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HOUSTON -- (October 31, 2008) -- The Children's Nutrition Research Center has been focused on improving the health and well-being of children and pregnant women for three decades. Researchers and doctors there have made significant contributions to children's nutrition, and as the center celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, they are poised to make even more.

A collaboration of Baylor College of Medicine, the United States Department of Agriculture/Agriculture Research Service and Texas Children's Hospital, the center started with only a handful of staff members and research that focused almost exclusively on breastfeeding.

Today, the CNRC is home to more than 60 doctors and researchers and seven core laboratories. The center has conducted important research that has resulted in the development of national and international child nutrition standards.

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Buford Nichols, M.D.

Dennis Bier, M.D.

Steven Abrams, M.D.

Kenneth Ellis, Ph.D.

Kendal Hirschi, Ph.D.

Dr. Buford Nichols, professor of pediatrics at BCM, was the founding director of the CNRC in 1978. He led the center through significant expansion, including the move to its current building in 1988. A statue stands in the CNRC lobby that Nichols says symbolizes the center's work.

The statue, done by the 19th century German-born sculptor Elizabet Ney, depicts two little boys, one holding a torch, the other a key. "The torch represents an idea or a hypothesis, and the key represents the methodology for testing the hypothesis," Nichols explains.

"I think it signifies the fact that we're going to be smarter tomorrow than we are today. And that is the goal of our research as well – to keep improving our understanding of children's nutrition needs."

Important contributions

In its 30 years, the CNRC has had a significant impact in several key areas.

One of those areas is calorie intake. Research into energy intake and energy expenditures in infants and children showed that previous recommendations for calorie intake in infants was too high. New recommendations have been incorporated by the National Academy of Science and the World Health Organization, Nichols said.

CNRC researchers have also studied the growth of the body and the protein composition of the body, which led to the recommendation that children actually need more protein in their diet than previously thought by about 20 to 25 percent, according to Nichols. This standard has also been adopted nationally and internationally.

Research at the center has also led to nutritional standards for lactating women and the development of growth standards for breast-fed babies as well as formula-fed infants, which have been accepted as the official standard by the World Health Organization.

Evolving research

Dr. Dennis Bier, professor of pediatrics and current director of the CNRC, noted that the research at the CNRC has evolved over time.

"Newer questions have developed at the CNRC, and I would say they are really some very complicated questions," Bier said.

Some of the areas that researchers at the CNRC are now undertaking include issues of behavior and why people make the food choices they do, he said.

"We know a lot of the science of what people need nutritionally, but we really don't understand very well how children make food choices and how they use those choices to develop their nutritional habits," Bier said. "We also know that adults frequently know what the right choices are, but they don't always make them."

Genetic and epigenetic research is also being conducted to try to understand how nutrients and genes interact to affect nutritional health. "We don't understand how the ingredients in food affect the expression of genes that are important for health maintenance or disease prevention," Bier said.

One-of-a-kind research center

Bier says that the CNRC is truly a unique research center because of its mixture of scientists at different levels of nutritional science.

This mixture starts with plant scientists whose research at the greenhouse on top of the CNRC building seeks to understand the fundamental biology of plants and how nutrients can be enhanced in plants. The plant science division has the ability to grow crop plants that are labeled with nonradioactive tracers so they can actually study how the nutrients in plants enter the body and how they are metabolized.

Animal scientists are studying nutrition at the very fundamental levels of either molecular and cell biology of animal physiology and using these as models for humans.

Combine this with the researchers at the CNRC who study nutrition in both healthy people and those who have unique nutritional needs because of illness, and it makes for a mix that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, Bier said.

HOUSTON -- (October 31, 2008) -- Ophthalmologists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston can now improve impaired vision of patients with damaged or transplanted corneas who cannot wear conventional contact lenses.

"There is a large group of patients who we cannot fit with conventional contact lenses, including trauma patients, patients with irregularly shaped corneas, severe dry eye or bad outcomes from Lasik surgery," said Dr. Stephen Pflugfelder, professor of ophthalmology at BCM and director of the Boston Ocular Surface Prosthesis clinic at the Baylor Eye Clinic. "This remarkable technology allows us to provide a custom-fit, prosthetic, oxygen-permeable contact lens that vaults over the cornea and improves eye sight."

Dr. Anisa Gire, therapeutic optometrist at the Baylor Eye Clinic, will begin fitting patients at the Baylor Eye Clinic at the Medical Building on the McNair Campus of BCM when it opens Nov. 4.

"We are proud to be one of two centers outside of Boston to offer this lens," said Dr. Dan B. Jones, chair and professor of ophthalmology at BCM. "It will be a major resource not only for patients who need the lens, but for the community and area ophthalmologists who previously had to refer patients to Boston to be fitted for the lens."

Prosthesis provides options

The cornea, the clear covering of the eye that lets light in, is a sensitive, dome-like structure that when damaged, weakens eye sight. Before the lens was made available, corneal transplant was the only option to repair damage, Pflugfelder said.

Called the Boston Ocular Surface Prosthesis the hard contact lens covers the abnormalities of the cornea with a protective, cone-shaped surface filled with saline, said Pflugfelder. It never touches the cornea, but rests on the less sensitive sclera (the white tissue surrounding the cornea) making a more comfortable fit for the patient.

Life changing for patients

The lenses are custom-made and based on eye measurements during the exam and the shape of the patient's cornea, said Pflugfelder. Patients are trained to insert and remove the lens, he said.

"Lenses are removed at night and worn all day," said Pflugfelder. "They can last up to 10 years."

"This lens has been life changing for some patients whose eye sight was totally incapacitated and paralyzed, including soldiers from Iraq with burns all over their eyes," said Pflugfelder.

"There is also great research potential to study improving drug delivery to the eye," said Pflufelder. "If we could inject medications into the lens' pocket of saline that covers the cornea, we could protect the eye, keep it moist and allow cornea specialists to operate on people we cannot operate on now."

"Scleral contact lenses were among some of the first contact lens developed," said Pflugfelder. "But until the development of oxygen-permeable hard contact lenses, their benefits were not well known."

Dr. Perry Rosenthal, president and founder of the Boston Foundation for Sight and on faculty at Harvard Medical School, led the development of the Boston Ocular Surface Prosthesis.

Other institutions fitting the lens include The Doheny Eye Institute at The University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles and The Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School.

To schedule a consultation, patients must be referred by an ophthalmologist or optometrist.

For more information on the Baylor Eye Clinic, visit http://www.bcm.edu/eye/.

LONDON: Scientists have created what they claim is the world's first artificial heart that beats.

A European team, led by French cardiac surgeon Alain Carpentier, has unveiled the fully implantable heart that can respond instantly to changes in blood pressure and adapt the heart beat rate accordingly.

"If you showed the electrocardiogram to a cardiologist he would say 'that's a human heart.' Well no, it isn't: it's a prosthesis," Prof Carpentier was quoted by British newspaper 'The Daily Telegraph' as saying.

Prof Carpentier, the Head of Research on cardiac grafts and prostheses at Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris, and his team have come up with the artificial heart after 15 years of research.

In particular, he used his expertise as a world authority in artificial heart valves to overcome the problem of blood clots -- the main stumbling block in other attempts to build an artificial heart.

He did this by using specially sterilised "bioprosthetic" pig cartilage and by replicating the exact same blood flow -- or hemodynamics -- of the human heart that reduce blood clot risks.

"The aim of this heart is to allow patients to go from an impossible life where they can do just a few steps from their bed to an armchair to a normal social life. They will even be able to run -- although naturally not a marathon," he said.

Weighing around a kilo, the only external part of the man-made organ is its battery having a five-hour charge life.

Prof Carpentier said the new heart was necessary given the chronic shortage of heart donors and growing heart patient waiting lists. "I couldn't stand seeing young, active people dying aged 40 from massive heart attacks," he said.

WASHINGTON: Medical researchers on Sunday unveiled clinical trials of new anti-AIDS drug that better controls the spread of the deadly virus among previously untreated patients.

Developed by US pharmaceutical giant Merck and Co, Isentress is the first of a new type of anti-AIDS medication called HIV integrase inhibitor, based on the enzyme that controls HIV virus reproduction.

The study's Phase III clinical trials - the last step before an approval request can be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - showed Isentress reduced HIV viral load to undetectable levels in 86 per cent of patients, against only 82 per cent treated with efavirenz, an older anti-HIV medication also developed by Merck.

Drug-related adverse effects were also significantly fewer in patients treated with Isentress (44 per cent) than with efavirenz (77 per cent), the researchers told the 48th annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents held this weekend in Washington.

Patients taking part in the clinical trial also took tenofovir and emtricitabine in combination with Isentress and efavirenz, Merck said in a statement.

On October 12, 2007, the FDA granted Isentress accelerated approval for use with patients that showed initial signs of resistance to existing anti-retroviral treatment, a common problem among AIDS patients.

Merck estimates that among some 500,000 US patients treated with anti-HIV cocktails, up to 40 percent have developed resistance to treatment.

Industry analysts said treatment with Isentress pills twice a day could bring Merck one billion dollars in sales over the next three years, competing directly with rival Gilead Sciences' elvitegravir, also undergoing clinical trials.

A separate study presented at the ICAAC conference showed anti-retroviral treatment was more effective if begun earlier: patients treated when CD4 cell count was at 500 had a 71 percent greater risk of dying than those treated when CD4 levels reached 350.

According to the World Health Organization, 33 million people around the world are infected with the AIDS virus, mostly in the sub-Sahara Africa. One million HIV-infected people live in the United States. Some two million people died worlwide of AIDS in 2007.

NEW DELHI: In a move to step up vigil on clinical research, the government may make it mandatory to register clinical research organisations (CROs) and clinical trials conducted by them. The move would also check unethical human experiments. The health ministry is in the process of finalising registration guidelines. Once the guidelines are in place, CROs complying with these guidelines would get registered. Non-registered CROs would not be allowed to function in the country, an official said.

“We have already framed guidelines for registration of CROs and have submitted them to an expert committee comprising of experts from CROs, academicians and people from health ministry,” the drug controller general of India (DCGI) Dr Surinder Singh said.
The guidelines are currently being reviewed by an internal committee. At present, registration of clinical trials is being done by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) along with WHO and is a voluntary process.

After the approval of the committee, the guidelines would go to the country’s highest technical body for drugs—Drugs Technical Advisory Board (DTAB)—for approval. “We plan to make the registration mandatory by December 2008,” Dr Singh said.