It is a great pleasure for me to express an invitation and welcome message to you for the 21st ESACT Conference in Dublin, Ireland, here in the pages of
BioProcess International,
one of the most prestigious journals of its kind, “covering the whole development process for the global biotechnology industry.”
Ireland is famous for her warmth of heart and poetic spirit, sometimes even brought into conjunction with Irish spirits —
uisce beatha,
“the water of life” — which together with Irish potato and soda breads can boast a long and harmonious relationship with “biotechnology.” So it is appropriate for Ireland to host ESACT’s coming of age, the 21st meeting some 32 years after the meeting’s conception in 1976 — after a gestation period of some three years!
In the early 1970s, large-scale animal cell culture was largely based on the foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) vaccine. In 1973, two scientists working in this field, Simon Barteling (CDI, Lelystad, The Netherlands) and Ray Spier (AVRI, Pirbright, U...
Vaccines have been around a long time — longer than any other biologic medical products. Since the 1700s, when a British doctor inoculated people against smallpox using
Variolae vaccinae
(cowpox virus), we’ve referred to such immunizing treatments as “vaccines.” Most children in developed countries grow up knowing there will be occasional “vaccinations,” usually injections, required to get into school and stay there (which may or may not seem like a great thing, depending on who you talk to). Similarly, people from developed nations traveling to underdeveloped ones expect to undergo certain vaccinations to prevent diseases that they would most likely not be exposed to at home. In the 21st century, vaccines are a routine part of our lives.
All the earliest vaccines were made using animal cell culture — some in petri dishes, some in diseased animals or humans — which produced large numbers of wild-type viruses or bacteria that could be weakened, killed, or sometimes used live as vaccines. Bacterial or tox...
In early April, I chatted with the chair of ESACT, Florian Wurm, a professor of biotechnology in the faculty of life sciences of école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
As chairman of ESACT, what are your duties? How is the chairperson selected, and how long does he or she serve? How long have you been chair?
The ESACT chair is elected from among the members of the executive committee, which are elected by the membership. The executive committee organizes board meetings twice a year. A good deal of our time goes into making plans for the next ESACT meeting, in collaboration with the planning committee made up of volunteers from among the members. ESACT meetings are held every other year and are the highlights of our organizational activities. ESACT membership is relatively small, but our conferences are large; we have between 800 and 900 people in attendance at a typical meeting. It is a huge task for volunteers to put together such a meeting as this. Ours is really the only meeting of i...
Stem cells are probably the most-discussed — and least understood — potential therapeutics biotechnology offers. Headlines in mainstream media tout their potential benefits and decry their ethical complications.
Time
magazine featured stem cells on its cover one week in February (
1
), and an ABC network drama depicted criminals selling stolen cord blood stem cells to the rich and vain as a high-end cosmetic treatment (
2
). It’s a safe bet that most nonscientists don’t know the difference between embryonic stem cells, so-called adult stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, and so forth. It’s another safe bet that most of those same people have an opinion anyway, pro or con, about the use of stem cells in research.
Thus, the politics of stem cells, particularly in the United States, have had more of an effect on their use than the related science or technology. President Obama’s recent reversal of the Bush-era ban on new embryonic stem cell lines caused simultaneous celebration and backlash as some ...
