Snapshots

27th ECNP Congress

New addiction treatment targets, structural brain changes in schizophrenia, findings on the effects of seasonal changes on the brain, and epigenetics as a possible target for intervention are some of the topics which were presented and discussed during the 27th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Congress which was held for the first time in Berlin from 18 to 21 October 2014.

The congress was opened by Karl Deisseroth, winner of several prestigious awards (2013 Brain Prize, 2014 Keio Medical Science Prize) and currently D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, USA, with a keynote lecture entitled “Circuit dynamics of motivated behavior”.

Deisseroth developed two technologies which integrate basic methods in order to study normal and perturbed brain structure and function in living organisms as well as post-mortem tissue: (1) CLARITY – a technology that can be used to transform intact biological tissue into a hybrid form in which tissue components are removed and replaced with exogenous elements for increased accessibility and functionality, and (2) optogenetics – a technique that uses light to control the activity of the brain.

The advantages of both methods are to control and monitor individual neurons and measure changes in real time (optogenetics), and to produce highly detailed three-dimensional images of brain volumes (CLARITY).

Nowadays, numerous labs worldwide are using optogenetics to understand and develop treatments for diseases of the brain and mental health conditions and to better understand the complex wiring of our brains.

One example of how optogenetics could point to better therapies came from work in Parkinson’s disease. Deisseroth and his team used optogenetics to stimulate different components of the brain’s wiring in animals with a version of Parkinson’s disease, and found that connections arriving into a particular region deep in the brain, when stimulated, powerfully reduce symptoms.

Detailed information about the keynote and the congress can be found at:

http://www.ecnp-congress.eu/~/media/Files/congress/Berlin%202014/ECNP%202014%20Monday%20-%20Low%20res%20final.pdf

and

http://www.ecnp-congress.eu/

(24.11.2014)

Falling Walls Conference 2014

More than 20 top international researchers, 100 outstanding young scientists from around the world and 30 of the best science-based start-ups presented their impending breakthroughs on 8 and 9 November 2014 in Berlin at the Falling Walls Conference. The Falling Walls Conference is an annual global gathering of forward thinking individuals organized by the Falling Walls Foundation. It was first held in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and has since developed into a highly acclaimed annual platform for top international research.

Berlin Wall (© David Lally @ PublicDomainPictures.net).

In 2014, at the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for the first time a Nobel Laureate who received his award only this year gave a presentation: the Göttingen researcher Stefan Hell, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his role in developing stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy.

As part of the conference, the Falling Walls Lab for young researchers and innovators and Falling Walls Venture, the competition for science-based start-ups, took place on the eve of the Conference, on 8 November 2014.

One of the young presenters of the Falling Wall Lab Final 2014 and second prize winner of the Falling Walls Young Innovators 2014 prize is the Egyptian Nermeen Youssef from the University of Alberta in Canada. In her presentation, entitled “Breaking the wall of type-1 diabetes”, Youssef pitched her idea of using blue light to stimulate engineered fat cells to secrete insulin – an idea that could lead to needle-free management of type-1 diabetes.

The first prize of the Falling Walls Venture competition was awarded to EyeTechCare for its innovative treatment of glaucoma, a degenerative disease of the optic nerve that affects about 4% of the world population and can lead to blindness. EyeTechCare has developed the first ophthalmic device that operates with high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). It has been used to treat over 1000 patients so far and is clinically tested and approved for sale in Europe. So far, the French-based company has managed to collect 16 million euros in investments, which allowed it to develop the product and to begin commercialization (source: Falling Walls Foundation gGmbH).

For more information please also visit:

http://www.falling-walls.com/press/press-releases

or

http://uofa.ualberta.ca/news-and-events/newsarticles/2014/november/ualberta-grad-student-takes-second-in-falling-walls-finale

or

http://www.eyetechcare.com/uk/news/science-start-up-the-year-2014,131.html

(24.11.2014)

Nobel Prize in Physics 2014

October 7, 2014. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics to Isamu Akasaki (Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan and Nagoya University, Japan), Hiroshi Amano (Nagoya University, Japan) and Shuji Nakamura (University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA) “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”.

This year’s Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source – the blue light-emitting diode (LED). In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources.

When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not have been created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades.

They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit up the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit up by LED lamps.

White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 lm/W for regular light bulbs and close to 70 lm/W for fluorescent lamps. As about one quarter of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth’s resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 h, compared to 1000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 h for fluorescent lights.

The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

The invention of the efficient blue LED is just 20 years old, but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all (source: “The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics – Press Release”, Nobelprize.org).

See also:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2014/press.html

(24.11.2014)

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014

October 8, 2014. The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig (Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA), Stefan W. Hell (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany) and William E. Moerner (Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA) “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.

For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules, the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos.

It was all but not obvious that scientists should ever be able to study living cells in the tiniest molecular detail. In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 μm. Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having by-passed this limit. Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld.

Two separate principles are rewarded. One enables the method of STED microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell in 2000. Two laser beams are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow, another cancels out all fluorescence except for that in a nanometer-sized volume. Scanning over the sample, nanometer for nanometer, yields an image with a resolution better than Abbe’s stipulated limit.

Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation for the second method, single-molecule microscopy. The method relies upon the possibility of turning the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images yields a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel. In 2006, Eric Betzig utilized this method for the first time.

Today, nanoscopy is used worldwide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis (source: “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 – Press Release”, Nobelprize.org).

Please also visit:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2014/press.html

(24.11.2014)

CERN Council selects next director-general

Geneva, 4 November 2014. At its 173rd Closed Session, CERN Council selected the Italian physicist, Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, as the Organization’s next Director-General. The appointment will be formalized at the December session of Council, and Dr. Gianotti’s mandate will begin on January 1, 2016 and run for a period of 5 years.

Council rapidly converged in favor of Dr. Gianotti. “We were extremely impressed with all three candidates put forward by the search committee,” said President of Council Agnieszka Zalewska. “It was Dr. Gianotti’s vision for CERN’s future as a world leading accelerator laboratory, coupled with her in-depth knowledge of both CERN and the field of experimental particle physics that led us to this outcome. I would like to thank all the candidates for giving the Council such a hard decision to make, and the search committee for all its hard work over recent months”.

“Fabiola Gianotti is an excellent choice to be my successor”, said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. “It has been a pleasure to work with her for many years. I look forward to continuing to work with her through the transition year of 2015, and I am confident that CERN will be in very good hands”.

“It is a great honor and responsibility for me to be selected as the next CERN Director-General following 15 outstanding predecessors”, said Dr. Gianotti. “CERN is a center of scientific excellence, and a source of pride and inspiration for physicists from all over the world. CERN is also a cradle for technology and innovation, a fount of knowledge and education, and a shining, concrete example of worldwide scientific cooperation and peace. It is the combination of these four assets that renders CERN so unique, a place that makes better scientists and better people. I will fully engage myself to maintain CERN’s excellence in all its attributes, with the help of everybody, including CERN Council, staff and users from all over the world”.

Portrait of Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS Experiment and new CERN’s Director-General for 2016 (© CERN, Photo: Claudia Marcelloni).

Dr. Gianotti was leader of the ATLAS experiment collaboration from March 2009 to February 2013, covering the period in which the large hadron collider experiments ATLAS and CMS announced the long-awaited discovery of the so-called Higgs boson, recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize to François Englert and Peter Higgs in 2013. She is a member of many international committees, and has received many prestigious awards. She will be the first woman to hold the position of CERN Director-General.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession. Serbia is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer Status (source: CERN press office).

Please also visit:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2014/11/cern-council-selects-next-director-general

(24.11.2014)

Airline crews may be more likely to get skin cancer

Pilots and flight attendants may be at an increased risk of developing melanoma the most deadly form of skin cancer, suggests a new literature review which was recently published (Sanlorenzo M, Wehner MR, Linos E, Kornak J, Kainz W, Posch C, Vujic I, Johnston K, Gho D, Monico G, McGrath JT, Osella-Abate S, Quaglino P, Cleaver JE, Ortiz-Urda S. The risk of melanoma in airline pilots and cabin crew: A meta-analysis. JAMA Dermatol 2014. doi: 10.1001/jamadermatol.2014.1077).

While the study cannot pinpoint why flight crews are at higher risk, the authors led by Dr. Martina Sanlorenzo from the Mount Zion Cancer Research Center, Department of Dermatology, University of California, San Francisco, USA suspect it could be the result of greater exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which causes damage to the DNA in skin cells, at high altitudes.

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the USA. Over 3.5 million Americans will be diagnosed with skin cancers in 2014, according to the American Cancer Society. About 76,000 people will be diagnosed with melanoma, which is the type of skin cancer that is most likely to lead to death.

Past studies have suggested that airline pilots and other flight crew members are prone to getting more skin cancers, but the association was poorly understood, the researchers write.

Jet airplane (© Peter Griffin @ PublicDomainPictures.net).

For the new analysis, Sanlorenzo et al. combined data from 19 previous studies published between 1990 and 2013. In total, they had data on more than 266,431 people.

The researchers used a measure known as standardized incidence ratio, which helps gauge whether the cancer cases observed among specific groups of people are more or less than what would be expected in the general population.

According to the National Cancer Institute, the average American has about a 2% risk of developing melanoma during his/her lifetime.

Among participants in the 19 studies, the researchers found that melanoma was about twice as common among pilots and flight crew members than would be expected in the general population.

The researchers caution that they cannot say why cabin crews may be more likely to develop melanoma. It could be due to greater exposure to solar radiation as altitude increases and the protective barrier of the atmosphere thins. There may, however, be other unknown factors among cabin crews, apart from UV exposure, that affect their melanoma risk, the study team writes.

The researchers don’t have any data on airplane passengers, but Sanlorenzo notes that “frequent flyers that fly as often as cabin crew should get regular skin checks and protect themselves from UV radiation”.

She suggested that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration should take more measurements of how much UV radiation pilots and cabin crews are exposed to inside commercial planes, versus, for example, aircraft with special radiation-blocking windows (source: Andrew M. Seaman, Reuters Health).

The full contribution can be found at:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/03/us-airplane-cancer-idUSKBN0GY2HO20140903

(24.11.2014)

From January 2015: Skin cancer is officially an occupational disease

Skin cancer will be recognized in Germany from January 2015 as an occupational disease. According to the Professional Association of German Dermatologists (Berufsverband der Deutschen Dermatologen, BVDD), people who are regularly exposed to the sun as part of their job and suffer from a form of non-melanoma skin cancer will for the first time be able to make claims for benefits from the statutory accident insurance. The benefits will include treatment and rehabilitation, as well as pensions and compensation.

Outdoor jobs are, for example, construction workers, roofers, farmers and sailors, but also postmen, lifeguards and ski instructors fall into this group. Even before the introduction of this new occupational disease payments of 100,000 euros were paid as an “invalidity pension” for individual cases. The accident insurance predicts that there will be additional costs of around 20.5 million euros per year for cases of white skin cancer.

Its inclusion on the list of occupational diseases is based on scientific and medical evidence but the decision has also been met with broad political approval (source: n24).

For more information please visit:

http://www.uptoderm.de/jsp_public/cms2/index.jsp?did=6298

(24.11.2014)