Geothermal energy: an under tapped, climate-friendly resource

SUBMITTED BY DAVID LAWRENCE 

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A few years ago I had the pleasure of swimming in a big, heated pool. Outdoors. In winter. It sounds like an unaffordable luxury, and in most places, it is. But in Iceland, you can swim all year round in geothermal swimming pools. Iceland sits on the boundary of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, which are slowly pulling apart, giving it extraordinary geothermal resources. Besides year-round outdoor swimming, this renewable resource provides heat, hot water, and electricity.

According to Iceland's National Energy Authority, about 25 percent of the country’s electricity was generated by geothermal power plants (2008 data). The benefits sound like an environmental fairy tale: pollution is almost nil, operating costs are low, power generation is constant, and it’s completely renewable.

Given that there are geothermic regions all over the world (think Pacific Rim), you’d expect that geothermal power plants would be under construction everywhere. But surprisingly according to Katherine Baragona, an infrastructure finance specialist at the World Bank, geothermal power doesn’t attract as much interest as solar or wind power.In an article inHandshake, a journal on public-private partnerships, she points out that what is preventing more financing in this area are the upfront costs of a geothermal power plant. They are very high, making it hard to attract investors. There’s also nervousness about causing a man-made disaster by triggering an earthquake. Given that potential scale of climate-related disasters (for example, submerging the Maldives or a chunk of Bangladesh), I don’t understand the worry — human activity sets off tremors all the time.

In the article, Baragona is optimistic about geothermal’s prospects. Anyone who’s gone swimming in an outdoor geothermal swimming pool will probably agree. The amount of heat inside the earth is incredible; if we can tap into just a fraction of it, we can use energy without worrying about its impact on the environment.

Recent developments are promising. Last month, Indonesia, which has the world’s largest geothermal reserves,  took a step in this direction with support from the World Bank, which agreed to lend $300 million to build geothermal plants there. There may not be much demand for heated swimming pools in Indonesia, but the new power plants will go a long way towards helping the country meet its energy needs in a sustainable way.

It seems to me that every country with geothermal potential should get busy developing it. It may be pricey in the short run, but generations of people will benefit from cheap, clean power with readily available technology. Why wait for solar and wind technology to catch up when you can tap into geothermal resources right now?

This post is the first of a series on PPPs and climate change. You can read more on this topic in the latest issue of Handshake, IFC’s journal on PPPs.

On the Front Line of Climate Change....Buildings!

SUBMITTED BY DAVID LAWRENCE 

 

Efforts to fight climate change tend to focus on emissions, usually dirty ones, like vehicle exhaust or the toxic belching of coal-fired power plants. A blast of diesel fumes in your face is a good reminder that these things are bad for both people and the planet. So it’s no surprise that we zero in on cheerful, clean solutions, like solar power and zippy electric cars.

But anyone who has lived in the former Soviet Union knows that buildings can also be incredibly wasteful, hemorrhaging heat in gushing torrents. Winter after freezing winter, I stuffed cotton into gaps in the window frame to block out the cold. And I was always astonished that people—including me—could only regulate temperatures in overheated apartments by opening their windows in subzero conditions.

 

The problem isn’t limited to former Soviet countries, or to windows. In arecent article in the PPP journal, Handshake, Prashant Kapoor, a Green Building specialist at IFC, points out that nearly half of all energy produced globally is used to heat, cool or ventilate buildings. Since we spend so much of our lives indoors, the opportunities to find ways to cut energy use in buildings are vast.

Making buildings greener seems to be getting more and more attention. The Economistrecently reported that growing grass on city rooftops, a part of Chicago’s Climate Action Plan, greatly reduces the energy needed to cool the building in summer. In Seattle, the Bullitt Foundation is building the greenest building on earth, which will use solar energy to generate electricity and heat (as well as process its own waste). And in London,a new fundwill offer low-cost loans to improve energy efficiency in public buildings.

The idea behind green buildings is that savings in energy and fuel costs can pay for itself over time, saving money in the long run while reducing both carbon emissions and pollution. It sounds like a winner. But I also love the idea of buildings being self-sufficient, not relying on a central grid or anyone else for energy, heating and lighting. The more a building can do for itself, the less costly infrastructure we need to build.

Mr Kapoor points out that simple energy efficiency measures, such as low-energy light bulbs, smart thermostats or better insulation, can reduce power costs by up to a third. This can save people a lot of money, and as The Economist points out, lead to significant savings in buildings that are active around the clock, like airports, hospitals or police stations.

That’s where public-private partnerships (PPPs) come in. Governments can do a lot to encourage greener buildings by making energy-efficiency a requirement in PPP transactions. Since PPPs are used more and more often for airports, hospitals and schools, this should be an easily achievable goal that will save governments a lot of money.

Mr Kapoor lists many reasons why there hasn’t been more progress. But I think the growing pressure to reduce carbon emissions, as well as hard economics, will change that.Handshake  mentions examples—the main airport in the Maldives and hospitals in Mexico. But if the idea catches on, especially in the cold countries of the former Soviet Union, I think we’ll see a real difference.

The India Paradox: Promoting Competitive Industries in a High-Growth Country

SUBMITTED BY IVAN ROSSIGNOL, CO-AUTHORS: PARTH SHRI TEWARI, ROSANNA CHAN 

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India’s economic growth rate in the past decade has been nothing short of spectacular.  With its GDP growth around 7 to 9 percent per year, India is the second-fastest-growing large economy in the world.  However, the country’s manufacturing sector accounts for a dismal 17 percent of its employment opportunities, as compared to 60 percent in agriculture and 23 percent in services.[1]This summer, the World Bank’s Indian Visiting Scholars Program* invited two leading academics from Harvard University to visit India and to articulate potential pathways to sustain the country’s growth trajectory. These 2 scholars are Ricardo Hausmann, Professor of Economic Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of Harvard’s Center of International Development and Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at the Kennedy School. While there, they interacted with the private sector and key policymakers, including senior officials of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, the Planning Commission, and the Ministry of Finance.

Monkeys…and India’s economic structure and growth

Hausmann argues that diversification in the economic structure, and not necessarily specialization, may be a crucial factor for accelerating growth in India.  He observes that rich economies produce many products whereas developing economies produce few products that are also made in rich economies. This relationship exists not only between countries, but also between cities within a country.

The obvious question arises: If each product requires specific sets of capabilities, how can resource- and skill-constrained developing countries diversify? Hausmann suggests leveraging existing capabilities to develop new products that, in turn, allow for the development of more capabilities, and the production of more new products, and so on. The novel analogy he makes is that of a monkey leaping from tree to tree in the forest of potential products of the world. The closer the tree is, the easier the leap. The successful value-chain upgrade from low-value-adding business process offshoring to higher-end “knowledge process outsourcing” is a case in point.

The greater the area of the forest that an economy occupies, the more diversified it is, and thus the greater the opportunities are for growth. So how does this inform industrial development? Like entering a forest with a map to navigate the various vegetation zones, Hausmann’s methodology can be used in some cases as a frame of reference to analyze so-called “product spaces” and to offer a roadmap for policymakers and entrepreneurs to identify strategic “tree leaps” towards new products. That, in turn, helps a country develop its capabilities and occupy greater areas of the product space.

From products to people: how does industry development relate to employment?

For his part, Rodrik argues that apart from developing new products, shifts in production structure contribute to overall productivity improvements that are needed for growth. 

Drawing comparisons across countries, Rodrik finds that successful countries have been able to channel labor resources to productive sectors, as well as develop sectors that absorb the type of labor that is available (for example South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil in certain industries). In India, the majority of labor is unskilled.  The challenge, says Rodrik, is twofold: to have policies that are aimed at allocating labor resources to productive sectors and developing additional sectors that will also absorb this labor.  He emphasizes that this would not only involve examining labor-market rigidities but would also involve maintaining a competitive exchange rate. In Rodrik’s view, today’s real debate is not whether to have an industrial policy but how to improve the contribution of industry to inclusive development. It cannot be a top-down process. It must be a process of collaboration, coordination, and dialogue with the private sector.  

The take away:  Industrial policy 2.0?

No matter how much we try to shy away from it, industrial policy is very much alive in countries like India, at both the central and the state levels. The question is how to go about it to avoid the trap of “picking winners.” While Hausmann and Rodrik championed different aspects of how industrial policy could help facilitate economic growth – one at the product-space level and the other on the exchange-rate and labor-rigidity aggregate level – both of them emphasized the importance of communication and coordination between the private sector and policymakers.  Indeed, it is important to create a process that is not political and involves collaboration, dialogue and feedback mechanisms.  As Rodrik puts it, a collaborative process should be one where government processes are embedded in, and not “in bed with,” the private sector, for it to be responsive and conducive to private-sector growth.

[1]Component parts of the labor force by occupation. CIA World Factbooks 18 December 2003 to 18 December 2008

*Enhancing Dialogue through the Visiting Scholar's Program The Finance and Private Sector Development Network of the World Bank Group, through the Competitive Industries Practice, has been working on enhancing the policy dialogue by linking world-class knowledge to Indian policymakers. FPD brings leading academic thinkers to look at these issues in the Indian context 

Related links:
Link to Hausmann’s presentation
Link to Rodrik’s presentations: I, II, III, IV

Old School or New School, the Question is the Same: How can development institutions make measurement core to their business?

SUBMITTED BY NIGEL TWOSE, CO-AUTHORS: JODI NELSON 

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Firms maximize their profits by developing strategy with targets, tracking progress, and using incentives to drive achievement. Without the natural feedback of the market, how can we use this approach to drive toward results for the poor? 

One of us works for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – an old school Bretton Woods institution with years of experience building systems to track results across countries. The other one of us works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an entrepreneurial organization that is much newer on the block, without some of the systems that come with fifty years of development work but also without the preconceptions. We come to the table with a desire to learn from each other’s experience. We hope this first blog will pique input from colleagues around the world, similarly passionate about the power of data to improve our business.

Our main concern is how to make relevant, credible, transparent and actionable measurement the powerful tool it needs to be in our organizations. We are convinced that private sector practices that link strategy, results, information and performance incentives hold promise, but also aware that there exist significant challenges to successfully using them. In our two very different institutions, we grapple with three similar questions about how to resolve this tension. 

Question #1: How do we ensure data about results are used to increase effectiveness?

There is no doubt that the last 5-10 years have witnessed enormous progress in the understanding and practice of evaluating development effectiveness. Although there remains philosophical debate about how evaluation is best done, we believe that the simple fact that it is supported at the highest levels of institutions such as DFID, USAID and the World Bank, debated among practitioners and academics, funded and pursued passionately indicates progress.

The problem is that the current discourse about evaluation theory and design doesn’t touch on the more daunting challenge of how to integrate measurement into decision making. Simply put, the most elegant evaluation design is irrelevant if the findings are never used. In this way, the true “gold standard” is the use of data rather than a specific way to collect it. Moreover, in both of our organizations, impact evaluation produces a small portion of the type of regular information people need to track progress and make decisions. High level strategies to alleviate poverty through business growth, farmer productivity, access to financial services and other means are built on diverse types of investments, grants, organizations, partnerships and contexts and therefore diverse types of information. Technically, we know how hard it is to “sum up” results data of varying quality and to track them as indicators on management scorecards and dashboards. Still, the real institutional need is to find a way to do exactly this: provide decision makers responsible for allocating resources with digestible information that they use. We find very little in the current debates and policy discussions to help us to chart a course to do this. 

Question #2: How can we use incentives to drive results and use of data?

Results-based approaches have been in and out of development for a while. Bilateral donors turned to tougher contractual tools as a means to buy and ensure outcomes from implementing partners some ten years back. Performance-based incentives (PBI) or pay-for-performance (P4P) is showing up today in discussions on development financing. DFID has adopted such an approach to allocate its aid budget. The Results Based Financing for Health (RBF) effort of the World Bank, Norwegian government and DFID seeks to use results-based financing to improve healthcare in developing countries. 

Despite these and other efforts to incentivize changed behavior among NGOs, governments and others, we don’t use performance-based incentives in our own organizations. Experience working in development reminds us how difficult it is to control for complexity. We understand, too, that measuring change is not the same as being able to attribute it to individual action and that it is hard to be held accountable for something that is both complex and beyond our control. Nevertheless, we wonder if we’ve disregarded too quickly lessons of professional accountability from the private sector. Private sector leaders are held accountable to increased revenue and sales despite their lack of direct control. If we are willing to hold our grantees, partners and national service providers up to this test, can we also hold ourselves accountable for targeting results, measuring progress and using the data to become increasingly effective?

Question #3: How can we assure that the “client” is center stage in our efforts to plan for and measure results?

Aspirations to assure that the people on the receiving end of development are central to its planning and measurement are not new. The arguments supporting participatory development date back to the 1970s and even the most mainstream institutions adopted its tenets in the 1990s. And yet, by the beginning of the century, twenty years of practice were characterized as an emperor with no clothes – the feared “New Tyranny” of orthodoxy without enough proof of the value added (Participation: The New Tyranny? by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, 2001). It’s no surprise that the pendulum has swung to the opposite pole today – rigorous positivist evaluation design as the sole focus of our dialogue and efforts to solve the broader measurement challenges we still face.
 
Although we applaud the emphasis on scientific methods, we lament the faddism of evaluation practice and the fact that we aren’t all focused on a more diverse set of problems to solve. People, communities and grantee and partner organizations remain essential to all of our efforts. Esther Duflo and Abijhit Banerjee’s recent book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty pushes us to see the connection between individuals and our efforts to help them, but how do we apply this kind of thinking to fit the scale and scope of high level strategies designed and implemented by large donor organizations? Foundations survey their grantees and IFC surveys its clients to assess the quality of their relationships. But how do we connect the dots between what we learn and how we do and improve our work in a way that avoids the mistakes of participatory and experimental fads?

We could go on and on to list and pose the questions that motivate our 1:1 conversations of late. Please join us – we’d love to broaden the conversation and hear your ideas.

Managing garbage to save the planet

SUBMITTED BY DAVID LAWRENCE
The world bank 

 

The plight of refugees is in the news all the time, mostly as a result of war. But recently, I saw a post in Dot Earth, a New York Times blog, about a documentary calledClimate Refugees. It suggests that climate change will lead to massive refugee problems, mainly as a result of flooding. Disasters in New Orleans, Bangladesh and Myanmar offer a glimpse of what might come.

The Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, is at special risk: most of it is only 1 - 1.5 meters above sea level. If global warming leads to rising sea levels, the country could be submerged. Consequently, the government aims to make the country carbon-neutral by 2020.

I don’t think that a carbon-neutral Maldives will stop global warming, but it’s done a good job demonstrating steps that governments and the private sector can take to reduce carbon output. Recently, it set up a public-private partnership to manage waste on the island of Thilafushi, where most of the country’s garbage was dumped and burned off. When the project is completed, this toxic island will have a state-of-the-art waste management system that includes a 2.7MW power plant that will replace existing diesel plants, saving 12,000 tons of carbon emissions annually.

There’s a lot of room for the private sector and governments to tackle climate change. You can read more in the latest issue of Handshake, IFC’s quarterly journal on PPPs.

Money can’t buy citizens’ love, but integrity and performance can

SUBMITTED BY ALEJANDRO GUERRERO RUIZ, CO-AUTHORS: AUDREY SACKS 

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We know very little about governments’ willingness to take risks. Technologies to enhance public sector performance are widely known and available nowadays, but we still can't predict when governments are likely to take risks in the implementation of complex public sector reforms. One prerequisite for any government attempting to implement reforms is that it has sufficient political capital. Governments and politicians seeking trust and legitimacy try to win or buy approval, but they do not always succeed in winning anything approaching legitimacy. We are still grappling with how to objectively measure the extent to which governments are effective and even demonstrate that citizens are good judges in perceiving and distinguishing good-performers from bad-performers, or in translating that perception into political endorsement or trust.

Our argument is that a government that shows early returns from Public Sector Management (PSM) reforms in terms of delivering better public services, showing fairness in the interactions with citizens, and enhancing the quality and performance of its street-level bureaucracy will build the necessary political capital to undertake more far-reaching and politically costly public sector reforms at a later stage. Further, these improvements are likely to increase citizens’ trust in governmental authority and their willingness to comply with government taxes and regulations, which in turn will improve a government’s capacity to become more effective and to evoke deference, which will further enhance the credibility of future reform packages.

Using survey data, we analyze the sources of political capital, specifically trust and legitimating beliefs, in a wide variety of settings: Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Our findings suggest that the source of this capital comes from service delivery, bureaucratic competence and honesty and procedural fairness. Across Africa, when evaluating governments, citizens’ perceptions of procedural fairness and the honesty of the bureaucrats swamp governments’ service delivery activities. In Latin America in particular, we found that governments were able to rapidly re-build trust in government institutions at the local level, by focusing on delivering quick improvements in sectors which were very visible and a priority for citizens. For example, these early gains allowed the Mayor of Medellin to gain enough political capital to break with past clientelist politics, and to introduce a new public management framework based on the delivery of services and responsiveness to citizens’ needs. His calculations were right: investing in improving very visible, relevant public goods, and making an extra effort to share the results with citizens paid off. He left office with 90 percent approval, without having to resort to clientelism as usual.

Thus, PSM reforms are more likely to generate short-term positive political returns and longer-term gains for a government if it is able to improve perceptions of its bureaucracy’s competence and the fairness of government procedures. The importance of procedural justice in eliciting support for governments is a strong finding of a large body of research. How we are to promote procedural fairness is compatible with PSM reforms: good public servants and transparency combined with institutional arrangements to provide effective voice and grievance procedures to those who experience discrimination. We also know from experiences around the world that governments are more likely to elicit its citizens’ approval when bureaucrats including teachers, nurses, and agricultural extension agents treat those individuals with whom they interact on a day-to-day basis with dignity and provide services with a manageable amount of red tape and corruption. 

While improving services may not harm an incumbent government’s popularity, enhancing service delivery is unlikely to directly generate any significant short-term political returns for a government. Why is this the case?  Introducing service-enhancing reforms in a clientelist context is costly and may trigger rent-seeking. In addition, because the public has limited information about what exactly the government does and how, individuals may not assign credit to government for service delivery improvements even when the credit is due.  Rather, citizens may be attributing the improvements to other actors including sectarian groups, the private sector; NGOs and community-based groups; religious institutions; traditional leaders; and, donors.  From looking at the results in our two pieces of research, we conclude that politicians will only engage in reforms to improve the provision of public goods when the chances of receiving credit and political capital are high. Therefore, we argue that projects which involve visible government agencies and address citizens’ top priorities will increase the chances that citizens correctly attribute improvements in welfare to the better performance of government.

If this is the case, and politicians are only going to be tempted to follow the risky path of reform when the gains are feasible, then how can the World Bank, other donors and NGOs work with governments to ensure that governments at least receive the credit when it’s fairly due?
 

I want to be... a millionaire.

Youth in Uganda discuss their career goals and aspirations.

Removal of fibroids that distort the womb cavity may prevent recurrent miscarriages

 by Biomechanism 

Researchers have found for the first time, a firm evidence that fibroids are associated with recurrent miscarriages. They have also discovered that if they removed the fibroids that distorted the inside of the womb, the risk of miscarriage in the second trimester of pregnancy was reduced dramatically – to zero.

"It has been recognised since the 1980s that women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage have very good pregnancy outcomes following referral to a dedicated clinic without the need for any intervention, and with psychological supportive care, i.e. tender loving care, alone.

The study, which is published online in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1] on Wednesday, is the culmination of 20 years of investigation into recurrent miscarriage by Professor Tin-Chiu Li and his team at the recurrent miscarriage clinic at the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals (Sheffield, UK). In addition, for the first time it has given a reliable estimate of the prevalence of fibroids in women who have recurrent miscarriages.

Fibroids in or around the womb (uterus) are benign tumours composed of muscle and fibrous tissue. Although they have been associated with spontaneous miscarriage, until now there has been no evidence of their role in recurrent miscarriages (RM). The prevalence of fibroids has been estimated to be between 3-10% in women of reproductive age, but the prevalence is unknown in women who experience RM, which is defined as three or more consecutive miscarriages.

The researchers analysed data from 966 women who attended the Sheffield RM clinic. The women were scanned for uterine anomalies, including fibroids, via transvaginal ultrasound and radiology, and 79 were found to have fibroids. “This enabled us to calculate that the prevalence of fibroids was 8.2% among women with recurrent miscarriages; this has never been accurately reported before,” said one of the researchers, Dr Sotirios Saravelos, who is a clinical research Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

Fibroids were diagnosed and grouped into three classifications:

• Submucosal – these grow in the muscle beneath the inner lining of the womb wall and grow into the middle of the womb, distorting the cavity
• Intramural – these develop in the muscle wall of the womb and are the most common type of fibroid. They do not distort the cavity and have less than 50% protrusion into the serosal surface – the outer membrane lining the womb
• Subserosal – these grow outside the wall of the womb into the pelvis, do not distort the womb cavity, and have a greater than 50% protrusion out of the serosal surface.

Prof Li used minimally invasive surgery (hysteroscopy) to remove cavity-distorting (submucosal) fibroids from 25 women; 54 women with fibroids that did not distort the cavity had no surgery and they were matched with a control group of 285 women whose recurrent miscarriages were still unexplained after all investigations found nothing abnormal; these women also had no intervention.

In the 25 women who had undergone surgery, miscarriage rates in subsequent pregnancies during the second trimester fell from 21.7% to 0%. This translated to an increase in the live birth rate from 23.3% to 52%.

Dr Saravelos said: “This is the first time that it has been shown that removing fibroids that distort the uterine cavity may increase the chances of a subsequent live birth in women with recurrent miscarriages.”

The 54 women with fibroids not distorting the uterine cavity and who had had no surgery also did better after referral to the RM clinic. Pre-referral, the miscarriage rate during the second trimester was 17.6% and this fell to 0% after referral. Live birth rates went up from 20.6% to 70.4% in subsequent pregnancies. This was similar to results from the 285 women with unexplained RM; the second trimester miscarriage rate was 8% pre-referral to the clinic, falling to 1.8% post-referral, while live birth rates increased from 20.6% to 71.9% after referral.

Dr Saravelos said: “These results are interesting because they suggest that the finding of fibroids in women with recurrent miscarriage does not necessarily imply that the fibroids are the only cause of the miscarriage. In addition, they suggest that surgical intervention is not the only means whereby patients with recurrent miscarriage benefit from attending a specialised, dedicated clinic. However, for women with fibroids that distort the uterine cavity, our work shows that removing the fibroids can eliminate miscarriage during the second trimester and double the live birth rate in subsequent pregnancies.

“It has been recognised since the 1980s that women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage have very good pregnancy outcomes following referral to a dedicated clinic without the need for any intervention, and with psychological supportive care, i.e. tender loving care, alone. This usually takes the form of regular visits to a dedicated recurrent miscarriage clinic, regular antenatal scans to check the condition of the baby, reassurance to the mother from the specialist that everything is progressing well and specialist antenatal counselling throughout the pregnancy.

“Interestingly, although women may increase their live birth rate by up to 50% after psychological supportive care, the exact underlying mechanisms involved in this process are not entirely understood. In the present study, the fact that women with fibroids not distorting the uterine cavity do so well, suggests that they also do not have an underlying cause for recurrent miscarriage. As a result, they can also be considered as having ‘unexplained recurrent miscarriage’, and should be counselled that they have very good chances of a successful pregnancy without the need for any intervention or surgery and with the psychological supportive care offered by a dedicated recurrent miscarriage clinic.”

The main limitation of the study is that there was no control group for the women who had their fibroids removed and so it is not possible to tell whether they would have done better without surgery, after referral to the RM clinic. The researchers say that their work highlights the need to perform a randomised controlled trial to investigate this.

“The definitive study requires the recruitment of a rather large number of patients to be randomised between intervention and no intervention. This would require the input of several clinics in a multi-centre randomised controlled trial and its success would depend on the support of all clinics along with that of Sheffield,” said Dr Saravelos.

-Health News For Women in Pregnancy

____________

[1] “The prevalence and impact of fibroids and their treatment on the outcome of pregnancy in women with recurrent miscarriage”, by Sotirios H. Saravelos, Junhao Yan, Hassan Rehmani, and Tin-Chiu Li. Human Reproduction journal. doi:10.1093/humrep/der293

How Normal Cells Become Brain Cancers

 by Biomechanism 

Brain tumor specimens taken from neurosurgery cases at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center has given scientists a new window on the transformation that occurs as healthy brain cells begin to form tumors.

The work may help identify new drugs to target oligodendroglioma, a common type of brain tumor, at its earliest stage, when it is generally most treatable. Any potential drugs identified will have to prove safe and effective in clinical trials, a process that can take several years.

Representative NG2+ cell pairs from tumor and non-neoplastic tissue stained for NG2 and EGFR. Scale bars represent 10 μM. Photo: Jason Bardi

As described in the journal Cancer Cell this month, the UCSF team found that the pool of cells from which oligodendroglioma tumors emerge normally divide “asymmetrically” by splitting into two unequal parts – like giving birth to fraternal twins who look different and have distinct fates. When these normal cells transform into cancer cells, they switch gears and begin dividing symmetrically, essentially giving birth to identical twins instead.

“This happens early – before the tumor forms, and it may provide a point to intervene in the process of tumor initiation,” said Claudia Petritsch, PhD, an assistant professor with the UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center who led the research.

The Brain Tumor Research Center is part of the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery, which is consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top departments in the world. Its doctors perform more than 1,100 neurosurgeries a year to remove brain tumors, and in the last 30 years, this work has helped to build one of the most extensive brain tumor repositories in the United States, with tissue samples collected from more than 7,800 cases of cancer.

In their research, Petritsch and her colleagues used genetically engineered mice to identify that a protein called NG2 controls this switch, and they are working on ways to target genes that regulate the process as a way of fighting oligodendroglioma and perhaps other brain tumors.

Why Divisions Matter to Cancer

Oligodendrogliomas are unusual among brain tumors because they often respond to chemotherapy drugs. However, the tumor frequently returns in a form that is resistant to chemotherapy and requires repeated surgical removal.

Petritsch and her colleagues first discovered last year that oligodendroglioma tumors derive from a type of progenitor cell called “oligodendrocyte progenitors” that proliferate in the brain throughout life. These progenitors may also play an important role when the brain is injured by multiplying rapidly and helping heal wounds.

The new studies in mice suggest that lacking an injury, these progenitors divide mostly asymmetrically, maintaining an equilibrium of these cells within the brain. Progenitors can also switch gears and divide symmetrically instead. Scientists believe that allows the brain to provide an expanded pool of cells when needed.

Using mouse models of the tumors as well as tissue samples taken from people with the disease, Petritsch and her colleagues showed that before the tumors arise, the cells preemptively make this switch, transforming from dividing asymmetrically to dividing symmetrically.

They used bioinformatics to discover that dozens of regulators of asymmetric cell division including NG2 are dysregulated in oligodendrogliomas. The Petritsch lab calls these “asymmetry proteins” and argues that if mutated they probably cause the switch to abnormal cell divisions and thereby initiate the genesis of tumors. Modulating NG2 and dysregulated asymmetry proteins pharmacologically may restore normal division modes and provide a new way to fight the cancer with drugs.

The article, Asymmetry-Defective Oligodendrocyte Progenitors Are Glioma Precursors” by Sista Sugiarto, Anders I. Persson, Elena Gonzalez Munoz, Markus Waldhuber, Chrystelle Lamagna, Noemi Andor, Patrizia Hanecker, Jennifer Ayers-Ringler, Joanna Phillips, Jason Siu, Daniel Lim, Scott Vandenberg, William Stallcup, Mitchel S. Berger, Gabriele Bergers, William A. Weiss, and Claudia Petritsch appears in the September 13, 2011 issue of the journal Cancer Cell.

This work is supported by grants from the National Brain Tumor Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Brain Tumor Association, the National Cancer Institute, the UCSF Brain Tumor SPORE, the Brain Tumor Research Sobrato Fund, the Farber A and J Foundation, the Grove Foundation, the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation, the UCSF Sandler Program in Basic Science, the Swedish Society for Medical Research and Medical Research Council, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.