Stem-cell trial aims to tackle effects of multiple sclerosis

Posted by Ian Sample on July 29, 2011 Comments Off

Scientists will inject patients with stem cells taken from their own bone marrow in experiment

Doctors in Britain are launching a clinical trial of a groundbreaking stem-cell therapy that aims to halt or reverse the damage caused by multiple sclerosis.

Patients admitted to the trial will be injected with stem cells harvested from their own bone marrow in the hope that the cells home in on and repair areas of their nervous system destroyed by the disease.

Bone marrow is a rich source of stem cells that are known to be capable of repairing many different types of body tissue and organs. Under the therapy, the stem cells will be collected, filtered and grown to great numbers in the lab, before being injected back into the blood stream.

The treatment, if safe and effective, could help some of the 100,000 people with multiple sclerosis in the UK. The condition is the most common, disabling neurological condition in young adults. Early symptoms, including blurred vision, poor co-ordination and balance, typically arise between the ages of 20 - 40.

Multiple Sclerosis occurs when the immune system goes awry and attacks a fatty coating called myelin that surrounds nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Damage to the myelin stops signals from the brain being sent quickly and smoothly around the body. There is as yet no cure.

Scientists received £1m from the MS Society and the UK Stem Cell Foundation for three studies that will investigate whether the treatment is safe. One trial, led by Paolo Muraro at Imperial College is the UK part of an international trial that will involve 150 to 200 people with multiple sclerosis in London, Edinburgh and elsewhere in the US, Canada and Italy.

The other trials, at Queen Mary Hospital, London, and the University of Nottingham, will look at the cells' ability to treat optic neuritis, a symptom of MS that can cause blindness, and differences between stem cells taken from patients with progressive MS and those without the condition.

A previous trial into the safety and feasibility of using bone marrow stem cells to treat MS, led by Neil Scolding, a clinical neuroscientist at Bristol University, was deemed a success last year. In June, a US benefactor donated $1.1m (£675,000) to fund a follow-up trial that will assess how much patients improve after receiving the treatment.

Richard Sykes, chair of the UK Stem Cell Foundation, said the trials brought "much-needed hope" to people affected by the disease.

The medical promise of stem-cell therapies has led to a rise in untested treatments for conditions like multiple sclerosis, which have attracted patients to unregulated clinics overseas. Doctors stressed that no stem-cell therapy has yet been proven for MS anywhere in the world.

Stem cellsMedical researchBiologyMultiple sclerosisHealthIan Sampleguardian.co.uk

Anecdotes are great – if they convey data accurately | Ben Goldacre

Posted by Ben Goldacre on July 29, 2011 Comments Off

Channel 4 reported that a study in the Lancet showed a new drug had reduced the symptoms of Duchenne's muscular dystrophy. Unfortunately, the study shows no such thing

On Channel 4 News, scientists have found a

Flu vaccine based on ‘super-antibody’ could prevent all pandemic strains

Posted by Ian Sample on July 29, 2011 Comments Off

Scientists have discovered an antibody that can tackle every strain of influenza A, the virus responsible for flu pandemics

A volunteer in a medical study who had an unusual reaction to the flu virus could hold the key to developing a vaccine that protects against all pandemic strains of the infection, scientists say.

Tests on a group of people who had either been infected with or vaccinated against the flu revealed one participant who produced a "super-antibody" that could fight off every strain of influenza A, the virus responsible for mass outbreaks of the illness.

The person produced too little of the super-antibody to make them immune to the flu, but scientists believe they can boost its effect, and use it to make vaccines against the virus.

In preliminary tests, researchers showed that injecting mice and ferrets with the super-antibody protected the animals against doses of influenza that would normally be lethal. The study appears in the journal, Science.

"What we can do now is mass-produce this super-antibody and give it as a therapeutic," said Antonio Lanzavecchia, director of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzone, Switzerland.

"This could be developed to treat any influenza A infection and prevent any possible new pandemic that will come out. We expect it will block not only the strains that circulate in humans but also those that are present in animals," he added.

Steve Gamblin, a co-author of the study and structural biologist at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in north London, said that, if proven to work safely, the antibody might be given directly to hospital staff and other frontline workers to protect them against flu pandemics.

In the longer term, scientists hope to create a vaccine that makes the body launch its own devastating attack on influenza by producing a surge of super-antibodies.

Traditional flu vaccines make the body produce antibodies that target proteins called haemagglutinins on the surface of the influenza virus. But these antibodies focus their attack on the tips of the proteins, which change as the virus mutates. Because the virus evolves so rapidly, flu vaccines have to be reformulated every season.

The super-antibody is different because it latches on to a part of the stem of the haemagglutinin that is shared by all influenza A strains and appears not to mutate. Lanzavecchia calls it the virus's "Achilles heel".

A universal flu vaccine could transform public health by making seasonal jabs obsolete and reducing the impact of fresh outbreaks, including those that spread from animals to humans, like the recent strain of swine flu.

Sir John Skehel, another co-author of the study at the National Institute for Medical Research, said: "Every year millions of people are infected with influenza A viruses and, although the majority of infections are mild, those in vulnerable groups, such as the very old or the very young, may be worse affected and more likely to die or be hospitalised.

"As we saw with the 2009 pandemic, a comparatively mild strain of influenza can place a significant burden on emergency services. Having a universal treatment which can be given in emergency circumstances would be an invaluable asset."

ImmunologyBiochemistry and molecular biologyMedical researchFluVaccines and immunisationHealthHealth & wellbeingFlu pandemicIan Sampleguardian.co.uk

One in ten research projects using monkeys has no benefit, finds review

Posted by Alok Jha on July 28, 2011 Comments Off

Research on monkeys must be subject to rigorous safeguards to ensure medical or scientific benefits, says review author

Almost one in 10 research projects that used monkeys in the UK resulted in no scientific or medical benefit, according to a major review.

Professor Sir Patrick Bateson, who led the study, said that the justification for some projects carried out over a 10-year period from 1996 was "inadequate or insufficient" and that future projects involving nonhuman primates that could not demonstrate plausible medical or social benefits should not be funded.

Bateson, an ethologist at Cambridge University and president of the Zoological Society of London, made his comments at a briefing to launch a report examining the necessity, quality and long-term impacts of the most sensitive of all animal experiments – those on nonhuman primates.

Last year, British scientists conducted scientific procedures on more than 2,600 monkeys, including marmosets and macaques, out of a total of more than 3.7m procedures on animals in total.

More than 2,000 of the monkeys were used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies to test medical treatments. The rest were used in universities and government institutions in the course of research into conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and infectious diseases including HIV/Aids.

"Unqualified support for all work on nonhuman primates is unjustified and unjustifiable," said Bateson. "But the same can be said for an outright ban on such research. What is needed is discrimination based on hard evidence."

Scientific research on monkeys should continue in the UK, he said, but the work must be subject to rigorous safeguards because "not everything in the garden is lovely."

"We did find a minority of cases, about 9% of them, that the justification of the projects was inadequate or insufficient," said Bateson. "These projects were unlikely to be beneficial and the claims made for them were implausible. In my view, funding of work on nonhuman primates should not be continued if no effort has been made to demonstrate, plausibly, the potential medical and social benefits of the work."

One example of such research cited in the report was of animals being used in reproductive biology experiments as part of training for researchers. The reviewers judged it to be repeating work published a decade earlier, and that its justification on the basis of scientific or medical benefit "would appear to have been small".

Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, welcomed the review and said that it was always difficult to guarantee the usefulness of research in advance.

"People go on exploration, they're trying to find places that weren't known before," he said. "But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end."

He gave the example of trying to understand the scientific basis of memory and how brain cells work to encode memory. "We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates," said Walport.

"It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health but, nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health."

John Savill, chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC), said that there was often a long pathway from scientific discovery to implementation for the benefit of patients. "Being able to identify potential for benefit in over 90% of studies is a great fillip for the peer review mechanisms involved because that's a very high hit rate, in my view."

Bateson's study, commissioned by the main funders of research using animals in the UK – the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust – looked at 67 academic projects carried out between 1996 and 2006, which involved around 3,000 monkeys.

Panel members made independent assessments of the scientific quality of the research, the welfare costs to the animal used and the likely benefits to medicine and the public good. Assessment of potential medical benefits was often speculative, said Bateson, because of the considerable time that can elapse between fundamental research and the findings being used to develop therapies.

In response to Bateson's report, the funders said that, since 2004, they had "strengthened our procedures for assessing all grant applications requesting the use of [nonhuman primates], cats, dogs and equines."

Bateson acknowledged that the research councils and funding bodies in the past were not as rigorous as they are now. "It has got better. We started this review in 1996."

Maggy Jennings, senior scientist at the RSPCA, said that "for too long people have been happy to overstate the importance of experiments using nonhuman primates in the absence of the evidence to back up their emphatic claims. The RSPCA has always had grave concerns about the use of nonhuman primates for ethical and welfare reasons.

"This is the latest report in recent days which emphasises the importance of a robust system of regulation for animal experiments. This makes it all the more concerning that the UK government is considering weakening the laws currently in place in the UK."

Michelle Thew, chief executive of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, said the Bateson report was "a chilling insight into primate research in the UK. It is also a shocking admission of failure. Regulations designed to protect primates in research are demonstratively not working.

"It is still far too easy to subject primates to extremely devastating experiments with little or no human benefit. It is now clear that the only measure that would completely protect primates, and to ensure more productive medical research, is to end their use in research. It is time for researchers and funding bodies to come into line with public opinion."

Animal researchMedical researchEthicsAlok Jhaguardian.co.uk

Why are we so good at recognising our own facial expressions? | Anna Perman

Posted by Science: Medical research | guardian.co.uk on July 27, 2011 Comments Off

Scientists think they may have solved the puzzle of why we're better at spotting our own facial expressions on an avatar than those of our friends, with possible implications for conditions associated with faulty body image

Bizarrely, we are better at recognising our own facial expressions than those of our friends – but now scientists think they know why.

A study published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences suggests that we use different recognition strategies when we see ourselves and when we recognise our friends. The finding could open up new possibilities for research into clinical disorders that are associated with body image, such as bulimia and anorexia.

Everyone has characteristic facial movements and gestures that others use to recognise them. But we are better at recognising our own characteristic facial movements, when we see them replicated in an avatar, than we are at recognising the movements of people we know.

This is obviously a surprise, because while we have a lot of experience of seeing others' movements, we rarely see our own except in the mirror or in video recordings. It's a puzzle how we have gathered enough information to recognise our own movements so readily.

Richard Cook, a psychologist at University College London who led the study, describes the phenomenon as "really, really weird".

To find out what causes it, the researchers recruited pairs of friends and recorded each individual telling a joke. They then mapped the facial expressions of participants onto avatars, so that their facial movements were visible but not their faces.

Six months later, each participant watched a selection of videos of the avatars and were asked to say whether they thought it was an avatar of themselves, a friend, or a complete stranger. The results showed that they were very good at recognising their own movements, but had trouble distinguishing the movements of their friends from those of strangers.

The researchers then manipulated the videos of the avatars to see how this affected recognition. They found that slowing down the movements or changing their "rhythm" or timings made people less able to distinguish their own avatars from those of strangers.

Cook concludes that we glean information about our characteristic expressions and movements without realising it.

"When walking along, you hear the rhythm of your feet and feel yourself moving," he said. "There are lots of ways that you can learn the rhythmic structure of your actions and it's that which helps you recognise yourself."

He suggested that this might account for how much better we are at recognising our own movements in an avatar, since we don't have the same insight into our friends' characteristic rhythms, instead having to rely on visual information alone.

"It could be that you're using a slightly different strategy to recognise your friends that is much more based on what they look like."

The research could suggest a direction for research into some psychological disorders. Kevin Gibson, a consultant clinical psychologist from the British Psychological Society said that, although this does not have a clinical application at the moment, it could initiate a line of future study.

Problems with body image are associated with conditions such as anorexia and bulimia. "If you had a larger control group, we could compare this to clinical groups," he said.

Anna Perman is a freelance writer and is studying science communication at Imperial College London. She tweets as @thepermanator

NeurosciencePsychologyMedical researchguardian.co.uk

TED Global 2011: Interspecies sex, the West’s killer apps and expert liars | Carole Cadwalladr

Posted by Carole Cadwalladr on July 27, 2011 Comments Off

On Wednesday delegates at TED Global 2011 were treated to talks on human-Neanderthal hybridisation, the end of Western supremacy and the post-truth society

Did modern man and Neanderthal man have sex?

They did. Although one of them would usually have been a woman. Last year, Svante Pääbo, a Swedish palaeogeneticist, sequenced 55% of the Neanderthal genome and began comparing it with the genomes of people around today. Did we mix, he asks? His evidence suggests that we did.
Neanderthals were bigger and beefier than Homo sapiens, and it's not clear that they had language, but according to Pääbo they ran into modern man somewhere in what is now the Middle East, and, as he put it, "mixed". The DNA of people born outside Africa contains on average 2.5% Neanderthal DNA.

Stranger still, DNA extracted from the tip of a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia has shown that not only is there another ancient human, "Denisovan man", but there are some people living on Earth today who are descended from them: Melanesians' DNA share 5% of their DNA with Denisovan man.

Is cancer contagious?

Terrifyingly, it can be. What's more, it's possible that a contagious form of cancer may wipe out an entire species: the Tasmanian devil. The world's largest carnivorous marsupial could be extinct in 20-30 years, according to Elizabeth Murchison, a Cambridge research fellow who studies the genetics of cancer.

It is, says, Murchison, "the ultimate cancer", unconstrained by the body that created it. The animals bite each other in greeting, and thereby spread the malignant cells, developing terrible tumours on their faces. In some areas of Tasmania, more than 90% of the population has already been wiped out.

Transmissible cancer is not confined to the Tasmanian devil. Dogs can develop a sexually transmissible form of cancer. "We believe this cancer may be very old. Tens of thousands of years old. It may have arisen in a wolf that lived alongside Neanderthals."

And people (gulp)? Can we catch cancer too? The answer is also yes. We're familiar with the idea that viruses, such as the human papilloma virus, can indirectly cause cancer. But in the 1950s, an American scientist, Chester M Southam, injected live cancer cells into unwitting inmates in an Ohio state prison. Most didn't go on to develop cancer, but some of them did. "It's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people," says Murchison. "However, under some circumstances it can happen."

What's the latest must-have gadget?

According to Mikko Hypponen, a Finnish cybersecurity expert, it's a fax machine. Yes, the fax is back, and the overhead projector may yet have its time again, because when the man who knows more about computer viruses than almost anyone tells you a firewall is not enough, it's time to listen.

Computers run everything in the modern world, but there are hundreds of thousands of computer viruses out there, and a whole business ecosystem servicing them. Forget teenage hackers, there are entire criminal underworlds dedicated to the creation and propagation of viruses.

They're almost impossible to find, and even when they are, the local police do little. What we need, says Hyponnen, is an Interpol for the internet. That, and a fax machine.

Is the work ethic Protestant?

Not any more, says the historian Niall Ferguson. The average Korean works 1,000 hours more a year than the average German, and if you look at mathematical achievement, it's a district in Shanghai that leads the world. In fact there's as big a gap in mathematical ability between Chinese teenagers and Americans as there is between Americans and Algerians.

We are living through the end of what Ferguson calls "The Great Divergence", the centuries-long period of time in which the West overtook the rest of the world. Now the rest of the world is striking back, having acquired what he's cutely termed "the West's killer apps": competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society and finally, that work ethic.

"The killer apps can be downloaded. They're open source. And any country can adopt these and achieve what the West has achieved. Only faster."

The financial crisis is an epi-phenomenon: an emblem of the end of Western supremacy.

Do gorillas lie?

They have been known to. Koko, the gorilla taught sign language, once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall, but it's us humans who are the true masters of the art. According to Pamela Meyer, a social media expert, we are living in a "post-truth society". Those Facebook friends of yours, for example? Just how real are they? Lying, she says, is the bridge between reality and our fantasies, between who we are and who we want to be.

And it's a cooperative act. You can only be lied to if you agree to it. Strangers lie three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting. But then again, according to Meyer, married couples lie to each other once in every 10 interactions.

Neanderthal manAnthropologyGeneticsBiologyCancerMedical researchVirusesData and computer securityPsychologyCarole Cadwalladrguardian.co.uk

Cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger dies

Posted by Science: Medical research | guardian.co.uk on July 26, 2011 Comments Off

Ettinger's body is frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at the institute he founded, along with those of his mother and wives

Robert Ettinger, a pioneer of the cryonics movement, has died and had his body stored at the facility he founded in the hope that medical technology will enable him to live again one day.

Ettinger died at home on Saturday, aged 92, in a suburb of Detroit after weeks of declining health. His body became the 106th to be frozen and stored at the Cryonics Institute, which he founded in 1976.

"My father devoted himself to doing what he could to enable his family, his friends and others to come back and live again," said his son David. "Whether he will achieve that nobody knows at this point, but we think he has a good shot."

Ettinger, a university physics teacher, was seriously wounded during the second world war at the Battle of the Bulge and spent years in hospitals. The bone graft surgery that saved his legs inspired his optimism about the prospects of preserving life through technology, a statement from the institute said. .

His son said Ettinger was also inspired by science fiction writings about deepfreezing the dead, and expected researchers to make serious progress toward developing the idea. But when nothing seemed to be happening, he wrote a 1964 book, The Prospect of Immortality, introducing the concept of cryonics.

"If civilization endures, medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death," he wrote.

"No matter what kills us, whether old age or disease, and even if freezing techniques are still crude when we die, sooner or later our friends of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us."

Ettinger promoted his theory in other writings and appearances on television. There are now similar facilities for preserving bodies in Arizona, California and in Russia. Ettinger also established the Immortalist Society, a research and education group devoted to cryonics and extending the human life span.

The Cryonics Institute charges $28,000 (£17,000) to prepare a body and store it in a tank of liquid nitrogen. The first person frozen there was Ettinger's mother, Rhea, who died in 1977. His two wives, Elaine and Mae, also are stored at the institute.

Ettinger was never bothered by ridicule and was a "reluctant prophet", his son said. "He did what he thought was necessary and appropriate and didn't worry much about what people thought," he said. "The people who are scoffers are like the people who said heavier-than-air flight won't work."

CryonicsMedical researchUnited Statesguardian.co.uk

What’s human? What’s animal? And what of the biology in between? | Nik Brown

Posted by Nik Brown on July 25, 2011 Comments Off

Policymakers, institutions and even language are hopelessly out of step with developments in trans-species science

Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how to keep pace with developments in the biosciences.

It can justly be said that politics and regulation have not dealt well with our newfound capacities for muddying the boundaries between us and other species. And yet the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in bioscientific techniques that increasingly call into question what it means to be human. Take the human genome project: many of us may have intuitively suspected that we might have more genetically in common with the chimpanzee than even Darwin had envisaged, only then to be told of our cousinly closeness to the fruit fly, maize and the zebra fish.

Casting a glance back to the 1990s, trans-species transplantation seemed to promise a new era of limitless animal organs and tissues. Who knows, it may still. But that dream slowly sank from view amid concerns about potentially catastrophic trans-species disease, and increasing evidence of its poor performance in preclinical trials with primates. Move forward a decade and we have the trans-species embryo debate, resulting in legislative changes permitting a whole new class of research embryos incorporating animal DNA. So to the classical question of "what is an embryo", has been added the equally vexing puzzle "what is an animal".

Bioscientific hybrids are difficult to categorise, disorderly, existing on the fringes of the humanised animal and the animalised human. And yet policymaking has arguably had a poor track in getting to grips with and understanding trans-species innovation. Trans-species biologies present acute difficulties especially in terms of regulation because they confuse and traverse regulatory institutional boundaries.

In the UK, as elsewhere, regulatory agencies have tended to regulate humans on the one hand, and animals on the other, with little consideration for what might lie between. The tendency has been to deal with all things animal through the Home Office and its Animal Procedures Inspectorate, and to deal with all things human through the Department of Health. There are good and disturbing grounds for suspecting this division has become increasingly naive and meaningless, as the biosciences enter their trans-species future.

In the late 1990s the UK deemed it necessary to establish a regulatory body to manage the many murky trans-species hybrid implications of xenotransplantation, the UK Xenotransplantation Interim Regulatory Authority. But far from being a porous conduit between the DoH and the Home Office, UKXIRA found itself hamstrung. The Home Office would seek its advice on animal experiments involving primates but would not allow the authority to see confidential trial applications or the results of previous studies. This proved to be a poor basis on which to advise the DoH about the wisdom or otherwise of proceeding to clinical trials with humans. UKXIRA wasn't perfect, but it represented an important attempt to overcome the regulatory divide between the human and the animal. The government's decision to disband UKXIRA in 2006 could justifiably be viewed as myopic and short-sighted, given the trans-species direction of travel in the biosciences. In losing UKXIRA, the UK also lost important institutional experience and a model for dealing with interspecies biotechnological developments.

Even more recently, the UK trans-species embryo debate points to equally serious flaws in the regulation of the wild indeterminate zones between us and other animals. One strategy evident in the run-up to changes in legislation allowing the creation of trans-species embryos was to downplay that they might be trans-species at all. Just reflect for a moment on shifts in the language used to describe these embryos: the DoH, for instance, started out talking about "trans-species embryos" before finally settling on its preferred term, "human admixed embryos". In other words, these embryos might be a bit mixed up, but they're essentially human. No worries.

Such embryos would allow stem-cell scientists to use animal eggs rather than scarce human eggs to create stem-cell lines. The animal nuclei could be removed and replaced with human nuclei leaving only a residue of animal egg DNA behind. It was striking to see this process now described by some stem-cell scientists as "especiation" in place of the more scientifically conventional term "enucleation". In this way, the vexing animal is tidied away behind a thin veneer of language and rhetoric.

More worrying is the continuing confusion over whether trans-species embryos should be regulated by human or animal agencies – again, the Home Office or the DoH. That boundary comes down to potentially confused assessments of whether it is the animal or the human which "predominates" in the resulting embryo. I had the privilege of discussing this recently with an eminent UK reproductive scientist who had been involved in crafting the legislation. "Ultimately," he said, "it has to be either human or animal to be regulated ... otherwise we would have to do away with our whole regulatory edifice." Well, that is exactly what we may have to do.

It could be argued that the report by the Academy of Medical Sciences searchingly arrives at a point of dissatisfaction with the bipedal and binary regulation of transbiology. Perhaps it's time for an overhaul of our institutions, their language and assumptions about what it is to be human, animal and the many murky zones in between.

AnimalsStem cellsAnimal researchZoologyBiologyMedical researchScience policyNik Brownguardian.co.uk

Medical research warning over human cells in animals

Posted by Alok Jha on July 23, 2011 Comments Off

Panel of scientists and ethicists says research on animals that contain material from humans should be more tightly regulated

Medical research on animals that contain material from humans – such as brain cells – should be more tightly regulated, according to a report from a leading panel of scientists and ethicists.

The report, which included a public consultation, says such research needs more scrutiny and clearer legal boundaries.

Scientists already use animals that contain human material in work to understand medical conditions such as Down's syndrome. But the report's authors said politicians should devise regulations to cover likely advances.

The team highlighted future research into human cognition and reproduction as areas of greatest concern to the public.

Martin Bobrow, professor of medical genetics at the University of Cambridge, led the panel set up by the Academy of Medical Sciences. He said: "Where people worry is when you get to the brain, the germ cells and the sentinel features that help people recognise what is a person, as opposed to a rat or a rabbit.

"Things like skin texture, facial shape, speech, replacing brain cells with human cells, allowing the development of human germ cells in animals. And particularly where there is any possibility of fertilisation within an animal."

He said the public was also concerned about animals whose appearance was deeply disturbing.

The professor said the panel was not recommending such work be banned outright, but that these were areas where the value of the science should be most carefully considered. Current laws around the use of animals in scientific research would cover most eventualities for now but these rules would not be enough for the techniques of the future, he said.

One "animal model" that includes human material is the Down's syndrome mouse. It carries a copy of human chromosome 21 among its DNA. Using this model, scientists are gaining insight into the condition.

"Changing animals by putting human genes or cells into their structure is one way of making them more resemble the bit of the human condition you're interested in studying," said Bobrow.

Tom Baldwin, a philosopher at the University of York and panel member, said ethical decisions might need to be based on the "great ape test", referring to the UK moratorium against using humans' closest animal relatives in medical research.

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human," he said. "These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

The report recommends that a science and ethics committee with input from the public be set up to assess the merit of scientific projects in sensitive areas.

Lovell-Badge said continuing public discussion about the issue was key, "so that those sorts of experiments are discussed openly. Some of them certainly should be done, but it needs to be done in an open way."

Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said this sort of research required open discussion to ensure it moved in a direction that the general public remained comfortable with. "The Royal Society is supportive of the recommendations made in this report, especially the call for a national expert body … Proper scrutiny and regulation of this developing field now will ensure that society benefits from its advances fully."

Animal researchGeneticsNeuroscienceMedical researchScience policyHealthEthicsAlok Jhaguardian.co.uk

Charlie Brooks’s kriotherapy leaves me cold | Martin Robbins

Posted by Martin Robbins on July 22, 2011 Comments Off

The evidence to support a freeze-treatment service at health spa Champneys is unsurprisingly underwhelming

Buried in the torrent of revelations about News International is the interesting fact that Rebekah Brooks's husband, Charlie, runs a "kriotherapy" centre at Champneys, the spa that played a part in Sir Paul Stephenson's demise after revelations that he enjoyed a free five-week stay there [see footnote]. Is "kriotherapy" legitimate enough to be allowed out without its "scare quotes" on, or are the Brooks family backing another less-than-reputable product?

"Kriotherapy" is an innovative take on America's "cryotherapy", with a "k" instead of a "c" to make it sound cooler – like Krispy Kreme donuts, but marginally healthier. People take off most of their clothes, sit in front of a fan for a bit to dry their skin, and then lark about for a few minutes in a freezer set to more than a hundred degrees below zero. The treatments are offered by Champneys for fitness, body-sculpting, injury rehabilitation, and general wellbeing, with specific claims that it can help with depression, infertility, psoriasis and insomnia.

The treatment has had a huge amount of publicity in the press, with features in the Independent, Telegraph and FHM. Articles about it tend to follow a particular pattern: 1) reporter seeks treatment on the trail of a celebrity aficionado (Tony Blair, Jason Orange, Frank Bruno, you know the type), 2) reporter puts on silly outfit and feels a bit nervous, 3) reporter goes into the freezer and comes out feeling all tingly and invigorated, much as you would if you'd had a bucket of ice cold water tipped over your head.

So how is it supposed to work? FHM win the prize for the daftest explanation:

"When your skin senses the temperature, it sends an 'extreme danger' signal to your brain, initiating a fight or flight response. Your brain then performs a scan to check for areas of the body that might not be working to their fullest potential. With exercise, blood is then pumped around the body at a significantly increased rate."

Or in proper biological terms, "wibble". Champney's own explanation isn't much better:

"The treatment subjects you to extreme cold for a short period of time during which your blood capillaries limit circulation, pooling blood to your vital organs. As soon as you exit the chamber, your blood capillaries dilate to their maximum promoting a surge in blood circulation ... Kriotherapy awakens the body's healing response, stimulating circulation and immune response."

Like a Dan Brown novel, it sounds vaguely plausible, but falls apart the more you look at it. It's not clear how slowing down and speeding up your blood provides any benefit over just letting your blood move around normally; and the idea of "awakening" the "body's healing response", as if it has a tendency to doze off on the job, is a bit suspect. After a few hundred million years of evolution, your immune cells are pretty good at knowing what they should be doing, and when they should be doing it. The one thing that is known to produce short-term changes in immune function is just good old-fashioned exercise.

The evidence is unsurprisingly underwhelming. A pair of systematic reviews in 2004 by Hubbard and Denegar at Pennsylvania State University looked at more than 50 previous clinical trials of cryotherapy, and found that the quality of previous work was poor, and the evidence "limited", a pattern noted elsewhere. They noted that as of 2004, "no authors have assessed the efficacy of ice in the treatment of muscle contusions or strains. Considering that most injuries are muscle strains and contusions, this is a large void in the literature." The general gist is that it's not impossible the therapy may help athletes return to participation more quickly, but nobody seems very keen to find out.

Lack of evidence is unlikely to stop celebrities and lifestyle reporters endorsing dodgy products any time soon, but if you're tempted to give "kriotherapy" a try, ask yourself what you'd prefer to do, trust the clinical trials or hand over your cash to Rebekah Brooks's husband [see footnote]?

• This footnote was appended on 22 July 2011: This article stated that Charlie Brooks, the husband of former News International's chief executive Rebekah Brooks, "runs a 'kriotherapy' centre" at Champney's. To clarify: Brooks once worked with the owner of the centre when it was based in London and he also helped bring it to Champneys two years ago but since then he has had no connection with it.

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