A Madison company founded by stem cell pioneer Jamie Thomson has obtained an exclusive license with a New York medical school to turn stem cells into heart cells.
Cellular Dynamics International announced the deal with Mount Sinai School of Medicine on Wednesday.
Of all the seismological hot-spots around the Pacific Rim, none has been as well documented as the Nankai Trough.
“We have just a phenomenal record of earthquakes here,” says Harold Tobin from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When President Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in March, many scientists hailed the move as a long-awaited boost for one of the most promising fields of medical research.
Quoted: “I think NIH has been hearing from many, many people how important it is to fix this,” said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin who served on Obama’s transition team. “I can’t say how they will do it, but I’m confident they want to.”
Judging from the TV ads for drugs that treat osteoporosis, you would think that the bone-thinning disorder is something only women have to worry about, and that men can simply ignore what Sally Field and other talking heads have to say about the disease.
You would be wrong.
Though osteoporosis is less common in men than in women, it still takes a toll on men.
It’s a painless illness in which bones become fragile and are more likely to break, and its first sign may be a fracture of the hip, spine or wrist.
The disease can progress silently, according to Neil Binkley, a physician and researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
The way to fight Alzheimer’s disease is to intervene decades before someone demonstrates symptoms, U.S. researchers suggest.
“The future of this disease is to intervene decades before someone becomes symptomatic. This analysis says you can save literally billions of dollars in long-term care costs if you can intervene at an earlier stage,” study co-author David Weimer of the La Follette School of Public Affairs said in a statement. “What you don’t know costs a lot of money when it comes to this disease.”
College students who frequently drink to extremes and are inclined to be thrill-seekers are more likely to be physically injured as a result of their alcohol use, a new study shows.
U.S. researchers found that students who binged heavily on alcohol at least four days a month were five times more likely to be physically hurt than their peers. Male students who had at least eight drinks on each of these drinking occasions and females who had a minimum of five drinks on each of these occasions were considered “frequent extreme heavy drinkers” in the study.
Universities and colleges are “missing the mark” in their fight against binge drinking on campus, which a new study says leads to 500,000 injuries in one year in the U.S. alone.
The research suggests that blanket efforts, such as cutting down on drink specials at campus pubs, may not be enough to curb consumption or prevent alcohol-related injuries. Universities have to pinpoint the students who are most at risk and perform some basic interventions with them, said one of the study’s authors.
Despite some efforts, drinking on campus has remained a problem. An estimated 500,000 college students in the United States suffered alcohol-related injuries in 2001 according to Marlon P. Mundt, assistant scientist in the department of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author for the study.
Can poker make you sick? How can a few herbs make your Memorial Day barbecue a little healthier? Why has the world community failed to stop genocide? “The Why Files” takes on scientific questions great and small, on the Web and in a new book. (Answers below.)
“The Why Files” has been serving up weekly samplings of science on the Internet for 13 years, which is about as long as msnbc.com has been in existence. “When the Internet was a vast wasteland, we were lucky to get out in front,” said one of the site’s creators, Terry Devitt, director of research communications at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It was the tweet read â??round the world.
Last month â?? using only his mind â?? UW-Madison graduate student Adam Wilson composed and posted a message to the social networking Web site Twitter.
The telepathic tweet caused quite a stir. Within a few weeks, Wilson had more than 130,000 followers on Twitter, the most followers of anyone located in Madison.
Many scientists and other advocates of studies involving human embryonic stem cells had expected the pace of such research to quicken after President Obama signed an order in March easing restrictions on the types of studies eligible for federal funds. But some now are questioning whether proposed new ethical guidelines, which the National Institutes of Health released for comment last month, might have the opposite effect, The Washington Post reported.
Fishing isnâ??t an exact science.
But Ben Hobbins, 49, has spent the past few years, with help from the University of Wisconsinâ??s Polymer Research Center, using it to develop an environmentally friendly soft plastic fishing bait.
And the scientific community has taken a liking to the IronClads brand, which was launched last year by Lake Resources Group, Inc.
Dr. James Shull has been named chairman of oncology and of the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at UW-Madison.
Shull, chairman of genetics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, will replace Dr. Norman Drinkwater, who stepped down as oncology chairman last year. Shull got his Ph.D and did a fellowship at UW-Madison
People who already speak two languages are more adept at learning a new foreign language than their monolinguists, U.S. researchers say.
Study co-authors Viorica Marian of Northwestern University and Margarita Kaushanskaya of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said the bilingual advantage persists even if the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know.
A $2.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow UW-Madison to hire 12 faculty members, with a focus on connections between the West and Asia.
With the first $400,000 of the grant in hand, officials in the College of Letters and Science will begin searching for the first four professors this fall, said Dean Gary Sandefur. The rest of the money will come in over the next three yea
Human embryonic stem cell research rules unveiled by the Obama Administration may prevent federal funding of more cells than the old rules, suggests one report.
Nowadays you’ll likely find John Knuti with his walker. Three years ago, he never imagined he would need one. He described a moment in 2006 when life changed in a humbling instant.
MADISON (WKOW) — Watertown native Mary Woodard Lasker will be honored on a 78-cent postage stamp.
The stamp is part of the Distinguished Americans series and a first-day-of-sale ceremony honored her at her childhood home on Friday.
….A special ceremony unveiling the stamp will be held Tuesday, May 19 at 9:30 a.m. The stamp will be unveiled in the lobby of the Wisconsin Institute for Medical Research on Highland Avenue.
Human embryonic stem cells, with their ability to turn into every kind of organ tissue in the body, have tantalized biomedical researchers ever since their 1998 isolation by University of Wisconsin scientists. Organ replacement tissues free from immune system rejection, grown from embryonic stem cells or from more recently discovered “induced” stem cells grown from skin cells, have been envisioned for a decade.
….In his grand exchange, the president traded away an essential piece of what he had only recently said he believed. When he campaigned, Obama said he supported the “therapeutic cloning of stem cells.” But as president, he has already traded that position for one that some see as more politically realistic.
Under the compromise plan, the president proposed that federal dollars be allowed to pay only for research on stem cell lines created from surplus fertility clinic embryos, but that funds continue to be barred from stem cell lines created in the laboratory to study particular diseases. Also barred is financial support for creating new, genetically matched stem cells for use in the treatment of disease. That is the very “therapeutic cloning” research that the president supported during his campaign.
Scientists from around the country are scrambling to get a share of new federal stimulus funding designed to enhance innovative research. The Challenge Grants, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are among the $2 billion in stimulus funds for new research, equipment and construction.
A working paper from the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds some key gaps in kids’ understanding of algebra â?? you know, that math the experts say is required for success in 21st century life.
One key gap: multiplication. The kids studied didn’t grab onto multiplication’s â??xâ? as well as they did addition’s â?? .â? And, at times, they tried to magically turn multiplication problems into addition problems as a result of this gap.
Dear Editor: There’s a common misconception that being green is the same as being economically impractical. Seen as nothing more than a conscience pleaser for the rich, renewable energy has long been perceived as expensive and beyond the reach of the average American. However, when it comes to solar power, this really isn’t the case. Through a large number of economic incentives and buyback programs, solar power can pay for itself and then some within years and simultaneously help in the fight against global warming.
UW-Madison announced last week that the U.S. Department of Energy has granted it three years of money for 10 studies. UW won more grants than any other college or university.
The Madison campus, which is home to a small nuclear research reactor, will study ways to make next-generation nuclear plants more efficient by allowing higher temperature operation. Two of the grants will focus on computer modeling of nuclear reactor behavior.
The campus also will study nuclear fuels and fuel coatings, waste separation technology and improved ways to cool reactors.
UW-Madison will get roughly $5 million over three years from the U.S. Department of Energy to study new nuclear energy technology under the Nuclear Energy University Program.
With ten proposals funded, UW-Madison received the most grants of any college or university.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and two other universities are working on a study of how organic and conventional farming practices affect cows’ health.
There is a stem cell research project under way in Wisconsin that could change almost everything about that field.
It could lead to medical breakthroughs without the ethical concerns that often surround stem cell research.
But what may be more incredible is the local man who’s helping to make that project possible.
President Obama on Thursday proposed a $30.9-billion budget for the National Institutes of Health for the 2010 fiscal year, including basic and clinical research. It sets a baseline 4.7 percent higher than the agencyâ??s final budget under President Bush in 2008.
The announcement is the latest in a series of budget swings for the NIH, which is the largest source of money for academic research. The agencyâ??s budget doubled over five years, from $13.6-billion in fiscal year 1998 to $27.1-billion in 2003. After that, Mr. Bush presided over a six-year trend during which the NIH received annual increases below the rate of inflation.
Actor Michael J. Fox is one of the best known Parkinson sufferers. As of 2006, his foundation gave more than $50 millions dollars to Parkinson research. About $1.2 million of that went to the University of Wisconsin’s stem cell studies.
In 2005, Fox visited the Waisman Center on campus. If the cause isn’t known, Fox hoped at least a treatment, or methods of early detection, could be found.
“I realized the best role for me to play was research, and dole out those dollars to researchers,” he said during a news conference at the center on February 1, 2005.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Pfizer, the number one biopharmaceutical corporation in the world, signed a research license this week for the use of human embryonic stem cells.
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a significant discovery in understanding the way human embryonic stem cells function.
They explain nature’s way of controlling whether these cells will renew, or will transform to become part of an ear, a liver, or any other part of the human body. The study is reported in the May 1 issue of the journal Cell.
The research team includes James Thomson, who provided an important proof to the research effort. Thomson, an adjunct professor at UCSB, is considered the “father of stem cell biology.”
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) will allow Pfizer Inc. to use some of its patented human embryonic stem cell lines for the development of new drug therapies.
WARF, the private, nonprofit patenting and licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, announced the signing of the licensing agreement Tuesday. Janet Kelly, a spokesperson for WARF, said financial terms of the deal were confidential.
Pfizer Inc. on Tuesday announced a licensing agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, for the development of drug therapies using human embryonic stem cells.
The pharmaceutical giant said it would use embryonic stem cells, discovered by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson in 1998, to improve drug safety, screen new drugs and develop cell therapies.
Medicare wonâ??t pay for genetic tests to determine patientsâ?? best dose of the blood thinner warfarin, discovered at UW-Madison and named after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Monday there isn’t enough evidence that the tests improve patientsâ?? health â?? though the agency agreed to pay for tests in studies that could lead to more such evidence.
It’s a new twist on an age-old question: What came first, the chicken or the fertilized egg?
So far as flu vaccine production is concerned, the answer is definitely the egg. Millions of contaminant-free, fertilized eggs are needed each year to produce vaccines against predicted strains of influenza. Absent sufficient numbers of â??cleanâ? fertilized eggs, there is no current way to produce the flu vaccines public health experts believe we’re most likely to need.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health has received a $6.9 million grant to create an Alzheimer’s disease research center, Gov. Jim Doyle announced.
Noted: Research being done at the University of Wisconsin, combined with FluGen’s cell-based vaccine production, could prove vital in studying the virus and developing a successful vaccine, officials said.
The number of probable swine flu cases in Wisconsin has risen to 66. Meanwhile Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation is backing federal funds to boost research on a new flu vaccine technology at U-W Madison. Gil Halsted reports. (Audio.)
A new study on poverty in Wisconsin shows a sharp increase in the need for food assistance as the recession deepened in the past two years.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty said the number of Wisconsin residents receiving food stamps has increased by 37 percent since 2007.
Noted: “It’s impossible to say with any assurance what’s going to happen,” said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine. “Influenza viruses can evolve quite quickly.”
Noted: Long before this outbreak of swine flu, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Vicki Bier imagined the worst. She authored a report in 2007 that makes the case that pandemic diseases aren’t just health problems.
“It’s not just something you can hand off to public health (departments) and say, ‘Fix it for us,'” said Bier, a professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Noted: “The volume of specimens coming into my laboratory has been sharply increasing, and we would anticipate that given the public health concern,” said Pete Shult, director of the communicable disease division of the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, who is overseeing the testing.
Dr. Christopher Olsen, a swine flu expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said having this H1N1 influenza A virus go back into swine creates opportunities for it to pick up genetic mutations or swap genes with other flu viruses. Canadaâ??s swine flu caseload swelled Sunday to 101 after health officials in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia reported new confirmed cases. Worldwide the WHO confirmed 787 cases in 17 countries.
Another great example of UW-Madison helping ordinary people and the economy in Wisconsin came Friday with the announcement of a $6.9 million federal grant for Alzheimer’s research.
UW-Madison is now home to a major national center focused on Alzheimer’s.
This will boost UW’s ability to attract more brain power and money for further studies. It also will give families struggling with the disease more hope for tests and therapies to prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s terrible symptoms.
To date, there are now five probable cases of swine flu identified in Wisconsin. Of all the scientists around the world monitoring the outbreak, one of the leading researchers lives and works right here in Wisconsin. Chris Olsen is a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison. He talked to WPRâ??s Terry Bell about the latest developments. (Audio.)
As the flu continues to spread, Madison is an epicenter of sorts.
Tireless work is happening by experts at the University of Wisconsin while one local company is working to make sure we’re better prepared in the future. The work is grabbing the attention of federal lawmakers.
The problems are worldwide but this is a local fight.
Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka is one of the worlds leading experts on pandemic flu. From his home at the UW Influenza Research Institute he’s been in constant contact with the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At his flu institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka is already studying the swine flu virus, prodding its genes for signs of weakness.
At his nearby company, FluGen, Kawaoka is developing vaccines for swine flu, bird flu and regular flu.
“I work on anything about the flu,” said the renown scientist, who received a sample of the swine flu virus last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Forget the face masks and stethoscopes, UW researcher Vicki Bier uses calculators to study the spread of the Swine Flu.
She says public health professionals, businesses, and local governments need to consider how a health emergency can threaten jobs.
Laura J. Knoll, associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, has been named one of 12 winners of the 2008 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Awards, the UW announced.
A hundred cases of swine flu in the U.S.? Health officials say there are likely more. Just how many is not important, they say. As the world faces a potential pandemic, swamped labs are not testing all possible cases. Getting an exact tally has taken a back seat to finding new outbreak hot spots or ways to limits its spread, health officials said.
“The specimens are coming in faster than they can possibly be tested,” said Dr. Jeffrey P. Davis, state epidemiologist in Wisconsin, where a lab helped spot the nation’s first known case, in a 10-year-old boy from San Diego.
In the last two days, the Wisconsin State Laboratoy of Hygiene “had a huge spike,” about 150 samples of suspected swine flu cases, said its communicable disease chief, Pete Shult. Wisconsin has five probable cases awaiting CDC confirmation.
Quoted: ‘Let’s not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world,’ Dr Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, told reporters.
Gov. Jim Doyle declared a public health emergency Thursday after two more probable cases of swine flu were identified, bringing the state’s total to five.
Doyle signed an executive order giving the state health department the power to take all necessary steps to prevent and respond to flu cases and distribute anti-viral stockpiles, among other things.
UW-Madisonâ??s Alzheimerâ??s disease research program, which runs the countryâ??s largest study of children of parents with the disease, is about to expand significantly.
The university is now home to one of 17 major national Alzheimerâ??s Disease Research Centers, officials will announce Friday.
A leading expert in Wisconsin on swine flu virus is urging caution, before there’s any projection about the potential of this current disease strain.
UW-Madison School of Veterinary School of Veterinary Medicine swine flu virus expert, Dr. Christopher Olsen has been quoted by ABC News, and L.A.Times and other national news outlets that this current epidemic may not be much different than regular flu outbreaks.
“My reason for making those comments is that we have some framework in which to rationally think about what has happened up to this point,” Olsen said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has done a study looking at the effects of a pandemic on schools, businesses and the working poor in Wisconsin.
Professor Vicki Bier said she and others tried to stay away from recommendations in the study. But, for example, it says if local health departments close schools, they should do it early to be effective.
As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.
In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.
Quoted: Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at UW-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
Dead men tell no tales. As it turns out, though, their teeth might.
Chemicals found in the teeth of the crew of Christopher Columbusâ?? 1492 voyage to America may reveal new insights about their origins, according to scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a recent study.
Wisconsin deer ticks – the type known for carrying Lyme disease – are widely associated with the Northwoods. But now, they occupy a much larger territory.
In 1994, a deer tick “census” led by Dr. Susan Paskewitz, a UW-Madison Entomologist who specializes in mosquitoes and ticks, revealed the ticks had become established in the western two-thirds of the state. Since then, reports of Lyme disease and new infestations led Paskewitz to suspect that they had become prevalent throughout Wisconsin.
The state’s leading infectious disease expert is warning of a possible flu pandemic because of the swine flu outbreak.
Mexico is the hardest hit with about 149 deaths in that country. Twenty of those are confirmed to be the swine flu. Meanwhile, nearly 2,000 have been hospitalized since the first report on April 13.
Dr. Dennis Maki, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine & Public Health, said that all signs are pointing toward a large outbreak, rivaling the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918.
Maki said that there are many reasons this situation might be even worse than the 1918 flu pandemic. He said that this is because of the preliminary mortality rate associated with this particular strain.
Health experts at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine say the current strain of pig swine virus is something the world’s never seen before.
“It primarily causes pneumonia — people with the flu will have a fever, muscle aches, body aches, sore throat, runny eyes, runny nose,” said Dr. Christopher Olsen.
Olsen oversees a laboratory at the UW devoted to studying why swine influenza spreads to humans. He says while the illness originated with pigs, it’s now spreading from human to human.
In a speech on Monday at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, President Obama presented a vision of a new era in research financing comparable to the Sputnik-period space race, in which intensified scientific inquiry, and development of the intellectual capacity to pursue it, are a top national priority.
