Sixty-six new energy research projects were announced on Wednesday. Here are some interesting ones.

(Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday unveiled a game plan for achieving a global “AIDS-free generation,” committing the United States to rapidly scaling up medical interventions that are beating back what once was seen as an unconquerable disease.

Clinton, announcing the next stage of the decade-long U.S. fight against AIDS around the world, said advances in drug treatment and prevention strategies had brought the end of the epidemic within reach.

“HIV may well be with us into the future but the diseases that it causes need not be,” Clinton declared, saying it was possible to foresee a time when the number of people receiving treatment worldwide outpaces the number of new infections.

“That will be the tipping point. We will then get ahead of the epidemic, and an AIDS-free generation will be in sight,” she said.

The U.S. PEPFAR program, launched by former President George W. Bush in 2003, has been a catalyst for advancing HIV treatment, particularly in Africa. It now supports some 5.1 million people worldwide who are receiving anti-retroviral drugs.

The U.N. AIDS program said this month that ending the pandemic was now “entirely feasible” as it released an annual report showing that both deaths from AIDS and new infections with the HIV virus that causes it were falling.

Worldwide some 34 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2011, the UNAIDS report said. Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010.

The number of people newly infected with HIV, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is also falling. At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001.

Despite the good news, not everyone is optimistic that the end of the epidemic is around the corner.

The ONE foundation, a charity founded by Irish rock star Bono, said this week that budget cuts in major donor countries were slowing efforts to reduce new infections and that a goal set last year by global leaders of turning the corner on AIDS by 2015 was now unlikely to be reached until 2022.

NO CHILD BORN WITH AIDS VIRUS

The new PEPFAR blueprint aims to accelerate the fight by scaling up both drug treatment and new strategies for combating the spread of AIDS including voluntary male circumcision, microbicide gels and interventions to stop pregnant women from passing the virus on to their unborn children.

“We can reach a point where virtually no children are born with the virus, and as these children become teenagers and adults they are at far lower risk of acquiring HIV than they are today,” Clinton said.

Clinton has lobbied hard to save U.S. overseas development spending in an era of increasingly tight budgets, and has stressed that Washington will not step back from the AIDS fight despite potential cuts to other programs.

The Obama administration has asked Congress for $6.4 billion for PEPFAR and other AIDS programs in 2013, down from $7.2 billion in 2012. Officials say economies of scale and savings from the purchase of generic drugs are making programs more efficient.

The U.S. government spent roughly $46 billion on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria programs from 2003-2010.

U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Eric Goosby said the new PEPFAR plan could likely lead to increased spending on anti-retroviral drugs as more people start the treatment earlier.

But he emphasized that the United States would not be paying for this alone, and said that U.S. efforts now would be to rally support from other donors as well as the recipient countries themselves.

“This administration has put a huge amount of political capital on this issue from day one. We remain committed. And we realize that we’re the major motor on the planet,” he said in an interview.

The new PEPFAR plan includes a greater emphasis on marginalized populations most at risk for HIV, including injecting drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men, as well as turning over more responsibility for management and oversight to recipient countries.

Reaction to the new PEPFAR plan was broadly positive, although some advocates said the onus was now on Congress to fully fund the campaign.

“What we’ve needed for a while is an action plan that had caught up to the science of today. The blueprint takes us a step toward that,” said Chris Collins, director of public policy at the Foundation for AIDS Research.

(Reporting By Andrew Quinn; Editing by Xavier Briand)

(Reuters) – Scientists from Britain, Germany and the United States have unlocked key components of the genetic code for wheat, helping to create varieties that are more productive and better able to cope with disease, drought and other crop stresses.

The identification of around 96,000 wheat genes, and insights into the links between them, comes just two years after UK researchers published the raw data of the wheat genome.

“Since 1980, the rate of increase in wheat yields has declined,” said one of the project leaders, Keith Edwards of the University of Bristol.

“Analysis of the wheat genome sequence data provides a new and very powerful foundation for breeding future generations of wheat more quickly and more precisely, to help address this problem,” he added.

The research was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“Bread wheat is a complex hybrid, composed of the complete genomes of three closely related grasses. This makes it very complex and large; in total it is almost five times bigger than the human genome,” said another of the project’s leaders, Klaus Mayer of Helmholtz-Zentrum Munchen.

“Because of this, we took a novel approach to analyzing the data and we have been successful in turning it into an accessible and useful resource that will accelerate breeding and the discovery of varieties with improved performance – for example better disease resistance and stress tolerance.”

Jan Dvorak of the University of California, Davis led the U.S. contribution to the project.

The study was welcomed by other scientists.

“As we struggle to confront the increasing challenges of population increase, land degradation and climate change that are contributing to food insecurity, it will be vital to understand the underlying genetics of staple crops like wheat,” said Denis Murphy of the University of Glamorgan.

“The newly published wheat genome will be a vital resource for researchers and crop breeders across the world in their efforts to maintain global food supplies.”

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt; Editing by Alison Birrane)

(Reuters) – IT services firm Infosys Ltd, the first Indian company to list on Nasdaq, will shift its American Depositary Shares to the NYSE Euronext in a move it said is intended to increase access to the stock for European investors.

Infosys, India’s second-largest software services provider, is also seeking listing of its ADS on the Paris and London boards of NYSE Euronext. The moves will not affect its float or capital structure, the company said on Friday.

The company, which has been listed on the Nasdaq OMX Group Inc board since 1999, is the third most widely held Indian stock. It will trade under the “INFY” symbol on NYSE Euronext starting December 12.

Infosys Chief Executive S.D. Shibulal said the shift to the NYSE Euronext and its London and Paris bourse will also “broaden the trading window available” for foreign investors.

Infosys and larger rival Tata Consultancy Services Ltd want to boost their business in Europe, as more European companies look to outsource IT services to cut costs.

Europe accounted for nearly 22 percent of Infosys sales in the quarter ended in September, while North America brought in 64 percent of its revenue.

(Reporting By Harichandan Arakali; Editing by Tony Munroe and Hans-Juergen Peters)

(Reuters) – A bill to create a permanent visa program for foreigners with advanced science and technical degrees cleared the House of Representatives on Friday, the latest salvo in the broader fight over U.S. immigration reform.

The Republican-backed measure would reserve 55,000 permanent residence visas for foreign graduates of U.S. universities with master’s and doctoral degrees in the “STEM” disciplines of science, technology,engineering and math.

Many Democrats including President Barack Obama oppose the bill because it would eliminate an existing program, often called the green card lottery, which provides visas to people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The bill passed 245-139 in the Republican-controlled House, largely along party lines. But Democrats control the Senate, and a similar bill there has little chance of passing this year.

Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who introduced the “STEM Jobs Act,” said the high-tech visa program would help the United States retain U.S.-trained workers to spur innovation and job creation.

“In a global economy, we cannot afford to educate these foreign graduates in the U.S. and then send them back home to work for our competitors,” Smith said.

Democrats argued that the bill unfairly pits lower-skilled immigrants against those with more education and qualifications in the battle for visas.

“Talk about picking winners and losers,” said Representative Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who chairs the Immigration Task Force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“There was no special line for PhD’s and master’s degree holders at Ellis Island. There was no asterisk on the Statue of Liberty that said your IQ must be this high to enter.”

Democrats, emboldened by strong support from Hispanics and other minorities in the November 6 election, are pushing for comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh and Richard Cowan; Editing by Xavier Briand)

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: November 25, 2012

A hedge fund manager aims to solve the funding problems facing early-stage biomedical research.

By Jessica Leber on November 19, 2012

Hedge fund manager and prominent economist Andrew Lo is recognized for developing theories about how markets function and why they failed during the financial crisis. Now Lo, who is also the director of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, thinks he can also help create a better market for investing in promising treatments for cancer.

His proposal is to structure a new kind of financial tool, a “megafund,” for funneling up to $30 billion into the discovery of cancer drugs. The project would be unprecedented in scale at a time when the biomedical sector is searching for fresh funding ideas. As Lo says, the community is “ripe for something new.”

In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology earlier this fall, Lo and his coauthors note that large pharmaceutical companies are no longer nurturing early-stage drug development. Venture capitalists, too, are deserting life science startups, which averaged them negative 1 percent returns over the last decade. The result is a growing funding gap between basic lab research and commercial drug development. And fewer drugs are surviving the costly gauntlet of clinical trials to eventually reach FDA approval.

Lo’s proposal would expand the pool of capital available for life science investment by bringing together investors who would not normally fund research at top biomedical universities in exchange for a small percentage of all royalties from successful drugs or licensing revenues that result.

About five drug royalty investment companies already exist, Lo says, but they only invest in drugs that are already approved. His plan would do this at an earlier and riskier stage, and spread the risk using techniques found elsewhere in finance—and familiar from the mortgage crisis—securitizing future revenues, in this case from drug compound licenses, into debts called “research-backed obligations.”

Boosting funding this way could have a big payoff, Lo says. The sheer size of the megafund would reduce risk by diversifying investments across many more projects, and therefore could provide investors stronger guarantees of returns than any smaller fund. Just one blockbuster drug, the paper notes, can net $2 billion in income a year over a decade.

Lo’s computer models, based on historical data, indicate a $5 to $15 billion megafund would yield 9 to 12 percent returns for equity investors, and 5 to 8 percent returns for “research-backed obligation” holders—rates that could be attractive to pension funds, for example. Careful and realistic planning could avoid the “pitfalls” that sank the mortgage companies during the financial crisis, the Nature paper says.

So far, all of this is just words on paper and code in a software model (which Lo has released for others to tinker with).

Melissa Stevens, deputy executive director of Faster Cures, a nonprofit think tank, sees promise in the idea, but says there would also be lots of details to get right—cataloging the assets that exist, and deciding how to choose them, and assessing the levels of risk and time until reward. Hammering out workable agreements between researchers and investors would be a challenge, but not “insurmountable,” she says.

Nor will the concept solve all of the problems involved with life science investing. More money won’t fix, for example, the scientific and regulatory slowdowns that contribute to decreased productivity of each research dollar. “The question is not only how we can attract more capital into R&D, but how we can decrease the amount of capital that we need,” Stevens says. (Lo imagines a megafund could actually help this too, providing shared resources like basic legal support or lab resources among portfolio projects.)

The megafund idea is a relatively radical example of a growing number of new drug research funding models being tried in the face of the industry’s recent challenges.

Meanwhile, to attract more funding, “hybrid” funds are emerging that bring in nontraditional venture capital investors, like governments and philanthropies, willing to absorb more risk or wait longer for a reward, says Stevens.

Lo is organizing a conference for next year to bring together investors, researchers, executives, and the National Cancer Institute to hammer out more details. He thinks it should all be an easier sell in the post-financial crisis, post-bailout world: “We spent billions on General Motors, which sells cars people don’t want to buy. So $30 billion for cancer research should not be a big deal. These numbers don’t look that big to me now.”

The military and GE have made strides toward a practical detonation engine.

By Kevin Bullis on November 23, 2012

(Reuters) – Silicon Valley remains the world’s most attractive spot for technology start-ups with other locations around the world catching up, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Silicon Valley-based start-ups raise, on average, a third more capital than those in other areas, the report, conducted by research firm Startup Genome and funded by Spanish group Telefonica, said.

Silicon Valley continued to lead in metrics including the amount of serial entrepreneurs, revenue models, and the level of education among business founders. Tel Aviv was ranked second, followed by Los Angeles, Seattle, New York and Boston.

“Some years ago it was only Silicon Valley. Now there are also other innovation hubs and this trend is only going to strengthen,” said Gonzalo Martin-Villa, chief executive of Wayra – a Telefonica unit that nurses start-ups.

“Flourishing communities in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia have grown considerably over recent years and are now beginning to challenge Silicon Valley’s domination in technology innovation,” the report said.

Phil Liblin, chief executive of Silicon Valley-based writing app maker Evernote, said in a recent interview: “Silicon Valley does have a lot of magic in it. It is still the only place you can get $20 million without owning a suit, but you do not need 20 million any more.”

The proliferation of Apple and Google app stores, Facebook and Twitter have enabled starting a global company with just $50,000 or $100,000, he said.

“I think the main structural advantages are disappearing. Silicon Valley’s greatest innovation in the last couple years have made itself less unique.”

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by Dan Lalor)

Flexible photovoltaics made of carbon promise low cost and durability, if their performance can be improved.

By Katherine Bourzac on November 15, 2012

Using a grab bag of novel nanomaterials, researchers at Stanford University have built the first all-carbon solar cells. Their carbon photovoltaics don’t produce much electricity, but as the technology is perfected, all-carbon cells could be inexpensive, printable, flexible, and tough enough to withstand extreme environments and weather.

The goal is not to replace solar cells made from silicon and other inorganic materials, says Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, who led the work. Rather, it is to fill new niches. “Carbon is one of the most abundant elements on earth, and it is versatile,” Bao says.

Carbon is remarkably tough—atom-thick graphene and long, thin carbon nanotubes are two of the strongest materials ever tested. So carbon photovoltaics might be sprayed on the sides of buildings, or rolled up and taken into the desert. Various forms of carbon can be printed to make thin, flexible, transparent, and even stretchable electronics.

Thanks to its versatility, carbon in one form or another was used to make each solar-cell component. The three main parts—a nanotube cathode and a graphene anode sandwiching an active layer made of nanotubes and buckyballs—were all made by printing or evaporating from inks.

Making the cathode work was the trickiest part, says Bao—researchers have had a hard time making carbon nanomaterials that collect electrons. The Stanford researchers solved the problem by picking the right flavor of nanotubes and giving them a chemical treatment. This work is described in the journal ACS Nano.

The all-carbon photovoltaics convert less than 1 percent of the energy in light into electricity (by comparison, a silicon solar cell converts around 20 percent of light into electricity). However, Bao says that her group worked mostly with off-the-shelf materials, with just a bit of tuning. She attributes part of the problem to the roughness of the carbon films, which trips up traveling charges, and says it should be possible to smooth them out by working on the processing methods.

Carbon nanomaterials “are still relatively new materials,” says Bao. “There’s a lot of research on how to control their properties and how to use them.”

IBM Yorktown researcher and 2011 MIT Technology Review young innovatorFengnian Xia, who is not involved in the work, agrees, saying that the solar cells need better-quality starting materials and processes. “The idea is great, and this is a good first demonstration, but it’s not ready for realistic applications,” he says.

Other groups are focused on making better carbon materials for the active layers of photovoltaics. According to theoretical calculations by Jeffrey Grossman at MIT, carbon solar cells should be able to reach 13 percent conversion efficiency.

For carbon solar cells to be commercially viable, says Shenqiang Ren, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas, their efficiency must cross 10 percent. Ren’s lab set the conversion-efficiency record for carbon solar cells (equipped with conventional metal electrodes) at 1.3 percent this September, in work that appeared in ACS Nano. That’s about how well the first polymer solar cells performed, he notes.

Ren is working with computational materials scientists, including Grossman, to design better carbon photovoltaics by picking the right kinds of carbon nanomaterials. With this guidance, Ren says, his lab has already made carbon solar cells that convert 5 percent of light energy into electricity, and he expects to go higher still.