Category Archives: Transhuman News

Sequenom announced this week that CEO Harry Hixson plans to retire from that position in June, at the time of the company's stockholder meeting. Current President and Chief Operating Officer William Welch will assume Hixson's position upon his retirement. Hixson will continue to serve as chairman of the firm's board of directors, a title he has held since 2003. Welch also will be nominated to serve on the board at the annual meeting, Sequenom said. Also, CFO Paul Maier also will retire from his job in June, but will continue to work with the company as a consultant. Current VP and Chief Accounting Officer Carolyn Beaver will replace Maier as CFO upon his retirement. She previously was corporate VP and controller of Beckman Coulter. In addition, Dirk van den Boom will be promoted to be chief scientific and strategy officer. He has been with Sequenom since 1998, and he recently was the company's executive VP of R&D and chief technology officer.

Former Life Technologies executive Paul Grossman has joined Telegraph Hill Partners as a venture partner. Grossman previously was head of global strategy and corporate development at Life Tech, and he also held the same position at Invitrogen. Before he joined Invitrogen, Grossman held a variety of leadership roles at Applied Biosystems, including as a research scientist and patent attorney, VP of intellectual property, and VP of strategy and business development.

Becton Dickinson has appointed Amit Bhalla to be VP of global strategy and development. In the role, Bhalla will work with the senior management team to develop BD's overall strategy. Bhalla joins BD from Citi, where he has been director of equity research for life science tools and medical technology since 2006. Before joining Citi, he was VP of equity research for emerging medical technology at Morgan Stanley, and a technical operations R&D associate at Johnson and Johnson.

Link:
Genetics in Healthcare

nvestigations for the study of identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly and, in doing so, launched human space life science research into a new era. Although NASA's Human Research Program has been researching the effects of spaceflight on the human body for decades, these 10 investigations will provide NASA with broader insight into the subtle effects and changes that may occur in spaceflight as compared to Earth-based environments.

NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) will jointly manage this ambitious new undertaking.

"We realized this is a unique opportunity to perform a class of novel studies because we had one twin flying aboard the International Space Station and one twin on the ground," says Craig Kundrot, Ph.D. and deputy chief scientist of NASA's Human Research Program.

"We can study two individuals who have the same genetics, but are in different environments for one year.

The investigations, which were picked from a pool of 40 proposals, introduce to space physiology the field of -omics, the integrated study of DNA, RNA, and the entire complement of biomolecules in the human body. Studying human physiology at this fundamental level will provide NASA and the broader spaceflight community with unique information.

This is because these tiny components of the human body tell researchers volumes about an individual's composition and their reaction to stressors like those associated with spaceflight. Investigating the subtle changes - or lack thereof - between the Kelly brothers at this level, after Scott's year in space and Mark's year on Earth, could shed light between the nature vs. nurture aspect of the effects of spaceflight on the human body.

The studies will focus on four areas: human physiology, behavioral health, microbiology/microbiome, and molecular or -omics studies. Human physiological investigations will look at how the spaceflight environment may induce changes in different organs like the heart, muscles or brain within the body. Behavioral health investigations will help characterize the effects spaceflight may have on perception and reasoning, decision making and alertness.

The microbiology/microbiome investigations will explore the brothers' dietary differences and stressors to find out how both affect the organisms in the twins' guts. Lastly, but potentially opening a whole new realm of information about humans exposed to the spaceflight environment are the molecular or -omics investigations.

These studies will look at the way genes in the cells are turned on and off as a result of spaceflight; and how stressors like radiation, confinement and microgravity prompt changes in the proteins and metabolites gathered in biological samples like blood, saliva, urine and stool.

Some of the investigations are brand new, some are already being considered as part of the research plans for the one-year mission set for 2015, and some are already being performed with crews living aboard the space station for six-month durations. These will allow the agency to build upon existing knowledge about long duration spaceflight.

Read the original post:
NASA Launches New Research, Seeks the Subtle in Parallel Ways