Vivisimo Velocity for Life Sciences

Vivisimo, the creator of innovative clustering software for better search and discovery, introduced the Velocity for Life Sciences 4.2 (VLS) search and discovery platform that includes meta-alerts, collaboration, document delivery and advanced reporting capabilities for improved knowledge sharing among functional groups across an enterprise. Velocity for Life Sciences 4.2 is the industry's first rapid-deployment, highly customizable enterprise-search platform that combines dynamic clustering, search and meta search into one solution providing a single point of access for all information sources - internal and external. The VLS platform is built on the widely deployed Vivisimo software and includes the company's award-winning Clustering Engine. Velocity for Life Sciences features also include:

-- Meta Alerts: Velocity allows users to create alerts from multiple information sources from a single point of access. Users no longer need to access each source individually; instead, they can initiate and receive alerts from several sources in one combined email. Alerts can be initiated simply by clicking on a result or by adding them through user profiles.

-- Collaboration and Exporting: With a simple click, Velocity users can export results into Endnote, Procite, Reference Manager, Documentum eRooms, or email reports in HTML or plain text format. It can also save reports as text, HTML or XML, making it easy to share, collaborate and preserve searches. Velocity allows users to save their searches and return to the results at a later time in order to better meet the work habits of individual users.

-- Customizable Reports: Velocity's comprehensive reporting feature is entirely customizable and enables administrators to ask and answer critical business questions. For example, administrators can learn what "resources" (journals, feeds, etc.) are actually used and which should continue to be licensed. Administrators can also learn what keywords or phrases are found through the search application, and how and with what frequency users reformulate their queries.

-- Full-Text Document Delivery: Velocity has interfaces with leading document delivery organizations such as Infotrieve. Now through a single solution, Velocity users can access full-text documents with the advantages of third-party providers that maintain document ordering quotas for document cost control.

-- LinkOut: Velocity incorporates the Entrez LinkOut feature providing full-text access to journals and databases that have been licensed by the organization.

-- Document-Level Security: Velocity document-level security provides administrators complete control over access to individual documents or groups of documents. It allows only authorized users access to search results involving sensitive information.

From this post from Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant

EU Invites Public Comment on Tissue Engineering Regulation

"A new biotechnology area has emerged: human tissue engineering, which combines various aspects of medicine, cell and molecular biology, materials science and engineering, for the purpose of regenerating, repairing or replacing diseased tissues. Current applications of this nascent field of 'regenerative medicine' include treatment for skin, cartilage and bone diseases or injuries.

More complex products - such as heart valves or blood vessels - are already in the pipeline. Tissue engineered products currently lie outside any legislative framework.

This is why the European Commission is working on a clear regulatory framework. Before tabling a formal proposal later this year, the Commission has now invited the general public to comment on a draft regulatory framework for authorisation, supervision and post-authorisation vigilance of advanced therapies (tissue engineering, cell and gene therapy). This consultation is part of the impact assessment of the upcoming proposal. "

Read more in this Medical News Today article.

Turning Biotechnology into Companies

This Infectious Greed post contains links to videos from the following panels held at the recent VentureForth @ UCSD - Biotechnology Entrepreneur Conference 2005 held in San Diego:

Keynote #1: Dr. Charles Cantor, Sequenom
Panel #1: Academia to Market
Keynote #2: Ivor Royston, Forward Ventures
Panel #2: Trends in Biotechnology
Panel #3: Legal & Tech Transfer Issues

Biotechnology Offers Hope, Fears to Developing Countries

"Brazil and other developing countries pondering whether or how much to use genetically modified agricultural crops must balance many different concerns.

They range from battling domestic starvation and malnutrition and ensuring health and safety, to preserving the environment, fulfilling multilateral trade obligations and protecting and enhancing trade opportunities, a recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study says.

The study, entitled International Trade in GMOs and GM Products: National and Multilateral Legal Frameworks reports that genetically modified crops pose especially difficult choices for the world’s poorer nations."

Read more in brazzilmag.com article.

Lawsuit hampers Calif. stem cell funding

"California officials conceded Monday that a legal challenge has severely hampered the ability of the state's stem cell agency to borrow even a penny of the $3 billion in research money it had hoped to raise over the next 10 years.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Treasurer Phil Angelides said their offices are aggressively fighting the lawsuit while pursuing alternative ways for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to borrow money to fund medical research."

Read more in thie The Beaufort Gazette article.

Making a Constitutional Issue of the Right to Conduct Research

"A Nobel laureate who campaigned for California's $3 billion stem cell initiative is warning that ideologically driven laws to prohibit research could abridge the constitutional rights of researchers and would face legal challenges.

Paul Berg, a biotech pioneer and a professor emeritus at the Stanford University School of Medicine, made the comments during a luncheon speech April 28 at BayBio 2005, a conference of the Bay Area biotechnology association.

"Given the federal government's threat to prohibit certain lines of research, it seems relevant to ask if the freedom to conduct scientific investigation and to report its results is legitimately different from the rights afforded to the press for their freedom of inquiry and publication," Berg said. "In short, lacking clear evidence of certain danger or harm, I believe the case can be made that the freedom to conduct scientific inquiry is inherent in the right to free speech granted in the Constitution's Bill of Rights."

Read more here.

Guidelines Released for Embryonic Stem Cell Research

The National Academies announced recommended guidelines for research involving human embryonic stem cells, “and urged all institutions conducting such research to establish oversight committees to ensure that the new guidelines will be followed. The guidelines are intended to enhance the integrity of privately funded human embryonic stem cell research by encouraging responsible practices, said the committee that wrote the report, a joint project between the National Academies' National Research Council and Institute of Medicine…

Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight, or ESCRO, committees should be established, but not as replacements for other research compliance bodies such as institutional review boards, the guidelines say. In addition to experts in biology and stem cell research, ESCRO committees should include legal and ethical experts as well as representatives of the public.

Stem cells usually are harvested after three to five days from a blastocyst -- an early stage of development before implantation in the uterus. The ESCRO committees should review proposals for research that takes stem cells from excess blastocysts at in vitro fertilization clinics or from blastocysts created expressly for stem cell research. They also should review any proposed use of blastocysts created by nuclear transfer, often referred to as therapeutic cloning. Nuclear transfer must not be used for reproductive cloning, the guidelines committee said, reiterating a recommendation from a previous National Academies report.

Proposals to generate additional human embryonic stem cell lines by any means should be reviewed and approved by an ESCRO committee, the guidelines say. They add that human embryos used for research should not be grown in culture for longer than 14 days, or until the point when the body axis and central nervous system -- called the primitive streak -- begin to form…

The ESCRO committee should maintain a registry of stem cell lines banked at an institution, the guidelines add. The registry should include a proof of informed consent, a medical history of the donors, and a characterization of any genetic markers on the cell lines. Repositories of stem cell lines also need a secure coding system to protect the identity of donors.

The Academies' guidelines also address how far scientists should go in mixing human and animal cells to create so-called chimeras, which researchers may need to do in order to test the therapeutic potential of human stem cells in animal models. The guidelines say no animal embryonic stem cells should be transplanted into a human blastocyst, and approval by an ESCRO committee should be secured before any human embryonic stem cells are put into an animal. Also, no animal into which human embryonic stem cells have been introduced should be allowed to breed. In addition, no human embryonic stem cells should be put into nonhuman primate blastocysts.

Human embryonic stem cells should be introduced into nonhuman mammals only under circumstances where no other experiment can provide the information needed, the guidelines say. Experiments in which there is a possibility that human cells could contribute in a "major organized way" to the brain of an animal require strong scientific justification, the committee added.

The committee urged the formation of a national independent body to periodically review whether the guidelines need to be updated in light of unforeseen advances in stem cell science and evolving public attitudes.

The National Academies developed the guidelines on behalf of the scientific community and without government involvement. Although compliance is voluntary, the committee called on private funders, professional societies, journals, research institutions, and others involved in embryonic stem cell studies, to require adherence to the guidelines."

From this press release.

GM rice 'good for Chinese farmers'

"Genetically modified (GM) rice reduces health risks for farmers and increases their profits because it demands far fewer pesticide applications than conventional rice, according to research in China.

The joint Chinese-US study, published today (29 April) in Science, also shows that one of the two types of GM rice under investigation had slightly higher yields than non-GM rice."

Read more in this article from SciDev.Net.

Biotech's promise arriving with a price tag

"For 30 years, prognosticators have proclaimed that the future of health care belongs to biotechnology -- to the promise that miraculous and less-expensive treatments will flow from a deeper understanding of disease at the genetic and molecular level of the human body....

Has the future arrived?

Yes and no.

Yes in the case of a few wonder drugs, and in the wealth of research that has inched us closer to teasing out the basic mechanisms of how ailments work...

But the bright future hasn't arrived in this sense: The price tag for creating a promised proliferation of new drugs continues to soar, with the secrets of how to design molecular-based drugs proving frustratingly complex, and far more expensive than anyone imagined."

Read more in this SFGate.com article.

Business Mocels for the Commercialization of Biotechnology Tools

"Biotechnology research tools require different commercialization strategies than drugs. They typically feature lower barriers to entry, increased risk of replacement / commoditization, and lower development costs. This series of Articles [from About.com] details issues in developing business models for biotechnology research tools, intellectual property protection, and valuation."