Jack’s Newswatch

ST. CATHARINES — The clinical setting inside Biolyse Pharma Corp. resembles the space-plague movie The Andromeda Strain.

Except this St. Catharines firm is developing what could be a real miracle drug for a horrible earthly disease.

In lab tests, the as-yet-unnamed drug so far seems to kill all cancer cells; if it continues to perform as well in human trials, it could revolutionize cancer treatment, generate billions of dollars for Biolyse and create hundreds of new jobs in St. Catharines.

Biolyse executive vice-president John Fulton is more blunt: “I’ve heard talk in the labs referring to this as the Holy Grail of cancer drugs.”

Inside the complex, glassed-in rooms are staffed by white-gowned researchers.

Strange machines whiz and rotate as raw materials are refined into life-saving potions.

On a tour yesterday, company production manager Claude Mercure spoke about the new injectible medicine in development that is made from a common flower.

Most aspects of its source and production are being kept confidential by the company.

But in tests so far, the drug is a dynamo.

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Two patients with inoperable prostate cancer have made dramatic recoveries after receiving one dose of an experimental drug that is creating excitement among cancer specialists.

The results were so startling that researchers decided to release details of the two cases before the drug trial – in which the patients took part – was complete. Doctors said their progress had exceeded all expectations. The men were treated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in the US, one of the top medical centres in the world.

Dr Eugene Kwon, the urologist who was in charge of their treatment, compared the results to the first pilot breaking the sound barrier.

“This is one of the Holy Grails of prostate cancer research. We have been looking for this for years,” he said.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men – 34,000 new cases and more than 10,000 deaths are reported each year in Britain, where rates of its occurrence have tripled in the past 30 years, mainly due to improved detection. The US has the highest incidence of the disease.

Rodger Nelson and Fructuoso Solano-Revuelta were diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

They were told the disease had spread beyond the prostate. Mr Nelson’s cancer was encroaching on the abdomen and Mr Solano-Revuelta’s tumour was the size of a golf ball. Patients in such condition are told they may have only months to live, and are normally only offered palliative care. But after one infusion of the drug ipilimumab, a monoclonal antibody that stimulates the immune system, given with conventional hormone therapy, their tumours shrank enough to be surgically removed. Both men have since made a full recovery and returned to their businesses.

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BALTIMORE – At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.

They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.

“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”

Alternative medicine has become mainstream. It is finding wider acceptance by doctors, insurers and hospitals like the shock trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Consumer spending on it in some cases rivals that of traditional health care.

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NEW YORK — Scientists know caloric restriction can delay aging and prolong life, but a Harvard researcher is working to develop a drug that could have the same effect without the extreme deprivation for which most people lack the desire and willpower.

“We are closer, it seems, than we’ve ever been — but it’s a big promise and I don’t want to over-promise,” says David Sinclair, a professor of pathology at the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at the Harvard Medical School. “There have been way too many promises about anti-aging for millennia.”

The scientific view of aging has changed drastically since the 1990s, he says. Before then, researchers believed the body simply wore down over time like an old car, and no serious thought was given to developing a medication that could slow that process.

Sinclair says researchers have now pinned down certain “longevity genes” that can be activated to deploy the body’s repair mechanisms and potentially prolong people’s lifespans.

Sinclair presented his work Wednesday at the 10th annual Age Boom Academy workshop run by the International Longevity Center, a non-profit think-tank.

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Scientists say a natural supplement made from tomatoes, taken daily, can stave off heart disease and strokes.

The tomato pill contains an active ingredient from the Mediterranean diet - lycopene - that blocks “bad” LDL cholesterol that can clog the arteries.

Ateronon, made by a biotechnology spin-out company of Cambridge University, is being launched as a dietary supplement and will be sold on the high street.

Experts said more trials were needed to see how effective the treatment is.

Preliminary trials involving around 150 people with heart disease indicate that Ateronon can reduce the oxidation of harmful fats in the blood to almost zero within eight weeks, a meeting of the British Cardiovascular Society will be told at Ateronon’s launch on Monday.

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OTTAWA - Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz pressed forward with a controversial new “Product of Canada” food labelling rule after the top official in his department warned it might not help local producers and could cause consumer confusion, internal records show.

The purpose of the memorandum to the minister, released under Access to Information and dated five weeks before the July 2008 announcement, was to “inform [Ritz] of potential food processing industry implications from proposed changes to ‘Product of Canada’ labelling guidelines” requiring 98% of all ingredients to be Canadian to use the term.

“Given that fewer food products will qualify to use the ‘Product of Canada’ label, it is unclear to what extent the new guidelines will encourage companies to strive to have more of their inputs sourced from Canada in order to meet this claim in response to increased consumer demand,” states the memo, dated June 10, 2008.

“It is also unclear whether the new guidelines will provide increased transparency [and as a result, presumably, increased demand] or simply add to consumer confusion.”

The memo was prepared by senior officials in the ministry’s food value chain bureau and presented to Ritz by the deputy minister.

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Canada will soon face a serious crisis in caring for the elderly unless policy-makers act now to head it off, says a Carleton University researcher.

Gabrielle Mason, a PhD student in political science, says lifestyle changes combined with an aging population are about to create a serious eldercare crunch in Canada.

Mason said that policy-makers should keep “Canada’s aging society in mind so that the [government] can adjust and design infrastructure, policies, plans and resources which celebrate increased longevity and reduce dependencies on family.”

By 2015 there will be more people in Canada over the age of 65 than under the age of 15, according to Statistics Canada’s most recent population projections. And the number of seniors is expected to double over the next 25 years.

“Canadian citizens deserve and should expect good quality of life in their elder years,” said Mason. “A minimum level of care shouldn’t be considered a luxury.”

Mason argued that investing in services now to help the elderly find care will dramatically cut costs to taxpayers later on.

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ATLANTA  —  Scientists have identified a lethal new virus in Africa that causes bleeding like the dreaded Ebola virus.

The so-called “Lujo” virus infected five people in Zambia and South Africa last fall. Four of them died, but a fifth survived, perhaps helped by a medicine recommended by the scientists.

It’s not clear how the first person became infected, but the bug comes from a family of viruses found in rodents, said Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in the discovery.

“This one is really, really aggressive” he said of the virus.

A paper on the virus by Lipkin and his collaborators was published online Thursday on in PLoS Pathogens.

The outbreak started in September, when a female travel agent who lives on the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, became ill with a fever-like illness that quickly grew much worse.

She was airlifted to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she died.

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International scientists say they have found the first evidence of resistance to the world’s most effective drug for treating malaria.

They say the trend in western Cambodia has to be urgently contained because full-blown resistance would be a global health catastrophe.

Drugs are taking longer to clear blood of malaria parasites than before.

This is an early warning sign of emerging resistance to a disease which kills a million people every year.

Until now the most effective drug cleared all malaria parasites from the blood within two or three days but in recent trials this took up to four or five days.

The BBC’s Jill McGivering, reporting from Cambodia, says it is unclear why the region has become a nursery for the resistance - but the local public health system is weak, and the use of anti-malaria drugs is not properly controlled.

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