Frankfurt gears up for Gangnam Style at MTV awards

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The MTV Europe Music Awards will rock Frankfurt’s Festhalle concert venue on Sunday, with Barbadian R&B singer Rihanna leading the nominations and all eyes on Korean dance sensation Psy.

Psy‘s hit “Gangnam Style“, which is up for the Best Video award, has been viewed more than 670 million times and received a record-breaking 4.9 million “likes” on Facebook since being released in mid-July.

The satirical video featuring Psy‘s horse riding-inspired dance has sparked a wave of copycat versions from Eton schoolboys to Californian lifeguards and has even caught the attention of United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon.

Psy will become the first South Korean artist to perform at the annual awards, one of the pop industry’s biggest nights outside the United States, when he takes the stage on Sunday.

German model and presenter Heidi Klum, who this year filed for divorce from singer husband Seal, will host the awards and said she had been practicing her Gangnam moves in case she gets called on to dance.

“My kids are obsessed with the song, even though it’s Korean and they have no idea what he’s talking about,” she told reporters ahead of the event.

Klum, who comes from the town of Bergisch Gladbach just two hours away from the 2012 host city, is also looking forward to some home comforts.

“I’ll be eating a lot of German food,” she said, adding jokingly that she would probably eat too much schnitzel and “gain a few pounds.”

Despite being billed as the Europe Music Awards, the vast majority of nominees are traditionally North American, and 2012 is no exception.

Alongside Psy, acts due to take the stage at the show include country singer Taylor Swift, 14-time Grammy winner Alicia Keys, the Killers and Carly Rae Jepsen.

“OLD WAYS” STILL COUNT

In a world where careers are so often launched by social media websites like YouTube, some young artists said there was still a role for more established platforms such as MTV and mainstream television.

American indie-pop band fun., who are up for three awards, hit the big time after the song “We Are Young” was featured in an advert for Chevrolet during the U.S. Superbowl.

“I don’t think that you can ever replace the impact that music videos have,” the band’s guitarist Jack Antonoff told Reuters when asked about the importance of MTV against social media channels.

“I think the more that social media takes over, the more importance you put upon the old ways.”

MTV said this week that it had become the first company to reach one million followers on Instagram, the fast-growing photo-sharing application developer.

Heading the nominations is party-loving Rihanna, with nods in six categories, including Best Song and Best Video for “We Found Love”.

Following close behind with five nominations is country star Swift, and other top nominees include Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, with four each, while Lady Gaga, who cleaned up last year with four prizes, is in the running for three awards.

Rihanna is favorite for Best Song and Best Female, according to odds offered by British bookmakers William Hill, while Gangnam Style is tipped to win Best Video.

The EMA awards were last held in Frankfurt in 2001. Last year’s awards in Belfast attracted 23 million viewers on all platforms and 158 million votes worldwide.

Following are the main nominations in 2012:

BEST SONG: Carly Rae Jepsen/Call Me Maybe; Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris/We Found Love; Gotye/Somebody That I Used To Know; Pitbull feat. Chris Brown/International Love; fun. feat. Janelle Monáe/We Are Young

BEST NEW: Rita Ora; fun.; One Direction; Lana Del Rey; Carly Rae Jepsen

BEST FEMALE: Rihanna; Katy Perry; P!nk; Taylor Swift; Nicki Minaj

BEST MALE: Justin Bieber; Kanye West; Flo Rida; Pitbull; Jay-Z

BEST POP: Justin Bieber; No Doubt; Katy Perry; Taylor Swift; Rihanna

BEST LIVE: Taylor Swift; Lady Gaga; Jay-Z & Kanye West; Green Day; Muse

BEST HIP HOP: Jay-Z & Kanye West; Nas; Rick Ross; Drake; Nicki Minaj

BEST ROCK: Linkin Park; Green Day; Muse; The Killers; Coldplay

BEST ELECTRONIC: David Guetta; Swedish House Mafia; Avicii; Skrillex; Calvin Harris

BEST ALTERNATIVE: Jack White; The Black Keys; Arctic Monkeys; Florence + The Machine; Lana Del Rey

BEST VIDEO: M.I.A./Bad Girls; Lady Gaga/Marry The Night; Katy Perry/Wide Awake; Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris/We Found Love; PSY/Gangnam Style.

(Reporting by Victoria Bryan and Maria Sheahan; editing by Mike Collett-White)

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Las guías hospitalarias no reducen las reinternaciones: estudio

NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) – Las guías de procedimientos

para garantizarles a los pacientes hospitalarios el acceso a

servicios de calidad también apuntan a reducir la necesidad de

reinternaciones, pero un nuevo estudio sugiere que esa relación

casi no existiría.

“La idea era que al aumentar la calidad de la atención

mejorarían los resultados”, indicó la autora principal del

estudio, la doctora Michaela S. Stefan, del Centro Médico

Baystate, Massachussetts.

Para controlar los costos, los hospitales y el Gobierno

federal intentaron reducir la cantidad de reinternaciones dentro

de los 30 días posteriores al alta médica.

Desde octubre, la tasa de reinternación es uno de los

factores que evalúan los Centros para los Servicios de Medicare

y Medicaid (CMS, por su sigla en inglés) para autorizar los

reintegros.

El equipo de Stefan halló que, en realidad, uno de cada

cuatro pacientes es reinternado a los 30 días del alta y se

estima que esas reinternaciones espontáneas le costaron 17.600

millones de dólares a Medicare en el 2004 (CMS publica la

información en http://1.usa.gov/Z7TeXy).

Uno de los enfoques para reducir las reinternaciones es la

elaboración de guías de calidad de la atención de cada

enfermedad, como los infartos o la neumonía.

Un estudio reciente había sugerido la existencia de muchos

factores que los hospitales no pueden controlar y hacen que un

paciente necesite volver al hospital, como la incapacidad de un

paciente de adherir a un tratamiento en el hogar o concurrir a

las consultas de control (ver noticia de Reuters Health del 19

de octubre del 2012).

Ahora, el equipo de Stefan analizó una base de datos del

2007 de los pacientes de Medicare, el seguro de salud

estadounidense para los adultos mayores, para conocer los

resultados con los tratamientos de infartos, insuficiencia

cardíaca o neumonía, y con las cirugías estomacales, cardíacas y

ortopédicas en miles de hospitales del país.

Por ejemplo: 2.773 hospitales atendieron a 322.668 personas

con insuficiencia cardíaca durante el período estudiado y 2.940

hospitales trataron 328.830 casos de neumonía.

Cada hospital recibió un puntaje de entre 0 y 100 por

ciento, según la cantidad de pacientes atendidos con los

tratamientos recomendados para cada caso. Eso, para los

pacientes con infarto, incluiría una aspirina al llegar al

hospital o, si corresponde, orientación para dejar de fumar

antes del alta, mientras que en los pacientes con neumonía

significaría la indicación de los antibióticos adecuados y la

verificación de la vacunación contra la influenza, entre otros

puntos.

El 96 por ciento de los 117.514 pacientes con infarto

recibió algunos de los tratamientos recomendados. Sólo el 88 por

ciento recibió todos los tratamientos adecuados. Y un 80 por

ciento de los pacientes operados del estómago accedió a los

tratamientos recomendados, aunque apenas el 46 por ciento

recibió todos esos tratamientos.

Luego, el equipo observó que los hospitales con los puntajes

más altos por cumplir las guías no tenían una cantidad

“significativamente” menor de reinternaciones que los centros

con los puntajes más bajos.

“Aun si la relación era estadísticamente significativa, las

diferencias en las tasas de reinternación eran pequeñas”, afirma

el equipo en Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Para los autores, algunas explicaciones posibles de esa

ausencia de asociación serían que las guías “influyen poco en el

riesgo de reinternación” o son demasiado amplias.

Aun así, Stefan opinó que es información que los pacientes

deben recibir. “Es importante conocer que el sitio Hospital

Compare existe. Desafortunadamente, la población lo usa poco.”

FUENTE: Journal of General Internal Medicine, online 16 de

octubre del 2012.

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Citigroup’s Pandit receives $15m

9 November 2012 Last updated at 18:51 ET

Former Citigroup chief executive Vikram Pandit, who stood down last month, will get more than $ 15m (£9.4m) as part of a settlement with the banking giant.

John Havens, the chief operating officer who resigned at the same time, will receive a similar amount.

The payments were disclosed in filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission late on Friday.

At the time of the resignations there were reports of disagreements with investors over Citi’s strategy.

Mr Pandit’s payments include $ 6.65m for incentive pay for work in 2012 and deferred stock and cash incentive awards valued at $ 8.83m.

Mr Havens’ payments include $ 6.79m for 2012 and $ 8.73m worth of deferred stock and cash incentive awards for work in 2011 and 2008.

“Vikram and John made significant contributions to Citi during their five years of service,” Citigroup chairman Michael O’Neill said in statement included in the filing.

Mr Pandit resigned on 15 October, a day after Citi reported an 88% drop in quarterly profits to $ 468m.

In a conference call at the time, Citi chairman Michael O’Neill said Mr Pandit’s departure was not due to any “strategic, regulatory or operating issue”.

He added: “Vikram offered his resignation and the board accepted it.”

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Exclusive: Google Ventures beefs up fund size to $300 million a year

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google will increase the cash it allocates to its venture-capital arm to up to $ 300 million a year from $ 200 million, catapulting Google Ventures into the top echelon of corporate venture-capital funds.

Access to that sizeable checkbook means Google Ventures will be able to invest in more later-stage financing rounds, which tend to be in the tens of millions of dollars or more per investor.

It puts the firm on the same footing as more established corporate venture funds such as Intel’s Intel Capital, which typically invests $ 300-$ 500 million a year.

“It puts a lot more wood behind the arrow if we need it,” said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures.

Part of the rationale behind the increase is that Google Ventures is a relatively young firm, founded in 2009. Some of the companies it backed two or three years ago are now at later stages, potentially requiring larger cash infusions to grow further.

Google Ventures has taken an eclectic approach, investing in a broad spectrum of companies ranging from medicine to clean power to coupon companies.

Every year, it typically funds 40-50 “seed-stage” deals where it invests $ 250,000 or less in a company, and perhaps around 15 deals where it invests up to $ 10 million, Maris said. It aims to complete one or two deals annually in the $ 20-$ 50 million range, Maris said.

LACKING SUPERSTARS

Some of its investments include Nest, a smart-thermostat company; Foundation Medicine, which applies genomic analysis to cancer care; Relay Rides, a carsharing service; and smart-grid company Silver Spring Networks. Last year, its portfolio company HomeAway raised $ 216 million in an initial public offering.

Still, Google Ventures lacks superstar companies such as microblogging service Twitter or online bulletin-board company Pinterest. The firm’s recent hiring of high-profile entrepreneur Kevin Rose as a partner could help attract higher-profile deals.

Soon it could have even more cash to play around with. “Larry has repeatedly asked me: ‘What do you think you could do with a billion a year?’” said Maris, referring to Google chief executive Larry Page.

(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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UK’s NICE rejects Novartis asthma drug in change of tack

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain‘s health cost-effectiveness watchdog NICE plans to recommend against the use of Novartis‘s severe asthma drug Xolair, or omalizumab, after earlier endorsing it for adults only.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which decides if medicines should be given on the state health service, said on Friday it had changed its mind in the light of evolving clinical evidence.

“After considering new evidence that has become available since the original guidance was published – particularly new mortality data – the NICE draft guidance does not recommend omalizumab for either adults or children,” NICE said.

New dosing recommendations for the drug had also changed its cost-effectiveness, the agency added.

The revised recommendation against using the drug is still at the review stage and NICE said it was now up to Novartis and other interested parties to respond to its concerns.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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AMR avoids investigation into $2.26 billion debt deals

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hedge fund Marathon Asset Management has withdrawn a request for an independent investigator to examine the books of American Airlines, a unit of bankrupt AMR Corp, lawyers for the companies said at a hearing on Thursday.

The move came after AMR agreed to preserve potential clawback claims relating to debt deals, struck between Marathon and AMR, that left American Airlines with $ 2.26 billion of debt.

AMR entered bankruptcy last November, and is considering its options for emerging either as a standalone firm or to merge with smaller competitor US Airways Group, which is making an aggressive takeover push.

Marathon, which has said it holds “well over” $ 100 million of AMR debt, last month sought an examiner to probe intercompany transactions consummated in the weeks before AMR’s Chapter 11 filing. The deals transferred about $ 2.26 billion of debt from AMR’s American Eagle unit to American Airlines.

Marathon said in court papers it was concerned that potential legal claims to claw the money back would be barred under the language of a separate settlement, under which AMR refinanced about 200 of its aircraft.

AMR dismissed that argument in court filings as an “obvious litigation tactic.” But on Thursday, it agreed to expressly preserve such claims in exchange for Marathon dropping its request for an examiner, AMR attorney Richard Hahn said at the hearing in federal bankruptcy court in White Plains, N.Y..

The resolution also allows AMR to move forward with the underlying aircraft refinancing deal, which it says will save about $ 670 million on planes manufactured by Embraer.

Marathon has been taking a more vocal role in AMR’s bankruptcy, adding another layer of complexity to the already multi-faceted case.

The examiner request was Marathon’s second attempt to flex its muscles as a significant creditor, coming days after it sent a letter to AMR Chief Executive Tom Horton demanding more transparency about the airline’s restructuring efforts.

It remains unclear whether Marathon supports a standalone restructuring or a US Airways merger, or whether Marathon would be in a position to finance an independent exit from bankruptcy for AMR. But as a large debtholder, the hedge fund could be in a position to influence either scenario by objecting to plans it does not support.

US Airways would like to acquire AMR out of bankruptcy, while a group of debtholders including JPMorgan Chase & Co has expressed interest in financing a standalone exit.

AMR received court permission at Thursday’s hearing to extend for 30 days, through January 28, its unilateral control of its bankruptcy exit plan. That means US Airways cannot propose its own takeover plan until that date, and that any merger plan before that date would have to be a cooperative effort with AMR.

Labor issues will also affect AMR’s ability to emerge from bankruptcy independently.

High labor costs were a driving force in the company’s bankruptcy filing, and while the airline has reached new collective bargaining deals with its flight attendants’ and ground workers’ unions, it remains at odds with its pilots.

That could spook investors assessing the company’s stability going forward, and AMR’s creditors’ committee has said labor peace with pilots is a top priority.

While AMR and its pilots continue to negotiate, the pilots have said they support a merger with US Airways. They have also said they already have a tentative labor deal in place with US Airways.

The case is In re AMR Corp et al, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-15463.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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Myanmar says Obama to visit later this month

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — President Barack Obama will make a groundbreaking visit later this month to Myanmar, an official said Thursday, following through with his policy of rapprochement to encourage democracy in the Southeast Asian nation.

The Myanmar official speaking from the capital, Naypyitaw, said Thursday that security for a visit on Nov. 18 or 19 had been prepared, but the schedule was not final. He asked not to be named because he was not authorized to give information to the media.

The official said Obama would meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as well as government officials including reformist President Thein Sein.

It would be the first-ever visit to Myanmar by an American president. U.S. officials have not yet announced any plans for a visit, which would come less than two weeks after Obama’s election to a second term.

Obama’s administration has sought to encourage the recent democratic progress under Thein Sein by easing sanctions applied against Myanmar’s previous military regime.

Officials in nearby Thailand and Cambodia have already informally announced plans for visits by Obama that same week. Cambodia is hosting a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Thailand is a longtime close U.S. ally.

The visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, would be the culmination of a dramatic turnaround in relations with Washington as the country has shifted from five decades of ruinous military rule and shaken off the pariah status it had earned through its bloody suppression of democracy.

Obama’s ending of the long-standing U.S. isolation of Myanmar’s generals has played a part in coaxing them into political reforms that have unfolded with surprising speed in the past year. The U.S. has appointed a full ambassador and suspended sanctions to reward Myanmar for political prisoner releases and the election of Nobel laureate Suu Kyi to parliament.

From Myanmar’s point of view, the lifting of sanctions is essential for boosting a lagging economy that was hurt not only by sanctions that curbed exports and foreign investment, but also by what had been a protectionist, centralized approach. Thein Sein’s government has initiated major economic reforms in addition to political ones.

A procession of senior diplomats and world leaders have traveled to Myanmar, stopping both in the remote, opulent capital city, which was built by the former ruling junta, and at Suu Kyi’s dilapidated lakeside villa in the main city of Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest. New Zealand announced Thursday that Prime Minister John Key would visit Myanmar after attending the regional meetings in Cambodia.

The most senior U.S. official to visit was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who last December became the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to Myanmar in 56 years.

The Obama administration regards the political changes in Myanmar as a marquee achievement in its foreign policy, and one that could dilute the influence of China in a country that has a strategic location between South and Southeast Asia, regions of growing economic importance.

But exiled Myanmar activists and human rights groups are likely to criticize an Obama visit as premature, rewarding Thein Sein before his political and economic reforms have truly taken root. The military — still dominant and implicated in rights abuses — has failed to prevent vicious outbreaks of communal violence in the west of the country that have left scores dead.

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Election night TV audience down from 2008: Nielsen data

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Tuesday’s presidential election may have been too close to call for weeks, but it didn’t pull in as many TV viewers as four years ago.

More than 66.8 million Americans watched coverage of the 2012 elections during prime time on Tuesday, according to final Nielsen data on Wednesday. That’s down from the 71.5 million who tuned in to see the United States elect Barack Obama as its first African-American president in November 2008.

Nielsen said 13 cable and broadcast television networks aired live coverage of the election results, which saw Obama defeat Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Americans aged 55 and older made up the biggest audience, according to the ratings data.

The viewers for election night were also slightly down on the 67.2 million people who watched October’s first presidential debate between Romney and Obama.

But activity on social media soared to a record level. More than 31 million, election-related tweets were sent on Tuesday night – including a couple from Obama proclaiming his victory – making the night “the most Tweeted about event in U.S. political history,” according to Twitter.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Paul Simao)

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Death of the cassette tape much exaggerated

LONDON (Reuters) – The widening gap between the amount of data the world produces and our capacity to store it is giving a new lease of life to the humble cassette tape.

Although consumers have abandoned the audio cassette in favor of the ubiquitous iPod, organizations with large amounts of data, from patient records to capacity-hungry video archives, have continued to use tape as a cheap and secure storage medium.

Researchers at IBM are trying to keep this 60-year old technology relevant for at least the next decade and they are getting help from rising energy costs, which are forcing companies to look for cheaper alternatives to stacks of power-hungry hard drives.

Evangelos Eleftheriou and his colleagues at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, have developed a cassette just 10 cm by 10cm by 2cm that can hold about 35 terabytes of data, the equivalent of a library with 400 kilometers of bookshelves.

“It is really the greenest storage technology,” Eleftheriou told Reuters. “Tape at rest, consumes literally zero power.”

Unlike hard drive storage devices, which have to be on continuously, tape systems only consume power when data is being read or recorded, giving them a carbon footprint a fraction that of their disc-based counterparts.

Latency is the biggest disadvantage. Tapes have to be retrieved, usually by a robotic selector, and then loaded into a reading device.

But for much of the world’s archived data, access time is not critical. From legal archives and company records kept to comply with legislation like the Sarbanes Oxley Act in the United States, to data on traffic flow and weather patterns, keeping secure copies is more important than instant access.

“If you have big data then you have really big backups,” said Eleftheriou.

This is borne out by an estimate from consultancy Coughlin Associates that about 400 exabytes, equal to 20 million times the content of U.S. Library of Congress, is currently stored on tape.

The new IBM cassette, originally developed with Fuji Film, packs about 29.5 billion bits on a square inch of tape using a coating made from the chemical compound barium ferrite, which maximizes so-called linear density – the amount of data that can be squeezed onto a length of the tape.

The other limitation is the number of tracks that can be laid down and the researchers have developed novel nanopositioning technologies that can position the read and write heads with an accuracy of 10 to 15 billionths of a meter.

SERIOUSLY BIG DATA

Eleftheriou and his team believe they can increase the storage capacity to 100 billion bits per square inch and they hope this will make tape storage a contender for one of the world’s biggest data collection projects – the huge radio telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

In just over 10 years the SKA will start scanning the skies from two remote sites in South Africa and Australia, and it will generate 10 times the data traffic of the global internet.

“There’s going to be a lot of data pouring out of what is essentially a giant computer with a few bits of metal (the dishes and the antennae) on the ends,” said Andy Faulkner, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and one of the project engineers on the SKA.

Faulkner said there has been quite a shift towards using hard drives in astronomy in recent years because their capacity has grown so far and fast, but the SKA will be a different kettle of fish, not least because of the vast amount of data it will generate and the restrictions on power usage from its remote location.

“In truth, nobody knows just yet what we will be using given the 10-year time frame but tape storage is very interesting because you don’t necessarily need real time access to everything.”

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

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Organ on a chip? Scientists test drugs on tiny, artificial lung

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have begun testing drugs using a microchip lined with living cells that replicates many of the features of a human lung, a technology that may one day help improve drug testing and reduce researchers’ dependence on animal studies.

In 2010, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developed the so-called lung-on-a-chip technology that mimics the function of air sacs called alveoli, which transfer oxygen through a thin membrane from the lung to the blood.

For drug companies, the technology offers a way to better predict how drugs will work in people, ultimately reducing the cost of drug development by identifying problems before drugs are tested in clinical trials.

“Major pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of time and a huge amount of money on cell cultures and animal testing to develop new drugs, but these methods often fail to predict the effects of these agents when they reach humans,” Dr. Donald Ingber, whose study was published on Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, said in a statement.

Now the Wyss team is putting its artificial lung to the test, using the device to recreate pulmonary edema, a condition that causes fluid to leak into the air sacs of the lungs, and then treating it with an experimental drug from GlaxoSmithKline.

The device, which is about the size of a memory stick, is made of a flexible polymer that contains hollow channels.

These channels are divided by a thin, permeable membrane lined on one side with human lung cells and on the other with tiny blood vessel or capillary cells that are bathed in fluid to simulate blood flow. A vacuum is applied to recreate the way human tissue stretches during breathing.

For the study, the team treated the device with interleukin-2 or IL-2, a cancer drug that can cause pulmonary edema, a deadly condition in which the lungs fill with fluid and blood forms clots.

When injected into the blood channel of the device, the drug caused fluid to start leaking across the membrane, reducing the amount of volume of air in the other channel. Blood plasma crossed into the air channels and started to clot.

Dr. Geraldine Hamilton, co-author on the paper and the senior lead for the organs on chips program at Wyss, said the study is “providing us with a very exciting proof of concept for our ability to use organs on chips to create human disease models.”

When the team turned on the vacuum to simulate breathing, fluid leakage increased, suggesting that breathing may make the condition worse.

“We learned more about the mechanisms by which this happens. Than really wouldn’t have been possible through an animal model,” Hamilton said.

The team next used their model to test a new class of drug being developed by GlaxoSmithKline called a TRPV4 channel blocker. They found that treating the tissues in the device with the Glaxo drug before exposing it to IL-2 prevented blood vessel leakage in the device.

To confirm this finding, Kevin Thorneloe, a scientist at GlaxoSmithKline, did a parallel study in which he tested the drug in the lungs of rodents and dogs with pulmonary edema caused by heart failure and found the drug improved lung function and reduced leakage, consistent with the chip finding.

“These findings suggest that TRPV4 blockers could be used to limit pulmonary edema in patients with heart or lung disease, and were an important step toward validating the lung on a chip model,” said Thorneloe, whose companion study was published in the same journal.

“This technology is still in its early stages of development,” he said, noting that several additional studies will be needed to further validate the chip device.

Although initially, such devices will be used to support early research seeking to get a better understanding of disease at the molecular level, Thorneloe said over time, they could be used to quickly study the impact of several drugs on lung function.

In July, Wyss entered a $ 37 million agreement with the U.S. defense department to help develop 10 engineered organs, all linked into one system.

The idea is to replicate a human body on a chip, which could be used to rapidly assess responses to new drugs and potential chemical threats.

Donna Dambach, a pre-clinical safety scientist at Roche’s Genentech unit, said she thinks drug companies will be quick to adopt these technologies for their own internal decision-making.

But Dambach said it will likely take much longer for drug companies to replace animal models used for regulatory approval with these engineered organs.

“I think everyone would love that, but animals are complex, like human beings, and we really have to make certain that we’re at least predicting some level of that complexity in these systems.”

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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