MOGADISHU (Reuters) - In a sign of growing optimism that Somalia is winning a struggle against pirates and al Qaeda-linked insurgents, Britain opened an embassy on Thursday in a set of four metal cabins at Mogadishu airport.
It was the first such move by a Western power since Somalia began to emerge from more than two decades of conflict. Turkey and Iran are among others vying for influence in the Horn of Africa country, with growing commercial ties and diplomatic missions already up and running.
"It is a symbol of our confidence and belief in the future of Somalia," said British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who flew in on an unannounced visit to watch the Union Jack flag hoisted above the cabins, generator and satellite dish within the airport perimeter fence.
"This is a sign of where Somalia is now heading to," said Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
"Somalia is going back to the international arena," he added, expressing hope that other Western states would follow suit.
The country is enjoying a delicate recovery but remains heavily dependent on others for its security. An African Union military offensive has driven weakened al Shabaab insurgents from bases in Mogadishu and other cities, and piracy in the strategic sea lanes off Somalia is at an all-time low, thanks largely to a heavy foreign naval presence.
REGIONAL BOOST
A stable Somalia would boost regional economies like Kenya and Ethiopia which have been rattled by their neighbor's insecurity, and would reassure Western capitals which have long worried Somalia provides a base for militant Islam to flourish.
The British government says now is "the best time in a generation for Somalia to get back onto the road to recovery." Britain will host an international conference in London on May 7 on ways to bolster security, impose the rule of law and rebuild the nation.
At the new embassy, due to be fully operational from late July, diplomats will live and work for a few weeks at a time in rotation behind two big blast walls, squeezed between the airport runway on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other.
Other countries with embassies in Mogadishu include Turkey, Libya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and Iran.
Britain's previous diplomatic mission lies in ruins: it closed in 1991 as a civil war broke out that led to first warlords and then Islamist militants stepping into the political vacuum.
Once written off as a failed state, Somalia now has its most legitimate government for decades since Mohamud's election in September. But the government still struggles to exert influence beyond the capital.
Foreign diplomats say they are spending more time in Somalia and will not be far behind the growing number of U.N. officials and aid workers slowly moving to Somalia from Kenya, where many organizations have been running their Somali operations.
Pictorious is a photo sharing startup that is faced with the unenviable task of crawling its way out of Instagram?s gigantic shadow. Today they?re releasing a bevy of updates to their iOS app, which will hopefully help it mount a better challenge against the photo sharing juggernaut.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Five people were slain early on Wednesday in Manchester, Illinois, and a suspect died after a shootout with police, Illinois State Police said.
State Police spokeswoman Monique Bond confirmed the killings and also said that a 6-year-old girl had been injured and taken to hospital. Initial reports were that the victims had been shot, but Bond could not confirm this.
State Police did not discuss any motive nor did they say if the victims were related. The Chicago Tribune reported, citing relatives, that they were a grandmother, a young couple, and two children.
A suspect fled in a white Chevy Lumina, police said, citing witnesses. At about 7:13 a.m., the car was spotted and chased by state and local police who exchanged gunfire with the suspect, state police said.
About 15 minutes later, the suspect was arrested and taken to hospital, and later pronounced dead, Bond said. Police did not release the person's name.
Police said there was no reason to believe that the 300 or so residents of Manchester were in danger.
"Scott County is a small community. Fortunately, this type of thing doesn't happen very often, but this is proof they can happen," Scott County State's Attorney Michael Hill said at the news conference.
"It's been a very tragic scene," said Larry Balthis, pastor of the Manchester Baptist Church. Balthis said he knew the people involved, but he declined additional comment.
Jacksonville School District 117 was closed for the day, according to Debbie McKean, secretary to Superintendent Steve Ptacek. The school district covers 222 square miles and includes the area where the suspect was reportedly apprehended, McKean said.
(Reporting by Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Greg McCune; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
Apr. 24, 2013 ? Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have created a mouse model of muscular dystrophy in which degenerating muscle tissue gives off visible light.
The observed luminescence occurs only in damaged muscle tissue and in direct proportion to cumulative damage sustained in that tissue, permitting precise monitoring of the disease's progress in the mice, the researchers say.
While this technique cannot be used in humans, it paves the way to quicker, cheaper and more accurate assessment of the efficacy of therapeutic drugs. The new mouse strain is already being employed to test stem cell and gene therapy approaches for muscular dystrophies, as well as drug candidates now in clinical trials, said Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of Stanford's Glenn Laboratories for the Biology of Aging.
Rando is the senior author of a study, published online April 24 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, describing his lab's creation of the experimental mouse strain in which an inserted gene coding for luciferase, the protein that causes fireflies' tails to glow, is activated only in an important class of rare stem cells that, collectively, serve as a reserve army of potential new muscle tissue. Under normal circumstances, these muscle stem cells, or "satellite cells," sit quietly adjacent to muscle fibers. But muscular injury or degeneration prompts satellite cells to start dividing and then to integrate themselves into damaged fibers, repairing the muscle tissue.
Muscular dystrophy is a genetically transmitted, progressive condition whose hallmark is the degeneration of muscle tissue. There are many different forms, whose severity, time of onset and preference for one set of muscles versus another depends on which gene is defective. But as a general rule, the disease begins to develop well before symptoms show up.
As the muscle fibers of someone with muscular dystrophy die off, nearby satellite cells -- which are normally dormant in the tissue -- begin replicating in an attempt to replace the lost muscle tissue. "But in the end, satellite cells' attempt to restore tissue is overwhelmed," said Rando, who is the founding director of Stanford's Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinic.
No truly effective treatments for muscular dystrophy exist. "Drug therapies now available for muscular dystrophy can reduce symptoms a bit, but do nothing to prevent or slow disease progression," said Rando. Testing a drug's ability to slow or arrest muscular dystrophy in one of the existing mouse models means sacrificing a few of them every couple of weeks and conducting labor-intensive, time-consuming microscopic and biochemical examinations of muscle-tissue samples taken from them, he said.
So Rando decided to design a better mouse. Dozens of mouse models of different varieties of muscular dystrophy, designed to best reflect different forms of the disease, already exist. Rando's team chose to start with a strain whose human analog is called limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. This steadily progressive form of the disease, whose clinical manifestations typically are most pronounced in limb muscles close to the torso (the thigh versus calf, or upper arm versus forearm), begins during the second or third decade of life, after the muscle-building burst of childhood is largely complete.
From that "starter" mouse strain, Rando's team developed another strain of mice that were prone to the same disease process but whose muscle cells contained the luciferase gene. When these mice are 2 months old, Rando and his associates use a sophisticated laboratory technique to activate the luciferase gene in the mice's satellite cells.
Once a luciferase gene is activated in a satellite cell, it stays "on" permanently in that cell and in all of its progeny, including mature muscle cells, causing them to glow whenever the mice are given a compound that gives off light in the presence of luciferase. So, as the muscular dystrophy progressed in the new mouse strain, the damage it inflicted on muscle fibers and the ensuing recruitment of neighboring satellite cells resulted in the affected muscle tissue's being increasingly luminescent. This luminescence, which could be observed through the mice's skin, was strong enough to be monitored and attributed to a precise anatomical location by a highly sensitive camera.
Invasive microscopic and biochemical methods are first able to detect disease symptoms in mice with the limb-girdle-analog strain when they are about 6 months old. In contrast, using this new method, the Stanford team could literally "see" the first signs of the disease's manifestation as early as 3 months.
Rando and his colleagues confirmed the validity of their luminescence assay with parallel examinations of the mice by standard microscopy and biochemical analysis. They also confirmed, in potentially luminescent but otherwise normal mice not suffering from progressive muscle deterioration, that healthy muscle tissue is ordinarily quiescent. In these mice, the Stanford scientists observed negligible luminescent output reflecting the less than 1 percent of all cells in muscle tissue that are satellite cells.
"In these luminescent mice, we could pick up the disease's pathological changes well before they could be seen otherwise," said Rando. "The readout was so sensitive we could observe those changes within a two-week period. Not only that, but we got our measurements instantaneously, without killing the mice."
The new assay's speed, accuracy and relative noninvasiveness will advance the pace of preclinical work, Rando said. "A lot of head-to-head comparisons of muscular-dystrophy therapies, including drugs already in clinical trials as well as stem cell therapies and gene therapies on the near horizon, can now be made that couldn't have been tried before, because they would have been too expensive and time-consuming to make them worth the effort."
The study was funded by the Jain Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (grant DP1OD000392). The first author was research associate Katie Maguire, PhD. Additional co-authors were Leland Lim, MD, PhD, clinical assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences; and undergraduate student Sedona Speedy.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center. The original article was written by Bruce Goldman.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Katie K. Maguire, Leland Lim, Sedona Speedy, Thomas A. Rando. Assessment of disease activity in muscular dystrophies by noninvasive imaging. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2013; DOI: 10.1172/JCI68458
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Apr. 24, 2013 ? The LHCb collaboration at CERN today submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters on the first observation of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the decays of the particle known as the B0s. It is only the fourth subatomic particle known to exhibit such behaviour.
Matter and antimatter are thought to have existed in equal amounts at the beginning of the universe, but today the universe appears to be composed essentially of matter. By studying subtle differences in the behaviour of particle and antiparticles, experiments at the LHC are seeking to cast light on this dominance of matter over antimatter.
Now the LHCb experiment has observed a preference for matter over antimatter known as CP-violation in the decay of neutral B0s particles. The results are based on the analysis of data collected by the experiment in 2011. "The discovery of the asymmetric behaviour in the B0S particle comes with a significance of more than 5 sigma -- a result that was only possible thanks to the large amount of data provided by the LHC and to the LHCb detector's particle identification capabilities," says Pierluigi Campana, spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration. "Experiments elsewhere have not been in a position to accumulate a large enough number of B0s decays."
Violation of the CP symmetry was first observed at Brookhaven Laboratory in the US in the 1960s in neutral particles called kaons. About 40 years later, experiments in Japan and the US found similar behaviour in another particle, the B0 meson. More recently, experiments at the so-called B factories and the LHCb experiment at CERN have found that the B+ meson also demonstrates CP violation.
All of these CP violation phenomena can be accounted for in the Standard Model, although some interesting discrepancies demand more detailed studies. "We also know that the total effects induced by Standard Model CP violation are too small to account for the matter-dominated Universe," says Campana. "However, by studying these CP violation effects we are looking for the missing pieces of the puzzle, which provide stringent tests of the theory and are a sensitive probe for revealing the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
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Journal Reference:
LHCb collaboration. First observation of CP violation in the decays of Bs mesons. Physical Review Letters, 2013 (submitted); [link]
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T2 Bio publishes data supporting diagnostic test T2Candida in Science Translational MedicinePublic release date: 24-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Karen Sharma ksharma@macbiocom.com 781-235-3060 MacDougall Biomedical Communications, Inc.
Breakthrough approach to rapid detection of Candida species directly from whole blood with T2 Magnetic resonance demonstrated in first patient samples
Lexington, MA, April 24, 2013 (Embargoed until 2:00 PM US Eastern Time) T2 Biosystems, a company developing direct detection products enabling superior diagnostics, today announced the publication of research supporting the Company's flagship diagnostic test, T2Candida, in Science Translational Medicine. The research highlights T2Candida as a breakthrough approach to rapid and sensitive identification of species-specific Candida, a sepsis-causing fungus, directly from whole blood in approximately three hours, or up to 25 times faster than the current gold standard of blood culture. This publication marks the first clinical study of patient samples with T2 Magnetic Resonance (T2MR) technology. Bloodstream infections of Candida, known as candidemia, are associated with a 40% mortality rate, largely due to the elapsed time from infection onset to pathogen diagnosis and treatment, which can take from two to five days with blood culture. With early identification of the specific species, this high mortality rate can be reduced to 11%.
"The rapid detection of Candida is of critical need within the healthcare community, where time is of the essence to enable life-saving treatment decisions," said Eleftherios Mylonakis, MD, Dean's Professor of Medicine, Chief, Infectious Disease Division, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and investigator in this study. "Studies have shown that each hour of delayed treatment increases the mortality of sepsis patients significantly, by up to 8% or more. This research outlines how T2 magnetic resonance can revolutionize the field, with great implications on mortality rates and healthcare costs."
"This research represents the first time that Candida has been identified directly from whole blood in patient samples with highly sensitive T2MR technology that affords limits of detection as low as 1 CFU/mL," added Tom Lowery, PhD, Vice President, Diagnostics Research & Development, T2 Biosystems, and principle investigator of the study. "Importantly, this T2MR approach to Candida identification is also amenable to virtually any molecular, immunoassay or hemostasis target, and we are currently developing a portfolio of products where high sensitivity and rapid detection will have the greatest impact on healthcare."
"T2MR represents a revolutionary, highly-sensitive nanotechnology solution, which can rapidly detect pathogens leading to early intervention that can save lives," said Robert S. Langer, D. Sc., David H. Koch Institute Professor, MIT, and co-founder and board member of T2 Biosystems. "T2Candida exemplifies the potential of nanotechnology to create great advances in healthcare in the near term."
In the paper entitled "T2 magnetic resonance enables nanoparticle-mediated rapid detection of candidemia in whole blood", the authors introduce a novel diagnostic method based on T2 magnetic resonance (T2MR). The T2Candida assay uses blood-compatible polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify Candida DNA, which then binds to superparamagnetic nanoparticles coated with a complementary DNA strand. The binding event causes the nanoparticles to cluster, which changes the sample's T2MR signal. Using this approach, the researchers tested both Candida-spiked and patient samples and were able to rapidly, accurately and reproducibly detect five Candida species within human whole blood with a limit of detection as low as 1 CFU/mL and a time-to-result of approximately three hours. Spiked samples showed 98% positive agreement and 100% negative agreement between T2MR and blood culture. Clinical samples demonstrated similar concordance with blood culture with the important distinction that T2MR was able to identify Candida species in the presence of antifungals, whereas blood culture could not. This study suggests that rapid diagnosis of specific Candida species is achievable with T2MR technology, which is fully automated and applicable to a broad variety of targets.
###
Study authors included Lori A. Neely, Mark Audeh, Nu Ai Phung, Michael Min, Adam Suchocki, Daniella Plourde, Matthew Blanco, Vasiliki Demas, Lynell R. Skewis, Parris Wellman and Thomas J. Lowery of T2 Biosystems, Theodora Anagnostou of Brown University and Jeffrey J. Coleman and Eleftherios Mylonakis of Brown University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
T2Candida is for research use only. The test has not been cleared by FDA, and is not available for diagnostic use at this time.
About Sepsis & Candidemia
Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening illness caused by the body's severe reaction to infection by bacteria, fungi, viruses or parasites. It is one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States, and each hour of delayed treatment increases the mortality of these patients by 8%. Candida is a fungal pathogen known to cause sepsis, and it is associated with approximately 100,000 cases of candidemia in the U.S. annually, making it the fourth-leading cause of hospital-acquired infections. Currently, candidemia has a 40% mortality rate, which can be reduced to 11% with early identification of the specific species. Current detection methods rely on blood culture, a process that can take two to five days before identifying a Candida infection. The T2MR platform is able to detect species-specific Candida directly from whole blood without the limits experienced with optical detection technology, even at low copy numbers, and provide results in approximately three hours.
About T2 Biosystems
T2 Biosystems is disrupting the landscape of clinical diagnostics with T2MR, the Company's proprietary magnetic biosensor detector. The T2MR technology enables healthcare professionals to save lives and reduce costs by providing sensitive, accurate and rapid assay results. The Company's products detect molecular, hemostasis or immunoassay targets directly from unpurified clinical samples in hospitals, labs and physicians' offices. For more information, please visit http://www.t2biosystems.com.
Special Notes to Reporters
More information, including a copy of the paper, can be found online at the Science Translational Medicine press package at http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/scitransmed. You will need your user ID and password to access this information. For multimedia only associated with this release, please visit: http://www.t2biosystems.com/media.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
T2 Bio publishes data supporting diagnostic test T2Candida in Science Translational MedicinePublic release date: 24-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Karen Sharma ksharma@macbiocom.com 781-235-3060 MacDougall Biomedical Communications, Inc.
Breakthrough approach to rapid detection of Candida species directly from whole blood with T2 Magnetic resonance demonstrated in first patient samples
Lexington, MA, April 24, 2013 (Embargoed until 2:00 PM US Eastern Time) T2 Biosystems, a company developing direct detection products enabling superior diagnostics, today announced the publication of research supporting the Company's flagship diagnostic test, T2Candida, in Science Translational Medicine. The research highlights T2Candida as a breakthrough approach to rapid and sensitive identification of species-specific Candida, a sepsis-causing fungus, directly from whole blood in approximately three hours, or up to 25 times faster than the current gold standard of blood culture. This publication marks the first clinical study of patient samples with T2 Magnetic Resonance (T2MR) technology. Bloodstream infections of Candida, known as candidemia, are associated with a 40% mortality rate, largely due to the elapsed time from infection onset to pathogen diagnosis and treatment, which can take from two to five days with blood culture. With early identification of the specific species, this high mortality rate can be reduced to 11%.
"The rapid detection of Candida is of critical need within the healthcare community, where time is of the essence to enable life-saving treatment decisions," said Eleftherios Mylonakis, MD, Dean's Professor of Medicine, Chief, Infectious Disease Division, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and investigator in this study. "Studies have shown that each hour of delayed treatment increases the mortality of sepsis patients significantly, by up to 8% or more. This research outlines how T2 magnetic resonance can revolutionize the field, with great implications on mortality rates and healthcare costs."
"This research represents the first time that Candida has been identified directly from whole blood in patient samples with highly sensitive T2MR technology that affords limits of detection as low as 1 CFU/mL," added Tom Lowery, PhD, Vice President, Diagnostics Research & Development, T2 Biosystems, and principle investigator of the study. "Importantly, this T2MR approach to Candida identification is also amenable to virtually any molecular, immunoassay or hemostasis target, and we are currently developing a portfolio of products where high sensitivity and rapid detection will have the greatest impact on healthcare."
"T2MR represents a revolutionary, highly-sensitive nanotechnology solution, which can rapidly detect pathogens leading to early intervention that can save lives," said Robert S. Langer, D. Sc., David H. Koch Institute Professor, MIT, and co-founder and board member of T2 Biosystems. "T2Candida exemplifies the potential of nanotechnology to create great advances in healthcare in the near term."
In the paper entitled "T2 magnetic resonance enables nanoparticle-mediated rapid detection of candidemia in whole blood", the authors introduce a novel diagnostic method based on T2 magnetic resonance (T2MR). The T2Candida assay uses blood-compatible polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify Candida DNA, which then binds to superparamagnetic nanoparticles coated with a complementary DNA strand. The binding event causes the nanoparticles to cluster, which changes the sample's T2MR signal. Using this approach, the researchers tested both Candida-spiked and patient samples and were able to rapidly, accurately and reproducibly detect five Candida species within human whole blood with a limit of detection as low as 1 CFU/mL and a time-to-result of approximately three hours. Spiked samples showed 98% positive agreement and 100% negative agreement between T2MR and blood culture. Clinical samples demonstrated similar concordance with blood culture with the important distinction that T2MR was able to identify Candida species in the presence of antifungals, whereas blood culture could not. This study suggests that rapid diagnosis of specific Candida species is achievable with T2MR technology, which is fully automated and applicable to a broad variety of targets.
###
Study authors included Lori A. Neely, Mark Audeh, Nu Ai Phung, Michael Min, Adam Suchocki, Daniella Plourde, Matthew Blanco, Vasiliki Demas, Lynell R. Skewis, Parris Wellman and Thomas J. Lowery of T2 Biosystems, Theodora Anagnostou of Brown University and Jeffrey J. Coleman and Eleftherios Mylonakis of Brown University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
T2Candida is for research use only. The test has not been cleared by FDA, and is not available for diagnostic use at this time.
About Sepsis & Candidemia
Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening illness caused by the body's severe reaction to infection by bacteria, fungi, viruses or parasites. It is one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States, and each hour of delayed treatment increases the mortality of these patients by 8%. Candida is a fungal pathogen known to cause sepsis, and it is associated with approximately 100,000 cases of candidemia in the U.S. annually, making it the fourth-leading cause of hospital-acquired infections. Currently, candidemia has a 40% mortality rate, which can be reduced to 11% with early identification of the specific species. Current detection methods rely on blood culture, a process that can take two to five days before identifying a Candida infection. The T2MR platform is able to detect species-specific Candida directly from whole blood without the limits experienced with optical detection technology, even at low copy numbers, and provide results in approximately three hours.
About T2 Biosystems
T2 Biosystems is disrupting the landscape of clinical diagnostics with T2MR, the Company's proprietary magnetic biosensor detector. The T2MR technology enables healthcare professionals to save lives and reduce costs by providing sensitive, accurate and rapid assay results. The Company's products detect molecular, hemostasis or immunoassay targets directly from unpurified clinical samples in hospitals, labs and physicians' offices. For more information, please visit http://www.t2biosystems.com.
Special Notes to Reporters
More information, including a copy of the paper, can be found online at the Science Translational Medicine press package at http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/scitransmed. You will need your user ID and password to access this information. For multimedia only associated with this release, please visit: http://www.t2biosystems.com/media.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Pictorious is a photo sharing startup that is faced with the unenviable task of crawling its way out of Instagram?s gigantic shadow. Today they?re releasing a bevy of updates to their iOS app, which will hopefully help it mount a better challenge against the photo sharing juggernaut.
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Public release date: 24-Apr-2013
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