entertainment guide 2010: June 2013

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

TGen and Ventana Medical Systems Inc. join forces to fight cancer

Public release date: 25-Jun-2013
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Contact: Steve Yozwiak
syozwiak@tgen.org
602-343-8704
The Translational Genomics Research Institute

2 of Arizona's premier biomedical institutions unite to develop critically needed diagnostic biomarkers for cancer

PHOENIX, Ariz. June 25, 2013 The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. (Ventana), a member of the Roche Group, today announced a collaborative research agreement to discover and develop diagnostic markers for treating cancer. The two Arizona-based institutions will leverage each other's expertise in discovery and diagnostic product development, bringing innovative cancer diagnostic tests to patients.

The first project under the umbrella research agreement will focus on diagnostic, prognostic and drug biomarkers for pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of death from cancer in the United States. This year, an estimated 45,000 people will be diagnosed and more than 38,000 patients will die from the disease. Worldwide, more than 213,000 are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year, and the numbers are growing. Fewer than 1 in 4 pancreatic cancer patients survive more than a year, and fewer than 6 percent survive more than five years the worst survival rate of any cancer.

This dismal picture of pancreatic cancer is mainly due to the lack of tools for early detection and the ineffectiveness of current therapeutics. This is why new diagnostic markers and more efficacious therapies are desperately needed.

"TGen is on the cutting edge of translational research, where investigators discover the genetic components of disease," says Jeffrey Trent, Ph.D., President and Research Director of TGen. "Our goal is to rapidly translate basic research findings into actionable targets. Partnering with Ventana we hope will accelerate our goal to deliver meaningful discoveries to cancer patients today."

"When a patient is faced with cancer, getting an accurate diagnosis quickly is the most important part of their treatment," says Ventana President and CEO Mara G. Aspinall. "As the global leader in tissue-based cancer diagnostics, our strength is moving research into the clinic in order to improve the lives of all patients afflicted with cancer. We are thrilled to be able to pursue this with a partner right in our Arizona backyard."

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About Ventana Medical Systems, Inc.

Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. ("VMSI") (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY), a member of the Roche Group, innovates and manufactures instruments and reagents that automate tissue processing and slide staining for cancer diagnostics. VENTANA solutions are used in clinical histology and drug development research laboratories worldwide. The company's intuitive, integrated staining, workflow management platforms, and digital pathology solutions optimize laboratory efficiencies to reduce errors, support diagnosis and inform treatment decisions for anatomic pathology professionals. Together with Roche, VMSI is driving Personalized Healthcare through accelerated drug discovery and the development of "companion diagnostics" to identify the patients most likely to respond favorably to specific therapies. Visit http://www.ventana.com to learn more.

VMSI Media Relations
Jacqueline Bucher
Senior Director, Corporate Communications
Phone: 520-877-7288
e-mail: jacquie.bucher@ventana.roche.com

About the Translational Genomic Research Institute

Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is a Phoenix, Arizona-based non-profit organization dedicated to conducting groundbreaking research with life changing results. TGen is focused on helping patients with neurological disorders, cancer, and diabetes, through cutting edge translational research (the process of rapidly moving research towards patient benefit). TGen physicians and scientists work to unravel the genetic components of both common and rare complex diseases in adults and children. Working with collaborators in the scientific and medical communities literally world-wide, TGen makes a substantial contribution to help our patients through efficiency and effectiveness of the translational process. For more information, visit: http://www.tgen.org.

TGen Press Contact:
Steve Yozwiak
TGen Senior Science Writer
602-343-8704
syozwiak@tgen.org

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

TGen and Ventana Medical Systems Inc. join forces to fight cancer

Public release date: 25-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail |

Share ]

Contact: Steve Yozwiak
syozwiak@tgen.org
602-343-8704
The Translational Genomics Research Institute

2 of Arizona's premier biomedical institutions unite to develop critically needed diagnostic biomarkers for cancer

###

About Ventana Medical Systems, Inc.

VMSI Media Relations
Jacqueline Bucher
Senior Director, Corporate Communications
Phone: 520-877-7288
e-mail: jacquie.bucher@ventana.roche.com

About the Translational Genomic Research Institute

TGen Press Contact:
Steve Yozwiak
TGen Senior Science Writer
602-343-8704
syozwiak@tgen.org

[ | E-mail |

Share ]

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/ttgr-tav062413.php

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Send him back: US urges nations to return Snowden

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The U.S. grasped for help Monday from both adversaries and uneasy allies in an effort to catch fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. The White House demanded that he be denied asylum, blasted China for letting him go and urged Russia to "do the right thing" and send him back to America to face espionage charges.

Snowden was believed to be in Russia, where he fled Sunday after weeks of hiding out in Hong Kong following his disclosure of the broad scope of two highly classified counterterror surveillance programs to two newspapers. The programs collect vast amounts of Americans' phone records and worldwide online data in the name of national security.

Snowden had flown from Hong Kong to Russia, and was expected to fly early Monday to Havana, from where he would continue on to Ecuador, where he has applied for asylum. But he didn't get on that plane and his exact whereabouts were unclear.

The founder of WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling organization that has embraced Snowden, said the American was only passing through Russia on his way to an unnamed destination to avoid the reach of U.S. authorities. Julian Assange said Snowden had applied for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland and possibly other countries.

Despite its diplomatic tough talk, the U.S. faces considerable difficulty in securing cooperation on Snowden from nations with whom it has chilly relations.

The White House said Hong Kong's refusal to detain Snowden had "unquestionably" hurt relations between the United States and China. While Hong Kong has a high degree of autonomy from the rest of China, experts said Beijing probably orchestrated Snowden's exit in an effort to remove an irritant in Sino-U.S. relations. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met earlier this month in California to smooth over rough patches in the countries' relationship, including allegations of hacking into each other's computer systems.

Secretary of State John Kerry urged Moscow to "do the right thing" amid high-level pressure on Russia to turn over Snowden.

"We're following all the appropriate legal channels and working with various other countries to make sure that the rule of law is observed," Obama told reporters when asked if he was confident that Russia would expel Snowden.

Obama's spokesman, Jay Carney, said the U.S. was expecting the Russians "to look at the options available to them to expel Mr. Snowden back to the United States to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged."

Carney was less measured about China.

"The Chinese have emphasized the importance of building mutual trust," he said. "And we think that they have dealt that effort a serious setback. ...This was a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant, and that decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship."

Snowden has acknowledged revealing details of top-secret surveillance programs that sweep up millions of phone and Internet records daily. He is a former CIA employee who later was hired as a contractor through Booz Allen to be a computer systems analyst. In that job, he gained access to documents ? many of which he has given to The Guardian and The Washington Post to expose what he contends are privacy violations by an authoritarian government.

Snowden also told the South China Morning Post that "the NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data," and is believed to have more than 200 additional sensitive documents.

Assange and attorneys for WikiLeaks assailed the U.S. as "bullying" foreign nations into refusing asylum to Snowden. WikiLeaks counsel Michael Ratner said Snowden is protected as a whistleblower by the same international treaties that the U.S. has in the past used to criticize policies in China and African nations.

The U.S. government's dual lines of diplomacy ? harsh with China, hopeful with the Russians ? came just days after Obama met separately with leaders of both countries in an effort to close gaps on some of the major disputes facing them. Additionally, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the U.S. has made demands to "a series of governments," including Ecuador, that Snowden be barred from any international travel other than to be returned to the U.S.

Ventrell said he did not know if that included Iceland. Icelandic officials have confirmed receiving an informal request for asylum conveyed by WikiLeaks, which has strong links to the tiny North Atlantic nation. But authorities there have insisted that Snowden must be on Icelandic soil before making a formal request.

Ecuador's president and foreign minister declared that national sovereignty and universal principles of human rights ? not U.S. prodding ? would govern any decision they might make on granting asylum to Snowden.

Ecuador has rejected some previous U.S. efforts at cooperation and has been helping Assange avoid prosecution by allowing him to stay at its embassy in London.

Formally, Snowden's application for Ecuadoran asylum remains only under consideration. But Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino made little effort to disguise his government's position. He told reporters in Hanoi that the choice Ecuador faced in hosting Snowden was "betraying the citizens of the world or betraying certain powerful elites in a specific country."

Patino said late Monday he did not know Snowden's exact whereabouts.

President Rafael Correa said on Twitter that "we will take the decision that we feel most suitable, with absolute sovereignty." Correa, who took office in 2007, is a frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and is an ally of leftist president Evo Morales of Bolivia. Correa also had aligned himself with Venezuela's late leader, Hugo Chavez, a chief U.S. antagonist in the region for years.

In April 2011 the Obama administration expelled the Ecuadorean ambassador to Washington after the U.S. envoy to Ecuador, Heather Hodges, was expelled for making corruption allegations about senior Ecuadorean police authorities in confidential documents disclosed by WikiLeaks.

American experts said the U.S. will have limited, if any, influence to persuade governments to turn over Snowden if he heads to Cuba or nations in South America that are seen as hostile to Washington.

"There's little chance Ecuador would give him back" if that country agrees to take him, said James F. Jeffrey, a former ambassador and career diplomat.

Steve Saltzburg, a former senior Justice Department prosecutor, said it's little surprise that China refused to hand over Snowden, and he predicted Russia won't either.

"We've been talking the talk about how both these countries abuse people who try to express their First Amendment rights, so I think that neither country is going to be very inclined to help us very much," said Saltzburg, now a law professor at George Washington University in Washington. "That would be true with Cuba if he ends up there."

The United States formally sought Snowden's extradition but was rebuffed by Hong Kong officials who said the U.S. request did not fully comply with their laws. The Justice Department rejected that claim, saying its request met all of the requirements of the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Hong Kong.

Snowden had been believed to have been in a transit area in Moscow's airport where he would not be considered as entering Russian territory. Assange declined to discuss where Snowden was but said he was safe. The U.S. has revoked his passport.

___

Associated Press writers Julie Pace, Eileen Sullivan, Kimberly Dozier and Robert Burns in Washington, Lynn Berry, Vladimir Isachenkov and Max Seddon in Moscow, Kevin Chan in Hong Kong and Sylvia Hui in London contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/send-him-back-us-urges-nations-return-snowden-221545517.html

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The future of solar financing ? Tech News and Analysis - GigaOM

This article originally appeared on GigaOM Pro, GigaOM?s premium subscription research service.

Over the past few years it?s become obvious to all involved in selling both residential and commercial rooftop solar systems that customers will balk at the hefty upfront costs of purchasing, installing, and maintaining a solar panel system. Into the fray have stepped companies offering financing solutions, ranging from power purchase agreements at fixed rate electricity prices to 20-year leases.

The question I?ve mulled over in my head has been whether the solar installation game is likely to become vertically integrated with installation and financing under one roof. SolarCity has gone this route, handling both financing and installation, and its success will be tightly linked to its cost of capital. Effectively, how cheap can it get money in order to help its customers finance their systems?

solar panel In a previous column examining First Solar?s small re-entry into manufacturing panels for the residential market in Japan, I?ve even wondered whether there?s room for a complete vertical integrator that could do panel manufacturing, installation, and financing.

On the other end of this equation is Clean Power Finance, which is expressly built around connecting financiers like Google and Morgan Stanley with regional solar installers so that these installers can offer financing options for customers. Investors now have a conduit for funneling money into rooftop solar investments.

?We?re running an online marketplace,? said Clean Power Finance CEO Nat Kreamer. ?We?ve got people on one side of the marketplace who are out there everyday using that software to sell to consumers, to design and build systems. On the other side you have companies offering PPA, leases, loan products to the people out there selling. We?re running a business to business marketplace.?

Loving solar

Kreamer and I had a lengthy conversation recently about challenges and opportunities in renewable energy financing. He clearly believes that the market is getting large enough to have companies offering specific services at key points in the value chain.

He noted that investors are getting ?high single digits to low single teens? rates of return on their solar investments. But perhaps more importantly, he?s focused on building a platform that will allow his investors to specify the degree of consumer credit risk they will take, the types of solar systems or panels they?ll finance, and ultimately the rate of return.

The introduction of risk-based pricing into solar financing could be an additional innovation driving Wall Street further into funneling money into renewable energy.

When I pressed Kreamer on whether he thought we might see solar contracts packaged as securities, he said, ?There are a lot of really smart people on Wall Street working on turning portfolios of solar systems into asset backed securities. You can break the investment into two parts. I have a tax return, meaning I get the investment tax credit and the deprecation. And then I?ve got this flow of consumer cash flow.?

I concur that there are some attractive aspects of solar-backed securities, notably that it?s actually easier not to pay your mortgage than not to pay for electricity. Also, if we?ve learned anything from the mortgage crisis, it?s that underwriters will be under pressure to glean accurate credit pictures of borrowers.

Solar Costs Dropped 30% Over Last Decade And with sophisticated risk-based pricing, returns can be correlated with credit risk. Finally, because solar systems are so new in terms of financing products, investors will get a premium for being the first to purchase these products.

So why couldn?t one large company still handle installations as well as financing? It could and SolarCity is doing just that. In fact, many of the largest automakers have their own captive financing groups in house to handle leases for car customers.

But at the same time if a company like Clean Power Finance can build strong relationships with investors and become known as the most efficient and sophisticated method for providing safe returns, correlated to risk, there?s a strong argument that the company will provide additional and necessary value in the market.

Clean Power Finance is taking investors at an initial commitment of $50 million with a willingness to do around $250 million, and running just under a billion in financing through its platform each year. As solar installation rates grow, the company is gunning to capture an increasingly large part of the financing capital flowing into solar. And to solidify itself as the conduit of choice for investors moving capital into rooftop solar investments.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/06/24/the-future-of-solar-financing/

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You Can Finally Buy the Magical Spray That Waterproofs Everything

We first heard about Rust-Oleum's liquid-repelling product, NeverWet almost two years ago. It looked absolutely magical, and now you can finally buy it.