Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Abbott May 21 announced a definitive agreement with Piramal Healthcare Limited to acquire full ownership of Piramal's Healthcare Solutions business (Domestic Formulations), a leader in the Indian branded generics market, for an up-front payment of $2.12 billion , plus $400 million annually for the next four years, giving Abbott the No. 1 position in the Indian pharmaceutical market. This further accelerates Abbott's emerging markets growth following the recent acquisition of Solvay Pharmaceuticals and announcements last week of Abbott's collaboration with Zydus Cadila as well as the creation of a new stand-alone Established Products Division to focus on expanding the global markets for its leading branded generics portfolio. "This strategic action will advance Abbott into the leading market position in India , one of the world's most attractive and rapidly growing markets," said Miles D. White , chairman and chief executive officer, Abbott. ...

Mutations in the protein tyrosine kinase gene ERBB4 contribute to — and may provide hints about treating — a subset of melanoma, according to a paper by researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University that appeared in the advanced, online edition of Nature Genetics this week. The team sequenced protein tyrosine kinase or PTK genes in 29 individuals with melanoma. Their search uncovered dozens of somatic mutations affecting the kinase domain of 19 different PTK genes. When they looked at the same 19 genes in another 79 melanoma patients, the researchers found that almost a fifth of those tested harbored mutations in ERBB4 . And, they reported, knocking down the mutated form of ERBB4 or using a drug that targeted the gene slowed the growth of melanoma cell lines, suggesting it might be useful to evaluate ERBB4 status in melanoma patients. Researchers at the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center sequenced all 86 PTK family genes in tumor samples from 29 ...

This one is extremely interesting, an awesome discussion, more so it attracted my interested as it sort of looked very relevant to my previous blogs Dawn of the GATTACA era! and the series of blogs on personal genomics . Nature News has an intriguing article on the next three decades of reproductive medicine: essentially a series of short musings from scientists working in the field about the issues we will be facing in 30 year's time. Thanks to Genetic Future another favorite blog of mine for having covered it. I totally agree with the author 'Daniel MacArthur' its in deed worth reading through in full. Which baby do you want? A dilemma for the 21st century parent-to-be Also read: The future of neo-eugenics Height and hypertension genes in Nature Genetics Making babies: the next 30 years Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service , that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user pr...

In its simplest sense, we imagine that learning occurs through a series of positive and negative rewards. Some actions lead to pleasure, others to pain, and it seems reasonable to expect that people will repeat the actions with pleasurable results and avoid those that ended in pain. Yet, we all know people who aren't deterred by the idea of punishment. We all know people who never seem to learn. Could there be a physical reason, hidden in their genes? Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... more Klein, T. (2007). Genetically Determined Differences in Learning from Errors. Science, 318 (5856), 1642-1645.

For the first time in Britain, researchers at Newcastle University said Tuesday they had created human-animal hybrid embryos, amid a political row over a disputed embryo research bill in parliament. According to the northern English university, the research, which was first presented at a lecture in Tel Aviv on March 25, has yet to be published or verified, with a spokesman for the university telling AFP that the institution "wouldn't claim it to be final at all." The revelation comes with British MPs engaged in a fierce battle over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which allows the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's governing Labour Party conceded in March that its party lawmakers with moral or ethical objections would be allowed to vote against parts of the proposed legislation when it comes before parliament this year. The embryos were created by injecting DNA taken from human skin cells into egg...