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CONTENTS

Biotechnology------------------------------------------------------------------------

4-5 - Biotech HackMice healed three times faster than normal after their broken bones were flood-

ed by proteins naturally used to regrow new tissues.

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6-7 - Genetic Secrets of living to 100A massive genetic study of people who lived for more than 100 years has found

dozens of new clues to the biology of aging.

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2 - Emerging Technologies - 2011



Semi-Natural Biotech Hack Makes Bones Heal 3 Times Faster

Mice healed three times faster than normal after their broken bones were flooded by proteins naturally used to regrow new tissues. The discovery raises the possibility of a stem cell–free route to regeneration. The Wnt family of proteins used in the mice are involved in healing many other types of tissue; the researchers hope they will find many other uses for them. “Gut, skin, brain, muscle, cardiac muscle, corneas, retinas — people have studied the role of Wnt signals in all those tissues,” said Stanford University reconstructive surgeon and study co-author Jill Helms. “Maybe there could be a therapeutic approach to all this.”

The experiment, published April 28 in Science Translational Medicine, is rooted in two decades of research on Wnt genes and proteins, which play a variety of regenerative roles. They help embryonic stem cells make copies of themselves, keeping a body’s supply fresh, and guide the maturation of stem cells into specific cell types.

Wnt proteins are found throughout the animal kingdom, from spong-es and flatworms to mice and humans, and their function seems to be consistent. When tissues are injured, Wnt genes in surrounding cells become more active, pumping out extra Wnt proteins. Arriving repair cells divide faster and grow more rapidly. Study co-author Roel Nusse, a cell biologist at Stanford, has pioneered much of the Wnt research. He was responsible for cloning the Wnt family genes, allowing pro-teins to be produced in tissue cultures in a lab. His success encour-aged the study’s other authors to see if the proteins could be used therapeutically.

“This pathway may be the key to regenerating, or at least rapidly repair-ing, tissues,” said Helms. “We’re augmenting nature’s own response to injury.” The researchers started their tests by genetically engineer-ing a strain of mice that produced exceptionally high amounts of Wnt proteins. Three days after their bones were broken, they grew three and half times more new bone tissue than regular mice.

That test’s purpose wasn’t to investigate a role for genetic engineer-ing, but rather to see if extra Wnt had an effect. The researchers next injected lab-grown Wnt proteins into mice with broken bones. These again healed three times faster.

There were no obvious side effects from the treatment, though the tests were preliminary. Somewhat disturbingly, Wnt genes were origi-nally identified while malfunctioning in cancerous cells. The likelihood of causing cancer is also a major obstacle to developing safe stem cell therapies. But Helms is confident that it won’t be a problem with potential Wnt therapies.

“In cancer, mutations cause the pathway to be always on. Delivering the protein only causes the pathway to be turned on for a moment,” she said. “Mutations in the insulin pathway also cause cancer, but in-sulin treatments do not.”

According to Thomas Einhorn, a Boston University biochemist and or-thopedic surgeon who wasn’t involved in the study, Wnt is an alluring therapeutic target. Malfunctions in Wnt regulation have been linked to human bone disorders, underscoring their importance. But he cau-tioned that “animal studies are animal studies, and human conditions are something else.” In mice, challenges still remain. A broken bone is relatively easy to target with an injection, but many conditions are less localized, involving entire organs or large amounts of tissue.

The researchers are now conducing mouse tests of Wnt proteins for skin wounds, stroke and heart-attack recovery, and cartilage injuries.“Nature uses this recipe over and over again,” said Helms.

Image Below: Healing in the skeletal tissues of mice given a placebo (top) and Wnt proteins (bottom).Science Translational Medicine.


GENETIC SECRETSOF LIVING

TO 100

A massive geneticstudy of people who lived for more than

100 years has found dozens of new clues

to the biology of aging.

The findings won’t be turned overnight into lon-gevity elixirs or lifespan tests, nor do they untan-gle the complex interactions between biology, lifestyle and environment that ultimately deter-mine how long — and how well — one lives.

But they do offer much-needed toeholds for sci-entists studying the basic mechanisms of aging, which remain largely unexplained.

“It shows that genetics plays an extremely im-portant role at these extreme ages. And it begins to be a not-unsolvable puzzle,” said Boston Uni-versity gerontologist Thomas Perls. “If we start looking at these genes and what they do, we bet-ter understand the biology of extreme longevity.”

The findings come from gene tests of 801 people enrolled in the Perls-founded New England Cen-tenarian Study, the largest study in the world of people who’ve lived past 100.

People who’ve reached that mark tend to have lives that are not only exceptionally long, but un-usually healthly. Unlike most people, they rarely develop diseases of aging — such as heart dis-ease, metabolic disease, cancer and dementia — until well into their 90s. They’re also more likely to bounce back from disease, rather than enter-ing a spiral of declining health.

People who’ve reached that mark tend to have lives that are not only exceptionally long, but un-usually healthly. Unlike most people, they rarely develop diseases of aging — such as heart dis-ease, metabolic disease, cancer and dementia — until well into their 90s. They’re also more likely to bounce back from disease, rather than enter-ing a spiral of declining health.

That manner of aging is a goal for most people, and a public health necessity. Modern medicine has had success in slowing individual aging dis-eases, but when one is postponed another soon emerges. Americans are living longer but not healthier. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. health spending now goes to treating diseases of aging. That proportion is rising.

In the last decade, scientists using animal mod-els of disease have identified numerous genes and biological pathways implicated in aging. That animal research is valuable, but the gold standard of longevity science involves long-lived people.



Inflatable Greenhouseson the Moon

Researchers at the University of Arizona's Controlled Environment Agriculture Center have devised a "lunar greenhouse" that "could be the key to growing fresh and healthy food to sustain future lunar or Martian colonies," Space reported back in October.

Under the guidance of Gene Giacomelli, “The team built a prototype lunar greenhouse in the CEAC Extreme Climate Lab that is meant to represent the last 18 feet (5.5 meters) of one of several tubular structures that would form part of a proposed lunar base. The tubes would be buried beneath the moon’s surface to protect the plants and astronauts from deadly solar flares, micrometeorites and cosmic rays. As such, the buried greenhouse would differ from conventional greenhouses that let in and capture sunlight as heat. Instead, these underground lunar greenhouses would shield the plants from harmful radiation.”

As Popular Science describes it:The 18-foot, membrane-sheathed system collapses into a 4-foot wide disk for easy packing on an interplanetary mission. When extended,


it is fitted with water-cooled lamps and seed packets prepped to sprout without soil. They hydroponic system needs little oversight, re-lying on automated systems and control algorithms to analyze data gathered by embedded sensors that optimize the controlled ecosys-tem. The whole system takes just ten minutes to set up and produces vegetables within a month.

Giacomelli himself explains that lunar rovers—or “robotic bulldozers”—would first bury the greenhouses, installing them in advance of human arrival. Then, “When the spacecraft sets down, the idea is that [the buried greenhouse] expands outwards, opens by itself, like a robot would. The seeds are already in place. We start it up, turn on the lights, turn on the water, and the plants can begin to grow, even in advance of when the astronauts arrive.”

Interestingly, Antarctica supplied a kind of natural test-environment for this architectural experiment: “the extreme conditions of the South Pole helped his team fine-tune their lunar greenhouse, and also allowed them to figure out how to remotely control conditions like temperature, humidity and light. He said similar technologies could also be used someday in cities—in a greenhouse in the middle floor of a skyscraper, for example. He added that, at least right now, the technology, and lighting, especially, are too expensive for daily com-mercial use.”


ISLANDS AT THE SPEED

OF LIGHT

A recent paper pub-lished in the Physical Review has some as-

tonishing suggestions for the geographic future of financial

markets.

Its authors, Alexander Wissner-Grossl and Cam-eron Freer, discuss the spatial implications of speed-of-light trading. Trades now occur so rapidly, they explain, and in such fantastic quan-tity, that the speed of light itself presents limits to the efficiency of global computerized trading networks. These limits are described as “light propagation delays.”

It is thus in traders’ direct financial interest, they suggest, to install themselves at specific points on the Earth’s surface—a kind of light-speed fi-nancial acupuncture—to take advantage both of the planet’s geometry and of the networks along which trades are ordered and filled.

They conclude that “the construction of relativis-tic statistical arbitrage trading nodes across the Earth’s surface” is thus economically justified, if not required.

Amazingly, their analysis—seen in the map, below—suggests that many of these financially strategic points are actually out in the middle of nowhere: hundreds of miles offshore in the Indian Ocean, for instance, on the shores of Antarctica,


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