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A scanning electron micrograph of induced pluripotent stem cells derived from plucked human hair. Two papers in this issue describe advances in the reprogramming of human somatic cells to pluripotency (p 1269 and p 1276). Credit: Merce Marti
In under three years, Deborah Dunsire transformed Millennium Pharmaceuticals from an unprofitable company to Takeda's oncology centerpiece. What's next?
The blood-brain barrier has confounded the development of many neurological treatments over the years. Now, several companies are claiming they can tackle the problem. Alan Dove reports.
Despite losses in revenue from erythropoietins, historically the highest earner of all biologics, more than 100 biotech drugs continued their upward trend in sales begun in 2006, with antibodies and insulin analogs fueling growth at double-digit rates.
Companies with a significant intellectual property stake in China should put in place an effective protection and enforcement strategy against local and overseas competitors.
Induced pluripotent stem cells have been generated from single human hairs, providing an easily accessible source of cells amenable to efficient reprogramming.
Chechik et al. define activity motifs, which extend the concept of a network motif from the static to the dynamic realm. Mapping functional data onto network structure enables them to reveal new systems-level principles describing how yeast cells integrate exogenous signals and use transcriptional regulation to optimize metabolic responses to environmental perturbations.
One strategy for advancing induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology toward the clinic is to replace the reprogramming genes with small molecules. Huangfu et al. show that the HDAC inhibitor valproic acid can substitute for the reprogramming gene Klf4, allowing human iPS cells to be generated with only two transgenes, Oct4 and Sox2.
Aasen et al. boost the efficiency of human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell generation 100-fold by starting with keratinocytes rather than fibroblasts. They also produce iPS cells from plucked adult hair, an easily accessible source of cells that avoids the need for a biopsy.
The picomolar sensitivity of fluorescence-based protein detection limits the use of protein arrays in research and clinical diagnosis. Chen et al. use antibody-tagged single-walled carbon nanotubes as multicolor Raman labels to detect femtomolar levels of serum analytes over a wide dynamic range.
Analyzing the massive and heterogenous datasets from genome-wide chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) datasets presents several computational and statistical challenges. Ji et al. present a software suite that integrates all steps in ChIP-chip and ChIP-seq data analyses and illustrate the use of these tools by comparing the ability of the two platforms to identify transcription factor binding sites.
Fruit-specific overexpression of a pair of snapdragon transcription factors produces tomatoes that uniformly accumulate anthocyanins at levels unprecedented for metabolic engineering. When included as a dietary supplement, the purple tomatoes increase the life spans of tumorigenic p53 knockout mice.
