UAB cures diabetes in lab mice, preparing for human trial

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) – A new study at the UAB Comprehensive Diabetes Center may prove beneficial for thousands of Alabamians. Researchers have cured diabetes in lab mice using a commonly prescribed blood pressure medication, Verapamil. “We found that we could reverse the disease completely,” said Dr. Anath Shalev, director of the UAB Comprehensive Diabetes Center.

Several studies in the past have cured diabetes in the early phases, but failed during the human clinical trials. “None of the therapies are actually addressing the underlying cause, namely the destruction and loss of insulin-producing Beta cells,” said Dr. Shalev. That’s where Verapamil differs. In the lab mice, Dr. Shalev said those treated with the drug not only showed reversal of the disease, but also showcased increased levels of Beta cells. “So, it’s really curing the underlying cause,” said Dr. Shalev.

MORE: Web Extra: Full interview with Dr. Anath Shalev on diabetes research

Beta cells are killed when higher levels of blood sugar manifest an increased presence of the protein, TXNIP. TXNIP, which is naturally in the body and not harmful at normal levels, slows the insulin production until it ultimately kills the Beta cells. Verapamil lowered the TXNIP levels to the point where Beta cells could potentially have started rejuvenating; however, Dr. Shalev said it’s not clear yet whether more Beta cells were being produced, or rather the environment was improved for them to become more clear in readings.

While other tests have struggled with the transition from animal models to human models, Dr. Shalev said this one could be different because of its target. “TXNIP is extremely well-conserved across species, almost identical in rat, mice, and human,” she said. Most of the other tests focused on the auto-immune system, which is drastically different between humans and mice, according to Dr. Shalev. The human clinical test, which is being labeled, “the repurposing of Verapamil as a beta cell survival therapy in type 1 diabetes,” will begin in early 2015. It will be a double-blind study, with 52 participants. Half will be given placebo and half will be given Verapamil. They will take one tablet orally once daily. The study will last a year. It is being funded by a $2.1 million grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Join WIAT 42 News at 5 and 6 for much more on this story.

For more information on the human clinical trials or to enroll, contact UAB’s Kentress Davison at 205-934-4112 or 205-975-9308.

To fund diabetes research at UAB and much more, visit the Comprehensive Diabetes Center.

For more information on the diabetes human trial, click here.

Below is an interview with the Alabama board chairman for the American Diabetes Association, Chris Christie. For more, click here.

Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood

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 Mathew Scott; Hair and makeup by Raina Antle

Phlebotomy. Even the word sounds archaic—and that’s nothing compared to the slow, expensive, and inefficient reality of drawing blood and having it tested. As a college sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes envisioned a way to reinvent old-fashioned phlebotomy and, in the process, usher in an era of comprehensive superfast diagnosis and preventive medicine. That was a decade ago. Holmes, now 30, dropped out of Stanford and founded a company called Theranos with her tuition money. Last fall it finally introduced its radical blood-testing service in a Walgreens pharmacy near the company headquarters in Palo Alto, California. (The plan is to roll out testing centers nationwide.) Instead of vials of blood—one for every test needed—Theranos requires only a pinprick and a drop of blood. With that they can perform hundreds of tests, from standard cholesterol checks to sophisticated genetic analyses. The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods. The implications are mind-blowing. With inexpensive and easy access to the information running through their veins, people will have an unprecedented window on their own health. And a new generation of diagnostic tests could allow them to head off serious afflictions from cancer to diabetes to heart disease. None of this would work if Theranos hadn’t figured out how to make testing transparent and inexpensive. The company plans to charge less than 50 percent of the standard Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. And unlike the rest of the testing industry, Theranos lists its prices on its website: blood typing, $2.05; cholesterol, $2.99; iron, $4.45. If all tests in the US were performed at those kinds of prices, the company says, it could save Medicare $98 billion and Medicaid $104 billion over the next decade.

What was your goal in starting a lab-testing company?

We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.

There are a billion tests done every year in the United States, but too many of them are done in the emergency room. If you were able to do some of those tests before a person gets checked into the ER, you’d start to see problems earlier; you’d have time to intervene before a patient needed to go to the hospital. If you remove the biggest barriers to these tests, you’ll see them used in smarter ways.

What was your motivation to launch Theranos at the age of 19? What set you on this road?

I definitely am afraid of needles. It’s the only thing that actually scares me. But I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking.

You’re not alone in your fear of needles.

Phlebotomy is such a huge inhibitor to people getting tested. Some studies say that a substantive percentage of patients who get a lab requisition do not follow through because they’re scared of needles or they’re afraid of worrying, waiting to hear that something is wrong. We wanted to make this service convenient, to bring it to places close to people’s homes, and to offer rapid results.

Why the focus on rapid results?

We can get results, on average, in less than four hours. And this can be very helpful for doctors and patients, because it means that someone could, for example, go to a Walgreens in the morning to get a routine test for something their doctor is tracking, and the physician can have the results that afternoon when they see the patient. And we’re able to do all the testing using just a single microsample, rather than having to draw a dedicated tube for each type of test.

So if I got a blood test and my doctor saw the results and wanted other tests done, I wouldn’t have to have more blood drawn?

Exactly. And on their lab form, the physician can write, “If a given result is out of range, run this follow-up test.” And it can all be done immediately, using that same sample.

 Todd Tankersley  Brown Bird Design

Some conventional tests, like pH assays, can be done quickly. Others, like those that require culturing bacteria or viruses, can take days or even weeks. Are there some tests that take Theranos longer? Can everything really be turned around in four hours?

Yes, we had to develop assays or test methodologies that would make it possible to accelerate results. So we do not do things like cultures. In the case of a virus or bacteria, traditionally tested using a culture, we measure the DNA of the pathogen instead so we can report results much faster.

Where do you see this making a big difference?

Fertility testing is a good example. Most people pay for it out of pocket, and it can cost as much as $2,000. These tests provide the data you need to figure out someone’s fertility, and some women can’t afford them. Our new fertility panel is going to cost $35. That means women will be able to afford the tests. They’ll be able to better manage the process and take some of the stress out of trying to conceive.

What are you doing to ensure the accuracy of your testing?

The key is minimizing the variability that traditionally contributes to error in the lab process. Ninety-three percent of error is associated with what’s called pre-analytic processing — generally the part of the process where humans do things.

Such as?

Manually centrifuging a sample or how much time elapses before you test the sample, which brings its decay rate into play.

So how do you avoid these potential errors?

There’s no manual handling of the sample, no one is trying to pipette into a Nanotainer, no one is manually processing it. The blood is collected and put into a box that keeps it cold. The very next thing that happens is lab processing, and that’s done with automated devices at our centralized facility with no manual intervention or operation.

How can improved processes actually save lives?

We’ve created a tool for physicians to look at lab-test data over time and see trends. We don’t usually think about lab data this way today. It’s “Are you in range, or are you out of range?” Instead, we like to think, “Where are you going?” If you showed me a single frame from a movie and asked me to tell you the story, I wouldn’t be able to do it. But with many frames, you can start to see the movie unfold.

How else can you use this technology?

Many, many years of work went into making this possible. We started our business working with pharmaceutical companies. Because we made it possible to get data much faster, they could use our infrastructure to run clinical trials. They were also able to run what’s called an adaptive clinical trial, where based on the data, they could change the dosing for a patient in real time or in a premeditated way, as opposed to waiting a long period and then deciding to change a dose.

In the long run, what impact will your technology have?

The dream is to be able to help contribute to the research that’s going on to identify cancer signatures as they change over time, to help intervene early enough to do something about an illness.

Will people become more used to gathering and examining their own health data?

No one thinks of the lab-testing experience as positive. It should be! One way to create that is to help people engage with the data once their physicians release it. You can’t do that if you don’t really understand why you’re getting certain tests done and when you don’t know what the results mean when you get them back.

It drives me crazy when people talk about the scale as an indicator of health, because your weight doesn’t tell you what’s going on at a biochemical level. What’s really exciting is when you can begin to see changes in your lifestyle appear in your blood data. With some diseases, like type 2 diabetes, if people get alerted early they can take steps to avert getting sick. By testing, you can start to understand your body, understand yourself, change your diet, change your lifestyle, and begin to change your life.

Novocure Cancer Treatment using Electrical Fields

Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are the best-known methods for treating cancer. At TEDMED, Bill Doyle presents a new approach, called Tumor Treating Fields, which uses electric fields to interrupt cancer cell division. Still in its infancy -- and approved for only certain types of cancer -- the treatment comes with one big benefit: quality of life.

Rife Cancer Treatment

Medical treatments today often involve the use of medications mostly made from various chemicals or chemical extractions from plants. It would be fair to say that modern pharmaceuticals don’t necessarily represent a natural treatment and they are very targeted in how they work. We have all seen the TV ads for pharmaceutical drugs that end with a long, quickly spoken list of side effects that can often be worse than the issue someone is treating to begin with. It is important to note that these aren’t really side effects but are instead the effects of the drug. We often don’t look at it this way, but when you do, you begin to realize the absurdity that goes along with many modern treatments for illness.

The technology this article will discuss takes a very different approach to treating the body. Royal Rife machines have been around for many years and it didn’t take long for them to be cast aside negatively by modern medicine when the results began pouring in.

It was in 1920 that Royal Rife first identified the human cancer virus using the world’s most powerful microscope. After identifying and isolating the virus, he decided to culture it on salted pork. At the time this was a very good method for culturing a virus. He then took the culture and injected it into 400 rats which as you might expect, created cancer in all 400 rats very quickly. The next step for Rife is where things took an interesting turn. He later found a frequency of electromagnetic energy that would cause the cancer virus to diminish completely when entered into the energy field. The great discovery led Rife to create a device that could be tuned to output the frequency that would destruct the cancer. He was then able to treat the cancer within both rats and patients who were within close proximity of the device.

By 1934, the device began getting much more attention. The University of Southern California appointed a Special Medical Research Committee to further look at and study the device and it’s claims. 16 terminal cancer patients from Pasadena County Hospital were brought to Rife’s San Diego Laboratory for treatment. This committee was made up of doctors and pathologists who were assigned to examine the patients if they were still alive in 90 days. The 3 months of treatment went by and the Committee concluded that 14 of the 16 patients had been completely cured of cancer. The remaining 2 patients were exposed to the device for another 4 weeks after a few adjustments were made. Both were cured after the 4 weeks. The amazing results were a surprise to many, as no one knew what to expect out of frequency based medical treatment. On November 20, 1931, Royal Rife was honored with a banquet billed as “The End To All Diseases” at the Pasadena estate of Dr. Milbank Johnson by 44 of the nations most respected medical authorities.

The device began receiving flack in 1939 and almost all distinguished doctors and scientists close to the device began denying that they had ever met Rife and saw results with his device. The complete reversal was due to pressure from drug companies who were being threatened by the device’s potential. Interestingly, on the night of the press conference where Dr. Milbank Johnson was going to reveal the results of Rife’s study in 1934, he was fatally poisoned and his notes and papers were “lost.” Along with that, a failed attempt by drug companies to purchase the device from Rife resulted in his labs being destroyed by arson. If that wasn’t enough, Dr. Nemes who had been duplicating Rife’s work, was mysteriously killed in a fire and his research material was all destroyed as well. Finally, the Burnett Lab, which had been validating all of Rife’s work, was also destroyed in a fire. Sure seems like the pharmaceutical industry may have been involved in this. But what about Rife? By 1971 Royal Rife died by an “accidental” lethal dose of Valium and alcohol at Grossmont hospital.

Rife machines do still exist today and are used in some medical practices but they are not FDA approved and are sometimes still seized by the FDA. They are often sold under the label of ‘veterinary devices.

Sources:

http://www.wanttoknow.info/cancercuresroyalrife

http://peswiki.com/index.php/PowerPedia:Royal_Raymond_Rife

http://www.energy-medicine.info/true-rife-plasma-devices.html

http://www.amazon.com/Cancer-Cure-That-Worked-Suppression/dp/0919951309?tag=wanttinfo-20

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/cancercurethatworked1997.shtml