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Cancer drug screening while you wait
News & Comment
18 April 2001), along with a big increase in the number of start-ups seeking venture capital support in the proteomics field. Several industrial proteome mapping projects are planned or under way, including Myriad Genetics ($185 million), GeneProt (with 51 mass spectrometers) and also Celera, who, according to company President J. Craig Venter, are ‘building the largest proteomics facility by far… the size of a football field.’ This should greatly increase the rate of identification of therapeutic targets, but, given that the proteome, unlike the genome, is cell specific and constantly changing, a Human Proteome Project will be an extremely challenging undertaking. S.L.
Wellcome targets the British government
Mike Dexter, Director of the Wellcome Trust, has announced that the Trust will not fund any new buildings but will concentrate its funding on research and equipment rather than the ‘bricks and mortar’. Dexter was reported in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper as saying that such funding was the ‘responsibility of the state’ and that ‘charities should not become an alternative to adequate state investment’. State spending on R&D in the UK has dropped by 12.5% in the past 10 years. Particular emphasis was put on the need to maintain Britain’s competitiveness in science, as well as the need to suitably fund the running and maintenance of University research facilities. Recent initiatives from the government have sought to redress the deficit in the research budget, but much of this money has itself been contributed by medical research charities. The Telegraph also highlights that 23% of the UK research and development budget now comes from charities compared with only 9% in the USA. D.S.
TRENDS in Cell Biology Vol.11 No.7 July 2001
Cancer drug screening while you wait Vascular endothelial growth factor – a typical THINK screening target. Further molecular structures can be viewed at the ‘Cure Cancer’ website.
Regardless of your research speciality, it is now possible to use your desktop computer in the fight against cancer. Running under the headline ‘don’t just make a donation, make a difference’, a global collaborative network has been established to speed up dramatically computer-based drug discovery for cancer therapy. The project is functionally similar to the phenomenally successful SETI@home project, which aimed to use spare computing power in the search for extraterrestrial life. It is estimated that up to 80% of the processing power of the average desktop computer is unused during routine use – distributed computing systems aim to exploit this unused power. Individual users download a small program that can be run either as a screensaver or continuously in the background. Cooperation of users in this way provides more computing power than the largest supercomputers currently available. The Centre for Computational Drug Discovery at
Stem cell research triumphs Two recent papers in Science exemplify the steady progress towards clinical application of stem-cell-derived tissue in replacement surgery. Wakayama and coworkers from New York’s Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center provide proof of principle for multistep therapeutic cloning: a somatic cell nucleus could be reprogrammed to produce embryos, from which pluripotent embryonic stem cells (ESCs) were isolated. Nuclei of mouse cells from a tail biopsy were transferred to anucleated egg cells and, a few days later, ESCs were derived from blastocyst-stage embryos. The stem cell capacity of the newly derived ESC lines was demonstrated by differentiating them into dopaminergic and serotonergic neuronal cells in vitro, and the cells passed the acid test of pluripotency by contributing to the germline in vivo [Science 292, 740–743 (2001)]. In a second report [Science 292, 1389–1394 (2001)], a team at the NIH in
285
the University of Oxford, UK, has teamed up with Intel and United Devices to generate the virtual supercomputing network required for the cancer project. The so-called ‘THINK’ software is essentially a virtual molecular modeling package that aims to find potential anti-cancer drugs from screens against a number of key proteins implicated in cancer. Users are sent a package of 100 molecules, which are screened in multiple conformations against the threedimensional structure of targets such as superoxide dismutase and Ras. The project, funded by the National Foundation for Cancer Research, is believed to be the largest combinatorial chemistry project ever undertaken. Over 320 000 users have signed up so far, with the organizers hoping for several million. Intel’s role in the project forms part of the company’s ‘Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program’. Peer-to-peer computing involves collaboration of users to share files and resources, enabling greater functionality. Intel has long used peer-topeer computing internally, and the company believes that the technology will allow much greater use of computing power in this and many other medical research applications. For further information, see: http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html http://www.intel.com/cure http://members.ud.com/vypc/cancer/ D.S.
Bethesda, Maryland, describes how it applied new insight into pancreatic development to successfully differentiate mouse ESCs into insulin-secreting cells in vitro. Lumelsky et al. transformed ESCs into small clusters of cells that look and behave very much like islets of Langerhans: mini-organs comprising beta cells producing insulin, and glucagon- and somatostatinproducing cells. Tissue produced in vitro might thus benefit diabetes patients, who display malfunctioning of the islets of Langerhans. J.d.B.
This month’s ‘In brief’ articles were written by: Jan de Boer [email protected] Sean Lawler [email protected] David Stephens [email protected]
http://tcb.trends.com 0962-8924/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
18 April 2001), along with a big increase in the number of start-ups seeking venture capital support in the proteomics field. Several industrial proteome mapping projects are planned or under way, including Myriad Genetics ($185 million), GeneProt (with 51 mass spectrometers) and also Celera, who, according to company President J. Craig Venter, are ‘building the largest proteomics facility by far… the size of a football field.’ This should greatly increase the rate of identification of therapeutic targets, but, given that the proteome, unlike the genome, is cell specific and constantly changing, a Human Proteome Project will be an extremely challenging undertaking. S.L.
Wellcome targets the British government
Mike Dexter, Director of the Wellcome Trust, has announced that the Trust will not fund any new buildings but will concentrate its funding on research and equipment rather than the ‘bricks and mortar’. Dexter was reported in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper as saying that such funding was the ‘responsibility of the state’ and that ‘charities should not become an alternative to adequate state investment’. State spending on R&D in the UK has dropped by 12.5% in the past 10 years. Particular emphasis was put on the need to maintain Britain’s competitiveness in science, as well as the need to suitably fund the running and maintenance of University research facilities. Recent initiatives from the government have sought to redress the deficit in the research budget, but much of this money has itself been contributed by medical research charities. The Telegraph also highlights that 23% of the UK research and development budget now comes from charities compared with only 9% in the USA. D.S.
TRENDS in Cell Biology Vol.11 No.7 July 2001
Cancer drug screening while you wait Vascular endothelial growth factor – a typical THINK screening target. Further molecular structures can be viewed at the ‘Cure Cancer’ website.
Regardless of your research speciality, it is now possible to use your desktop computer in the fight against cancer. Running under the headline ‘don’t just make a donation, make a difference’, a global collaborative network has been established to speed up dramatically computer-based drug discovery for cancer therapy. The project is functionally similar to the phenomenally successful SETI@home project, which aimed to use spare computing power in the search for extraterrestrial life. It is estimated that up to 80% of the processing power of the average desktop computer is unused during routine use – distributed computing systems aim to exploit this unused power. Individual users download a small program that can be run either as a screensaver or continuously in the background. Cooperation of users in this way provides more computing power than the largest supercomputers currently available. The Centre for Computational Drug Discovery at
Stem cell research triumphs Two recent papers in Science exemplify the steady progress towards clinical application of stem-cell-derived tissue in replacement surgery. Wakayama and coworkers from New York’s Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center provide proof of principle for multistep therapeutic cloning: a somatic cell nucleus could be reprogrammed to produce embryos, from which pluripotent embryonic stem cells (ESCs) were isolated. Nuclei of mouse cells from a tail biopsy were transferred to anucleated egg cells and, a few days later, ESCs were derived from blastocyst-stage embryos. The stem cell capacity of the newly derived ESC lines was demonstrated by differentiating them into dopaminergic and serotonergic neuronal cells in vitro, and the cells passed the acid test of pluripotency by contributing to the germline in vivo [Science 292, 740–743 (2001)]. In a second report [Science 292, 1389–1394 (2001)], a team at the NIH in
285
the University of Oxford, UK, has teamed up with Intel and United Devices to generate the virtual supercomputing network required for the cancer project. The so-called ‘THINK’ software is essentially a virtual molecular modeling package that aims to find potential anti-cancer drugs from screens against a number of key proteins implicated in cancer. Users are sent a package of 100 molecules, which are screened in multiple conformations against the threedimensional structure of targets such as superoxide dismutase and Ras. The project, funded by the National Foundation for Cancer Research, is believed to be the largest combinatorial chemistry project ever undertaken. Over 320 000 users have signed up so far, with the organizers hoping for several million. Intel’s role in the project forms part of the company’s ‘Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program’. Peer-to-peer computing involves collaboration of users to share files and resources, enabling greater functionality. Intel has long used peer-topeer computing internally, and the company believes that the technology will allow much greater use of computing power in this and many other medical research applications. For further information, see: http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html http://www.intel.com/cure http://members.ud.com/vypc/cancer/ D.S.
Bethesda, Maryland, describes how it applied new insight into pancreatic development to successfully differentiate mouse ESCs into insulin-secreting cells in vitro. Lumelsky et al. transformed ESCs into small clusters of cells that look and behave very much like islets of Langerhans: mini-organs comprising beta cells producing insulin, and glucagon- and somatostatinproducing cells. Tissue produced in vitro might thus benefit diabetes patients, who display malfunctioning of the islets of Langerhans. J.d.B.
This month’s ‘In brief’ articles were written by: Jan de Boer [email protected] Sean Lawler [email protected] David Stephens [email protected]
http://tcb.trends.com 0962-8924/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.