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New Measures To Promote Quality In Darzi's One Year On Progress Report, UK
Plans to scrap some centrally driven targets and proposals for giving doctors and nurses control of their budgets were announced by Health Minister Lord Darzi today.
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California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Signs Budget That Cuts $52M From HIV/AIDS Programs
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) on Tuesday signed a state budget in which he made $489 million in line-item veto cuts that "will affect child welfare and children"s health care, the elderly, state parks and AIDS treatment and prevention, going beyond the dramatic cuts that were part of the deal Schwarzenegger negotiated with legislative leaders," the Los Angeles Times reports (Rothfeld/Goldmacher, 7/28). "Services for people with AIDS, which had previously been spared by the Legislature, were reduced by $52 million by Schwarzenegger on Tuesday. That cut will mean no state spending on HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, education or housing services for people with the disease. The state will continue paying for AIDS medications and for tracking the epidemic," the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Buchanan, 7/29). Schwarzenegger said, "The legislators have given me a budget with a $156 million negative reserve, so now I had to go in over this weekend and work with my team and make additional cuts." He added, "That"s ugly, when already we have cut so much, and then we had to make additional cuts" (Steinhauer, New York Times, 7/28). Mark Cloutier, executive director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said of the cuts to HIV/AIDS programs, "This means there are going to be more people who are HIV-positive who are unwittingly infecting others" (Buchanan, 7/29).
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Novo Nordisk Convenes Policy And Clinical Experts At Diabetes Media Summit
A distinguished panel of clinical and policy experts gathered by Novo Nordisk recently convened in Washington, D.C. to explore solutions to address the exponential growth of diabetes in America. The universal theme from the renowned speakers, including Larry Hausner, CEO of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), was that the cost of the disease to our nation, at $218 billion annually, is startling and the lag in patient motivation to take action to offset the disease is distressing. Without intervention at both a national and patient level, our nation runs the risk of reaching a projected 50 million Americans having diabetes by the year 2025.
Mental Health

Tumor Suppressor Gene In Flies May Provide Insights For Human Brain Tumors

In the fruit fly"s developing brain, stem cells called neuroblasts normally divide to create one self-renewing neuroblast and one cell that has a different fate. But neuroblast growth can sometimes spin out of control and become a brain tumor. Researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have found a tumor-suppressing protein in the fly"s brain, with a counterpart in mammals, that can apparently prevent brain tumors from forming. "Our data explicitly show that the fruitfly protein PP2A (protein phosphatase 2A) suppresses brain tumor formation and controls the balance of self-renewal and differentiation of neural stem cells," said Hongyan Wang, Ph.D, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavioral disorders, and senior author of a paper published online in the journal Development. "Given that mechanisms for stem cell division in flies and mammals are likely to be similar, our study on fly PP2A may provide useful insights for certain types of human brain tumors and possibly in a wide variety of cancers," Wang said. By studying flies that had a PP2A mutation, the researchers learned that flies with missing or abnormally expressed PP2A had ten times the amount of stem cell growth in their larval brains. The flies" neural stem cells did not become neurons (nerve cells) in the brain, the types of cells needed for normal function. Instead, they effectively grew into a tumor mass. Dr. Wang"s previous work had identified a protein kinase called Polo as a tumor suppressor. Because phosphatases like PP2A usually have the opposite biochemical function to kinase, the scientists predicted that PP2A would stop the tumor suppressor Polo and allow for unchecked cell growth. "We were very surprised when we found that PP2A also suppressed tumors," Wang said. Follow-up experiments showed that PP2A is important for regulating Polo kinase function, and showed that these two critical brain tumor suppressors work together to control neural stem cell divisions. "Our discovery suggests that PP2A and Polo, both of which are crucial brain tumor-suppressors and cell cycle regulators, can function in the same pathway to regulate stem cell self-renewal and tumor development," Wang said. The research team plans to uncover novel proteins in this pathway by learning which protein functions between PP2A and Polo during the neural stem cell division process. Notes> Other authors include Cheng Wang (lead author) and David Virshup at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School; Kai Chen Chang and Fengwei Yu, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory in Singapore; Gregory Somers, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Melbourne, Australia; and Beng Ti Ang and Carol Tang at the National Neuroscience Institute. The study was supported by Duke-NUS funding and by the Singapore Millennium Foundation. Mary Jane Gore Duke University Medical Center


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