Updates from DynPort President Dr. Robert V. House on topics related to biopharmaceutical product development. Click each title to view the entire post.
- Readers of this blog are almost certainly conversant on the concept of biosecurity as it relates to protection from, and response to, large-scale use of chemical and biological entities as agents of warfare and terrorism. Billions of dollars and decades of effort have gone into creating countermeasures against a literal handful of the top-priority agents (anthrax, smallpox...the usual suspects). It's hard work, to be sure, and very expensive using today's methodologies and currently existing regulatory requirements. But are we safer?
- Like many of you, I watched with a mixture of interest, gallows humor and incredulity the furor over the past six months or so regarding the publication of the papers detailing how two different research teams figured out how to coax H5N1 influenza into fulfilling its potential to be a serious pandemic pathogen. ...
- Not long ago, while in a hotel and faced with a rare moment of "nothing better to do" I watched a couple installments of one of the so-called reality shows devoted to the interesting creature known as a "hoarder.” If you've missed out on this, hoarders are people who surround themselves with mountains of junk and trash, sometimes imprisoning themselves in filth. ...
- I spent almost 20 years of my career working at the bench, all of that time involved in studies using animals as test systems (as opposed to totally in vitro or in silico models). Readers of this blog will recognize that I believe that--for now--it remains absolutely necessary to use living animals to conduct scientific research since none of the alternative are yet reliable enough to give us even marginally relevant information about in vivo events. I hope in my lifetime to see non-animal systems evolve to the point where it will no longer be necessary to exert dominion over our fellow creatures, it's just that that day is not yet here. ...
- A good friend and colleague of mine, an expert in breast cancer, told me that as he has gotten older, his focus has switched from breasts to prostates. (This is a funny quip, but he assures me it's true.) Like my friend, as I have gotten older my interests have evolved, although thankfully not quite so divergently. Rather, as my various systems don't obviously work as well as they used to, I've researched the effects of age on the immune system, and I'm not liking what I've learned.
- Let me state for the record that any political decision that uses "for the children" as its basis triggers a response from me somewhere between indifference and anger. Any efforts by society to make the world a better place should be rooted in the here-and-now, with benefits to accrue to future generations.
- A few years ago I served as a board member of an industry group; at one of our meetings, a discussion broke out and I voiced my opinion on the topic at hand. The chairman of the board (and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work he was) barked at me "I believe you should get your facts straight".
- Who doesn't love zombies? They're are all the rage now, in movies, on TV and in video games. In the old movies like "White Zombie", zombies were corpses reanimated by magic to serve evil purposes. In the 60s and 70s zombies were shuffling corpses driven to kill and eat the living by some natural yet undefined source (Night of the Living Dead comes to mind here). Neither type of zombie seems very scary, and one wonders just how hard it would be to escape from awkward, shuffling corpses. ...
- The balance between the human immune system and the external microbial world is a delicate one. The very mechanisms responsible for recognizing and destroying the countless attacks by various bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi and so forth can, if unchecked, turn against the very body they were intended to protect.
- Like many of you, I spend a considerable bit of time attending conferences; in my case, many of these conferences deal with the twin subjects of bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases...