RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded nearly $2 billion – about $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

BlackBerry maker settles on Raleigh

Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of BlackBerry smart phones, confirmed plans to open a research and development office in Raleigh, but provided few details.

The company has long had an eye on the Research Triangle Park area. State documents show RIM filed paperwork to do business in North Carolina in February 2002 and kept it updated. In December, company recruiters interviewed potential hires at an RTP job fair that attracted telecommunications workers who already lost their jobs or fear layoffs. Nortel Networks and IBM have shed many jobs and Sony Ericsson recently announced it would shut down its RTP operations, where more than 400 are employed.

In a response to questions, the company issued a prepared statement that read, “Raleigh is a great fit for RIM given its highly skilled work force and proximity to many excellent academic institutions.”

Last year, RIM reported $11 billion in sales. Analysts expect the company to generate $15 billion in revenue this year.

In other company news:

• GlaxoSmithKline, the British drugmaker that has its U.S. headquarters in RTP, has decided to finance an educational documentary about eating. GSK makes alli, an over-the-counter pill to lose weight.
• Speculations that Biogen Idec may prepare to look for a buyer arose after James Mullen, chief executive of the Boston-based biotech company, announced he would step down. Biogen’s multiple sclerosis drugs Avonex and Tysabri are made in RTP.
• PeopleClick, a Raleigh software company, agreed to be sold for $100 million.

UNC researchers figure out how bacteria walk

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill figured out how some bacteria move around in the body to spread infections. Just one atom makes the difference. The atom plays a key role in how the bacteria grow tiny legs and coordinate their movement.

Blocking the atom stops the roving bacteria in their tracks.

The discovery could lead to the development of new medicines to prevent infections.

RTI looking to boosts its chances for new business

RTI International, a large research institute in RTP that snaps up government contracts worth millions, is looking to boost its chances to attract business with the help of a new division and a hire.

Less than a year after buying MasiMax, RTI turned the health communication and marketing firm in Rockville, Md., into a new division. MasiMax employees research and analyze complex health information and translate it for target audiences, such as health professionals, researchers, policymakers or the general public.

RTI also hired Bradley Peganoff as vice president of government and corporate relations. Peganoff  joins RTI from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, where he was in charge of generating revenue, raising policymakers’ awareness of the institute and cultivating academic and industry collaborations.

Tranzyme signs partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb

It’s a deal that both companies needed and that will add 10 to 12 jobs in the Research Triangle Park area.

Tranzyme Pharma, a Durham drug develop company that employs 25, had been looking to raise at least $30 million to get its first drug to market. (More on that here.) The deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb will net Tranzyme $16 million in the next two years. But if the partners are successful in finding new medicines, developing them and bringing them to market, the deal could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

To expand discovery and early development work under the partnership, Tranzyme plans to add 10 to 12 employees.

Like other large drugmakes, New York-based BMS is facing serious generic competition. In the next five years, the company stands to lose about 37 percent of its sales as two of its biggest sellers go off patent and compete with cheaper generic copy cats. The deal with Tranzyme offers BMS hope to find replacements for its product lineup.

In other business news:

• Credit Suisse will start hiring 300 at its RTP operations, where the Swiss banking giants already employs about 1,000.
• Quintiles Transnational raises $525 million on the bond market to pay its large stakeholders a fat dividend.
• Swiss ag biotech company Syngenta, which develops all of its new biotech crop seeds in RTP, added 100,000 square feet to the about 200,000 square feet it already had in RTP and agreed to buy 50 acres for future expansions.

RTI receives $101 million contract to reduce malaria

Anopheles mosquito having a meal.

RTI International, a research institute in RTP, received a $101 million contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development to fight malaria in Africa.

Under the contract, RTI workers will spray the inside walls of homes to kill anopheles mosquitos, which carry the parasite that causes malaria and transmit it to humans.

Foom 2006 to 2008, about 6 million homes in 11 African countries were sprayed. Under the new contract, the effort will be extended to a dozen.

The five-year program aims to cut the malaria-related childhood mortality in 15 African countries in half. Malaria kills more than 1.2 million people every year and causes worldwide economic losses of $12 billion.

In other research news:

• RTI researchers calculated the cost of mandatory CO2 emission reductions. (More about that here.)
• The 15 percent of adult Americans with a disability account for 27 percent of U.S. adult health-care spending. (More about that here.)
• Dr. Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center visits RTP to talk about digging for the roots of diabetes, and UNC researchers stumble over a genetic marker for diabetes in African-Americans. (More about that here.)

Researchers team up to probe drug side effects

David Threadgill

Dr. Paul Watkins

Dr. Paul Watkins, a liver toxicity expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a founding member of the Hamner-UNC Institute for Drug Safety Sciences in RTP, is teaming up with David Threadgill, head of the genetics department at N.C. State University, to study why some patients have serious liver reactions to otherwise safe drugs.

The two researchers were awarded a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to conduct their work.

For the two-year project, Watkins and Threadgill will use a specially bred mouse that represents the genetic diversity in the human population. The researchers expect to uncover genetic risk factors that could lead to tests to identify patients at risk and improve the safety of future medicines.

The RTI analysis is based on the “Blueprint for Legislative Action,” a plan by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership that includes mandatory  reductions of CO2 emissions. The partnership, which is a group of businesses and environmental organizations, recommended emissions reductions of 80 percent to 89 percent by 2020 and a 58 percent by 2030.

Enforcing these targets will cost U.S. households an average $89 per year in 2020 and $269 in 2030, RTI researchers figured. The projections are in 2007 dollars.

The cost increases come mostly from moderately higher electricity and natural gas bills and a 15 percent increase in petroleum prices by 2030. That means, a gallon of gas would cost $4.42 instead of $3.84, according to the RTI study. (More about the study results here.)

RTI, a research institute based in Research Triangle Park, released the study results Thursday, while negotiators from 192 countries talked about climate change in Copenhagen. Earlier in the week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. And on Friday, U.S. Senators John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will submit their legislative plan on CO2 emissions control.

Americans who are disabled because of a traumatic brain injury, stroke, diabetes, arthritis or a vision impairment are generally in poorer health. They use health care services more often and have more chronic conditions. But they also encounter bigger obstacles to obtain health care, which lands them in the emergency room more frequently.

The cost? About $398 billion in 2006, according to the study.

Northeastern states had the highest costs per disabled adult, states in the western part of the country the lowest. In North Carolina, the cost per disabled adult was about $12,213, which was above the national average. (Read the whole report here.)

The majority of the cost was shouldered by taxpayers through Medicaid and Medicare.

To reduce the spending, the study suggested to decrease hospitalizations and premature entry into nursing homes, mainly through more preventive care such as smoking cessation and mammograms, by interventions such as nutritional improvement programs by improving access to medical care.

“When looking for ways to improve health and control costs, the role of disability in care management should be addressed,” said Wayne Anderson, senior health policy analyst at RTI, in a prepared statement.

I could attend only the Monday morning portion of the meeting, but Sabine Vollmer was at the Symposium for the whole thing and wrote two blogs posts about the rest of the program here and here with a lot of details.

There were four broad themes entertained by the symposium: Personalized Medicine, Behavioral Neuroscience of Alcoholism, Global Climate Change and Education Opportunity and Achievement. Each of the themes had its own breakout session later, but Monday morning was reserved for Keynote Speakers, one on each of the four topics, each of interest to me in one way or another.

Let me first dispose of the things I did not like about the conference before I get into things I liked. Over the past few years, most of the conferences I go to are informal, unconference or unconference-like events: from Scifoo in Mountain View, to Science FEST in Trieste, to ConvergeSouth in Greensboro, to our own ScienceOnline meetings. Even the ‘real’ science meeting I like to go to, the SRBR meeting, is very relaxed and informal – shorts-and-Hawaiian-shirt-clad scientists giving funny and entertaining talks about their new findings in my own field, with internal jokes, calling out friends in the audience and occasional hackling joke from the room (OK, OK, I overstate – folks are mostly nice and polite, especially when the talk is given by someone younger, e.g, a properly dressed graduate student, waiting in attentive silence until the end and then asking proper questions afterwards, but still, the general atmosphere is friendly and relaxed).

I realize of course that different conferences require different setup and different levels of formality. Not everything is a Bar Camp. While I was personally uncomfortable wearing my suit-and-tie costume at the IASP meeting, I understood that this was a business meeting in a business venue with businessmen (and a handful of businesswomen) in business attire talking about business. But this one, I think, was a mismatch. All (or almost all) speakers were scientists talking about science. Almost everyone in the audience were scientists. For this kind of meeting, the organization was far too formal. And not just in pomp and ceremony and dress-code. For example, if you look at the abstracts, they don’t really say anything about the topic of the talk – they go in great detail about the speaker, including all the past and present appointments, awards and honorary degrees. This indicates that the organizers were more interested in the power hierarchy (i.e., ‘look at VIPs we managed to get here to talk’) instead of the substance of what they are saying. It felt more like a big corporate show-off than a conference meant for an exchange of ideas.

Then, there was no time designated for Question & Answer periods after the talks. I wanted to ask questions, but there was just no mechanism for doing so. I understand there were panels afterwards, but even those were built strangely – with panelists, after each gave a separate talk, sitting at a table on a podium above the audience, physically looking down at the audience, thus psychologically inhibiting all but the bravest from actually speaking up. I do not know how it went, but I doubt it was a free-wheeling discussion. Then, the talks. Two speakers actually read their talks. Arrrgh! Yawn (and I was FULL of caffeine).

Others were much better. Howard McLeod gave a good, clear introduction into personal genomics and personal medicine, its pros and cons. Robert Jackson from Duke provided a good summary of the current state of science of climate change. Ronald Dahl talked about adolescent brain development (something I am very interested in, both professionally and as a father of two adolescents), especially the lengthening of the period between onset of puberty which arrives earlier and earlier (the timing of which is not matched by an earlier development of other brain functions, including self-control) and the delay of societally approved age for onset of sexual activity (including marriage). Thus the duration of the period during which adolescents are sexually mature (but not entirely emotionally mature) but discouraged from sexual activity is getting longer and longer – which is an obvious problem. Couple that with the tendency of adolescents to be unable to resist, despite personal fear, engaging in risky behaviors, problems like teen alcoholism and traffic accidents are on the rise.

Lunch Keynote Speaker, Ralph Tarter, was the biggest dissapointment. His talk about bridging the Two Cultures and lessons from Hollywood was surprising for its naivete easily detectable by anyone who’s been reading science blogs for more than a year or so (including Framing Wars, response to Sizzle and response to Unscientific America, along with bloggers who routinely write about history of science). It was infused with nostalgia for good old days when scientists and poets drank wine and talked together (ehm, scientists and poets at the time were the one and the same people – that was Victorian era when gentlemen of means could afford to indulge themselves in such pastimes as philosophy, natural history and poetry and meeting their like-minded buddies at the pub). Science today is a very different business, specialized, expensive, profesionalized and rightly so. That’s progress. The worst part was the lunch talk was the last point – a very erroneous analogy between peer-review of grants and movie reviews. First error: grants are reviewed before they are funded – movies are reviewed after they are funded. Second, as much as the grant review is prone to error, it is still done by well-meaning teams of scientists who are at least trying to evaluate the proposals according to their merits. Yes, outlandish proposals have a harder time than bandwagon stuff or conservative approaches, but it is at least attempted to be done fairly. Which movie gets funded is totally up to whims of movie moguls and producers. I bet even smaller percentage of submitted movie scripts gets actually made into movies than a proportion of grant proposals that gets funded. And while grant reviewers may look at the past publishing records of the grant submitters, the movie magnates are not in any way swayed by the statistics of positive or negative views of particular actors by movie critics in the media.

The highlight of the day was the talk by James Evans. I know Jim well, but I have never seen him speak before. And he blew me away. He knew that all the other speakers on the Personalized Medicine topics will be over-optimistic, so he took it on himself to provide a counter-view, a summary of cautionary notes backed up by data and a nice dose of humor. It was a very energetic and fun talk that explained very clearly what claims by personal genomics companies really mean, why they are so seductive if you don’t stop to think about them, and how they stack up against reality.

Talecris to expand in Clayton

Plans to invest up to $450 million in plant expansions had been sitting on the shelf at Talecris for at least two years. Following an initial public offering of stock and the sale of notes that raised more than $1 billion for the company in the past month, the RTP-based drugmaker is dusting off the expansion plans.

Talecris will invest $268.7 million in its Clayton plant and create 259 jobs over the next seven years, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce. Up to $4.8 million in state incentives beckon.

The company makes its blood-based medicines in Clayton, where 1,800 of its 2,300 Triangle employees work.

The expansion plans, which are mentioned in Security and Exchange Commission filings, had been on hold after Talecris postponed its IPO and then considered selling itself to a competitor. When the sale ran afoul of U.S. antitrust regulators, the company was able to switch course again and go public Sept. 30.

Duke goes to India to develop clinical therapies

Discoveries by Duke’s medical faculty will be tested and developed in India.

Dr. Victor Dzau, chief executive officer of Duke University Health System, announced in Delhi that the university is teaming up with Jubilant Biosys, an Indian company with operations in Bangalore.

Jubilant is charged with developing a portfolio of four to five clinical therapies, which could be licensed to large drugmakers.

Pfizer to close two R&D centers in RTP area

Following its $67.3 billion acquisition of Wyeth, Pfizer plans to close six research and development centers and cut 15 percent of the jobs held by scientists and lab technicians.

Two former Wyeth R&D centers in Sanford and RTP are among those tagged for closure, which is expected to cost at least 170 local employees their jobs.

RTI gets $70 million contract

College is expensive and about two-thirds of all students who continue their education past high school receive some type of financial aid. This year, the U.S. Department of Education will spend about $116 billion on student financial aid.

The investment reflects how important college degrees are to the economy, the labor pool and the standard of living in the U.S.

But does student financial aid work? What is the taxpayers’ return on the investment?

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded RTI International a $70 million contract to find out.

More information here.

Quintiles scores kid and caboodle

Quintiles Transnational, a Durham company that helps drugmakers test and sell new medicines, has scored extensive contracts with British drugmaker AstraZeneca and Japanese drugmaker Eisai.

The AstraZeneca contract gives Quintiles responsibility for the majority of the drugmaker’s clinical pharmacology, which includes the composition of the new drugs and their side effects. The Eisai contract covers six experimental cancer drugs that the drugmaker wants to test on 11 tumors.

Drugmakers have long outsourced development of new drugs, but contracts with companies such as Quintiles used to be for just one drug or one clinical trials.

Quintiles is taking on whole programs to try to reduce the time it takes to bring new medicines to market.

Stiefel consolidates in RTP

Stiefel Laboratories, which was bought by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline for about $3 billion in cash, is closing its corporate headquarters in Coral Gables, Fla., and an operation in Duluth, Ga., to consolidate its business in Research Triangle Park.

Stiefel, which specializes in skin products, moved its research and development to RTP three years ago.

The consolidation following the deal with GSK will move a few Stiefel jobs from Florida and Georgia to RTP. But many of the 260 Stiefel employees in Florida and Georgia will be laid off.

Symposium identifies research gaps

RTI International organized its fourth symposium to identify areas that require more research. The RTI Fellows Symposium, which was held Monday and Tuesday at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center in Chapel Hill, identified several areas lacking of scrutiny, including personal medicine, global warming and the role of biofuels.

Reports on some of the presentations:

• Genes as weather vanes for disease
• Global warming worries drive biofuels research

  Related to greenhouse gases, Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., talked about his vision of lowering carbon dioxide emissions at Duke University Wednesday.

Government funding for research is up sharply from five years ago, so are concerns about global warming.

Temperatures are rising most everywhere around the globe. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also up, a hallmark of more than two centuries of industrialization.

More carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere today than in the past one million years, according to measurements taken from columns of South Pole ice. Sea levels are rising, because the sea ice at the North Pole is melting. The Arctic ice cap shrunk about 25 percent from 1979 to 2005, satellite photos show.

Robert Jackson

By the end of the century, carbon dioxide amounts are projected to double. That could raise ocean levels 1½ feet, enough to put most of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and stretches of the state’s coastal areas under water.

“We’re heading into territory the Earth hasn’t seen in millions of years,” said Robert Jackson, director of the Duke University Center of Climate Change. (Photo at left)

It’s a prospect that gives researchers looking for alternative energy sources pause, because climate change is first and foremost thought of as an energy issue.

The notion of exploring the sun, the wind, water, geothermal heat and plants as energy sources takes on new meaning when the purpose of the research shifts from trying to preserve the status quo to trying to ensure survival.

“We may be entering territory that is unexplored,” said Carl Bauer, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Carl Bauer

Jackson and Bauer made their statements during the RTI Fellows Symposium, a two-day event built around scientific challenges in need of attention. The symposium, which attracted about 400 researchers, was held Monday and Tuesday at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center in Chapel Hill.

Global warming and what role biofuels will play in the energy supply were two of the scientific challenges addressed at the symposium. (More on personalized medicine, another scientific challenge discussed at the symposium, here.)

Alternatives to oil and coal are nothing new. Geothermal heat made hot spring spas possible thousands of years ago. Windmills pumped water into irrigation canals and milled grain for centuries. Ethanol powered some of the first cars more than 100 years ago. Nuclear power plants started sprouting in the U.S. and Europe in the late 1950s.

None of the energy sources are ideal. But fossil fuels have a lot going for them. They pack a big bang for the buck and are fairly easy to store and transport across the globe.

Bauer projected that by 2030 the energy demand will increase by about 11 percent in the U.S. and by about 45 percent worldwide. With fossil fuels providing much of that energy, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions would go up by about 45 percent.

David Dayton

Biofuels are more expensive than gasoline and less energy dense, but they are a good option to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, said David Dayton, director of chemistry and biomass program manager at RTI International in Research Triangle Park.

Dayton was part of a panel of experts at the RTI symposium Tuesday who talked about biofuels. Also on the panel were Bauer, Steven Burke, chief executive of the Biofuels Center of North Carolina, and Rakesh Agrawal, a professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Ethanol made from corn produces on average 19 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline. If the feedstock is biomass, such as agricultural residue, forest waste and switch grass, the reduction can exceed 80 percent.

Rakesh Agrawal

There’s just one problem: Not enough land to supply the entire U.S. transportation sector with ethanol fermented from the cellulose in biomass, said Agrawal.

By 2022, ethanol production is projected at 36 billion gallons, less than a fourth of the amount of fuel the U.S. is projected to need for transportation.

So the U.S. Department of Energy, which pays for much of the research, is no longer focused on fermentation technologies to produce ethanol. Rather, the DoE is shifting to a broader strategy and spreading out funding among technologies, Dayton said.

That’s a good thing. In the case of alternative energy sources, Bauer said, “one size doesn’t fit all.

North Carolina, for example, focuses on biodiesel and ethanol from corn and biomass to meet an ambitious goal: By 2017, 10 percent of liquid fuels sold in the state should be locally grown and produced.

Steven Burke

The first corn ethanol plant is scheduled to go online in January in Hoke County, said Burke of the biofuels center.

Fourteen biomass feedstocks have been planted at research sites and private farms statewide and North Carolina’s 18 million acres of forest are expected to contribute wood waste for ethanol production.

The state also has a partnership with RTI to produce ethanol in other ways than fermentation. Outside of that partnership, RTI recently was awarded a federally funded contract to work on a process that turns biomass into a type of bio oil, which can be mixed and refined with petroleum.

The state’s 10 percent goal is a tall order, Burke acknowledged. It will require an increase of biofuels production from 2 million gallons in 2008 to 600 million gallons in 2017.

He’s counting on music to gain support and boost demand for biofuels. The biofuels center signed up 19 artists, who agreed to have their fan Web sites linked to the center’s site. All artists are featured on a CD called “From Bluegrass to Switchgrass.”

Burke called it music “for a state obsessed with fast-driving NASCAR.”

But that’s exactly what a panel of experts did Monday at the RTI Fellows Symposium at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center in Chapel Hill.

Personalized medicine – the idea of using gene-based information to individualize medical care – was one of eight hot research areas that RTI International’s scientific advisors recommended for further scientific scrutiny. Other areas addressed at the two-day symposium, the fourth since the inception of the RTI fellows program in 2002, include biofuels and the role computers play in accelerating innovation.

On the first day, personalized medicine attracted more listeners among the about 400 people who had registered for the symposium than any other topic.

The four members on the panel agreed that gene-based research, also known as genomics, and its offshoots, proteomics and metabolomics, have advanced medicine. The pursuit of personalized medicine has improved the understanding of diseases, reduced side effects from certain drugs and brought about new treatments.

But after about 20 years of research, the ‘omics are still far from being a crystal ball to assess a person’s risk for disease, said Eric Juengst, director of the Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

Predictive genetic risk assessment is rather like a weather forecast, said Juengst (photo at left). “We all watch it but we take it with a grain of salt.”

The idea of consulting the genome to improve on health care is alluring, said Howard McLeod, director of the UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy in Chapel Hill.

Prescription medicines approved to treat a particular disease generally work in only about half of all patients, said McLeod (photo at right).

A good number of patients don’t respond to certain medicines – 25 percent cannot activate the blood thinner Plavix, 10 percent don’t respond to tamoxifen, which reduces the recurrence of breast cancer – because of genetic reasons, he said.

Genetic differences among patients also require significantly different doses of Warfarin, a blood thinner that is similar to rat poison and just as toxic if taken incorrectly.

“We don’t really know how medicines work to the degree we need to know,” McLeod said. “It’s Yogi Berra pharmacology: We know what we know, but we don’t know what we don’t know.”

The ‘omics are helping to unravel some of the unknowns, said Susan Sumner, a chemist who works in the RTI Biomarkers and Systems Biology group.

Researchers have found metabolites – products of chemical reactions in cells – that help predict drug-induced liver injury, the predominant reason why experimental drugs fail. The metabolites can be found in urine samples.

Similarly, biomarkers in urine tests are early warning signs during pregnancy for premature labor, said Sumner (photo at left).

The technology is becoming available to delve deeper into what triggers disease and understand individualized risk factors for expensive, chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

Research centers advancing genomics, proteomics and metabolomics have sprung up and federal research funding is flowing to companies in pursuit of the $1,000 genome analysis per person. There’s even a bill before Congress that could give personalized medicine a role in the debate about health care reform.

The promise of personalized medicine is to reduce health care costs as technological advances make the ‘omics cheaper and faster. But embracing genetics in medicine too fast has its pitfalls, said Dr. Jim Evans, an internist, professor of genetics at UNC-CH and the editor-in-chief of the journal Genetics in Medicine.

Very little is known about how genes interacting with genes or with the environment can affect disease, said Evans (photo at left).

Sometimes, tests to screen for disease risks turn out to do more harm than good. A test to measure the amount of a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, as a tumor predictor is one such example, he said.

Sometimes, it’s not clear what the significance of certain genetic risk factors is. Researchers have found 19 genetic risk factors for Type 2 diabetes, but each has such a miniscule odd to cause the disease it becomes irrelevant.

Evans is a big believer in data that proves personalized medicine goes beyond the promise and actually promotes an outcome.

“It’s so seductive to believe that a good idea improves health,” he said. “But it’s really hard to prove it does.”