Convergence was an emerging topic this month. Biotech is converging with
medtech to produce “diapeutic” devices that diagnose and treat, and
traditional pharma is convincingly converging with biotech as evidenced by
construction of Eli Lilly‘s
half-billion-dollar biotech lab and production complex.

Other snippets that suggest how fast things are moving:

• The first bird genome has been
  sequenced.
• A Canadian parliamentary candidate advocates preparation for human-humanoid marriage.
• Your cell phone will soon do what the US Congress recently stopped a
  multimillion dollar Defense Department program from doing — lifeblogging.

Ronald Kotulak provides a comprehensive review in the Chicago Tribune
of the state of R&D into artificial life forms such as custom-made cells to
heal the body, clean up pollutants, transform electronics and communication, and
make sweaters that mend their own holes and computers that fix their own
glitches. The bottom line is that man-made lifeforms are perhaps as close as
five years away.

The enormity of the philosophical and pragmatic implications of human
acquisition of power thought by many to be God’s alone to wield has not dampened
the enthusiasm of research. Kotulak counts more than 100 laboratories —
including top government labs in the United States — involved in “alife”
(artificial life) research. The European Union’s Programmable Artificial Cell
Evolution (PACE) project is about to open a major international center devoted
exclusively to creating artificial life.

A cell is essentially a machine made of and processing inanimate atoms, yet
somehow it is — and it produces — life. Researchers generally agree, writes
Kotulak, that life “must have three elements: a container, such as the membrane
wall of a cell; metabolism, the ability to convert basic nutrients into a cell’s
working parts; and genes, chemical instructions for building a cell that can be
passed on to progeny and change as conditions change. Each of these critical
elements has now been achieved in the laboratory, albeit in rudimentary form,
and scientists say they are ready to try to put them all together in one working
unit.”

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard have made
artificial cells out of artificial membranes and laboratory-made RNA that grow
and divide. A Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research scientist has
test-tube assembled small RNA sequences that can make partial copies of
themselves. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory
scientists are trying to create an artificial cell by using an easy-to-make DNA
variant called polypeptide nucleic acid (PNA). “We have all the pieces, and we
have demonstrated that our metabolism can produce the container molecules,” said
one.

The physicist founder of what Kotulak says is the first company to capitalize
on the new field of living technology “thinks of artificial cells as tiny
machines that can be programmed to clean out arteries, deliver drugs to specific
sites in the body and perform other jobs with great precision.”

Some scientists are quite comfortable that alife will not get out of control
on a global scale on the grounds that (1) safeguards can easily be built-in and
(2) the natural world would quickly gobble up any escaped alife.

Reference: Kotulak, Ronald (2004). “Science
on verge of new `Creation’: Labs say they have nearly all the tools to make
artificial life.” Chicago Tribune, March 28.

GM Art

From the “But wait, there’s more”
department: Boggled by GM (genetically modified) foods and our report last
month about GM
insects? Read on . . .The latest work by the “genetic artist” who created a fluorescent rabbit is a
mutant tomato plant modified by DNA he first designed in genetic code (A,C,G,T)
on his computer. A lab synthesized the chemicals according to his code sequence
and FedEx’d the DNA to him overnight. He then inserted it into the tomato.

Yes, it is that easy, and as the price of gene synthesizers drops,
schoolchildren could soon be doing genetic experiments at home on . . . well,
one shudders to think. Already, the makers of “DNA-2-Go” will send anyone a
small test tube containing about 0.001 gram of synthetic DNA for about $3 per
base. All the customer has to do is “add bacteria,” as it were, to grow the tiny
sample into usable batches.

Reference: Jones, Debra (2004). “DNA Spirals Into
Artists’ Medium.” Wired News, March 6.

Artificial Prions

University of California at San Francisco scientists have made artificial
prions — renegade proteins that underlie mad-cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
— upon which they can test various treatments. However, it is not certain that
the artificial prions, which were produced using yeast cells, will respond to
interventions in the same way as mammalian prions.

Reference: Philipkoski, Kristen (2004). “Science Cooks Up
Deadly Proteins.” Wired News, March 24.

Gray Goo Fears Rising

A small but significant study appears to show that manufactured carbon
nanoparticles caused damaging oxidation in the brains of aquarium fish and wiped
out entire populations of Daphnia (“water fleas”). With industrial-scale
production of nanoparticles just beginning
to get under way , the study fuels concern about the potential environmental
damage and health risks, especially given that current regulations may not
adequately protect against nanoparticles’ unique toxicities.

The nano-sized C 60 fullerenes or “buckyballs” used for the study are seen as
potential drug delivery systems, fuel cell components, and environmental cleanup
material. But after 48 hours of exposure in concentrations of only 0.5 parts per
million, the fish were found to have suffered severe brain damage and half the
Daphnia were dead.

A federal study to test the toxicity of several kinds of nanoparticles is in
planning but will take years to conclude, and is already meeting resistance from
corporations reluctant to divulge the details of their nanoproducts, according
to the Washington Post‘s Rick Weiss. A White House advisor said: “I think
that most people still believe that with some modifications . . . the existing
regulations will be effective in covering these new materials.” This begins to
smell of seriously dangerous smoke eliciting a seriously indifferent response
from the fire brigade.

Reference: Weiss, Rick (2004). “Nanoparticles
Toxic in Aquatic Habitat, Study Finds.” Washington Post, March 29.

Convergence of Biotech and Medtech

The convergence of mechanical engineering and biomedicine is being noticed;
by the Financial Times, for one. Most of today’s diagnostic devices exist
in labs and analyze samples after they have been removed from the body. Future
“closed loop” devices will both monitor diagnose and treat in situ.

Medtronic already offers a service that retrieves data from implanted
pacemakers and sends it to treating physicians, eliminating many office visits.
Medtronic’s CEO anticipates an artificial pancreas in a few years, so clearly
they have one in the pipeline, and clearly they have got the message of
convergence. So has General Electric, whose new GE Healthcare Technologies unit
combines its medical equipment operations with the biological marker business it
acquired along with Amersham.

Another way of looking at convergence is to think of medical devices moving
into traditional pharmaceutical markets, especially for congestive heart failure
(pacemakers, defibrillators, etc.), depression (brain pacemaker), cancer,
Alzheimer’s, and incontinence. It will result in better, evidence-based, tools
for continuous monitoring and imaging, and it is necessary for the
site-specific, controlled/targeted delivery of many drugs (with some exceptions,
such as insulin).

The fundamental change-drivers behind convergence are:

• MEMS/nanotech — ultra-miniaturization will enable sensors and other
  elements to be added to devices to make them more intelligent (currently 2/3 of
  devices have no built-in intelligence). Smaller devices also need less power.
• Wireless — stimulates remote monitoring using converged devices, for
  example of the elderly at home.
• Imaging — scanners increasingly provide functional, real-time, 3D
  information to assist surgeons during a procedure, enabling the surgeon to
  understand what is happening and whether an intervention is working before
  closing up. A current problem is that many implanted devices are not
  MRI-compatible — they need to be made so.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Financial
Times Looks at Convergence of Medical Devices, Bioscience.” iHealthBeat,
March 25.

Reference: Personal notes from “MedTech: The
Business of Medical Devices.” Symposium organized by the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, March 12, 2004.

Eli Lilly Biotech Center

In what a senior executive described as “a pretty significant change,” Eli
Lilly has invested US$531 million in a 788,500-square-foot biotechnology complex
able to produce clinical-trial quantities of four drugs at once. The facility
will be completed in early 2007. Though highly automated, the plant is expected
to bring thousands of new jobs to Indianapolis. Few of them will be construction
jobs, however: the new complex’s main building will be assembled from more than
100 prefabricated factory blocks made in Sweden.

Reference: Swiatek, Jeff (2004). “Lilly complex
will be twice planned size: Drug maker to spend $531 million to build
biotechnology center.” Indianapolis Star, March 31.

First Bird Genome Sequenced

The Red Jungle Fowl, ancestor of domestic chickens, is the first bird to have
its genome sequenced. It may not yield quick or indeed any answers to bird flu,
but it will have value as another comparator genome for the human genome.

Reference: Winstead, Edward R. (2003). “Chicken
Genome Is Sequenced.” Genome News Network, March 4.

Inter-Lifeform Marriages

A man who would be a member of Canada’s parliament advocates, among other
things, marriage with robots. “We must allow for same-sex marriages,
multiple-people marriages and android-human marriages,” he wrote to a
newspaper.

Considering how human-like — physically, mentally, and emotionally — some
robots are rapidly becoming, and how humans bond so readily to anything remotely
anthropomorphic, perhaps the notion is not so outlandish as it seems.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Would-be
Nova Scotia MP advocates polygamy and marriage to robots.” National Post,
March 11.

Lifeblog

“Lifelog”
was a multimillion dollar DARPA project just yesterday, before it was axed by
the US Congress following bad press. Come mid-year, a system very much like it
in both name and function will be on sale to cell phone buyers.

Nokia’s Lifeblog software will automatically arrange all the messages,
images, videos, and sound clips people capture with their camera cell phones.
Data captured from other sources can also be added. The software, due for
release in June, will organize and annotate the information on a timeline. The
annotations about when and where something was done (a picture was taken, a call
to Mary was made, for example), are automatically supplied from the phone’s own
record of the base stations it interacts with, through their unique ID codes.

Reference: Ward, Mark (2004). “Log your
life via your phone.” BBC News Online, March 10.

See also previous articles in HFD on: collaborative
agents; AI bots
that help mothers cope with the stresses of caring for cancer-stricken children;
Spyglass spectacles sporting a hidden camera record
everything the wearer sees; DARPA’s now officially abandoned LifeLog;
and Thinking
Machines that watch everything you do, learn everything they can about you,
and (you hope) help you in whatever way they can.