The Next Evolution Of Solar

By Jeff Siegel

In the past, we've discussed potential moves in the field of organic photovoltaics.

This is what many researchers are looking to as the next evolution of solar.

But after attending the Organic Photovoltaics conference in Philadelphia last week, I suspect it might be some time before we see any solid plays in this area.

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) offers the promise of significant disruption in pricing and aesthetics, as well as impressive efficiencies in low light conditions. OPV materials are also flexible and form-fitting. This stuff can potentially be wrapped around or even painted onto various materials.

By Lumos Labs Science Associate, Paul Li, MS Neuroscience.

There is some new evidence that Alzheimer’s disease is much more likely for people whose parents both have the neurodegenerative disorder than if only one parent has it. Researchers examined families in which both parents have Alzheimer’s, and found that their children ended up with the disease 42% of the time.

By Elwin Green, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A biofuels developer is building a plant in Westmoreland County to demonstrate a process for producing ethanol from biomass and waste products.

Executives from Coskata, based in Warrenville, Ill., are joining Gov. Ed Rendell; Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr., D-Pa.; and Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center this morning to announce the $25 million project in Madison.

The plant, which will be on the grounds of the Westinghouse Plasma Center, will employ about 20 to produce ethanol from a variety of materials, including municipal waste, more cheaply and efficiently than producing it from corn, said Bill Roe, Coskata's president and chief executive officer, in an interview with the Post-Gazette.

Source: Green Chip Stocks

If you haven't been following the debate surrounding capping and trading emissions, you're missing out. Not only does it have implications for how our nation, and the world, produces energy, it has the potential to offer a myriad of opportunities for well-informed investors.

You see, California has been asking for permission to regulate greenhouse gas emissions since 2004, but the philistines at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have yet to grant it permission to do so.

By Lynne Taylor

The US Food and Drug Administration will never have sufficient resources to be “the quality-control unit of the world,” and drugmakers will have to assume more responsibility for the quality of their products, a senior agency official has told US legislators.

The FDA is not the industry’s quality system, and the agency is holding companies accountable, Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, warned after addressing a hearing convened on April 24 by Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Education, Labor, Health and Pensions (HELP) Committee to discuss the contaminated heparin supply. “Any legislative fixes that do not address quality by design will fail,” she added.

By Nick Hodge

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth was covered with shallow oceans filled with algae and other simple critters.

As landmasses shifted and grew, water was displaced, leaving thick masses of algal residue that were eventually buried and compressed.

Skip forward a few eons, throw in some heat and pressure and ta da . . . oil.

Then, in 1859, Colonel Drake drilled the first oil well in Titusville, PA, unleashing not only oil, but an economic juggernaut that would dictate our way of life for years to come.

The world began to use oil for everything from fuel to waterproofing, and since then has consumed over a trillion barrels. With such furious consumption - and no way to make more - world oil reserves are set to dwindle.

WHO:	Rhonda Greenapple, MSPH, President of Reimbursement Intelligence and Warren Dodge, President of Oncology Metrics
WHAT:	ASCO Breakfast Session
WHERE:	The Matterhorn Room, located on the 42nd Floor., Swissotel Chicago, 323 E. Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 60601
WHEN:	Monday, June 2nd, 6:30 a.m. – 7:30 a.m.

Until recently, oncology treatment decisions were exempt from health plan interference. With multiple early stage products entering the same category, premium pricing will be a challenge as payors increase their management of oncology products and costs shift for oncology patients.

Source: Science Blog

A newly created microbe produces cellulose that can be turned into ethanol and other biofuels, report scientists from The University of Texas at Austin who say the microbe could provide a significant portion of the nation’s transportation fuel if production can be scaled up.

Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol.

“The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels,” says Nobles, a research associate in the Section of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Source: ITPro /...

Nanoribbons solve problems in bendable electronics

Scientists in the US have developed flexible silicon circuit boards, which could be used to create wearable computers or biomedical devices.

The boards are created from "nanoribbons", ultra-thin sheets of silicon bonded to sheets of rubber. The sheets are so thin that a complete circuit is just one and a half microns thick, hundreds of times thinner than conventional silicon circuits found in PCs.

Source: Eurekalert.org /...

Flexible colour monitors and 'heads-up' displays in windscreens may soon be a reality.

Engineers have created the first "active matrix" display using a new class of transparent transistors and circuits, a step toward realizing applications such as e-paper, flexible color monitors and "heads-up" displays in car windshields.

The transistors are made of "nanowires," tiny cylindrical structures that are assembled on glass or thin films of flexible plastic. The researchers used nanowires as small as 20 nanometers - a thousand times thinner than a human hair - to create a display containing organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDS. The OLEDS are devices that rival the brightness of conventional pixels in flat-panel television sets, computer monitors and displays in consumer electronics.

By Ann Fernholm, Chronicle Staff Writer

The Food and Drug Administration is poised to throw its support behind a powerful new method of predicting the safety of experimental drugs, a step that could help pharmaceutical companies bring treatments to market more quickly - and reduce patients' risk.

The process being considered uses seven indicators - known as biomarkers - that signal kidney injury when found in the urine of test subjects.

"Today, the FDA gives approval for a new drug or device, but there has previously been no way to obtain approval for a new and better way to test a drug for its safety," said Raymond Woosley, president and CEO of the nonprofit Critical Path Institute, which is working with the FDA to safely speed drug development.

By: Alexandra M. Goho, Technology Review

Researchers design a crop that can break down its own cellulose.

In an effort to help boost the nation's supply of biofuels, researchers have created three strains of genetically modified corn to manufacture enzymes that break down the plant's cellulose into sugars that can be fermented into ethanol. Incorporating such enzymes directly into the plants could reduce the cost of converting cellulose into biofuel.

The Upcoming Era of Nanomedicine: A Briefing
Source: Drug Delivery Technology Magazine, April 2008

By: Bhupendra.G.Prajapati, MPharm; Jayvadan K. Patel, PhD; Vishnu M. Patel, PhD; and Krunal V. Prajapati

An increasingly diverse library of devices and technologies are used to aid drug targeting and delivery. The technologies include natural vectors (antibody and protein carriers, recombinant proteins, liposomes, and viruses), pseudo-synthetic vectors (polymercoated liposomes, polymerantibody hybrids), and synthetic vectors (polymer conjugates, polymeric micelles, and nanoparticles). The concepts of antibody-conjugates, liposomes, nanoparticles, and polymer-conjugates were born in the 1970s. Nanomedicine is beginning to emerge from research in nanotechnology.

By Nick Hodge

Sobering Up from Ethanol Inebriation

In the past two years the price of corn in the United States has more than doubled, driven partly by demand for alternative fuels such as ethanol.

That is one of the key pieces of data being used to fuel the growing debate now known as food versus fuel.
And that debate has been increasingly in the limelight as global food prices continue to climb, causing unrest in numerous locations around the world.

In the past few weeks alone we've seen riots in developing nations including Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti.

But for all the now-known harms associated with using food for fuel, that action isn't the only thing causing food price angst.

Contact: Seamus Hughes

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Ranking Member Susan Collins R-Me., Wednesday examined the nature of the threat of nuclear terrorism against the homeland - the intent and capability of terrorists to obtain nuclear materials, build a bomb, transport it, and detonate it.

What it's like to be hounded by activists who will stop at nothing to stop your research.

By P. Michael Conn, The-Scientist.com
Photographs by Bill Cramer

This is an edited excerpt from The Animal Research War by P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in May 2008.

For more information please visit www.palgrave-usa.com.

"Excuse me," I said, cutting to the front of the line of passengers at the airport departure gate counter. "I have an emergency and need you to call the police right now!" Two airline agents stopped checking seating charts and looked at me. "I am a medical researcher and some people are protesting my visit to Tampa. They're not passengers," I explained. (This was in 2001, shortly before 9/11, when security measures allowed nonpassengers into boarding areas.)

One desk agent examined my boarding pass, and then looked at my pursuers. I knew what she saw: five people with T-shirts that read: "KEEP PRIMATE TESTER Dr. P.M. CONN OUT OF U.S.F." She let me through. Ten minutes later, when the pilot boarded and asked if I was okay, and I heard the outer doors close, my blood pressure and heart rate slowly began to sink into normal ranges.

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) enacted in 1992 provided authority for FDA to collect additional resources (fees from industry) and enable FDA to accelerate its drug evaluation process without compromising review quality. Since 1992 PDUFA has seen a progression of performance commitments designed to speed drug development and approval while preserving and even raising FDA’s high standards for safety, effectiveness, and product quality. Congress reauthorized PDUFA in 1997 under the FDA Modernization Act (FDAMA) and again in 2002 under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act. Most recently Congress reauthorized PDUFA for another five years under the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA).

By Nick Hodge

Even Oil Billionaires are Switching to Cleantech

"Oil, energy, the environment. It is the story of our time."

Those are the words that begin the now-famous Chevron (NYSE: CVX) commercial alerting the public that an oil company can be a part of the solution.

Newsletter Offers Information to Support Business Planning and Revenue Forecasting

Rhonda Greenapple, president and founder of Reimbursement Intelligence, has recently created a quarterly newsletter, RI Monitor, to aid investors and emerging biotechnology companies in their efforts in preparing for and addressing reimbursement challenges that will influence the commercial success of their products.

By: Jennifer Chu, Technologyreview.com

Researchers have grown stem cells in tiny, protective sacs.

[VIDEO of protective sacs being produced]

Stem-cell therapies are often touted as the future of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. But one of the challenges to developing such therapies is creating an environment in which stem cells can grow. An additional hurdle involves designing a vehicle to deliver stem cells to their target, without being detected by the body's immune system. Now scientists at Northwestern University have engineered a "miniature laboratory" in the form of a tiny, gel-like sac. They successfully grew stem cells within the sac, delivering proteins and nutrients to the cells through the sac's membrane. Researchers say that the sac may act as a delivery system for stem cells and other drugs, shielding them until they reach their target.