Tag Archives: Royal Society of Chemistry

Virtual panel discussion: Canadian Strategies for Responsible Neurotechnology Innovation on May 16, 2023

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The Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) sent a May 11, 2023 notice (via email) about an upcoming event but first, congratulations (Bravo!) are in order,

The Science Meets Parliament [SMP] Program 2023 is now complete and was a huge success. 43 Delegates from across Canada met with 62 Parliamentarians from across the political spectrum on the Hill on May 1-2, 2023.

The SMP Program is championed by CSPC and Canada’s Chief Science Advisor, Dr. Mona Nemer [through the Office of the Chief Science Advisor {OCSA}].

This Program would not have been possible without the generous support of our sponsors: The Royal Military College of Canada, The Stem Cell Network, and the University of British Columbia.

There are 443 seats in Canada’s Parliament with 338 in the House of Commons and 105 in the Senate and 2023 is the third time the SMP programme has been offered. (It was previously held in 2018 and 2022 according to the SMP program page.)

The Canadian programme is relatively new compared to Australia where they’ve had a Science Meets Parliament programme since 1999 (according to a March 20, 2017 essay by Ken Baldwin, Director of Energy Change Institute at Australian National University for The Conversation). The Scottish have had a Science and the Parliament programme since 2000 (according to this 2022 event notice on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s website).

By comparison to the other two, the Canadian programme is a toddler. (We tend not to recognize walking for the major achievement it is.) So, bravo to the CSPC and OCSA on getting 62 Parliamentarians to make time in their schedules to meet a scientist.

Responsible neurotechnology innovation?

From the Canadian Strategies for Responsible Neurotechnology Innovation event page on the CSPC website,

Advances in neurotechnology are redefining the possibilities of improving neurologic health and mental wellbeing, but related ethical, legal, and societal concerns such as privacy of brain data, manipulation of personal autonomy and agency, and non-medical and dual uses are increasingly pressing concerns [emphasis mine]. In this regard, neurotechnology presents challenges not only to Canada’s federal and provincial health care systems, but to existing laws and regulations that govern responsible innovation. In December 2019, just before the pandemic, the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] Council adopted a Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology. It is now urging that member states develop right-fit implementation strategies.

What should these strategies look like for Canada? We will propose and discuss opportunities that balance and leverage different professional and governance approaches towards the goal of achieving responsible innovation for the current state of the art, science, engineering, and policy, and in anticipation of the rapid and vast capabilities expected for neurotechnology in the future by and for this country.

Link to the full OECD Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology

Date: May 16 [2023]

Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT

Event Category: Virtual Session [on Zoom]

Registration Page: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-g8d1qubRhumPSCQi6WUtA

The panelists are:

Dr. Graeme Moffat
Neurotechnology entrepreneur & Senior Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy [University of Toronto]

Dr. Graeme Moffat is a co-founder and scientist with System2 Neurotechnology. He previously was Chief Scientist and VP of Regulatory Affairs at Interaxon, Chief Scientist with ScienceScape (later Chan-Zuckerberg Meta), and a research engineer at Neurelec (a division of Oticon Medical). He served as Managing Editor of Frontiers in Neuroscience, the largest open access scholarly journal series in the field of neuroscience. Dr. Moffat is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and an advisor to the OECD’s neurotechnology policy initiative.

Professor Jennifer Chandler
Professor of Law at the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics, University of Ottawa

Jennifer Chandler is Professor of Law at the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics, University of Ottawa. She leads the “Neuroethics Law and Society” Research Pillar for the Brain Mind Research Institute and sits on its Scientific Advisory Council. Her research focuses on the ethical, legal and policy issues in brain sciences and the law. She teaches mental health law and neuroethics, tort law, and medico-legal issues. She is a member of the advisory board for CIHR’s Institute for Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction (IMNA) and serves on international editorial boards in the field of law, ethics and neuroscience, including Neuroethics, the Springer Book Series Advances in Neuroethics, and the Palgrave-MacMillan Book Series Law, Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She has published widely in legal, bioethical and health sciences journals and is the co-editor of the book Law and Mind: Mental Health Law and Policy in Canada (2016). Dr. Chandler brings a unique perspective to this panel as her research focuses on the ethical, legal and policy issues at the intersection of the brain sciences and the law. She is active in Canadian neuroscience research funding policy, and regularly contributes to Canadian governmental policy on contentious matters of biomedicine.

Ian Burkhart
Neurotech Advocate and Founder of BCI [brain-computer interface] Pioneers Coalition

Ian is a C5 tetraplegic [also known as quadriplegic] from a diving accident in 2010. He participated in a ground-breaking clinical trial using a brain-computer interface to control muscle stimulation. He is the founder of the BCI Pioneers Coalition, which works to establish ethics, guidelines and best practices for future patients, clinicians, and commercial entities engaging with BCI research. Ian serves as Vice President of the North American Spinal Cord Injury Consortium and chairs their project review committee. He has also worked with Unite2Fight Paralysis to advocate for $9 million of SCI research in his home state of Ohio. Ian has been a Reeve peer mentor since 2015 and helps lead two local SCI networking groups. As the president of the Ian Burkhart Foundation, he raises funds for accessible equipment for the independence of others with SCI. Ian is also a full-time consultant working with multiple medical device companies.

Andrew Atkinson
Manager, Emerging Science Policy, Health Canada

Andrew Atkinson is the Manager of the Emerging Sciences Policy Unit under the Strategic Policy Branch of Health Canada. He oversees coordination of science policy issues across the various regulatory and research programs under the mandate of Health Canada. Prior to Health Canada, he was a manager under Environment Canada’s CEPA new chemicals program, where he oversaw chemical and nanomaterial risk assessments, and the development of risk assessment methodologies. In parallel to domestic work, he has been actively engaged in ISO [International Organization for Standardization and OECD nanotechnology efforts.

Andrew is currently a member of the Canadian delegation to the OECD Working Party on Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and Converging Technologies (BNCT). BNCT aims to contribute original policy analysis on emerging science and technologies, such as gene editing and neurotechnology, including messaging to the global community, convening key stakeholders in the field, and making ground-breaking proposals to policy makers.

Professor Judy Illes
Professor, Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, UBC [University of British Columbia]

Dr. Illes is Professor of Neurology and Distinguished Scholar in Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. She is the Director of Neuroethics Canada, and among her many leadership positions in Canada, she is Vice Chair of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Advisory Board of the Institute on Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction (INMHA), and chair of the International Brain Initiative (www.internationalbraininitiative.org; www.canadianbrain.ca), Director at Large of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council of Canadian Academies.

Dr. Illes is a world-renown expert whose research, teaching and outreach are devoted to ethical, legal, social and policy challenges at the intersection of the brain sciences and biomedical ethics. She has made ground breaking contributions to neuroethical thinking for neuroscience discovery and clinical translation across the life span, including in entrepreneurship and in the commercialization of health care. Dr. Illes has a unique and comprehensive overview of the field of neurotechnology and the relevant sectors in Canada.

One concern I don’t see mentioned is bankruptcy (in other words, what happens if the company that made your neural implant goes bankrupt?) either in the panel description or in the OECD recommendation. My April 5, 2022 posting “Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read)” explored that topic and while many of the excerpted materials present a US perspective, it’s easy to see how it could also apply in Canada and elsewhere.

For those of us on the West Coast, this session starts at 9 am. Enjoy!

*June 20, 2023: This sentence changed (We tend not to recognize that walking for the major achievement it is.) to We tend not to recognize walking for the major achievement it is.

DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), nanoparticles, and your traumatized brain

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According to the May 10, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has awarded $6 million to a team of researchers to develop nanotechnology therapies for the treatment of traumatic brain injury and associated infections.

Led by Professor Michael J. Sailor, Ph.D., from the University of California San Diego [UC San Diego], the award brings together a multi-disciplinary team of renowned experts in laboratory research, translational investigation and clinical medicine, including Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D. of Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D. of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Clark C. Chen, M.D., Ph.D. of UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Ballistics injuries that penetrate the skull have amounted to 18 percent of battlefield wounds sustained by men and women who served in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the most recent estimate from the Joint Theater Trauma Registry, a compilation of data collected during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

“A major contributor to the mortality associated with a penetrating brain injury is the elevated risk of intracranial infection,” said Chen, a neurosurgeon with UC San Diego Health System, noting that projectiles drive contaminated foreign materials into neural tissue.

The May 9, 2013 UC San Diego news release by Susan Brown, which originated the news item, describes the reasons why DARPA wants to use nanoparticles in therapies for people suffering from traumatic brain injury,

Under normal conditions, the brain is protected from infection by a physiological system called the blood-brain barrier. “Unfortunately, those same natural defense mechanisms make it difficult to get antibiotics to the brain once an infection has taken hold,” said Chen, associate professor and vice-chair of research in the Division of Neurosurgery at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

DARPA hopes to meet these challenges with nanotechnology. The agency awarded this grant under its In Vivo Nanoplatforms for Therapeutics program to construct nanoparticles that can find and treat infections and other damage associated with traumatic brain injuries.

“Our approach is focused on porous nanoparticles that contain highly effective therapeutics on the inside and targeting molecules on the outside,” said Sailor, the UC San Diego materials chemist who leads the team. “When injected into the blood stream, we have found that these silicon-based particles can target certain tissues very effectively.”

Several types of nanoparticles have already been approved for clinical use in patients, but none for treatment of trauma or diseases in the brain. This is due in part to the inability of nanoparticle formulations to cross the blood-brain barrier and reach their intended targets.

“Poor penetration into tissues limits the application of nanoparticles to the treatment of many types of diseases,” said Ruoslahti, distinguished professor at Sanford-Burnham and partner in the research. “We are trying to overcome this limitation using targeting molecules that activate tissue-specific transport pathways to deliver nanoparticles.”

There is another major hurdle for treating brain injuries (from the news release),

Treating brain infections is becoming more difficult as drug-resistant strains of viruses and bacteria have emerged. Because drug-resistant strains mutate and evolve rapidly, researchers must constantly adjust their approach to treatment.

In an attempt to hit this moving target, the team is making their systems modular, so they can be reconfigured “on-the-fly” with the latest therapeutic advances.

Nanocomplexes that contain genetic material known as short interfering RNA, or siRNA, developed by Bhatia’s research group at MIT, will be key to this aspect of the team’s approach.

“The function of this type of RNA is that it specifically intereferes with processes in a diseased cell. The advantage of RNA therapies are that they can be quickly and easily modified when a new disease target emerges,” said Bhatia, a bioengineering professor at MIT and partner in the research.

But effective delivery of siRNA-based therapeutics in the body has proven to be a challenge because the negative charge and chemical structure of naked siRNA makes it very unstable in the body and it has difficulty crossing into diseased cells. To solve these problems, Bhatia has developed nanoparticles that form a protective coating around siRNA.

“The nanocomplexes we are developing shield the negative charge of RNA and protect it from nucleases that would normally destroy it. Adding Erkki’s tissue homing and cell-penetrating peptides allows the nanocomplex to transport deep into tissue and enter the diseased cells,” she said.

Bhatia has previously used the cell-penetrating nanocomplex to deliver siRNA to a tumor cell and shut down its protein production machinery. Although her group’s effort has focused on cancer, the team is now going after two other hard-to-treat cell types: drug-resistant bacteria and inflammatory cells in the brain.

“The work proposed by this multi-disciplinary team should provide new tools to mitigate the debilitating effects of penetrating brain injuries and offer our warfighters the best chance of meaningful recovery,” Chen said. [emphasis mine]

BTW, the term ‘warfighters’ is new to me; are we replacing the word ‘soldier’?

Returning to the matter at hand, I found DARPA’s In Vivo Nanoplatforms for Therapeutics program which is described this way on its home page,

Disease limits soldier readiness and creates healthcare costs and logistics burdens. Diagnosing and treating disease faster can help limit its impact. [emphasis mine] Current technologies and products for diagnosing disease are principally relegated to in vitro (in the lab) medical devices, which are often expensive, bulky and fragile.

DARPA’s In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN) program seeks to develop new classes of adaptable nanoparticles for persistent, distributed, unobtrusive physiologic and environmental sensing as well as the treatment of physiologic abnormalities, illness and infectious disease.

The IVN Diagnostics (IVN:Dx) program effort aims to develop a generalized in vivo platform that provides continuous physiological monitoring for the warfighter. [emphasis mine] Specifically, IVN:Dx will investigate technologies that may provide:

  • Implantable nanoplatforms using bio-compatible and nontoxic materials
  • In vivo sensing of small and large molecules of biological interest
  • Multiplexed detection of analytes at clinically relevant concentrations
  • External interrogation of the nanoplatform free from any implanted communications electronics
  • Complete system demonstration in a large animal

The IVN Therapeutics (IVN:Tx) program effort will seek unobtrusive nanoplatforms for rapidly treating disease in warfighters.

(I see DARPA is using both soldier and warfighter’.)

This team is not the only one wishing to deliver drug therapies in a targeted fashion to the brain. My Feb. 19, 2013 posting mentioned Chad Mirkin (Northwestern University) and his team’s efforts with spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), from the posting,

Potential applications include using SNAs to carry nucleic acid-based therapeutics to the brain for the treatment of glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, as well as other neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Mirkin is aggressively pursuing treatments for such diseases with Alexander H. Stegh, an assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. (originally excerpted from this the Feb. 15, 2013 news release on EurekAlert)

Coincidentally, Mirkin has just been named ‘Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year’ by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry, from the May 10, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Northwestern University scientist Chad A. Mirkin, a world-renowned leader in nanotechnology research and its application, has been named 2013 Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). The award recognizes an individual’s contribution to the commercialization of research.

The RSC is honoring Mirkin for his invention of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), new globular forms of DNA and RNA. These structures form the basis for more than 300 products commercialized by licensees of the technology.

I’m never quite sure what to make of researchers who receive public funding then patent and license the results of that research.

Getting back to soldiers/warfighters, I’m glad to see this research being pursued. Years ago, a physician mentioned to me that soldiers in Iraq were surviving injuries that would have killed them in previous conflicts. The problem is that the same protective gear which insulates soldiers against many injuries makes them vulnerable to abusive head trauma (same principle as ‘shaken baby syndrome’). For example, imagine having a high velocity bullet hit your helmet. You’re protected from the bullet but the impact shakes your head so violently, your brain is injured.

Why does hot water sometimes freeze faster than cold—a 2300 year old question

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The Mpemba effect is when hot water freezes more quickly than cold water and the question as to why was first posed, as far as we know, by Aristotle. 2300 years later we’re still looking for the answer and the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has decided to pose the question to two different audiences in the hope of finally getting a solution. Brian Emsley in his June 26, 2012 posting on the Guardian Science Blogs describes the RSC’s open contest for £1000,

The Royal Society of Chemistry has decided enough is enough. In an attempt to nail the matter once and for all, we’re asking the public to come up with a convincing explanation of a phenomenon that defeated Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes. To win the £1,000 prize, you will need to make a convincing case and employ some creative thinking.

The deadline for public entries is 30 July [2012] …

You can go here to the Hermes organization website to submit your solution.

For those with any lingering questions about the competition for the general public, the June 26, 2012 RSC news release provides more information including a list of prominent theorists who have also puzzled over the question,

  • Aristotle agonized over it fruitlessly in the fourth century BC
  • Roger Bacon in the 13th century used it to advocate the scientific method in his book Opus Majus
  • Another Bacon, Francis, wrote in his 1620 Novum Organum, that “slightly tepid water freezes more easily than that which is utterly cold” but could not explain why
  • Descartes was defeated by it in the 17th century AD
  • Even perplexed 20th and 21st century scientists and intellectuals have swarmed over it without result

Now the Royal Society of Chemistry is offering £1000 to the person or team producing the best and most creative explanation of the phenomenon, known today as The Mpemba Effect.

Competition judges will be looking for an outside-the-box, inventive submission. In addition, the format of the submission should be creative and eye-catching.

Any medium or technology can be employed to make the case, including articles, illustrations or even film.

Submissions can be based on, and reference, existing research. The winning submission will be scientifically sound, and arresting in presentation and delivery.

The public has four weeks to crack the case …

Then, according to the RSC news release,

… a group of the world’s brightest young science brains take on the challenge in London as one aspect of a special science communications meeting entitled Hermes 2012.

…

The sharpest international postgraduate science students will travel to England from around the globe to participate in the Hermes 2012 event.

The Royal Society of Chemistry is sponsoring this visit to the UK of the hand-picked young scientists, who will gather at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park.

The organisers of Hermes 2012, based at Imperial College, chose the opening weekend of the Olympic Games for the academic event to underline the global nature of the meeting, with its temporary, multi-national community of high-achievers.

A highlight of the Windsor event will be a team attempt to produce videos to explain various scientific phenomena, which will include The Mpemba Effect.

Good luck!

Hermes, by the way, was the Greek god associated with messages and communication, as well as, sports, literature, and athletics, (from the Wikipedia essay) [Note: I have removed footnotes and links],

Hermes was the herald, or messenger, of the gods to humans, sharing this role with Iris. A patron of boundaries and the travelers who cross them, he was the protector of shepherds and cowherds, thieves, orators and wit, literature and poets, athletics and sports, weights and measures, invention, and of commerce in general.

While the effect had been observed a number of times, it wasn’t considered a serious scientific question (from the RSC news release),

The problem has been around for millennia, with philosophers such as Aristotle and Descartes pondering over it.

“But this effect was reintroduced into the scientific world in 1968 by Erasto Mpemba, a young inquisitive student in Tanzania during a lab session.

“Erasto questioned a teacher on why ice cream froze more quickly when it was boiled, and was quickly told that he was wrong and had probably imagined it. It was only when the teacher performed the experiment himself that he noticed this unusual phenomenon.

“Since the discovery of the effect, scientists have been trying to find out why the phenomenon occurs but remain divided as to what the answer is. It seems that there are lots of possible answers but a conclusive explanation hasn’t been produced yet.

London (UK) Science Festival opens Oct. 19, 2011

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Being held from Oct. 19 – 26, 2011, the first London Science Festival will be featuring the Festival of the Spoken Nerd; Bridget, Astrium’s Mars rover prototype for the European ExoMars Project; Field of Jeans, London College of Fashion and Royal Society of Chemistry science-fashion installation; The Big Bang Machine: Engineering the LHC [Large Hadron Collider]; a special screening of the movie, Inception; and more.

You can get details about these events and others here in this roundup. The London Science Festival website lists each event with its date and booking information.