space.

The MRI scans showed lowered bloodflow to regions linked to the ego, the sense of self and personality.

A second study, to be published on Thursday in the British Journal of Psychiatry, gave volunteers cues to remember positive events in their lives such as their wedding or performance in a play. Their recollection became very vivid. "It was almost as if rather than imagining the memories, they were actually seeing them," said Carhart-Harris. "This could be very useful in psychotherapy, for instance in people with depression who find it very difficult to remember good times and are stuck in the negative."

The team are now hoping to do a further study which will involve giving psilocybin to depressed people who are undergoing psychotherapy, in the hope that it will allow them to relive times of past happiness.

The studies showed that psilocybin worked on the same areas of the brain as the SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac, as well as talking therapies and meditation as carried out by skilled practitioners. But the advantage over pills, the team believes, is that the positive effect could be long-lasting.

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