Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuk take home the prize for chemistry

Again, this one is a bit surprising that it happened so late.  These three researchers revolutionized organic chemistry by developing palladium-catalyzed cross coupling.  This technique has allowed the development of scores of pharmacologic drugs as well as been used to build modern consumer electronics.

And the Nobel Prize in Physics goes too...

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in England.  The prize was awarded to them for there isolation of single carbon thick polymers known as graphene.  While graphene has not yet made its ways into manufactured use, it is incredibly light and as strong as steel.  This discovery has the potential to revolutionalize material science just as polymers did decades ago.

Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to the pioneer of IVF

This year the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to Robert Edwards, the man that pioneered in vitro fertilization, or IVF.  This is probably long overdue as millions of children have now been born thanks to Dr. Edwards life work.  Congrats to you Dr. Edwards.

Nobel Prize Week is here

Hooray for the geeks in all of us.  This week the Nobel awards are announced, starting Monday with the award for Medicine. 

Herpes Simplex Virus type 2 Vaccine fails in stage three trials

The search for a vaccine to prevent Herpes Simplex type 2 infection (genital herpes) has been sought after for decades.  The need for an HSV-2 vaccine has recently been highlighted by the observation that people that have genital herpes have a greater increase of risk of getting HIV.  Unfortunately, making an HSV vaccine has proven quite elusive.  Some glimmer of hope, however, had emerged from a subunit vaccine produced by GlaskoSmithKlein (GSK).  In two independent stage II trials, the vaccine prevented HSV transmission in 70% of HSV-1 seronegative women (aka, women that had not been exposed to the closely related virus most often associated with cold sores), encouraging GSK to move to a larger stage three trial.  After 8 years of study, the results of that trail were released on Friday and, sad to say, the 70%  reduction in transmission observed in the stage II trial did not hold up.  In fact, the vaccine only reduced HSV-2 transmission by 20% which was not statistically different than the control group.  It is unclear what steps GSK will take from here but if they do continue with an HSV vaccine program, it probably will be starting from scratch.

FDA decision on Avandia

So this is a follow up to the post a couple months ago on the fate of Avandia.  In short, the manufacturer of the drug hid data about its safety.  It turns out the drug increases your risk for heart attack.  In light of the danger and the obfuscation by the drug company, the FDA put Avandia back under review. Last week the FDA finally released their decision, which was to change the status of Avandia to only be prescribed for diabetics who do not respond to safer drugs on the market.  Now, while I admit I would have liked the FDA to have removed the drug completely from the market, the fact that the drug does help some diabetics does make it worthwhile to keep around.  I do wish, however, the FDA would have taking a much harder stance on the drug company itself.  Sadly, the current state of the FDA, both its dependence on corporate money, and its lack of true regulatory power, would have made that option highly unlikely.

A Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise

I'm sure most everyone reading this blog has dealt with personally, or has had a close family member or friend that has been diagnosed with cancer.  While detection and treatment of cancer has greatly improved over the past two decades, it still is one of the most devastating diagnoses a doctor might have to give.  This is even more so the case with malignant forms of brain cancers as surgery and/or drug treatment typically only delays progression of the disease for a short time, in part, due to difficulty in operating on the brain, but also the fact that our bodies do a very good job of preventing many proteins and chemicals from reaching the brain (aka the blood-brain barrier) including many potentially helpful drugs.

Now, one of the holy grails of fighting cancer has been to make a vaccine to fight it.  The concept of making such a vaccine has been around for as long as I can remember.  In fact, my uncle, who died of kidney cancer, was asked by his doctors at the VA if he wanted to participate in a trial to make a vaccine for his cancer over a decade ago (he opted to not take part).  Unfortunately, the idea of a cancer vaccine has proven difficult to turn into reality.  There are a few reasons for this, but I want to highlight just a couple.  First, vaccines for infectious diseases (what we normally associate vaccines with) rely on the fact that the virus and/or bacteria looks very different than the cells in your body.  The immune system uses these differences to kill the bad stuff and leave our bodies in tact.  Cancer, however, doesn't look all that different from the rest of the body to the immune system, making it difficult to elicit a robust immune response.  Second, almost every cancer from every patient is slightly different, so making a single vaccine for more than one person is not really feasible.  For that reason, most attempts to make a cancer vaccine has required removing part of the cancerous material, growing it up in the lab, grinding it up with some adjuvants (think Red Bull for your immune system) and injecting it back into the patient.  Sadly, for most cases it hasn't really worked....well with the exception of a new study centered on glioblastomas (very deadly forms of brain cancer).

The new study, led by Dr. Parsa at UCSF, has used individual vaccines to treat glioblastomas in 8 patients.  While the usual prognosis of glioblastoma is measured in months, all 8 of the patients in the study are alive and well, all a full year after receiving the vaccine.  Is this a cure for glioblastoma?  No, probably not, but it is a huge step forward.  It will be very interesting to see how these patients fair as time marches on but we can hope that the continued use of this vaccine will extend the lives of many more cancer patients in the future.