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Molecular library opens era of personal medicine By Rick Merritt EE Times September 19, 2003 (4:12 p.m. ET) CANCUN — The U.S. National Institutes of Health will roll out next week a national molecular library in an effort to accelerate the development of new drugs and nano-scale agents for an emerging "era of personalized medicine." Separately, a recently-formed government medical electronics institute under NIH is planning its first industry summit and internal research programs. The national molecular library is one part of "a major focus on galvanizing resources at NIH to tackle major problems like developing new drugs in a timely manner," said Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) in a question-and-answer period following his keynote at a medical electronics conference here Friday (Sept 19). The library will act as a repository "for some of the hundreds of thousands of molecules the pharmaceutical industry screens for their use in identifying target agents that could be used to track or treat diseases," Pettigrew said. "There's a huge effort at NIH to accelerate the development of [these] agents," he added. Such agents are key as new medical imaging techniques help physicians peer deeper into the cellular and molecular activity to discover and treat diseases at ever-earlier stages in ways tailored to the individual patient. Researchers are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to display real-time images of heart tissue damaged in cardiac arrest so that custom gene or stem cell therapy can repair the specific tissues. Other imaging technologies let researchers peer inside a cross-section of a blood vessel to see and treat early signs of plaque build up that could lead to a heart attack, said Pettigrew in his keynote address to the annual conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society here. "We are headed toward an era of personalized medicine in which we can target specific ailments down to cells and the proteins expressed by those cells," Pettigrew said. In another example, he noted MRI readings using 7 Tesla magnets at the University of Minnesota have been able to locate the regions of the brain involved in hearing specific frequencies, resolving images down to 150 microns. "These are invaluable tools in unleashing the secrets of biological systems and disease to understand how they work," he added. Nevertheless he called for giant steps forward in imaging still needed for a host of applications such as identifying which segments of the brain need to be stimulated to treat Parkinson's disease. Surgeons now use a trial-and-error system that can require hours in the operating room. "Currently, the tools we have are too insensitive by a factor of a thousand," Pettigrew said. For its part, NIBIB, now in its second year of operation, is gearing to reach out to industry while setting up its first internal research projects. "We anticipate having an industry summit in the not-too-distant future to ask how we can more effectively bring discoveries to the patient in a timely fashion," he said. In the next fiscal year, NBIB plans to fund internal research for the first time, focusing on work not being conducted by industry or academia. To date, the fledgling institute has spent all its R&D funds on external projects. Pettigrew said Congress is currently considering a two-to- nine million dollar increase in the group's current $280 million budget that was a significant leap from the $112 budget in its first year of operation. Separately the NIH is considering a national initiative in tissue engineering to help advance that nascent field. Tissue engineering is already a significant focus area of NBIB, he said. In the past year Pettigrew reorganized NBIB into discovery and applied divisions, nixing the institute's original imaging and bioengineering divisions. "That underscores the fact the world is moving to an integrated approach pairing advances in diagnostic imaging with bioengineering," he said. SOURCE: The EE Times Online http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20030919S0062 Reference: Art and GE Medical Systems Announce First Sale of Optical Molecular Imaging System to U.S. National Institutes of Health http://www.newswire.ca/releases/September2003/19/c2697.html New Compound Library To Speed Drug Discovery http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/09/030905072326.htm Data Bases http://ep.llnl.gov/msds/orgchem/dbases.html * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn