Air Products : BIG Supports O2 Medical Grade to Help Patients in Flood Areas

October 25, 2011 - BIG Supports O2 Medical Grade to Help Patients in Flood Areas -

Management of Bangkok Industrial Gas Co., Ltd. or BIG led by Senior Executive Director Chaiwat Niyomkarn (5th from right), recently teamed up to Ayudhya province to present 70 cylinders of oxygen medical grade to the Center of Flood Relief in Ayudhya to help patients get stuck there.

The support will continue until the flood situation is eased.

This inundated is the worst of its kind as there are many victims waiting for helps. Stocks of oxygen are critical as the delivery was very difficult and some gas operations are closed. BIG has contacted the Public Health Ministry to offer the help... Bangkok Industrial Gas' Press Release - Air Products' Press Release -

ChemDiv Research Institute at ChemRar Hi-Tech Centre : Collaboration and License Option agreement with Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases to battle Tuberculosis

October 6, 2011 - ChemDiv Research Institute (CDRI) at the ChemRar Hi-Tech Centre announced that it has signed collaboration and license option agreement with the Singapore based Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD) to undertake discovery and development of patentable chemical compounds to find new, faster cures for Tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major health problem in the world today, responsible for nearly 2 million deaths per year. One third of the world's population are infected with latent TB, and ~5-10% of infected individuals may develop active TB within their lifetime. Current treatment of TB takes more than half a year, much longer than treatment for other infectious diseases. Emergence of multi drug resistant tuberculosis and TB co-infection with HIV are escalating the need for finding new drugs for curing the TB.

CDRI has prepared and delivered to NITD a focused library consisting of thousands of compounds that will be screened in a cell-based assay to identify lead molecules that are active against the mycobacterium... ChemDiv's Press Release -

Calypso Medical Technologies : FDA Grants Calypso Medical IDE Approval for Pivotal Lung Cancer Study

Sept. 27, 2011—Calypso Medical Technologies, Inc., developer of real-time localization technology used for precise tumor tracking, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) approval for its clinical study evaluating real-time tracking of lung cancer tumors during radiation delivery. Patient enrollment is planned at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Investigators in the United States will implant three anchored Beacon® transponders in patients’ lungs and use the Calypso® System to precisely track tumor location and movement during lung cancer radiation therapy.

“We are very pleased to see Calypso begin the U.S. portion of this important clinical study to assess the clinical experience and safety of anchored transponders in the small airways of patients with lung cancer,” said Daniel Nader, DO, FCCP, national clinical director, pulmonary/critical care and interventional pulmonologist at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America at Southwestern Regional Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla. “The five-year survival rate for lung cancer is grim at just 16 percent; however, with the Calypso System’s ability to track this high-velocity repetitive motion, treatment options for lung cancer patients may expand to include earlier and more aggressive radiation treatment.”

Calypso began the pivotal study in October 2010 at Tygerberg Hospital, affiliated with the University of Stellenbosch, in South Africa, located outside of Cape Town. The multi-center study is also underway at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland. Early data on the implantation of the electromagnetic transponders in lung cancer patients, and the use of the Calypso System for real-time tracking in these patients will be presented at the upcoming American Society of Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) meeting in Miami... Calypso Medical Technologies' Press Release -

Kinexus : Proteomics Study Reveals Profound Gender-related Differences in Lung Responses to Cigarette Smoke

Aug. 4, 2011 - Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, a world-leader in molecular intelligence research, announced the publication of the results from a major study undertaken in collaboration with the A. W. Spears Research Center, Lorillard Tobacco Company to uncover cigarette smoke protein biomarkers. The findings appear in the Journal of Proteome Research and reveal profound differences in the responses of many lung proteins in male and female rats exposed to dilute mainstream smoke for 3 hours per day for 5 consecutive days. The data is also available online with open-access in the Kinexus KiNET DataBank.

Using the Kinexus integrated platform of proteomics discovery services, the researchers initially analyzed lung lysates that were pooled from similar groups of exposed rats using antibody microarrays that tracked over 500 key cell signaling proteins for their abundance and their phosphorylation status. Phosphorylation acts as an on/off switch for most of the 23,000 proteins encoded by the human genome. Promising leads from these antibody microarrays were confirmed by immunoblotting studies, and they were further monitored using microarrays that were printed with lysates from individual animals as separate spots on the chips. Over 20 signal transduction and stress proteins were found to be consistently and significantly altered with the short term cigarette exposures, and bioinformatics was used to show how these proteins connected within cell signaling networks.

Smoke-altered proteins regulate apoptosis, proliferation, stress response, cell structure, cell migration and inflammation. The female rats demonstrated much higher sensitivity to low doses of cigarette smoke and resultant changes in these protein pathways than their male counterparts. The study utilized proteomic technologies to enable a systematic approach to understanding lung proteins altered by smoke... [PDF] Kinexus Bioinformatics' Press Release -