Spectrum | Sundayobserver.lk

Research in Sri Lanka is underestimated and not clearly understood by society. Little do we know that medical breakthroughs are possible after extensive research and development which is imperative to save lives. Today, Sri Lanka is an example to other countries in the area of medical research in health innovations and technologies applied to the health sector.

This is reflected in the successful medical goals achieved in Sri Lanka which has made a tremendous impact to make the country’s health sector the best.

With this in mind, Sri Lanka’s Medical Research Institute (MRI) has become the focal point in bringing the best of bio-medical and applied health research to the standard it is today.

The MRI conducts extensive research in various fields ranging from virology to immunology.

The MRI as the national laboratory provides the hospitals with diagnostic laboratory tests for Japanese encephalitis, measles, rubella and influenza and also functions as a regional reference laboratory for poliomyelitis.

It is important to understand how a little research goes a long way in combatting even the deadly dengue which is spread by mosquito vectors.

In such a realm of expertise and professionalism, the MRI will elevate medical research to the next level with the opening of Sri Lanka’s first medical museum.

“The De Soysa Bacteriological Institute building will be revamped as Sri Lanka’s first medical museum,” said director of the Medical Research Institute, Dr. Anil Samaranayake.

He said this would make Sri Lanka an example for other nations in developing the health infrastructure and policies taking medical research to a more dynamic platform.

The director was speaking at the Medical Research Institute’s 111th anniversary celebrations held recently.

The Medical Research Institute has garnered many Presidential awards for its innovative research projects.

“We would need at least Rs 200 million to make this dream a reality but I’m hopeful that if we dream it, we can do it,” said the director. He said that he hopes that the Museum, when completed will be a centre of learning excellence.

”It will be centre of life sciences in its widest sense which would be on par with international standards,” he said.

The Museum will pave the way for a new generation of worthy professionals who will contribute to the country in terms of highly developed research. Dr. Samaranayake said: “I want to ensure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes as our predecessors but seek new and comprehensive solutions to present issues by the inspiring a younger generation who aim at the best professionalism.”

Indeed, the MRI has overcome all obstacles to ensure that timely and accurate reporting of information is done dispensing the best medical research documentations.

“We aim at improving the health of Sri Lankans through world-class medical research to achieve the national health goals set by the Ministry of Health,” said Dr. Samaranayake. Supporting research from clinical trials where major diseases are quickly understood with a simple test and how to prevent it has become the mainstay of medical research technology.

“However, medical research needs funding and this has always been an issue from the time of its inception and we hope that we could solve this problem because research on the best medicines could save lives and save millions,” the doctor said.

History of the MRI

The MRI was built by J.W.C. de Soysa, in commemoration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The ceremonial opening was by the then Governor of Ceylon, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway, on January, 31 1900 and initially named The Soysa Bacteriological Institute. Sir Marcus Fernando, a consultant physician of the General Hospital, Colombo was appointed in an acting capacity as the first head of the institute. Later, Dr. Joseph Silva and Dr. S.C.Paul too acted as the director of the institute for a short period.

Dr. Anil Samaranayake

In 1903, Dr. Aldo Castellani, Professor of Pathology was appointed the first Director of the MRI. Dr. Castellani had a global reputation as the discoverer of the etiology of Sleeping Sickness in 1902 in Sub- Saharan Africa.

In Sri Lanka, he conducted a large number of pioneer research studies in the fields of microbiology and parasitology. As the Director of the MRI he introduced various laboratory tests for the diagnosis of bacterial, fungal and parasitic infestations for the first time in Sri Lanka. Dr. Castellani also introduced vaccination for typhoid infections. In 1909 a vaccine unit to produce small pox and anti-typhoid vaccines was set up.

This erudite scholar had to leave the colony, Ceylon, prematurely, in 1915, as he refused to change his Italian nationality during the political fiasco created by World War I. Dr. Lucas A. Nicholls, a lecturer in Bacteriology at the Ceylon Medical College was then appointed as the Director of the MRI. Under his tenure, a Pasteur Institute was commissioned in 1918. Legend has it that the well-known philanthropist Soysa was bitten by a rabid dog and consequently he died at a relatively young age.

Thereafter, his family donated a large sum of money to set up the institute. In 1936, the Pasteur institute and the Vaccination Establishment were amalgamated with the De Soysa Bacteriological Institute.

In 1938, the Department of Nutrition was set up at the De Soyza Bacteriological Institute (Now MRI) to research the prevailing the major nutritional problems at the time of Director Dr. Lucian A. Nicholas who lectured in Bacteriology and Tropical Medicine but had a wide range of interests including Nutrition.

Dr. Nimalasuriya headed the Department of Nutrition since then and he became the first Sri Lankan Director of the Institute from August 1945 and changed the name of the Institute as Medical Research Institute in 1946.

Mother’s blood test reveals baby’s sex

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Blood drawn from expectant mothers could offer parents an earlier sneak peek at their baby’s sex than methods currently used in the U.S., researchers said Tuesday.

The test may be particularly valuable for families that harbour sex-linked genetic disorders like hemophilia, they add.

Because such disorders only strike boys, knowing that the baby is a girl could spare the mother diagnostic procedures, such as amniocentesis, that carry a small risk of miscarriage.

“It could reduce the number of invasive procedures that are being performed for specific genetic conditions,” said Dr. Diana Bianchi of Tufts University School of Medicine, who worked on the new study.

But other researchers voiced concerns, saying it could be misused to terminate a pregnancy if the baby isn’t of the desired sex.

“What you have to consider is the ethics of this,” said Dr. Mary Rosser, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

Gender

“If parents are using it to determine gender and then terminate the pregnancy based on that, that could be a problem,” she told Reuters Health. “Remember, gender is not a disease.”

The test looks for small pieces of the male sex chromosome in the mother’s blood, which would mean she is carrying a baby boy.

Some European hospitals already rely on the method, called cell-free fetal DNA, although it’s not available from doctors in the U.S.

“What they are finding in England is that many women are not going on to have the invasive tests,” Bianchi told Reuters Health.

In those procedures, doctors either extract a small amount of the fluid that surrounds the fetus (amniocentesis) or they take a sample of the placenta (chorionic villus sampling). Between one in 100 and one in 600 mothers miscarry as a result, according to Bianchi. In a fresh look at the medical evidence for the blood test, she and her colleagues analysed 57 earlier studies that included more than 6,500 pregnancies.

They found parents could trust the test 98.8 percent of the time when it said they’d have a boy, and 94.8 percent of the time when it indicated a girl.

That leaves some room for error, which could be important if parents are making medical decisions based on the results — such as whether or not to get an invasive procedure to look for genetic disorders.

Ultrasound

However, the current non-invasive alternative an ultrasound done at the end of the first trimester isn’t always good at spotting a baby’s sex, Bianchi’s team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And the blood test is reliable as early as seven weeks into the pregnancy, whereas ultrasound is not. Bianchi said one study had estimated the blood test costs about 255 pounds in the UK (about $413), all included.

While it’s available over the Internet, she said her team had only looked at hospital-based test performance.

“It is a great test that can be part of our armamentarium of noninvasive testing that we use,” she said. “But it should only be used by families that are at risk for sex-linked diseases.”

Bianchi said she owns stock in Verinata Health, a company that is developing cell-free fetal DNA tests for Down syndrome, although that company had no role in the new study.

Source: Journal of the American Medical Association.

How tumour cells are fed

Researchers have gained a new understanding of the way in which growing tumours are fed and how this growth can be slowed via angiogenesis inhibitors that eliminate the blood supply to tumors.

This represents a step forward towards developing new anti-cancer drug therapies.

The results of this study have been published in the September issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

“The central role of capillary sprouting in tumor vascularization makes it an attractive target for anticancer therapy.

“Our observations suggest, however, that targeting just this mode of blood vessel formation may not be sufficient to result in a significant antitumor effect,” commented investigators.

Investigators from the Semmelweis University, the National Institute of Oncology, and the National Koranyi Institute of Pulmonology, Budapest, Hungary, and the Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, used electron and confocal microscopy to examine tumor tissue in mice in which malignant tumor cells had been introduced.

They proposed a novel mechanism for the development of tissue pillars (the most characteristic feature of intussusceptive angiogenesis, in which a vessel folds into itself to form two vessels).

Moreover, they demonstrated a significant increase in pillar formation after treatment with the angiogenesis inhibitor vatalanib. Their observations support the notion that inhibition of just a single tumor vascularization mechanism can trigger alternative ones.

Prior to this study, the mechanism of pillar formation had not been fully understood.

Investigation revealed a progression of events that generates a connection between the processes of endothelial bridging and intussusceptive angiogenesis resulting in rapid pillar formation from pre-existing building blocks.

To describe this mechanism of pillar formation the group coined the term “inverse sprouting.”

“It is well established now that tumors can obtain sufficient blood supply from alternative vascularization mechanisms (such as intussusceptive angiogenesis) to grow without capillary sprouting (known as the key mode of new vessel formation in cancer).

Therefore, antiangiogenic therapies should be tailored depending on the angiogenic phenotype in each single tumor, and the targeting of non-sprouting angiogenic mechanisms in cancer seems to be a rational strategy.

Our study provides new understanding of cancer-induced intussusceptive angiogenesis and may serve as a basis for the development of novel drugs targeting this type of blood vessel formation.”

Courtesy: Elsevier Health Sciences

Psychological Science:

Social class as culture

Social class is more than just how much money you have. It’s also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to - and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes - a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.

People who come from a lower-class background have to depend more on other people. “If you don’t have resources and education, you really adapt to the environment, which is more threatening, by turning to other people,” Keltner says. “People who grow up in lower-class neighbourhoods, as I did, will say,’ There’s always someone there who will take you somewhere, or watch your kid. You’ve just got to lean on people.’” Wealthier people don’t have to rely on each other as much. This causes differences that show up in psychological studies. People from lower-class backgrounds are better at reading other people’s emotions.

They’re more likely to act altruistically. “They give more and help more. If someone’s in need, they’ll respond,” Keltner says. When poor people see someone else suffering, they have a physiological response that is missing in people with more resources. “What I think is really interesting about that is, it kind of shows there’s all this strength to the lower class identity: greater empathy, more altruism, and finer attunement to other people,” he says. Of course, there are also costs to being lower-class. Health studies have found that lower-class people have more anxiety and depression and are less physically healthy.

Upper-class people are different, Keltner says. “What wealth and education and prestige and a higher station in life gives you is the freedom to focus on the self.”

In psychology experiments, wealthier people don’t read other people’s emotions as well. They hoard resources and are less generous than they could be.

One implication of this, is that’s unreasonable to structure a society on the hope that rich people will help those less fortunate. “One clear policy implication is, the idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull,” Keltner says. “Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back.

The ‘thousand points of light’ - this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society - is improbable, psychologically.”

The ability to rise in class is the great promise of the American Dream. But studies have found that, as people rise in the classes, they become less empathetic. Studies have also found that as people rise in wealth, they become happier - but not as much as you’d expect.

“I think one of the reasons why is the human psyche stops feeling the need to connect and be closer to others, and we know that’s one of the greatest sources of happiness science can study,” Keltner says.

Sri Lanka’s first medical museum