In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Manfred Lindinger takes up the issue whether nanotechnology poses danger to human health and the environment in an article and an interview with Jochen Flasbarth, president of the German Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt – UBA). Flasbarth points out that UBA’s nanotechnology study published last year, highlighting gaps in knowledge about potential health hazards, was misunderstood by the media and the public as a sweeping warning of all things nano. He also dismisses calls for introducing a label for products containing nanotechnology: “If there is no risk, we don’t need to put up a warning sign.”

Several German papers feature and discuss an ad-hoc statement on preimplantation diagnosis  issued January 18 by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. It was drafted by 13 eminent German academians from biology, medicine, law and philosophy & ethics, among them nobelist Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard. The statement calls for admission of PID under narrowly defined circumstances (high risk of serious monogenic disorder, chromosomal dysfunction, miscarriage or stillbirth). The parliament needs to to regulate PID after the German Federal Supreme Court last year ruled that Germany’s ban on PID was based on misinterpretation of the country’s Embryo Protection Law.  » Read more...

If the story by a small, Philadelphia-based company called Avid Radiopharmaceuticals communicated earlier this month holds up, there will be a reliable diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease available in a few years.

Such a test not only would change diagnosis but also help develop novel Alzheimer treatments as it would enable clinical researchers to check whether a drug candidate is making a difference in terms of plaque formation or reduction. At present, the only definite diagnosis of Alzheimer is by brain autopsy.

The company presented interim data  of a Phase III study of patients with a life expectancy of less than 6 months, in which the results of  a brain scan using florbetapir, a novel radiolabeled compound that specifically and sensitively binds β-amyloid, were compared to the autopsy results obtained after the patients’ death. The data were presented at the 2010 Annual Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) meeting in Salt Lake City. According to the abstract, the florbetapir PET brain images  are highly correlated with autopsy-confirmed β-amyloid deposition in the brain.

According to the New York Times, the company will present final data of 35 patients during next month’s ICAD, the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease 2010 in Honolulu, Hawaii.  » Read more...