Daily Archives: November 28, 2021

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., Nov. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) will present at the 2021 Evercore ISI Healthcare Conference at 5:10 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021. Rob Lenz, M.D., Ph.D., senior vice president of Global Development at Amgen will present at the conference. Live audio of the conference call will be broadcast over the internet simultaneously and will be available to members of the news media, investors and the general public.

The webcast, as with other selected presentations regarding developments in Amgen's business given at certain investor and medical conferences, can be accessed on Amgen's website, http://www.amgen.com, under Investors. Information regarding presentation times, webcast availability and webcast links are noted on Amgen's Investor Relations Events Calendar. The webcast will be archived and available for replay for at least 90 days after the event.

About Amgen Amgen is committed to unlocking the potential of biology for patients suffering from serious illnesses by discovering, developing, manufacturing and delivering innovative human therapeutics. This approach begins by using tools like advanced human genetics to unravel the complexities of disease and understand the fundamentals of human biology.

Amgen focuses on areas of high unmet medical need and leverages its expertise to strive for solutions that improve health outcomes and dramatically improve people's lives. A biotechnology pioneer since 1980, Amgen has grown to be one of the world's leading independent biotechnology companies, has reached millions of patients around the world and is developing a pipeline of medicines with breakaway potential.

For more information, visit http://www.amgen.com and follow us on http://www.twitter.com/amgen.

CONTACT: Amgen, Thousand Oaks Megan Fox, 805-447-1423 (media)Trish Rowland, 805-447-5631 (media)Arvind Sood, 805-447-1060 (investors)

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Amgen To Present At The 2021 Evercore ISI Healthcare Conference - Yahoo Finance

It involves understanding human behaviour, addressing inequalities, optimising our communications. It brings in public health and how that interacts with animal health, and then there is the economics lurking behind that. In parallel, there is a whole gamut of aspects to do with education.

Whitelaw says that Scotland, and specifically the University of Edinburgh, is ideally positioned to take advantage of the One Health agenda because of its expertise in human and animal health and in data.

He adds: Edinburgh has a joint medical and vet medical college, a leading science and engineering college and the wonderful humanities, arts and social sciences in the third college. It is not individually that we can address One Health, it is by bringing all these together, by intertwining roles and ideas, that we will achieve success, or do One Health data better.

But how has the One Health approach of collaboration and data sharing between scientists, health practitioners and the wider academic community helped shape our efforts to understand and tackle the coronavirus pandemic? And, building on the achievements already made, how better prepared are we for another global virus outbreak?

Dr Sam Lycett, a genetics expert at the University of Edinburgh, uses phylodynamics to study the spread of viruses. She says: This technique makes use of the now large collections of virus genome sequence data and the fact that these viruses accumulate mutations over time.

She uses this information to look at who infected whom either at an individual level or group level, such as a city or region. Going deeper than this we can also estimate predictive factors for why we see the transmission patterns. Is it just distance, known host movement patterns or a change in environmental conditions?

During the coronavirus pandemic, the amount of available data has been huge, Lycett says. In this current pandemic, there has been a massive global and UK-specific Sars-CoV-2 sequencing effort for people there are almost four million genomes now, with almost one million just in the UK and close to 100,000 just for Scotland.

This is a really good surveillance sample roughly, we are sequencing one in five or six positive cases. We use this sequence data to calculate how individual lineages and mutations are being generated, imported, and growing and declining, in Scotland.

Dr Kenny Baillie, a senior clinical research fellow at the Roslin Institute, says viral sequence data is now converging with clinical and biological data from humans and being used to find treatments for Covid-19.

The Roslin Institute is leading the most powerful study of human genetics of Covid more powerful in terms of discovery power than all of the other genetics studies in the world put together, says Baillie. Most recently, we have reported25 genetic associations with critical illness in Covid, many of which lead us to promising therapeutic avenues.

Discoveries reported after only five months of Covid being in the UK included two genes which have led directly to treatments being included in large-scale clinical trials.

In the future, Baillie wants to be able to look at treatments even more quickly than the five months which was achieved in the pandemic. We can move towards doing this in real time there is a convergence between animal and human science which means the same statistical techniques are used for both livestock and human genetics. With computing power and the human resource that is being deployed, we can move towards close to real-time host and viral genetic studies.

The study of zoonotic pathogens those that can move from animal to a human is at the heart of discovering the way coronavirus spreads, both locally and globally.

Virologist Christine Tait-Burkard, a research fellow at the Roslin Institute, has been working on coronaviruses for more than 12 years. She says: Coronaviruses have an inherent potential for cross-species transmission as one of the properties they have is that they can swap large parts of their genome relatively easily, and that is a bit reminiscent of the most known zoonotic virus, the influenza virus.

International data accumulation and sharing has helped build understanding of coronavirus. Tait-Burkard says this includes looking at treatments for other diseases, such as cardiac conditions and cancer, which can help develop help with coronavirus we can harness that and also tackle coronavirus.

And she says the drugs needed should be taken as early as possible, not when a patient has had to be hospitalised. We really need a pill that people can take at home when they get the first symptoms.

Tait-Burkards work with international colleagues includes looking at the livestock, the wildlife and the human coronaviruses and finding the commonalities, taking all the data together so that we can get drugs that are there for any future pandemic.

We need to leverage lessons from Covid, says Professor Ross Fitzgerald, personal chair of molecular bacteriology at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), described as a slow pandemic and a huge public health threat, with estimates suggesting hundreds of thousands of deaths occur worldwide due to infections caused by resistant bacteria. This is a major health crisis that has taken a back seat since the pandemic, he says, warning that effective antibiotics could run out.

A lot of the work to find a solution to AMR surrounds data, says Fitzgerald faster diagnostics, more sequence information and real time surveillance of humans, animals and the environment on a global scale.

And he adds that the work on coronavirus can now help tackle AMR. We need to unite academia, industry, government and policy-makers so we are all working together, communicating the data effectively to address the impact of AMR.

Fitzgerald is concerned there is not sufficient volume of data to address AMR at the moment. We need more data, but to get the value from it we need to have really good descriptive information it is high-quality data that we need.

And he is a strong advocate of developing artificial intelligence and machine learning to harness that data. We know that it will allow us to track the emergence and spread of resistance and pathogens.

Professor Lisa Boden, chair of population medicine and veterinary public health policy at the University of Edinburgh, says that from a One Health perspective, there have been issues surrounding the way coronavirus has been dealt with.

She says: Covid-19 has really made visible different types of vulnerabilities in our institutions, our governance and our legal structures, and those are really due to entrenched health, social, racial, political and economic inequalities at different scales, at a local and international level.

Boden says there has been a lack of complete data particular for people living on the edges of society and those people who are living in communities which might be remote, rural and geographically isolated.

To change this, she advocates a non-linear approach which looks at both the causes of inequality as well as at a disease itself, using multi-sectoral datasets.

But with the experience of a vast amount of data collection, use and sharing surrounding the pandemic, some believe future outbreaks could look a lot different.

Lycett says: We will be able to predict and quantify the risk of having a pandemic. Whether we will be able to predict the exact time and place of the event itself is very variable. But certainly to predict risky areas and risky situations, it is possible.

Tait-Burkard agrees, saying: It is probably not all that easy to predict when the transmission is going to happen but what we can learn from this pandemic is to be better prepared. And we now have the facilities in place to do that preparedness, we will have to make sure there is money available to maintain these facilities.

This article first appeared in The Scotsmans Life Sciences 2021 supplement. A digital version can be found here.

The rest is here:
How experts have deployed data to tackle Covid-19 and plan for future pandemics - The Scotsman

As I write this article, my children are stealing cars and robbing houses, I suppose. I am an Indigenous father so, doesnt that tell you everything you need to know about me as a parent, and about my childrens capacity to understand right from wrong?

I know you sense the sarcasm in this. Well, a great, great majority of Australians would. But there is a certain type of person I am implicating here. The type who have an ignorance so deeply ingrained, that it is a wonder they havent wandered off into the dark recesses of our colonial history and followed each other off the edge of a cliff. Shouldnt they be extinct?

An article celebrating an infamous Bill Leak cartoon the one which depicts an Indigenous father unable to remember his childs name sparked me to respond to those with this mindset. I suggest you dont bother reading any of these articles dont give them the benefit of a click. But I will summarise: A journalist, hiding behind a rotting faade of caring about Indigenous children, argued that the statistics of Indigenous over-representation in prisons are caused by Indigenous parents [who] routinely abandon their responsibilities and do little to instil in their children respect for our laws and the property of others. According to this privileged white man, While [Indigenous parents] march up and down the street waving flags, their children are stealing cars, robbing houses and being hauled off to the watch-house.

The harm that racist comments and cartoons cause is never felt by those who make them. It is not white males, nor their children, who are creepily shadowed by security as they shop. They dont feel the suspicious glances that a First Nations father feels when he hugs his child, as if he is not a protector of the child, but as if the child needs protection from him. They would never have felt that thick and heavy fear that we feel, when we imagine what may well happen to our children should they step into the path of a cop who has nodded in agreement at a cartoon in a major paper, and believes that all Black kids, thanks to all Black parents, carry a greater criminal intent in our DNA.

Racist stereotypes have an awful human cost.

The fact that Indigenous people die around eight years younger than other Australians says more about how little regard our political system has for my people, than it does about our genetics. And the fact that Indigenous people are proportionately the most incarcerated people on the planet says more about our powerlessness as a people to hold the nations law and policymakers to account, than it does about my childrens capacity to understand right from wrong.

It really is as the Uluru Statement so eloquently and powerfully says:

Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

And how can you argue with that, unless you believe we are less than human unless you are racist?

I had to think hard about if I bite back by writing this article. Why give the likes of Leak and others any attention, I wondered. Should I ignore it and focus on the positives rather than the negatives?

I concluded there should be a response. The stereotype must be defeated; not so much by changing the ignoramus mind, but by changing the country so the ignoramus is forced closer to that cliff.

And so it is to the pen, the ink, the keyboard we go, more and more Indigenous writers who are fighting fire with fire. We are the authors of who we are. Not old white men.

This is one of the reasons 12 First Nations men wrote a book with me, Dear Son Letters and reflections from First Nations fathers and sons. We wrote it, partly in response to publications like Bill Leaks racist cartoon, but also because of the awful legacies of the Northern Territory Intervention, and the crap we were taught about our First Nations forefathers in school that our forefathers were savages while the white students forefathers were our discoverers and saviours. Dear Son celebrates Indigenous fatherhood through letters and poems. We express love for ourselves and our families in a beautiful act of defiance.

The key factor is that contrary to claims of failed responsibility by Indigenous parents, we in fact are calling for greater responsibility. We march the streets and fly our flags, we protest because we love our children. We are calling to change this country for the better we want a referendum for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice, so we may hold parliament accountable for failing to meet their responsibility to keep all Australians equally safe.

Thomas Mayor is a Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander. He is the Indigenous officer of the Maritime Union of Australia and the author of Dear Son Letters and reflections from First Nations fathers and sons. He tweets @tommayor11

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I write while my children steal cars and rob houses: the awful human cost of racist stereotypes - The Guardian

**Warning Spoilers ahead**

Sacrifice the mince pies this Christmas for a slice of Amazons The Wheel of Time. Up ahead, we explore the big bad enemies, the Trollocs, and where the creatures came from.

The Wheel of Time follows Rosamund Pikes wizard, Moiraine, who journeys across the lands in order to pinpoint who the reincarnation of the Dragon is and oversee their destiny to navigate the fate of the world.

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Trollocs are a species of Shadowspawn (creatures formed by the Dark One) created during the Age of Legends.

These creatures are known to have made up a large portion of the Dark Ones army and are a cross between humans and animal stock similar to Orcs.

Trollocs are able to communicate with the local tongue, however, their primitive side decreases their intelligence across the board, and therefore, they require supervision on the battlefield.

Similar to J. R. R. Tolkiens Uruk Hai, the antagonist during the War of the Shadow in The Wheel of Time, the Dark One, was hellbent on creating super soldiers for his army.

Using the skills of the Forsaken Aginor, human genetics were mixed with intelligent and sturdy animals, such as boars and eagles, to produce an advanced breed.

While early creations of the Trollocs were looked on as a failed experiment, the offspring of this new species eventually resulted in the birth of more sentient Trollocs known as the Myrddraal.

The Trollocs were introduced during the three-episode premiere of The Wheel of Time when Moiraine and Lan were ambushed.

Using a combination of Moiraines magical abilities and Lans swordsmanship to mitigate the Trollocs ambush, a telekinetic lightning storm was then produced.

The Trollocs arrival at the Two Rivers foreshadows a much larger threat looming and fans will have to wait and see the full force of the Dark One later on in season 1.

In other news, Release date for JoJos Bizarre Adventure Stone Ocean explained

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What are the Trollocs in The Wheel of Time? Creatures origin explored - HITC

AUSTIN (KXAN) How far would you go to save your childs life? Thats a question some parents have to ask themselves after learning their child has been diagnosed with a rare disease.

While each rare disease only impacts a small portion of the population, thousands of them exist. KXAN found many Texas parents are forced to quit their jobs and become full-time advocates for their kids after diagnosis. Funding research for potential treatments costs millions of dollars.

Here are some of those families.

Five-year-old Simon could probably hold his own against just about anyone in a game of Horse. Its something you would see go viral on social media, the little guy can sink baskets on his Little Tikes hoop for hours.

Simon loves basketball. His mom says hes been that way since he was 2 years old.

While his shooting is beyond impressive, its actually the happy dance he does when hes made a particularly impressive shot that might be more fun to watch. Its hard not to match Simons energy when youre in a room with him especially when hes sinking baskets one after another.

But this isnt what Simons life is going to look like much longer without treatment.

Simon has Sanfilippo Syndrome, a rare disease that his mom, Alina Gorniak, describes as Alzheimers in children. As the disease progresses, Simon will lose his ability to speak, care for himself, he wont be able to run or jump or shoot a basketball, hell suffer from seizures and by his teens, Simon will likely die.

I just cried and cried and cried, Gorniak said sitting on the floor with Simon in her lap, remembering the night she learned Simon had Sanfilippo. And then I woke up in the morning thinking okay, what do we do next?

The answer to that question was to fight, and parents like her have to if they want to see the needle move on potential treatments or cures for rare diseases. Because a rare disease, as the name indicates, impacts so few people proportionally, biotechnology companies dont generally initiate or fund the research.

Thats where the parents come in.

We have vulnerably opened our world up to the rest of the world in hopes of finding a cure for Simon and other kids with Sanfilippo Syndrome, Gorniak said.

Even though rare diseases are well, rare Simons family is far from alone. Maxwells family is going through a very similar process, trying to raise money for research that could potentially save their sons life.

Maxwell has a disease that doesnt even have a formal name, referred to by the gene SLC6A1. The disease causes developmental disabilities, a movement disorder and eventually debilitating epilepsy. Doctors told Maxwells parents that nothing could be done.

They said give him the best life you can, we have no idea what the future holds, youre going to become the expert in this disease,' Maxwells mom, Amber Freed, said.

Freed quit her job and started calling around to scientists and research groups hoping for a better answer. She found that UT Southwestern in Dallas was willing to develop a gene therapy that could potentially help Maxwell, and other kids with the same disease.

The catch, again, was money. Freed now works around the clock trying to raise enough of it to keep the research from being tabled.

By far the greatest challenge for me has been balancing motherhood while trying to help Maxwell. Its finding a balance between fighting for him and being with him, Freed said.

For these two families, its a full-time job seeking out groups and trials that could help their children. At the end of the day, Freed described her sons disease as one that fell into the too rare to care category.

Doctors are only going to see a couple of these cases in their lifetime, scientists dont work on them often and biotechs dont work on diseases that dont effect many people because its not profitable, Freed said.

UT Southwestern is where Maxwells family turned. Just this month, UT Southwestern was named a rare disease center for excellence by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD). That designation is designed to help expand access, and advance care and research for rare disease patients in the United States, a news release said.

But to get her son connected to UT Southwestern, Freed says she had to send a researcher Uber Eats snacks with messages from Maxwell every day. Finally, she found he was going to be at a conference and just showed up.

Sat down right next to him in a row with no people in it and he turned to me and said hi, Amber,' Freed said. It was either going to be a beautiful team or he was going to file for a restraining order, and Im very happy to report that it has become a beautiful team.

Meanwhile, the Croke family turned to the Cure Sanfilippo Foundation. Glenn ONeill, the president of the foundation, also has a child with the syndrome Simon has. Like these families, he and his wife work full-time seeking out a cure.

Oftentimes its left to these parent foundations and organizations to make the difference, ONeill said.

The general rule of thumb is that to fund basic research, you need $100,000. To move that to a preclinical research stage, you need $1 million. To fund a phase one clinical trial youll need about $10 million and to get an approved treatment all the way through the FDA approval process costs between $50 and $100 million, ONeill told KXAN.

Were not going to sit back and do nothing, ONeill said. Were going to try and fund that early research so that it actually de-risks the research so biotechs are more interested because some of that early research has been done.

The National Organization for Rare Disorders puts out a report card every year, breaking down how all 50 states stack up when it comes to supporting people with rare diseases.

In their most recent report, published in January of 2021, Texas failed in three of the seven ranked categories. The state passed, or was given an A for three others.

You can read the report here:

There are more than 7,000 identified rare diseases, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Roughly 95% of those diseases have no treatment.

Dr. Brendan Lee, professor and chairman of the department of molecular and human genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine, and the main investigator for the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, says theres just not enough research available to look into each and every rare disease.

There are so many rare diseases, and while theres enormous research that goes on in this country, in the world, and obviously the U.S. has been the leader in the world in investing in research and technology innovation, there still isnt enough research to account for every rare disease, Lee said.

The Undiagnosed Diseases Network works to help patients identify undiagnosed rare diseases and connects hospitals and researchers in an attempt to spread awareness and get people to solutions faster.

Patients often bounce around getting all different types of tests and they dont point to a known association, a label, Lee said. Thats where we and this network come together.

For more information about the UDN and the application process, visit the networks website.

Both of these Texas families need your help donating, and sharing their story.

The Freed family is working to raise $1 million to benefit SLC6A1 Connect, which is advocating for research to help find a treatment and cure for kids like Maxwell. To donate visit their GoFundMe here.

Gorniak and her husband working to raise $1 million for the Cure Sanfilippo Foundation, which is doing research that could help kids like Simon. A fundraiser for the Cure Sanfilippo Foundation through Simons family can be found on GoFundMe.

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Treatment in Texas: For families of kids with rare diseases, its a full-time job to advocate for, raise millions for research - KXAN.com