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It's been 17 years since Cleveland Clinic hosted its first Medical Innovation Summit. As the 2019 version of conference officially launches Monday morning, its organizers say this year's gathering reflects the changing landscape of healthcare innovationnot only in terms of topics, such as sessions exploring AI, augmented reality, and virtual realitybut also in terms of who's standing at the dais and who's attending.

Through Wednesday, entrepreneurs from startup companies, investors, and payers will join the venerated researchers and practitioners who once were the primary focus of the Summit. Also present: key players from companies outside the traditional healthcare sector, including Amazon Web Services, CVS, Google, and Microsoft.

"While the technology is interesting, the bigger story is the die is not cast in terms of who will disrupt healthcare," saysWilliam Morris, MD, executive medical director, Cleveland Clinic Innovations. "Healthcare disruption will come from all angles. That's the power of this Innovation Summit."

For example, late Monday Eric Lefkofsky, co-founder and chairman of Groupon will present a keynote address. Four years ago, after Lefkofsky's wife was diagnosed with cancer, he founded Tempus to leverage data analytics, genomics, and artificial intelligence to provide precision medicine to patients.

"Health issues touch all of us," says Morris, adding that today people and companies outside of traditional spheres of influence have been empowered to innovate and take action. "It's an interesting theme because it challenges the status quo."

On Tuesday, Morris says, Craig Mundie, senior advisor to the CEO of Microsoft, who is former chief research and strategy officer for the company, will discuss the role of technology in transforming the healthcare delivery industry.

"Again, it's very personal story, talking about the promises of new technologies and how they can actually benefit all patients," says Morris. "I think there's an interesting thread for an audience member to ask, 'Who are these people? How are they navigating this?' It's so diverse. A tremendous takeaway is that it is incumbent on us all to reimagine healthcare."

In the past the Summit focused on specific disease states and medical devices, says Susan Bernat, general manager of strategic marketing, Cleveland Clinic Innovations.

"We realized that we were truly missing something as healthcare is evolving," Bernat says. Cleveland Clinic treats each of its patients as a whole person, not just a disease, she says. The conference needed to reflect that dynamic, which led to this year's theme, "Caring for Every Life Through Innovation."

"Now it's a more well-rounded conversation," Bernat says.

Morris says that those involved in healthcare innovation bring optimism to the U.S. healthcare industry.

"There's an esprit de corps in our DNA that we will solve [the challenges]," he says. "I don't think there'll be one simple eureka moment. It's going to be a lot of work, a lot of collaboration. But the great news is, there is such passion to do better. The focus has moved beyond innovating for the sake of innovating and to challenge traditional status quo of how healthcare is being rendered."

Some highlights from Summit include:

The 2019 Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit takes place October 2123 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland in downtown Cleveland. The Summit is organized by Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the business development and commercialization arm of Cleveland Clinic.

Mandy Roth is the innovations editor at HealthLeaders.

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Outsiders Are In: The Cleveland Clinic Innovation Summit Evolves - HealthLeaders Media

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been utilized for years in the field of healthcare and continue to grow tremendously each year with its ability to advance medicine and discoveries in the industry.

The term precision medicine, sometimes referred to as personalized medicine, is a relatively new term in the healthcare field but the idea has been around for many years in the industry. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, precision medicine is "an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person."

Precision medicine helps physicians determine more personalized treatments for patients considering individualized approaches instead of a blanketed approach for all patients. They do this by looking at a patients genetic history, location, environmental factors, lifestyle and habits to determine a plan of action for treatment.

With artificial intelligence, it takes precision medicine to the next level and increases the accuracy and prediction of outcome for patients. Some actually believe that precision medicine is not completely possible without the addition of machine learning algorithms to assist in the process.

In a report from Chilmark Research, it states that to achieve the full potential of precision medicine it must be accompanied by machine learning and artificial intelligence due to the deep learning technology and ability to analyze large data sets faster than clinicians and medical researchers.

Not only can AI read and analyze large sets of medical data much faster than a human, it can more accurately determine results to come to conclusions about a patients treatment options and possible outcomes of the treatment.

With AI, the ability to not only predict outcomes but also be able to predict future patients probability of having diseases is a major benefit for precision medicine. By better understanding why diseases may occur and in what environments they are more likely to occur, artificial intelligence can help in the education of medical professionals to know what to look for before a disease is showing symptoms. To be able to evaluate the risk of disease in patient populations is revolutionary for healthcare and the lives of many.

Machine learning can also help improve FDA regulations of tests, drugs and pharmaceutical partnerships to help support treatments. Fully achieving precision medicine effectively takes a collaboration of pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, academia, diagnostic companies and others to drive innovation forward.

Amplion, a leading precision medicine intelligence company, recently released Dx:Revenue, a software intelligence platform that uses machine learning to deliver insights into pharmaceutical partnerships.

The platform uses over 34 million data sources from clinical trials, scientific publications, conference abstracts, FDA approved tests, lab tests, and other information to match a test providers capabilities to pharmas specific needs.

This is particularly important in cancer, where were moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach to care toward a more targeted approach with treatments based on the biological characteristics of each patient, said CEO of Amplion Chris Capdevlia. Personalizing our approach to healthcare in this way not only results in better outcomes for patients, it also drives down drug development costs through shorter, more successful trials and reduces time to market for valuable drugs all very good news for better patient outcomes.

Precision medicine can truly improve the lives, and even save the lives, of many people and the use of artificial intelligence can increase those outcomes drastically. It can also make treatments more affordable and accessible to those who may not be able to receive those treatments due to cost and health insurance at this time. There are many challenges ahead for precision medicine to be perfect, but artificial intelligence can help drive us closer to those goals.

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How Artifical Intelligence Is Advancing Precision Medicine - Forbes

Precision medicine uses some of the worlds most sophisticated technologies, but the goal is quite simple: Find the root causes of each patients unique condition and apply the best, most precise treatments.

A good example is cancer, which is not one condition but many. Each patients disease is different, but only recently have we been able to pinpoint these distinctions.

Genomic diagnostics, and other advanced tests, can read a patients tumor DNA and identify the mutations driving his or her cancer. With this information, doctors can prescribe targeted therapies that can help control the disease.

But thats just the beginning. In addition to helping clinicians find the best cancer therapies, precision medicine can also determine, in almost real-time, whether those treatments are working, helping oncologists make midcourse corrections as needed.

Genomic sequencing and other approaches can also delineate a patients risk of recurrence. Emerging liquid biopsy technology may eventually detect cancer at its earliest, most treatable, stages with a simple blood test.

Cancer is just one of many examples.

Genomic sequencing is starting to benefit children with rare diseases. A decade ago, families could wait months or years during the diagnosis odyssey to find out which disease is debilitating their child.

Last year, the Rady Childrens Institute for Genomic Medicine, in San Diego, produced a genomic diagnosis in 19.5 hours, a Guinness World Record.

As sequencing becomes more widely accepted, families will receive these critical diagnoses in days, rather than months.

Precision medicine has applications in heart disease, neurodegenerative conditions, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and many other conditions. Its a new toolbox clinicians can use to find out exactly what ails us and prescribe the best treatments, therapies, and in some cases even cures without time spent on less effective and potentially costly care.

At the California Life Sciences Association, we have been following precision medicines advances with great excitement. We are pleased to have worked closely with the California Legislature, and both Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom, to encourage new investment, and help make these life-saving approaches available to more patients.

In 2015, Gov. Browns office launched the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, a $3 million partnership between the state, California universities and other public and private organizations to accelerate the move to personalized medicine.

This initiative has accelerated the life sciences communitys ability to translate basic science into new diagnostics and treatments. Californias support for precision medicine has encouraged private investment, creating a multiplier effect to help ensure the states continuing life sciences leadership.

Thanks to continued support over the past years by the Legislature, investment from the state has grown to $53 million to advance the California initiative. This noble endeavor will give scientists more resources to develop even better precision diagnostics and treatments.

The $215 billion 2019-2020 state budget extends the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicines authority to fund projects until June 2025. This extension means it can set longer term goals for the California-based precision medicine innovations it aims to foster.

At the request of the life sciences sector, Gov. Newsom wisely removed restrictions on the initiatives ability to fund projects, providing flexibility on how it distributes resources to researchers up-and-down the state. We applaud the governor for recognizing the importance of precision medicine and for his ongoing support for Californias life sciences community.

In my associations 2019 California Life Sciences Industry Report, we write that the Golden State has the most robust life sciences community in the world, with over 3,400 firms employing 311,000 people.

Each year, this life sciences ecosystem advances thousands of new medicines, devices, diagnostics and other medical interventions. Continued investment in precision medicine will help biomedical innovators continue to move the needle on improving care for patients.

California is a biomedical juggernaut, and the precision medicine research being funded today will impact patients around the world. This leadership should be a great source of pride for every Californian.

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Mike Guerra is president and CEO of California Life Sciences Association (CLSA), which helps advance public policies that foster and promote medical innovation, [emailprotected] He wrote this commentary for CalMatters.

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California leads the way in precision medicine - CALmatters

Consultant Marc Brush spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute seven years ago. At the time he was the editor of Nutrition Business Journal.

Brush was invited back as an attendee this year by PLMI founder Dr Jeff Bland ND. Brush said the difference in the atmosphere at this years event compared to the first go round was striking.

Seven years ago, it was, heres this idea; wouldnt it be cool if it worked? Brush said.Now its here and the question is how do you talk about it with consumers? How do you commercialize it?

Formally titled the Thought Leaders Consortium, the event took place last week in Seattle. As the name suggests, the goal of the event was to bring together researchers and clinicians working on the cutting edge science and clinical applications in the space.

Brush said there was extraordinary breadth and depth to the agenda at this years conference. The list of speakers included researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts University and the Scripps Institute.

Topics included the application of systems biology to personalized medicine, the use of biomarkers, and global perspectives on microbiome health as well as the overall application of a personalized approach to health care.

Brush said of particular import was a presentation by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, PhD. Barabasi is a professor both at Northeastern University and the Harvard Medical School. Barabasi said the study of genes as related to disease has moved far beyond the search for one marker that was common even just a few years ago. There is enough information now to take a systems type of approach to managing disease states.

They talked about having genetic information on 54 disease states, Brush said. There was talk about component pathways, about clusters of genes being involved, not just one genetic marker.

And Barabasi talked about what he called the dark matter of nutrition. In the same way that dark matter makes up much of the universe and is someting we dont track, Barabasi talked about how we only track about .5% of the nutrients in food, things like the vitamin and mineral content. He said that two thirds of the effects of nutiriton is associated with the 99.5% of the chemicals in food that we dont track, he said.

So if youre a genetic researcher, you know that only a small percentage of whats going on is related to the genes you are tracking. The good news for the supplement and food industries is what is left over, and all that you can do with lifestyle and nutrition, Brush added.

Much of that information is being uncovered by what researchers are calling GWAS (pronounced GEE-wahs), or Genome-Wide Association Studies. This type of analysis became possible with the first iteration of the human genome published in 2003. In the years since, more than 36,000 studies mentioning GWAS in the title or description have been published on the PubMed database. Just this year alone, more that 2,700 such studies have been added to the database.

Brush said that the interesting, and perhaps unsettling notion for the dietary supplement industry is that to some degree it is along for the ride.

The future of the dietary supplement industry is increasingly being dictated by people outside the industry. Its being driving by people like genetics researchers and microbiome researchers, Brush said.

Brush said that one of the saving graces, and also the Achilles heel, of the personalized medicine approach is how it is moving away from a 1 to 1 equivalency on health care. In other words, the idea of the past has been problem A is solved by drug B; disease A can be explained by genetic factor B. The issues are now seen as far more complex.

Personalized health care embraces that complexity. The pharmaceutical model was always one to one, and even some supplement studies could be seen as matching one natural ingredient to one condition. There is a huge amount of data coming in, and whoever is able to process all that complexity of information will win. The question for the supplement industry is does it have the scientific sophistication to do that? Brush asked.

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Personalized nutrition has taken giant steps in seven years, observer says - NutraIngredients-usa.com

Biotech stocks saw some strength last week. Positive clinical readouts, a couple of M&A deals and hopes of drug companies clinching a broader opioid settlement agreement worked in favor of the sector.

Reata Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: RETA) was among the strong performers of the week following a positive Phase 2 readout for its drug to treat Friedreich ataxia.

Hereare the key catalysts for the upcoming week.

Conferences

PDUFA Dates

Sunday

The FDA is set to rule on Foamix Pharmaceuticals Ltd (NASDAQ: FOMX)'s NDA for FMX101 in treating inflammatory lesions of non-nodular moderate-to-severe acne vulgaris in patients nine years of age and older.

Monday

The regulatory is also expected to issue its verdict on Eton Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: ETON)'s NDA for ET-202, a ready-to-use injectable formulation of phenylephrine.

Thursday

Melinta Therapeutics Inc NASDAQ: MLNT) and Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: LGND) await FDA decision on a label expansion for Baxdella in community-acquired bacterial pneumonia.

The FDA is scheduled to rule on GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE: GSK)'s sNDA for Zejula in treating advanced ovarian, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal cancer patients who have been treated with three or more prior chemotherapy regimens and whose cancer is associated with either BRCA mutation or homologous recombination deficiency.

See Also: Biotech Stock On The Radar: Assessing Mirati's Oncology Franchise With An Eye On Multiple Readouts

Clinical Trial Readouts

Protagonist Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ: PTGX) will present Phase 1 data for PTG-200 in Crohn's disease on Tuesday.

Arvinas Inc (NASDAQ: ARVN) is scheduled to present at the Targeted Protein Degradation Summit initial Phase 1 data on ARV-110 for treating castration-resistant prostate cancer on Wednesday. The company will also present Phase 1 data for ARV-471 in ER+ positive/HER2-negative breast cancer at the summit.

Bellerophon Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ: BLPH) is due to present Phase 2b additional cohort 1data at the CHEST meeting on Wednesday.

Axovant Gene Therapies Ltd (NASDAQ: AXGT) is scheduled to present Phase 1/2 data for AXO-Lenti-PD in Parkinson's disease and AXO-AAV-GM2 in GM2 gangliosidosis. Both presentations are to be made at the ESGCT annual Congress on Wednesday.

Earnings Wednesday, Oct. 23

Thursday, Oct. 24

IPOs

Phathom Pharmaceuticals, a company working on in-licensed assets for treating gastrointestinal disorders, proposes to offer 7.9 million shares in an IPO, estimated to be priced between $18 and $20. The company seeks to list its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "PHAT."

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2019 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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The Week Ahead In Biotech: Earnings Trickle In, While Glaxo, Melinta, Foamix And Eton Await FDA Verdict - Yahoo Finance

SINGAPORE - The chief executive of the National University Health System (NUHS), Professor John Eu-Li Wong, was elected on Monday (Oct 21) to the United States-based National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

Election to the academy is "considered one of the highest honours in the fields of health and medicine", said the National University of Singapore (NUS) and NUHS in a statement on Monday.

The academy aims to address critical issues in health, medicine and related policy.

An election to the academy recognises individuals who have made major contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care and public health, the statement added.

Prof Wong, who is also senior vice-president of health affairs at NUS and a medical oncologist-haematologist, has been actively involved in the development of health and biomedical sciences in Singapore. He served as a member of the National Health and Biomedical Sciences Executive Committee.

He obtained his medical degree from NUS and completed his residency and fellowship at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where he was the Chief Resident in Medicine, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

At an international level, Prof Wong is a former president of the World Health Summit and a founding member of the Association of Academic Health Centers (International).

He served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the International Affairs Committee of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, M8 Alliance of Academic Health Centers, and the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Personalized and Precision Medicine.

In his 27-year career with NUS and NUHS, Prof Wong has held various leadership positions.

These include chairman of NUH's medical board; vice-president of life sciences at NUS; dean of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at NUS; and director of the National University Cancer Institute Singapore.

He is also the Isabel Chan Professor in Medical Sciences at NUS.

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NUHS chief executive elected to US-based National Academy of Medicine - The Straits Times

Edmonton, AB, Oct. 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A new provincial collaboration has been formed to improve the long-term health outcomes, quality of life, and economic prosperity for Albertans suffering with digestive diseases. The University Hospital Foundation (UHF), Ministry of Alberta Economic Development, Trade and Tourism, and Takeda Canada through the Calgary Health Trust (CHT), have jointly invested $1.7 million into the partnership. Albertas Collaboration of Excellence for Nutrition in Digestive Diseases (AsCEND) announced the official launch today at the Western Canadian Nutrition Conference in Edmonton, Alberta. From prevention programs, to acute treatments that enhance the quality of life for survivors, this collaboration is funding cutting edge research, and taking an innovative and comprehensive approach to understand the role nutrition can play in numerous types of digestive diseases. The internationally recognized researchers are performing studies on three key gastrointestinal conditions: inflammatory bowel disease, intestinal failure, and cirrhosis. In the past several decades, prevalence of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) has rapidly increased. Canada has one of the highest rates in the world at 1 in 360 Canadians living with the chronic disease. Dr. Maitreyi Raman is the Medical Director for the AsCEND collaboration. "There is currently no cure for IBD." said Dr. Raman. "Patients describe IBD or Crohns Disease as an inner demon thats impossible to defeat, and are bombarded with medications after diagnosis. There is potentially new hope for disease management in patients with IBD using personalized anti-inflammatory diet therapy, which improves diet quality and meets nutrient recommendations." The provincial partnership for Albertas Collaborations of Excellence for Nutrition in Digestive Diseases (AsCEND) will support education and training, post-graduate physician nutrition fellowships, and clinical patient support and development, focused on three main pillars:

"At Takeda, we are driven to make a real difference in the lives of Canadians with digestive diseases," said Gamze Yceland, General Manager for Takeda Canada. "We are excited to be part of the AsCEND collaboration which aims to make a difference through a comprehensive nutrition-based approach to achieve better health and a brighter future for Canadian patients."

"Alberta is home to world-leading healthcare and research teams in gastroenterology, nutrition, and inflammatory bowel diseases. The University Hospital Foundation is proud to be a partner in this collaboration as we know it will have a positive impact on the health of Albertans living with these conditions," said Christy Holtby, Interim CEO with the University Hospital Foundation. "Were so grateful for the support from community members through our Foundation to help fund this ground-breaking collaboration."

"This partnership is an excellent example of how collaboration between the public and private sectors, and our foundations in both Edmonton and Calgary can work together to make a transformational impact on healthcare outcomes for Albertans," added Mike Meldrum, CEO of Calgary Health Trust. "We are pleased to have the opportunity to work alongside University Hospital Foundation and Takeda Canada in bringing this opportunity to Alberta."

About the AsCEND Partners

University Hospital Foundation

The University Hospital Foundation raises and manages funds to advance patient care, research and healthcare education at the University of Alberta Hospital, the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute and the Kaye Edmonton Clinic. Through Strategic Partnerships, the University Hospital Foundation brings together industry, the public sector, and philanthropy to fund research and find solutions that impact the health of all Albertans. http://www.GivetoUHF.ca Government of Alberta

The Ministry of Alberta Economic Development, Trade and Tourism focuses on economic growth and diversification by supporting innovation and research; expanding access to capital for small and medium-sized enterprises; promoting trade, investment and market access initiatives; and leading Albertas negotiations on trade agreements. http://economic.alberta.ca Takeda Canada

Takeda Canada headquarters is currently located in Oakville, Ontario and is the Canadian subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. Takeda Canada is delivering better health for Canadians through leading innovations in gastroenterology, oncology, neuroscience, and rare diseases. Additional information about Takeda Canada is available at http://www.takeda.com/en-ca.

Calgary Health Trust

Calgary Health Trust raises money to advance healthcare within Calgary. Funds raised benefit Foothills Medical Centre, Peter Lougheed Centre, Rockyview General Hospital, South Health Campus, many community health programs and 12 Carewest care centres in our community. For more information about Calgary Health Trust and its strategic priorities, visit http://www.calgaryhealthtrust.ca.

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ALBERTA PARTNERSHIP STRENGTHENS THE LINK BETWEEN NUTRITION AND DIGESTIVE DISEASE - GlobeNewswire

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is commonly known for its ability to have machines perform tasks that are associated with the human mind - like problem solving. However, what's less understood is how AI is being used within specific industries, such as healthcare.

The healthcare industry continues to evolve as machine learning and AI in technology become more popular in the digital age. Business Insider Intelligence reported that spending on AI in healthcare is projected to grow at an annualized 48% between 2017 and 2023.

Machine learning has the potential to provide data-driven clinical decision support (CDS) to physicians and hospital staff - paving the way for an increased revenue potential. Machine learning, a subset of AI designed to identify patterns, uses algorithms and data to give automated insights to healthcare providers.

Business Insider Intelligence reported that researchers at the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center used IBM Watson's Genomic product to identify specific treatments for over 1,000 patients. The product performed big data analysis to determine treatment options for people with tumors who were showing genetic abnormalities.

Comparatively, Google's Cloud Healthcare application programming interface (API) includes CDS offerings and other AI solutions that help doctors make more informed clinical decisions regarding patients. AI used in Google Cloud takes data from users' electronic health records through machine learning - creating insights for healthcare providers to make better clinical decisions.

Google worked with the University of California, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago to generate an AI system that predicts the outcomes of hospital visits. This acts as a way to prevent readmissions and shorten the amount of time patients are kept in hospitals.

Integrating AI into the healthcare ecosystem allows for a multitude of benefits, including automating tasks and analyzing big patient data sets to deliver better healthcare faster, and at a lower cost.

According to Business Insider Intelligence, 30% of healthcare costs are associated with administrative tasks. AI can automate some of these tasks, like pre-authorizing insurance, following-up on unpaid bills, and maintaining records, to ease the workload of healthcare professionals and ultimately save them money.

Wearable healthcare technology also uses AI to better serve patients. Software that uses AI, like FitBits and smartwatches, can analyze data to alert users and their healthcare professionals on potential health issues and risks. Being able to assess one's own health through technology eases the workload of professionals and prevents unnecessary hospital visits or remissions.

As with all things AI, these healthcare technology advancements are based on data humans provide - meaning, there is a risk of data sets containing unconscious bias. Previous experiences have shown that there is potential for coder bias and bias in machine learning to affect AI findings. In the sensitive healthcare market, especially, it will be critical to establish new ethics rules to address - and prevent - bias around AI.

The use of AI in the healthcare market is growing due to the continued demand for wearable technology, digital medicine, and the industry's overall transformation into the modern, digital age.

Hospitals and healthcare professionals are seeing the benefits in using AI in technology and storing patients' data on private clouds, like the Google Cloud Platform. AI allows doctors and patients to more easily access health records and assess patient's health data that is recorded over a period of time via AI-infused technology.

Health tech companies, startups, and healthcare professionals are discovering new ways to incorporate AI into the healthcare market; and, the speed at which we improve the healthcare system through AI will only continue to accelerate as the industry dives deeper into digital health.

In the AI in Medical Diagnosis research report, Business Insider Intelligence examines the value of AI applications in three high-value areas of medical diagnosis - imaging, clinical decision support, and personalized medicine - to illustrate how the tech can drastically improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and increase productivity.

Want to learn more about the fast-moving world of digital health? Here's how to get access:

Featured Digital Health Articles:- Telehealth Industry: Benefits, Services & Examples- Value-Based Care Model: Pay-for-Performance Healthcare- Senior Care & Assisted Living Market Trends- Smart Medical Devices: Wearable Tech in Healthcare- AI in Healthcare

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AI and machine learning are changing our approach to medicine and the future of healthcare - Business Insider India

Dr. Aswini Kumar, a board-certified cardiologist, recently joined Mercy Clinic Cardiology, 7001 Rogers Ave., Suite 401A, in Fort Smith.

Originally from Chennai, India, she received her medical degree at Chengalpattu Medical College in India and completed an internal medicine residency at State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. She was also fellowship-trained in cardiovascular disease at the University of Connecticuts Hartford Hospital.

Outside of work, Kumar enjoys traveling and painting. Her husband is an oncologist who will join Mercy in Fort Smith next summer.

A passion for medicine runs deep in Kumars family.

"I grew up in a family of doctors, said Kumar. My father and uncles are compassionate physicians. I was always determined to follow in their footsteps."

As a cardiologist, she involves patients in every step of their medical journey and encourages them to make lifestyle changes to improve their health.

I believe in personalized medicine, she adds. I try to get to know my patients as best as I can so I can provide the individualized care that will help them the most.

Mercy Hospital Fort Smith also recently welcomed four new providers to the community to care for patients needing emergency care or during their hospital stay.

Dr. Aaron Lawrence, an emergency medicine physician, received his bachelors degree in biology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He earned his doctorate of osteopathic medicine from the Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine at the University of Pikeville in Pikeville, Kentucky. He completed his residency in emergency medicine at Central Michigan University in Saginaw, Michigan. He is also a U.S. Army veteran.

In August, Drs. Devron Osborne and Amy Wilson joined Mercys hospitalist team, and Dr. Monali Patil began treating patients in the Intensive Care Unit at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith.

Osborne received his bachelors degree in biology from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He earned his doctorate of osteopathic medicine from A.T. Still Universitys Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri. He completed his internal medicine residency at Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri.

Wilson received her bachelors degree in nursing from the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa and her bachelors degree in biology from the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith. She earned her doctorate of osteopathic medicine from the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa. She completed her internal medicine residency from OUs School of Community Medicine in Tulsa.

Patil is board certified in critical care medicine, pulmonology and internal medicine. She has a masters degree in epidemiology from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. She received her medical training from Grant Medical College and Sir J.J. Group of Hospitals in Mumbai, India. She completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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People In Business - Times Record

Every night, millions of people with sleep disorders struggle to get a good nights rest. One of the most prominent of these disorders is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which impacts ones ability to breathe. During the past two decades, the number of adults living with OSA has grown; 25 million people in the United States and an estimated 100 million around the world have obstructive sleep apnea.

Despite its prevalence, eight out of every 10 people with sleep apnea remain undiagnosed, which can lead to serious health issues, including high blood pressure, chronic heart failure, stroke and even death. With these health implications, its critical that people with OSA get diagnosed, receive the proper course of treatment and stay compliant with therapy. Compliance, however, has not always been easy for patients. Some find it difficult to adjust to sleeping with their CPAP equipment, citing challenges with moving around in their sleep or with pressure on their noses and in their airways. These patients tend to abandon their therapy, leaving them susceptible to the serious health effects that come with not complying with treatment.

Fortunately, advancements in sleep technology are paving the way for new CPAP solutions to be more comfortable, personalized and cost effective. With the ability to personalize service for each patient, these connected care technologies help home medical equipment (HME) providers create better patient experiences and engagement, enhance patient care and improve staff experiencesall while reducing the per capita cost of health care by limiting wasted materials, energy, efforts, money and time. Today, many providers are turning to these solutions to help enhance CPAP therapy for OSA patients from initial diagnosis throughout the entire course of treatment at home.

Once a patient is diagnosed with OSA, personalized CPAP solutions can start to play a significant role in a patients adherence to therapy. The selection of a properly fitting and comfortable mask is an incredibly important factor that strongly influences a persons experience, acceptance and long-term use of treatment. Over the years, advances in mask design, materials and construction have and continue to improve mask effectiveness and comfort.

The latest advancement in developing patient-centric CPAP masks is 3D scanning. This new solution offers a precise and personalized mask fitting experience to give providers data-driven guidance that will help support the right mask selection for their patients. Patients and physicians can sometimes find themselves dealing with trial and error as they seek the best sleep mask for a patients specific needs. But with 3D scanning, providers can have the confidence that their mask recommendation is the best option for the patients needs. By improving the patient experience and satisfaction with the appropriate mask, HME providers can guide patients on the right path to long-term therapy adherence.

Technology is not only helping patients in the beginning stages of their CPAP therapy, but also throughout their courses of treatment. In addition to patient-centric technologies that help providers set patients up with personalized care at the time of diagnosis, connected care technologies are helping patients and providers support adherence over time. An increasing number of HME providers are adopting seamless, connected technology that brings them one step closer to improving long-term CPAP adherence: remote monitoring, therapy adjustments and motivational support.

Before connected care, HME providers had limited ability to remotely know how a patient was responding to therapy, if they were using it as prescribed or if something in their environment had changed. This lack of information created inefficiencies and barriers for providers and resulted in patients returning to the hospital time after time. The emergence of connected care solutions started to limit these inefficiencies and readmissions by allowing providers to monitor patients conditions outside of the doctors office or hospital and understand if they were properly adapting to their CPAP therapy at home.

Today, remote patient management solutions allow providers, physicians and payers alike to review patient data through one unified platform, making it easier to make fast, informed clinical decisions for more personalized patient care. This allows providers to focus on the patients who require immediate attention and to troubleshoot issues early on to help increase CPAP therapy compliance and reduce the risk of a user being readmitted into the hospital.

A simple but powerful example of this is a tool that can monitor the use patterns of a sleep apnea patient as they adapt to CPAP therapy. Knowing these nuanced patterns enables better identification of those patients who will most benefit from intervention. This monitoring tool allows HME providers to focus their efforts on patients who will benefit from service, while minimizing unnecessary calls to compliant patients. It leverages a combination of technology and human capital expertise to ensure the best patient experience and care.

Connected care technologies not only allow effective clinician interaction and monitoring but also offer therapy adjustment and patient management or engagement services, which can help motivate patients to stick with their CPAP treatment regimens within the comfort of their own homes. With these insights, patients can track their progress or set reminders to take action, and even receive motivational messages from their physicians. This helps ensure they stay on track and get the most benefit out of their CPAP therapy while on their own.

As the homecare industry shifts toward a value-based care model with a focus on improving patient adherence, providers are waking up to the fact that technology is an important part of the solution to many of the industrys challenges. With the adoption of patient-centric and connected care technologies, providers now have the capability to deliver more effective CPAP therapy management for patients with sleep apnea from the moment they are diagnosedand through their entire course of treatment. As CPAP technology continues to advance, the industry must make sure connected care and personalized medicine are integrated to provide both providers and patients the best possible solutions for the best possible outcomes.

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How Technology Is Reshaping CPAP Therapy - HomeCare

We are in an age of scientific breakthroughs, particularly in areas such as personalized medicine, genomics-based research, and immuno-oncology. While science advances, theres still a major opportunity to improve how organizations work together across the clinical environment. The increased focus on a new class of medicines is creating new challenges across the drug development process that slow trial execution. Collaboration, for instance, is one of the biggest issues impacting speed.

This year, former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, challenged the industry to improve collaboration across all participants in research with modern technology. At the Veeva R&D Summit, I sat down with experts from clinical research sites, academia, CROs, and sponsors to discuss opportunities to automate information exchange, streamline processes, and leverage new technology and data sources for faster drug development.

Automating Information Exchange

In a recent industrywide survey, all clinical leaders reported the need to improve information exchange among study partners. On average, they utilize at least three methods to share trial data and documents among sponsors, CROs, and sites, with email as the primary tool. At clinical research sites, a lack of common technology creates obstacles to seamless data sharing between trial partners.

The lack of technology geared toward their unique needs can make sites jobs more difficult and distract from the important work that they are passionate about the medicine, said Hunter Walker, CTO at ARG. Ideally, sponsors should be able to keep their finger on the pulse of our operations, too. Thats something that all CROs should strive for, said Walker.AstraZeneca is focusing on being a sponsor of choice for research sites and CROs, so the company is prioritizing efforts to automate information exchange. The information we all need is sitting in isolated siloes across the clinical trial ecosystem but requires multiple emails back and forth to get it, said Doug Schantz, executive director of clinical operations at AstraZeneca.Streamlining Processes for Trial PartnersStreamlined process flow between sites, CROs, and sponsors remains an industrywide issue. As Schantz said, information sharing is the next horizon.We need a complete paradigm shift from transactional interactions with partners to connected relationships where what we need is already available in the clinical trial ecosystem, said Schantz. With better united, networked systems across stakeholders, no one wastes time emailing back and forth and can instead focus on the science and the patients.East discussed the importance of open lines of communication, particularly regarding feedback to sponsors after a trial is complete. With more feedback to sponsors, we can improve process flow in the next trial, she said. We want constant communication from the sponsors and CROs to the sites. And that should happen in a more efficient way than email.Using eSignatures is another way to speed trial execution. Physical signatures on paper slow everything down when there are physicians located in 11 hospitals as we have, added Sheppard. Its hard to start a study when youre waiting on signatures on financial disclosures.If the ink signature requirement is whats holding up getting patients the treatments they need, we need to change, East agreed.Walker offered a potential solution. One way forward is for sponsors to invest more in common technology platforms for sites. Very simply, fewer emails are key, said Walker.The administrative minutiae are what hold sites back from getting trials going quickly. And these setbacks could be resolved with better technology, added Sheppard.Leveraging Patient-Generated Data and New Data SourcesThere is an enormous amount of patient data collected during a treatment or therapy. Innovations like wearable devices and sensors offer promise in collecting new patient data. The question is how to use all this data to speed trial processes and gain insight into disease.Were sitting on a mound of patient data from sensors and wearables, said East. I once heard someone from the FDA say that 80% of the data we collect is only used once. That has to change. With the data collected from wearables, we can gain valuable insights into disease states, how drugs are operating, and how to design trials that provide better outcomes for patients, she added.Walker noted that we are still in the early days of using wearables to gather patient-generated data. There are a lot of logistics, he said. We want to know how often things break and which tools are most effective. Are their systems to process all of this patient data through machine learning? Technologies like sensors and wearables are in their infancy, but we need to start now to get a jump on the experimentation needed to incorporate these devices into the process.An Exciting Frontier in ClinicalAs scientific innovations continue to emerge, the panel agreed that advanced cloud-based platforms and data analytics technology can help processes keep up with breakthroughs in drug development. A day matters when manual processes get in the way of patients receiving life-saving therapy. Automation in a networked clinical trial offers a solution.The life sciences industry is behind. Without automated processes, we will continue to send six emails and use Excel spreadsheets to review the safety data of a clinical trial. We went from paper to electronic, but we need to go from paper to digital so we can automate. Then we can better align and run trials faster, concluded East.

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Matthew Knowles, the father of the artists Beyonc and Solange, recently announced that he had been told that he has a breast cancer caused by a BRCA2 gene mutation and that his children have a 50 percent chance of inheriting it.

In 2007, my mother was in a similar position. She learned after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis at age 42 for a second time her first bout with cancer came when she was 28 that she carried a BRCA2 mutation. It meant that as her daughter, I had even odds of having inherited it from her.

BRCA1 and -2 gene mutations can elevate a carriers lifetime risk of developing breast cancer up to 72 percent, compared to a 12 percent lifetime risk among the general population. They can also elevate a carriers lifetime risk of ovarian, pancreatic or prostate cancers along with melanoma. Although he had a family history of breast cancer, Mr. Knowles had never been referred for genetic counseling or testing to evaluate his risk of having a BRCA mutation.

His story is all too common among African-Americans. Black women are substantially less likely to undergo genetic counseling and testing for BRCA mutations as compared to white women, even though research suggests that the rate of BRCA mutations is higher among black women than it is for white.

Researchers at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida found that among young breast cancer patients who met the national guidelines for receiving genetic counseling, only 37 percent of black women had discussed it with a provider compared to 86 percent of white women. Just 36 percent of black women received testing for BRCA compared to 65 percent of white women. A study showed that only 58 percent of black women who were eligible for genetic testing under the national guidelines received testing as a part of their routine care.

Although there is no clear answer as to why the disparity exists, one reason may be the lack of awareness among doctors that black people are at risk for carrying BRCA mutations. Ohio State University researchers interviewed black and white women at higher risk for breast cancer. One study participant, a black woman in her 20s, reported that when she had expressed interest in genetic counseling, her gynecologist told her that only Jewish women tested positive for BRCA mutations.

Although its true that Ashkenazi Jews have an especially high risk of carrying a mutation (the rate is estimated to be one in 40), people of all racial backgrounds run a risk. The same study also found that black women are less likely have seen a specialist who could provide information on genetic counseling and testing: only 15 percent of black women in the study had met with a genetics, cancer or breast specialist as against 70 percent of white participants.

Although there have not been any published studies that I know of on genetic counseling and testing rates among black men, a 2016 report found that among men diagnosed with prostate cancer, black men may be more likely to have BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations than white men.

The discovery of the BRCA1 and -2 mutations in 1994 and 1995 was a huge breakthrough that allowed for us to get better at treating and preventing cancer. That makes the low levels of BRCA testing among African-Americans especially troubling, because people who know they are carriers can possibly reduce the risk of getting cancer by getting a preventive mastectomy or oophorectomy.

I know this myself. When I was 29, I was tested and discovered that my mother had passed on her BRCA2 mutation to me. I decided to have a preventive double mastectomy, which shrank my risk of developing breast cancer from 80 percent to less than 5 percent.

Even if a person decides not to do what I did, enhanced surveillance, like an MRI and mammogram every six months, can help detect cancer at an early stage when its more treatable. If black women and men arent receiving genetic testing, theyre potentially missing out on the chance to catch breast cancer early on. This is crucial because black women are more likely than white women get diagnoses of breast cancer at a later stage, which has lower survival rates. Similarly, black men are also more likely than white men to be told they have prostate cancer when it has reached a more advanced stage.

As the use of personalized medicine and genomics in treating cancer increases, knowing whether a patient has a BRCA mutation allows for individualized treatment. It also lets the patient to take steps to prevent a recurrence or a second cancer elsewhere. For example, once my mother learned that she carried a BRCA2 mutation, which is also associated with a higher risk of ovarian cancer, she underwent an oophorectomy. She has been cancer-free for 12 years.

Knowing that a person carries a BRCA mutation also provides an opportunity to test and identify relatives who may carry a harmful mutation potentially preventing and detecting cancer early in a whole family.

We need a large-scale effort to improve genetic counseling and increase testing rates in the black community. The first step is to make medical providers more aware that black women and men are at risk for carrying BRCA mutations. Numerous studies have shown that the biggest indicator of whether someone undergoes genetic testing is a recommendation from a doctor.

An educational effort would also help to dispel myths that genetic testing is financially prohibitive. Most insurance will cover the costs of testing for people who meet the national guidelines. When I underwent testing in 2014, I paid only $80 after insurance kicked in.

Cancer awareness organizations also need to do a better job of reaching out to the black community about BRCA mutations and the benefits of genetic counseling and testing. Research shows that black women are highly interested in undergoing testing for BRCA mutations once they are presented with information regarding its benefits.

Only one percent of genetic counselors in the United States are black. We need more black health care professionals who have undergone specialized training to provide risk assessment and interpret genetic testing results. This could also help to increase the number of black women who receive genetic testing.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like for my mother to have faced her first cancer diagnosis when she was not even 30 and had a young daughter. What I do know is that I was able to substantially lower my chance of having to battle the same disease because I knew about her BRCA2 mutation. More black families should be empowered with the same information.

Erika Stallings (@quidditch424) is a lawyer.

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Beyoncs Dad Has a Mutation More African-Americans Should Be Tested For - The New York Times

BARBARA SCHWARTZ BECHET Misericordia

ELIZABETH BETTY BURNS Marywood

Better Homes

and Gardens Real Estate Wilkins

& Associates

The company recently hired several new Realtors. Melanie Vanderveer joined the Bushkill office and Jessica Curry and Joseph M. Seagraves joined the Stroudsburg office.

Vanderveer has been a resident of the Pocono Mountains since June 2005. She resides in Bushkill as a social media specialist. She formerly worked as a reporter for the Pocono Record and in 2013 started her own freelance social media management PR business.

Curry is a native of the Pocono Mountains and resides in East Stroudsburg. She is a 2017 graduate of the Polley Associates real estate school. In addition, her education includes a family and consumer science degree with a masters degree in technology.

Seagraves, originally from Philadelphia, has lived in the Poconos for the past 37 years. During that time, Seagraves has been employed full time in new construction, custom home design, home builder business and new home sales. Seagraves has won numerous awards through the Pocono Builders Association for custom homes that he designed. He is considered the grandfather of todays new home sales. Seagraves formerly worked for RGB Custom Home Builders, where he was a top salesman. He will continue to sell RGB homes in his capacity.

Classic Properties

Angie Marx joined the Kingston office. Raised in Kinston, North Carolina, she later attended Kings College and worked for 10 years in the family business, Marx Sheet Metal & Mechanical, as the account manager/controller. She recently earned her real estate license from Vintage Real Estate Academy and chose to join the company for the strong support system she felt it offered agents.

Cohen Haydu

Chiropractic

Dr. Richard Cohen conducted a workshop at the Professional Hockey Chiropractic Society conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Cohen, who is beginning his fifth season as the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins team chiropractor, conducted the workshop on neck exercises to prevent and reduce the severity of neck and head injuries in hockey. Some studies suggest that head and neck injuries are the second most common and second most costly injury occurring in professional hockey. Drawing from his concepts of movement development, he created a series of exercises that incorporate neck strengthening and core strengthening in positions that occur naturally as babies grow from birth to free walking.

Commonwealth Health

Soohan Mansuri, M.D., has joined the primary care team of the physician network. Mansuri will provide personalized medical care to patients of all ages from infant to senior adulthood and welcomes new patients to his practice at 610 Wyoming Ave., Kingston.

Board-certified in family medicine, Mansuri comes from the Wright Center of Graduate Medical Education, Family Medicine Residency Program, Scranton.

Mansuri is a member of the medical staff at Commonwealth Health Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.

Foley, Comerford

& Cummins

Daniel E. Cummins and Stephen T. Kopko, both of the Scranton insurance defense firm, published an article titled Litigating the Zero Verdict that appeared in the September/October edition of the Pennsylvania Lawyer magazine. The article provides an overview of the propriety of zero verdicts by juries under different circumstances in personal injury matters. The article also reviews the variety of arguments that can be raised by both sides in support of either affirming or overturning such a verdict based on the facts of the case. Cummins is a partner in the firm and Kopko is an associate attorney. They both focus their practice in the handling of auto accidents, premises liability and products liability, and other civil litigation matters.

Glenmaura

Senior Living

Janine Kubasko Starinsky, MHA, CDP, CDCM, CADDCT, has been named executive director. She is dedicated to raising the bar for senior living in NEPA. Kubasko-Starinsky, born and raised near Moosic, brings more than 25 years of experience across independent, personal care, memory care and enhanced living. She most recently served as an interventionist for Penn States EIT-4-BPSD cohort study. She earned her Bachelor of Science from East Stroudsburg University and a Master of Health Administration degree from the University of Scranton.

Honesdale

National Bank

Gregory W. Sheridan joined as branch manager of the Hallstead office, currently being constructed in Susquehanna County.

He will administer the operation of the banks future office location being constructed at 313 Main St., Hallstead. In his role, he will be showcasing the banks capacity to support comprehensive banking solutions for the Hallstead community through personal, business, mortgage, lending, cash management, financial planning and wealth management resources.

Keystone College

Professor Jeffrey Brauer has been selected for the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason Universitys Academic Research Seminar, Poverty, Institutions and Economic Development, as an expert on Generation Z. The institute will be held in November in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

As a full professor of social sciences and an accomplished researcher and diversity facilitator, Brauer has presented dozens of workshops and seminars throughout the country to educators, business leaders, civic organizations and student groups.

Marywood University

Elizabeth Betty Burns, of Jefferson Twp. and Charleston, South Carolina, has been elected to the board of trustees. She will serve on the University Advancement Committee and the Financial Affairs Committee.

Burns retired in 2005 from the Capital Group of Companies in New York, where she served as senior vice president of Capital Guardian Trust Co., and previously worked at Time Warner Inc. as assistant treasurer in the companys Corporate Finance Group.

She serves locally on the board of United Neighborhood Centers and is a founding member and trustee of NativityMiguel School of Scranton. She also is a member of Women in Philanthropy of Scranton.

Misericorida

University

The university recently named Barbara Schwartz-Bechet, Ed.D., as the dean of the College of Health Sciences and Education.

Schwartz-Bechet joins the university after serving as the interim dean and professor in the College of Education and Rehabilitation at Salus University. While at Salus University, she was actively engaged in an interprofessional education-forward culture that included programs in low vision, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, and education, special education and rehabilitation.

NBT Bancorp Inc.

Angela Wolfe Kelley has joined as executive vice president and general counsel. In this position, Kelley will coordinate the banks legal activities, manage external legal counsel and oversee relations with regulatory agencies.

Kelley will serve on the executive management team and will be appointed corporate secretary by the board of directors. She will be based at the companys headquarters in Norwich, New York.

Kelley has 12 years of corporate law experience. She comes from Heartland Financial USA Inc., based in Dubuque, Iowa.

ODonnell Law Offices

Best Lawyers has chosen Neil T. ODonnell, owner and founder of the law firm, in the 2020 Best Lawyers in America for Personal Injury Litigation Plaintiffs and Workers Compensation Law. ODonnell has been recognized by Best Lawyers for the last eight years.

A frequent contributor to legal education programs, ODonnell has held leadership positions in both regional and state legal communities, including the Pennsylvania Association for Justice, the Pennsylvania Bar Association and the Pennsylvania Bar Institute.

Society for

Human Resource Management

Ivy Rinehimer was awarded the 2019 NEPA SHRM scholarship for her pursuit and achievement of the SHRM-CP certification in June. Rinehimer is employed by Moses Taylor Hospital, Scranton, as a human resource professional. She is a 2018 graduate of Kings College, majoring in human resource management.

NEPA SHRM is an affiliate chapter of the most highly regarded professional association for HR professionals.

Wayne Memorial Community

Health Centers

Kate Scully, CNM, has joined as the fourth midwife of the Womens Health Centers existing staff of obstetricians/gynecologists, nurse midwives and a certified registered nurse practitioner at its Honesdale office at 110 Park St.

As a certified nurse midwife, Scully provides prenatal care and facilitates births at the New Beginnings Birthing Suites of Wayne Memorial Hospital in Honesdale. Additionally, she offers postpartum care, annual gynecological exams, family planning and menopause counseling.

Wilkes University

Kishan Zuber has joined as the vice president of enrollment management and marketing. Zuber oversees undergraduate and graduate admissions offices, enrollment services, financial aid and marketing. With her leadership, the university will continue to advance its overall enrollment strategy, creating one of the finest doctoral universities in the country.

Zuber was formerly vice president of enrollment services at Wells College in Aurora, New York. Zuber earned her bachelors degree in environmental studies and her masters degree in student affairs and diversity from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Wyoming Valley Habitat for

Humanity

The organization recently filled two positions on its board of directors. Kevin Engelman will be acting as the WVHFH board president and Bernie Stelma will be a new board member. Both will volunteer their time and professional expertise to further the mission of the organization.

Engelman is a graduate of Wilkes University with a degree in business administration and a concentration in finance. He joined Wells Fargo Bank as a manager trainee in the Northern New Jersey market. He is currently a district manager for the Wilkes-Barre market.

Stelma is a graduate of Wyoming Valley West High School and Pennsylvania State University. He spent 22 years working with Wells Fargo Bank as a branch manager and is currently a business banking relationship manager with M&T Bank in the Wilkes-Barre Region.

SUBMIT PEOPLE ON THE MOVE items to business@timesshamrock.com or The Times-Tribune, 149 Penn Ave., Scranton, PA 18503.

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The disciplines of ecology and evolution have long been integrally associated. Ecology is the study of organisms relationships with each other and their environments; evolution draws upon the understanding of these relationships to elucidate the processes by which organisms change over time and produce observed patterns in biodiversity. While the term ecology did not exist at the time that Charles Darwin took his voyage on The Beagle, his comparisons of the ways in which organisms interacted with each other and their environments (i.e. ecology) laid the foundations for understanding natural selection as a major force in evolution and patterns of biodiversity. In the decades since Darwin, technological advancement has transformed our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes, allowing researchers to discern mechanisms underlying biological patterns from global to molecular scales. Over time, the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology have broadened and deepened, yet the fundamental nature of their interrelatedness continues to argue for them to progress side by side, as is evidenced by the many Ecology and Evolution programmes across universities worldwide.

Accordingly, at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Biological Sciences Directorate (BIO) provides research funding for core ecology and evolutionary research through a single division, the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB). DEB supports research and training on evolutionary and ecological processes acting on organisms across multiple levels of organisation from populations to ecosystems.

DEB core programmes are organised into four research clusters Evolutionary Processes, Systematics and Biodiversity Sciences, Population and Community Ecology and Ecosystem Sciences. In these core programmes, innovative topics proposed by the research community comprise a diverse portfolio of research projects, fostering breakthroughs that can transform biology and disciplines beyond. For example, DEB has long supported epigenetics research, in which researchers examine the genome at the molecular level and seek to understand how it interacts with the environment to shape an observed organisms physical, behavioural and other biological traits. Epigenetics is now garnering increasing attention as we learn more about how the environment experienced by a parent can alter the genome and the traits of offspring, including humans. Epigenetics has been a high-profile topic for the Rules of Life theme within NSFs 10 Big Ideas, drawing vibrant interdisciplinary research to exciting questions at the core of DEB research.

Many of the transformative advances in evolution and biodiversity research have been propelled by the decreasing cost and increasing performance of genomic technologies; these approaches are now changing research throughout ecology as well. Genomic approaches not only add new dimensions to studies of familiar organisms, such as plants and animals but also constitute the only feasible mode of comprehensively researching the ecology and evolution of microbes.

An explosion of research in all areas of biology focuses on the associations between microbes and larger, multicellular organisms. Most organisms, including humans, cannot survive without their microbial partners. DEB researchers are working to understand how microbiomes evolve and function in ecological and evolutionary processes. For example, bees are the most important pollinators of crops and other plants and are estimated to contribute at least $15 billion to U.S. crop production. Bees depend on their microbiomes to develop from larvae to adult, however, the normal microbial symbionts can be altered by pathogens, pesticides and invasive species. Researchers seek to characterise microbial diversity in flowers and pollen and then determine the nutritional role of those microbes in the development and health of larval bees. The goal is a comprehensive understanding of how bees and flowering plants interact via their shared microbial partners. Similarly, in virtually all plants, mycorrhizal fungi play a unique role in providing essential nutrients for growth. Research enabled by genomic sequencing is being used to probe this symbiosis. This project will determine how mycorrhizal symbioses affect the diversity, productivity and composition of plant communities. A better understanding of these interactions will help scientists and land managers sustain robust and resilient ecosystems.

Beyond these advances in core areas of ecology and evolutionary research, DEB partners with other NSF divisions and agencies to promote interdisciplinary research at the cutting edge of environmental biology. For example, DEB initiated the Dimensions of Biodiversity program in 2010 with a plan to revolutionise our understanding of the origins, maintenance and consequences of biodiversity. DEB has partnered with the NSF Geosciences Directorate, NASA and international funding agencies to expand the scope of these projects, which now number over 100. One important Dimensions project focuses on explanation and prediction of the distribution of animal and plant species in the megadiverse Brazilian Atlantic forest. This work combines cutting edge remote sensing, fossil pollen studies, molecular genetics, physiological assays and modern-day to paleoclimatic data to demonstrate how

In recognition of both the need to address environmental questions at increasingly large scales and the tremendous potential of new technologies, BIO has taken the bold step of creating the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), managed by NSFs Division of Biological Infrastructure. NEONs network of instrumentation provides data to researchers in ecology, evolution and allied disciplines. NEON is designed to provide open access for scientists, educators, resource managers, policymakers and members of the general public interested in forecasting the impacts of climate change, land-use change and invasive species on ecological systems. In 81 terrestrial and aquatic sites across the nation, data are collected on select variables ranging from the biodiversity of native and invasive species to elemental chemistry and gas flux, genomics and disease occurrence. The NEON system is strategically designed to address environmental questions for which a coordinated network of standardised observations is particularly effective. In 2019, the construction was completed and the Observatory moved into full operations, poised to scale up our understanding of the Earths systems to a degree never before possible.

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A time of unprecedented opportunity for ecology and evolutionary biology - Open Access Government

Video: New research links excess neural activity the flickering light seen in this image to reduced longevity. Credit: Yankner lab, Harvard Medical School.

The brains neural activity long implicated in disorders ranging from dementia to epilepsy also plays a role in how long we live.

The study, led by scientists in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and based on findings from human brains, mice, and worms, suggests that excessive activity in the brain is linked to shorter life spans, while suppressing overactivity can extend life.

Neural activity refers to the constant flicker of electrical currents and transmissions in the brain. Excessive activity, or excitation, could manifest in numerous ways, from a muscle twitch to a change in mood or thought, according to the researchers.

An intriguing aspect of our findings is that something as transient as the activity state of neural circuits could have such far-ranging consequences for physiology and life span, said study senior author Dr. Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging.

Neural excitation appears to act along a chain of molecular events famously known to influence longevity the insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF) signaling pathway, the researchers explain.

The key in this signaling cascade appears to be a protein called REST, previously shown by researchers in the Yankner Lab to protect aging brains from dementia and other stresses.

Study results could lead to the design of new therapies for conditions that involve neural overactivity, such as Alzheimers disease and bipolar disorder, the researchers said.

The findings also raise the possibility that certain medicines, such as drugs that target REST, or certain behaviors, such as meditation, could extend life span by modulating neural activity, they said.

Human variation in neural activity might have both genetic and environmental causes, which would open future avenues for therapeutic intervention, Yankner added.

The researchers began their investigation by analyzing gene expression patterns the extent to which various genes are turned on and off in donated brain tissue from hundreds of people who died at ages ranging from 60 to over 100.

The information was collected through three separate research studies of older adults. Those analyzed in the current study were cognitively intact, meaning they had no dementia, the researchers noted.

The researchers immediately noticed a striking difference between the older and younger study participants, Yankner said. The longest-lived people those over 85 had lower expression of genes related to neural excitation than those who died between the ages of 60 and 80.

Next came the question that all scientists confront: Correlation or causation? Was this disparity in neural excitation merely occurring alongside more important factors determining life span or were excitation levels directly affecting longevity? If so, how?

To answer these questions, the researchers conducted a barrage of experiments, including genetic, cell, and molecular biology tests in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, analyses of genetically altered mice, and additional brain tissue analyses of people who lived for more than a century.

These experiments revealed that altering neural excitation does indeed affect life span and illuminated what might be happening on a molecular level, the researchers said, noting all signs pointed to the protein REST.

REST, which is known to regulate genes, also suppresses neural excitation, the researchers found.

Blocking REST or its equivalent in the animals led to higher neural activity and earlier deaths, while boosting REST did the opposite.

The researchers also discovered that people who lived to 100 and beyond had significantly more REST in the nuclei of their brain cells than people who died in their 70s or 80s.

It was extremely exciting to see how all these different lines of evidence converged, said study co-author Dr. Monica Colaicovo, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, whose lab collaborated on the C. elegans work.

The researchers found that from worms to mammals, REST suppresses the expression of genes that are centrally involved in neural excitation, such as ion channels, neurotransmitter receptors, and structural components of synapses.

Lower excitation activates a family of proteins known as forkhead transcription factors. These proteins have been shown to mediate a longevity pathway via insulin/IGF signaling in many animals. Its the same pathway that scientists believe can be activated by caloric restriction, according to the researchers.

In addition to its emerging role in staving off neurodegeneration, discovery of RESTs role in longevity provides additional motivation to develop drugs that target the protein, the researchers said.

Although it will take time and many tests to determine whether such treatments reduce neural excitation, promote healthy aging, or extend life span, the concept has captivated some researchers.

The possibility that being able to activate REST would reduce excitatory neural activity and slow aging in humans is extremely exciting, said Colaicovo.

The study was published in Nature.

Source: Harvard Medical School

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Excessive Brain Activity Linked to Shorter Life Span - PsychCentral.com

UNITED STATES

[This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Americas leading higher education publication. It is presented here under an agreement with University World News.]

I actually wasnt surprised, said Margee Louisias, an associate physician at Brigham and Womens Hospital who wants to study ways to reduce asthma in minority children.

Thats exactly what Ive seen in this early stage of my career, said Utibe Essien, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburghs School of Medicine, who studies racial disparities in who gets the latest treatments for heart disease.

The NIH analysis also revealed a concerning double bind. Not only are health-disparity projects underfunded, but black applicants for the grant type the agency studied, called R01 grants, are disproportionately likely to propose those types of studies.

Meanwhile, white applicants are more likely to propose studying topics having to do with cells, molecules and genetics that are among the NIHs most funded.

In short: black academics, already under-represented in science, are less likely to land grants that are critical to advancing their careers, in part because they tend to want to study interventions that could improve the health of poor Americans of colour.

Getting the message

Early-career scientists said theyre getting the message from mentors, reviewers and their own observations that they might have a harder time getting funding in general for the research topics theyre passionate about.

Mya Roberson, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is rewriting a grant application thats been rejected by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which, like the NIH, is an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services.

Roberson proposed studying black women with breast cancer. In the feedback she received with her rejection, she said: What had been said, nearly verbatim, is that the major limitation of my study was that it was an all-black study. Without including white women, I would be limited in the interventions I could suggest.

She declined to share the rejection letter, citing rules about not sharing grant applications that are being resubmitted.

Roberson was frustrated; her sister and aunt are cancer survivors. Black women are about 20% more likely to die of breast cancer than white women are, according to the American Cancer Society, though that gap has narrowed recently. Roberson remains unsure of whether to hold her ground or change her study for the chance to get funding.

Louisias, the physician who wants to study asthma disparities, recalled her mentors telling her that she should apply for funding from private foundations and federal agencies beyond the NIH because the people in the room may be basic scientists and translational researchers, and they may not get it.

Wanda Phipatanakul, a professor at Harvard Medical School, is one of those mentors. She told The Chronicle that reviewers who focus on basic science think experiments on cells and lab animals, not people may not know whats feasible in population studies and have biases against them. But she added that it is possible to be funded through the NIH; it just might take a few tries, as it did for her before she built a reputation for her work.

I started from the ground up, she said. I took three times to get my first R01. Its an uphill battle for everybody.

Despite the greater success they might have with other funding sources, aspiring population-health scientists said they want NIH grants, which are seen as more prestigious. Depending on the institution where they work, landing one or more R01s may even be a requirement for promotion.

The NIH, getting a grant from there is seen to be a metric of, Youve really reached that level of success, Louisias said.

The NIH analysis found black applicants face barriers beyond the choice of research topic. For example, while all proposals to study areas such as socio-economic class and health were less likely than average to be funded, black applicants nevertheless had an even harder time getting the green light than whites did. The NIH is studying what role implicit bias plays in its process for peer-reviewing grant applications.

Its all made early-career scientists feel they need to take extraordinary measures to ensure they can stay in their field. I have to think so far ahead, Roberson said. This study makes me feel like I have to really be on top of it.

Officials at the NIH said they care about population-health research and diversity among scientists.

Those topics are clearly extremely important, are in our mission, and are being funded. We would like to see more equivalent rates of funding, said Hannah Valantine, the NIHs chief officer for scientific work-force diversity, who worked on the recent NIH study.

In the past few years, efforts by the NIH to link under-represented minority scientists with mentors have helped reduce the black-white funding gap in R01 grants and eliminated it among K grants, which are for scientists with less experience, according to agency numbers.

Scientists, on the other hand, said theyre getting mixed messages. They knew of and appreciated the NIHs projects aimed at improving diversity among scientists. Yet they chafed at the fact that the NIHs one institute focused on Americans who systematically suffer from worse health, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, is one of the poorest funded by Congress. Of the NIHs 27 institutes and centres, its budget was ranked 23rd in 2019.

Theres little research on why American scientists might undervalue population-health research, compared with molecular biology, but scholars have theories.

Aimee Medeiros, a historian at the University of California at San Francisco, pointed to the Scientific Revolution as the beginning of the scientific communitys privileging of lab science over real-world observations.

Roberson and Louisias thought lab experiments might seem sexier because thats the kind of science that leads to new drugs treatments that might seem like easier solutions than untangling the effects of discrimination and environmental exposures that lead to health disparities.

Nevertheless, the scientists interviewed said they were inspired to study population health, rather than bench science, because they thought it could help make an immediate difference.

Essien, who is a doctor as well as a researcher, said: I felt like being a physician was much more than the biology and the science of disease, but really what our patients lived experiences are, before they even get to us in the clinic.

Francie Diep is a staff reporter covering money in higher education. Follow her on Twitter @franciediep, or email her at francie.diep@chronicle.com.

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The double bind faced by black research applicants - University World News

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The hubbub of election season sees parties and candidates promoting and revamping policies and agendas, but theres one policy discussion that has yet to materialize government funding for fundamental science research.

The platforms of the Conservative Party, Liberal Party, and New Democratic Party (NDP) all have sparse information on science research, though the Green Party has provided a detailed strategy on funding.

Science research funding is lower than it was 10 years ago. The three main agencies that finance most of Canadas federal research the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) have substantially decreased the amount of funding theyre willing to give, with the approval rate of grant applications by these agencies dropping to as low as 13 per cent.

Since winning the last federal election in 2015, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau appointed Dr. Kirsty Duncan as the chief scientific officer. Duncan commissioned an expert panel to carry out the fundamental science review, surveying the current landscape of science research in Canada.

In a 2015 mandate letter to the minister of science, Trudeau committed to the creation of more opportunities for students in STEM and business programs, enhanced research funding across the board, and strengthened recognition of the importance of fundamental research in discovery. According to the federal government, these mandates have been fulfilled.

However, the Canadian Association of University Teachers has contended that federal research funding has not been optimally allocated. The Liberals allotted $900 million to science research from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, but the association maintains that it did not make a substantial impact on the larger science community. It wrote that the amount was only shared between 13 postsecondary institutes and their researchers.

Voters might expect a more coherent plan for research funding developed by each of the main parties. In the absence of a clear commitment to science research funding from the Liberals, the NDP, and the Conservatives, The Varsity reached out to party representatives.

Different parties pledges to research funding

According to a spokesperson from the Liberal Party, the party plans on providing$354.7millionoverfiveyears, and$90.1millionperyearongoing,tothe CIHR. It also plans to invest $265 million in the SSHRC.

A spokesperson for the NDP wrote that they will work with universities and health professionals to make sure that public research on critical health issues continues to flourish, and will invest in public agriculture research.

A representative from the Green Party referred to its in-depth funding strategy, which mentions that it plans on incorporating conclusions of the Fundamental Science Review and increasing funding to postsecondary institutions and universities for science research.

The Conservatives did not respond to The Varsitys request for comment.

U of T professor highlights reticence on science funding

A major issue for voters is that none of the parties seem to want to talk about science research funding in-depth, according to an op-ed to the Toronto Star written by Dr. David Naylor, a former U of T President, and Dr. Mark Lautens, a professor at U of Ts Department of Chemistry.

Lautens underscored the importance of federal research investment in an interview with The Varsity. He noted that it enables scientists to improve the publics quality of life by developing disease therapies, finding solutions to environmental issues, and bettering waste reduction. He noted that funding also provides research opportunities to better train the countrys future researchers.

Lautens has supported the rebound of federal funding since cuts in the mid-2000s, but he still believes that a lot more needs to be done. He highlighted the low rates of CIHR grant approval for medical research funding as a critical area of improvement.

Whats at stake for students?

Farah Qaiser, a Masters student in molecular genetics at U of T and a head spokesperson for #VoteScience, a national nonpartisan effort to advocate for science in the upcoming election, explained how voters can learn more about the parties positions on supporting research.

In an email to The Varsity, Qaiser advocated for voters to reach out to their candidates as soon as possible to ask where they stand on science issues that matter to their electorate such as funding research or better supporting the next generation of scientists.

She recommended voters to do so by reaching out to candidates in-person, calling, emailing, or using the #VoteScience campaigns email form.

To learn more, Qaiser further recommended students check CBCs non-partisan science and environmental policy debate between federal candidates, as well as the conclusions of a survey sent to the federal parties to determine their environmental policies.

The Evidence for Democracy advocacy group, along with members of the #VoteScience campaign, have also published results of a questionnaire sent to the federal parties about their positions on science policy.

The Liberals, NDP, and Greens submitted responses to the survey. According to Evidence for Democracy, the Conservatives declined to participate due to time constraints.

Tags: federal election, money, politics, Science

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Where do Canada's federal parties stand on research funding? - Varsity

Rechavi says that exactly how the changes in the neurons are communicated to the germline and how thataffects the nervous system of the next generation are still open questions. He hypothesizes that the process involves one or more molecules released by the nervous system perhaps small RNAs, perhaps something secreted like a hormone. But somehow those germ cells then influence the behavior of the next generation and seem to circumvent the normal need for rde-4 in the production of the small RNAs for chemotaxis in the progeny.

In another paper on epigenetic behavior that appeared in the same June issue of Cell, Rebecca Moore, Rachel Kaletsky and Coleen Murphy, the molecular biologist who leads their laboratory at Princeton University, reported that C. elegans worms exposed to the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa learn to avoid it, and they transmit this learned avoidance for approximately four generations. Normally, the worms seem to prefer Pseudomonas to the bacteria on which they routinely feed.

The researchers sought to understand how this behavior is controlled at a molecular level. They discovered that double-stranded RNA from the pathogen triggered the worms response, a finding that they further investigated with Lance Parsons of Princeton University and described in a biorxiv preprint posted on July 11.

In the worms exposed to the pathogen, they detected changes in the expression of a gene, daf-7, in a specific neuron called ASI that is required for the avoidance behavior. They also found a huge number of changes in the small RNAs in the germline, Murphy said, including the ones called Piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA). As the name suggests, piRNAs interact with piwi genes, which help to regulate stem cell differentiation.

Moore, Kaletsky and Murphy found that animals without the piRNA pathway can learn to avoid Pseudomonas but do not pass on this avoidance behavior to their progeny. Thus, the piRNA pathway is critical for inheritance of the behavior. Thats why were excited about the piRNA pathway, Murphy said.

Sarkies thinks these findings may help to explain the curious ability of C. elegans to take up double-stranded RNA from the environment and use it to silence endogenous genes. For years, geneticists have exploited this property of worms: By synthesizing double RNAs that match any gene, researchers can silence it and study what it does.

But why the worm has this ability was mysterious. It obviously didnt evolve it in order to make life easy for scientists, and we dont really understand what ecological role it might have, Sarkies said. Whats quite exciting in principle about the studies from the Murphy lab is that they suggest that this might be a way in which C. elegans is able to adapt to pathogenic bacteria. Hypothetically, when the worm takes up double-stranded RNA from bacteria in its environment, the molecules could silence some of the worms genes and induce adaptive responses. Those adaptations could then be passed to the next generation.

Most in the field still approach such conjectures with skepticism. I believe that today, there is not a single solid paper showing that only small RNAs are involved in epigenetic inheritance, said Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroepigenetics researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Zurich who studies the inheritance of trauma in humans and mice. In the mouse model she works with, she knows that small RNAs are not sufficient because if she injects small RNAs alone into fertilized mouse eggs, the resulting animals do not show the RNA-associated trait.

Mansuy believes that a multitude of factors may contribute in different ways to epigenetic inheritance, and their importance may vary with the trait or behavior. Very often people like to simplify the matter and think either its DNA methylation or its microRNA. I think its totally misleading to think that way, she said. People should not dismiss one or the other but just think about all these factors together.

She added that errors have crept into the literature on epigenetic inheritance, making some findings seem more definitive than they are. For example, some review articles claim that Mansuy demonstrated that injecting microRNAs into fertilized eggs is sufficient to cause the inheritance of behavioral symptoms in mice. We never showed this, she emphasized. Authors of review articles often dont go back to check the original findings, so when the review is cited subsequently, it creates an auto-feeding system that perpetuates errors. Its polluting the field, she said. Now many people work only on RNA epigenetic inheritance because they think it is well established, she added.

Unreliable findings have also sometimes appeared in high-profile journals. As a result, she argues, the field as a whole may be on thinner ice than it seems. The lack of rigor can lead to a misleading thought and perception, she warned.

Validation of Mansuys skepticism can be found in a recent study in eLife on epigenetic inheritance in fruit flies. Giovanni Bosco and his colleagues at Dartmouth College demonstrated that learned adaptive behaviors in fruit flies can be epigenetically inherited but that small RNAs are not sufficient to transmit this behavior.

In Drosophila, adult females raised with parasitic wasps learn to lay their eggs on food that contains ethanol, which protects the eggs and larvae from being parasitized by the wasps. This egg-laying preference occurs even when the mother herself was never exposed to ethanol, Bosco emphasized. Exposure to the wasp was in and of itself sufficient for the females to somehow epigenetically reprogram their eggs so that their daughters would be predisposed to have this behavior, he said.

The preference for egg laying on ethanol persists for five generations. Bosco, his graduate student Julianna Bozler, and Balint Kacsoh (now a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania) hypothesized that small RNAs were involved in the inheritance of this behavior. To test this idea, they used a quirk of fly genetics to create flies with a pair of chromosomes that both came from the same parent (normally, both parents contribute to each pair). Boscos team reasoned that if small RNAs in the cytoplasm of the mothers egg were sufficient for inheritance of the learned behavior, then the offspring should exhibit the inherited behavior even if it received both pairs of chromosomes from the father.

In a series of experiments, Bozler, Kacsoh and Bosco demonstrated that small noncoding RNAs from the mother were not sufficient for transmitting the behavior between generations; an as yet unidentified epigenetic modification on chromosome 3 was also essential. They are currently investigating the nature of this epigenetic change.

To Bosco, the big question is: How does the signal from the brain reach an egg and change the information thats in the egg? Figuring this out would open the floodgates to ask: What else is the brain doing to the germline? What else are our cognitive experiences and environmental exposures impinging on the epigenome of the egg or sperm?

Most people, Bosco continued, would have no trouble accepting that exposure to a toxic chemical in our water or food could interact with the germline and change the epigenetic state of germ cells.

What I would suggest is that our brains are our pharmacies, Bosco said. Our brains are making chemicals all the time, such as neuropeptides and other neuromodulatory molecules with diverse functions. Some of those functions impinge directly on processes in other organs, including the reproductive system. If we can ingest a chemical from our environment that changes the epigenomes of the egg or sperm, why couldnt our brain make a similar molecule that does the same thing? he said.

At Cambridge, Burton has identified at least one of the ways in which information from the nervous system can be transmitted to the germline. In a 2017 Nature Cell Biology paper, he and his colleagues exposed C. elegans to high levels of salt to induce a state called osmotic stress. They discovered that the worms brain responded by secreting insulin-like peptides that change the egg-making cells (oocytes) in ways that induce an epigenetic change. The resulting alterations in gene expression in the oocytes lead the offspring to produce more glycerol, which protects them against osmotic stress.

You have a neuronal signal affecting the germ cells that looks to be adaptive, Burton said.

Mansuy has found that early-life trauma in mice leads to the release of stress hormones that affect the animal throughout its life span, producing depressed or risk-taking behaviors, metabolic dysregulation, and other health problems. They also affect the developing germ cells, causing the same behaviors and metabolic alterations to be inherited in the offspring for up to five generations. Previously, Mansuy had found that small RNAs were not sufficient to transmit these phenotypes in mice, just as they were not sufficient in the fruit flies. Something else was going on.

In a preprint recently posted on biorxiv.org, she and her colleagues report that by injecting the blood of traumatized mice into control mice, they could induce similar metabolic symptoms. The injected blood also appeared to affect the mices germ cells because their offspring inherited the metabolic abnormalities too.

The researchers identified some of the signaling molecules that transmitted the metabolic effects as fatty acids that can bind to receptor molecules, move into the nucleus and help activate the transcription of certain targeted genes. The receptors exist in germ cells, too, so they could be one of the ways in which information moves between blood and germ cells, Mansuy suggests.

One of the outstanding questions in the field is why epigenetic inheritance only lasts for a handful of generations and then stops, said Eric Greer, an epigeneticist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Childrens Hospital who studies the epigenetic inheritance of longevity and fertility in C. elegans. It appears to be a regulated process, in part because the effect persists at the same magnitude from one generation to the next, and then abruptly disappears. Moreover, in a paper published in Cell in 2016, Rechavi and colleagues described dedicated cell machinery and specific genes that control the duration of the epigenetically inherited response. So its an evolved mechanism that likely serves many important functions, Rechavi said.

But what exactly is adaptive about it? If the response is adaptive, why not hardwire it into the genome, where it could be permanently and reliably inherited?

In Murphys C. elegans model, because the learned avoidance behavior is transient (even if it is transgenerational), it allows animals to go back to eating bacteria that are nutritious but smell a lot like those pathogens, she explained. Sniffing out the difference between food and foes can be difficult, so worms that permanently avoid pathogens will miss out on nutritious food sources.

Greer concurs that there could generally be a cost to deploying an adaptive response permanently. For example, deploying antiviral defenses when pathogens arent around is a waste of resources that could be used instead for growth and reproduction.

Trade-offs could also constrain other adaptations. In Burtons 2017 study, worms exposed to P. aeruginosa produced offspring resistant to the pathogen, but that adaptation was deleterious to the offsprings ability to respond to other challenges, like osmotic stress. Unavoidable trade-offs between adaptations to different stresses make it impossible for the worms to be optimally adapted across the board.

In that scenario, you wouldnt want it hardwired into your genetics. Youd want this plasticity where you could program the adaptation, but also get rid of it, Burton explained. That may explain why stress appears to reset transgenerational small-RNA inheritance, as reported by Rechavi and his colleagues in a new preprint on biorxiv.org.

Very little work has been done to investigate mismatched stresses between parents and offspring, but a lot of literature suggests that these mismatched stresses might play a role in human diseases, Burton said. I think mechanistically looking at that is going to be really interesting, going forward.

Correction added on Oct. 16, 2019: The beginning of one sentence was rephrased to clarify that the described work in Murphys lab was not related to Rechavis experiments.

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Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain - Quanta Magazine

An Ottawa astrophotographer who has been fascinated with space for years has earned recognition from NASA scientists for a dramatic image of the aftermath of two galaxies colliding.

In the photo, what looks like a pale but fiery strip of orange curls around a blue and purple swirl of stars. The two forms meet in a bright flare in the middle, creating the impression, as NASAs Astronomy Picture of the Day description puts it, that this galaxy is jumping through a giant ring of stars.

Rudy Pohl, the Ottawa man behind the processing of the image, said that theres a gravitational force that has been set up between them, sort of pulling it apart, though he was quick to add that he was not an astronomer himself.

In a phone interview with CTVNews.ca, Pohl said he was thrilled to have his photo chosen by NASAs Astronomy Picture of the Day -- his second image since he started submitting to NASA.

It's really extraordinary to get one of those, he said. Hundreds of images get submitted every day to NASA for this.

Astronomy Picture of the Day has been running since 1995, and each photo comes with an explanation of the image, provided by a professional astronomer.

Although it appears as though two galaxies are wrestling in front of our eyes, both the blue and orange arms in the picture are all part of the same galaxy: NGC 7714.

According to the description, the image shows how NGC 7714 has been stretched and distorted by a recent collision, with NGC 7715, a smaller, neighboring galaxy, that is off to the left out of the frame of the image.

Scientists believe that NGC 7715 charged right through NGC 7714.

The ring of golden light in the image is made up of millions of older stars thought to be similar to our sun, the description says, while the bright centre of NGC 7714 is the nexus of a new star formation for the galaxy.

Youd never guess it, looking at the vibrant colours in the picture, but this image started out life as a series of black and white photos taken by NASAs Hubble telescope.

It took hours of work to process the image, but it was work that Pohl, 69, was happy to do.

Pohl is part of an online community of astrophotographers who create stunning colour photographs of space. Although some have their own telescopes and equipment to take photos of the sky themselves, others rely on free archives, such as the Hubble Legacy Archive, to find the source images to create their masterpieces.

If the source images are black and white, does that mean those who process the images are choosing colours at random?

Not according to Pohl. The colour clues are in the filters used by Hubble, he said.

What they do is they put a colored filter in front of that black and white camera. In this case there are three colors, red, green, and blue. It's called RGB imaging. It's the same imaging as in our computer monitors and in our televisions, he explained.

Every single pixel is made up of a percentage of red, percentage of green and percentage of blue.

So the Hubble camera first puts a red filter in front of it, which means it blocks out everything but the red, and so the red wavelength hits the camera and you get an image.

Although the image still comes out looking black and white, it is effectively a picture of what the galaxy would look like if it was composed of only red light.

The process is repeated with blue filters and green filters, Pohl said, producing numerous images that -- while technically greyscale images -- contain a massive amount of information regarding where different wavelengths of light, and thus different colours, are concentrated in the image.

Astrophotographers take these different greyscale images and fill them with colour corresponding to the filter they were taken with, so they end up with numerous red, blue, and green layers of the same deep space object. When they line the different images up on top of each other, thats when the real picture of a galaxy, star or nebula starts to form.

It takes a lot of processing and refining of the different layers to filter out the noise in the images and produce a final photo that looks as crystal clear as Pohls picture of NGC 7714. Pohl said it can take anywhere from 12 to 16 hours to finish an image.

He used to have his own telescopes and equipment to image the heavens with, but when chronic illness advanced on him, he said he had to sell his gear.

Broke my heart to do it, he said.

Working with public archives of space images allowed him to hold onto his passion.

A love of science is something that has informed almost his entire life. Pohl got his undergraduate degree in molecular genetics at Carleton University, and met his wife while he was at it, who was also studying science. He only started posting astrophotography pictures within the last few years, but he's not slowing down now.

I'm going to be doing it for the rest of my life now, he said. I am so blown away, like when I think of the vastness of space.

NGC 7714 is around 100 million light years away from Earth, which makes it a relatively close cosmic neighbor.

According to APOD, NGC 7714 and NGC 7715 first started interacting around 150 million years ago, and are expected to continue for several hundred million years more, possibly resulting in the two combining into a single galaxy.

Link:
This image shows the aftermath of two galaxies colliding - CTV News

A recent study looked at funding rates for R01 grant applications, which are designed to support "health-related research and development based on the mission of the NIH." In general, population-based projects were less likely to be funded than explorations of cellular mechanisms, the study found. Will & Deni McIntyre/Science Source hide caption

A recent study looked at funding rates for R01 grant applications, which are designed to support "health-related research and development based on the mission of the NIH." In general, population-based projects were less likely to be funded than explorations of cellular mechanisms, the study found.

Black applicants to a prestigious research grant program at the National Institutes of Health are awarded funding at a significantly lower rate than their white peers. The NIH has been intensively investigating this funding gap since a 2011 report revealed the extent of the problem, looking for underlying mechanisms to use as opportunities for corrective intervention.

NIH's latest finding, described in a study released this month in the open-access journal Science Advances, reveals that part of the gap can be attributed to differences in the types of topics scientists propose studying and how those topics are valued by grant reviewers.

The study of grant applications submitted between 2011 and 2015 suggests African American scientists may be more likely to pursue research in topic areas such as community-oriented research on disease prevention, for example, versus more microscopic-level research on cellular mechanisms or the basics of genetics. Those population-based topics aren't being funded as readily.

And that's a problem with the system, some outside researchers point out not with the choice of research topic.

"I do think that the areas of research that apparently are being funded at a lower rate are important," says David Asai, senior director for science education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an advocate for diversity in STEM, who was not involved in the NIH analysis. "This study might prompt the community to think about the underlying biases we might have in deciding what sorts of research deserve greater attention."

The NIH study looked at funding rates in the form of successful applications for R01 grants, which are designed to support "health-related research and development based on the mission of the NIH."

Despite NIH efforts to diversify the pool of scholars doing medical research, white applicants for these grants continue to receive funding at nearly twice the rate of black applicants 17.7% of white applicants were approved in fiscal years 2011-2015 compared with 10.7% of black applicants.

The researchers analyzed keywords in the topics of 157,549 grant applications and found that some topics were close to four times more likely to gain funding support.

"Among the less favored [topics] are areas that include study of groups of people," says Dr. James Anderson, deputy director for program coordination, planning and strategic initiatives at the NIH and one of the authors of the paper.

"These topics are are described by words like socioeconomic status, physical activity, pregnancy," Anderson says. "The ones that did best were really about molecular mechanisms cells, or parts of cells. Words like cilium, DNA polymerase, chimeral chemistry, ribosome. It's not absolute, but it's really quite a striking distinction." The success rates by topic ranged from about 29% to 7.5%.

The researchers used self-reported demographic data in an optional portion of the application one that was not visible to the grant reviewers to identify each applicant's race. They found that over a third of the applications from black scientists were tied to just eight of the 150 topic clusters.

Six of those eight topics involved "communities, or health disparities, and so on," says Anderson, "and those were in the topics that didn't do quite as well" in the funding process.

This difference in topic preference can account for 20% of the overall funding gap for black applicants, the study found, after controlling for other variables such as the applicant's prior academic and professional experience and accomplishments.

Dr. Hannah Valantine, director of the Office of Scientific Workforce Diversity at the NIH and another author on the paper, says black scientists might be more drawn to certain topic areas at the population level because "connection to one's community, and seeing the disparities, drives people to go into science to create a better environment for their community."

"It's critically important that African American scientists are able to advance their career and stay in academia, not only for their own success, but for enhancing the diversity of the biomedical workforce," Valantine says. "Because we know already that when we have a diverse scientific enterprise, we come up with more creative solutions to the problems that we seek to solve."

That concern resonates with Stephani Page, a postdoctoral fellow in biophysics at Duke University Molecular Physiology Institute and initiator of the Twitter hashtag #BLACKandSTEM, even though her field of study lies on the more statistically successful end of the grant-getting spectrum.

"For me, personally," Page says, "the science that gets me really excited, and I get tingles about, tends to be more quantitative, mechanistic science. But I also have the experience of coming up growing up and being a mom as a black woman in this skin. So when I think about what I want my career to be, it's difficult for me to detach from my career meaning something to my community more broadly."

Page says she is losing hope that she can have the community impact she wants helping black scientists feel affirmed while working in her current field. "I don't want to be a scientist who can't be committed and devoted to changing the system," she says.

One underlying cause of the disparity this study documented, Page says, might be that many of the NIH reviewers who evaluate grant proposals only 2.4% of whom were black in this study lack a certain lens when evaluating what research topics deserve priority.

"If you haven't grown up with inequity as deeply ingrained in your lived experience, it's not going to be as important a lens in your life decisions," she says. "The fact that there's data behind it now gives us a space to talk about it differently. Now we can begin to say that the lens makes a difference."

Valantine says the NIH is also actively evaluating whether the disparity is partly due to racial bias by reviewers. A study to be published early next year, she says, "will tell us whether, if we anonymize an application, we can close this gap."

Whatever the causes of the diversity gap, she says, the NIH is committed to closing it, and the study's results suggest several areas of intervention that could help. For one, the NIH has already begun mentoring programs aimed at increasing the diversity of the grant applicant pool.

"Black applicants submitted only 1.5% of the total applications for these R01s," Valantine says, adding that "we must do all we can" to increase that percentage.

In the meantime, the underfunded topics that the study identified are " 'mission critical' areas of NIH," Valantine says. "The solution is figuring out, within NIH, how we can make sure that those areas are funded."

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Racial Disparities In NIH R01 Funding May Be Partly Caused By Topic Choice : Shots - Health News - NPR