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Osiris Therapeutics Reports Interim Data For COPD Stem Cell Study
Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:OSIR) announced six-month interim data from a Phase II clinical trial evaluating Prochymal, the Company"s proprietary formulation of adult mesenchymal stem cells, for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Sixty-two patients were enrolled and are being followed for two years in the placebo-controlled study. At the six-month time-point, the data revealed several important findings.
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World Leaders Must Take Action To Support Commitments To Lower Maternal Mortality, Opinion Piece Says
"I stood up and applauded for women everywhere when I heard the news" that the United Nations Human Rights Council, including the U.S., "recognized maternal death as a human rights issue," CARE President and CEO Helene Gayle writes in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution opinion piece. Gayle writes that governments for the past 15 years "have failed to meet the commitments made and targets set to reduce the more than half a million maternal deaths every year."According to Gayle, preventing maternal death "requires three well-coordinated actions: sustain political leadership, secure adequate res and strengthen health systems." She adds that the resolution "is a positive step" but that it is "only effective if it translates into action." She continues, "It"s great to see the Obama administration places women and girls high on the agenda," adding that many members of Congress also support these issues.Reducing maternal mortality "requires significant res," Gayle writes. She adds, "To be blunt, an estimated global commitment of $39 billion over 10 years is needed to make significant progress." Such a commitment would be "an investment in women, their families and the economic productivity of nations," according to Gayle."The cost of not investing is far greater," Gayle continues. She notes that women "do two-thirds of the world"s work and produce nearly 60% of the world"s food." In addition, "children who lose their mothers are 10 times more likely to die in childhood than children with mothers," and maternal and newborn deaths "represent an estimated annual loss of $15.5 billion in productivity," according to Gayle. "Clearly, other development goals cannot be met without healthy mothers," she adds.She continues that the "most tragic and infuriating point" is that the "death of a woman in childbirth is one of the most inexcusable deaths on earth." Because high maternal mortality is a "barometer of weak health systems, often reflecting the low status of women," strengthening health systems to improve maternal health will therefore enable the system to "address other health needs," Gayle writes. She adds that countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Peru have improved mortality rates "through four lifesaving programs: family planning, skilled and culturally sensitive care during pregnancy and childbirth, emergency care for complications and postpartum care."Gayle writes, "The U.S. can spearhead a comprehensive maternal health action plan and, by doing so, set an example for world leaders to join and invest in." She concludes, "The actions we take now can make maternal death a problem of the past and not one of our children"s future" (Gayle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7/10).
News of the day
WHO And EFA Call For Global Action On Chronic Respiratory Disease
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and European Federation of Allergy and Airways Diseases (EFA) today announced that they are bringing together over 150 international delegates to discuss the growing epidemic of Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRD) that affects one billion people worldwide1, [2], [3] and is responsible for four million deaths annually1. The conference which will discuss the implementation of a five-year initiative to unite policy makers, providers and patient groups will be hosted by the Italian Ministry of Health in Rome on June 12 and 13.
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Programming Tools Facilitate Use Of Video Game Processors For Defense Needs

Video gaming computers and video game consoles available today typically contain a graphics processing unit (GPU), which is very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics. However, the unit"s highly parallel structure also makes it more efficient than a general-purpose central processing unit for a range of complex calculations important to defense applications. Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing programming tools to enable engineers in the defense industry to utilize the processing power of GPUs without having to learn the complicated programming language required to use them directly. "As radar systems and other sensor systems get more complicated, the computational requirements are becoming a bottleneck," said GTRI senior research engineer Daniel Campbell. "We are capitalizing on the ability of GPUs to process radar, infrared sensor and video data faster than a typical computer and at a much lower cost and power than a computing cluster." Mark Richards, a principal research engineer and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is collaborating with Campbell and graduate student Andrew Kerr to rewrite common signal processing commands to run on a GPU. This work is supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The researchers are writing functions defined in the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) to run on GPUs. VSIPL is an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers and government labs. GPU VSIPL is available for download here. The researchers are currently writing the functions in Nvidia"s CUDA™ language, but the underlying principles can be applied to GPUs developed by other companies, according to Campbell. With GPU VSIPL, engineers can use high-level functions in their C programs to perform linear algebra and signal processing operations, and recompile with GPU VSIPL to take advantage of the speed of the GPU. Studies have shown that VSIPL functions operate between 20 and 350 times faster on a GPU than a central processing unit, depending on the function and size of the data set. "The results are not surprising because GPUs excel at performing repetitive arithmetic tasks like those in VSIPL, such as signal processing functions like Fourier transforms, spectral analysis, image formation and noise filtering," noted Richards. "We"ve just alleviated the need for engineers to understand the entire GPU architecture by simply providing them with a library of routines that they frequently use." The research team is also assessing the advantages of GPUs by running a library of benchmarks for quantitatively comparing high-performance, embedded computing systems. The benchmarks address important operations across a broad range of U.S. Department of Defense signal and image processing applications. Preliminary studies have shown several of the benchmarks have straightforward parallelization schemes that result in faster operation without requiring significant optimization. For other benchmarks, additional research needs to be conducted into optimizing the use of multiple GPUs. For the future, the researchers plan to continue expanding the GPU VSIPL, develop additional defense-related GPU function libraries and design programming tools to utilize other efficient processors, such as the cell broadband engine processor at the heart of the PlayStation 3 video game console. Abby Vogel Georgia Institute of Technology Research News


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