utenzi

Twenty two years ago a group of researchers started studying a small village in South America. You might be asking yourself what's so interesting about this Ecuadorian village. Well, it so happens that there's an unusually large percentage of people with Laron syndrome. A disease which involves mutations to the GHR (growth hormone receptor) gene. These mutations lead to severe GHR and IGF-1 (insulin like growth factor-1) deficiencies. Since insufficient growth hormone results in a failure to grow properly, this is a very height challenged group. This study commenced in 1988, two years before the human genome project got underway. Back then we didn't have DNA microarrays to pinpoint which genes are being up and down regulated. Why am I mentioning this? Hell if I know. In any case, the researchers commenced the project in an attempt to help the people with GHRD. But an interesting thing happened on the way to the forum . These short people don't die of cancer or diabete...

It's been nearly a month since my last post. Maybe this is becoming a once-a-month blog. These pictures are from a hike I took with a Meetup group last weekend. The hike was a 9.5 mile meander along 3 trails in Raven Rock park, near Lillington NC. The last month has seen a few changes in my life. My mother succumbed to lung cancer after a 2+ year encounter with the disease. She was diagnosed 23 months ago with a fairly advanced tumor in her left lung. Fist sized, they said, and gave her a couple of months to live. She stayed nearly pain free for almost the entire two years. It was a very slow growing tumor and really fooled the doctors. The last 2 weeks were bad though---the cancer, relatively mild for most of its span, showed its fangs at the end. That happened a month ago. During the two bad weeks and the month since I managed to gain some serious weight. I don't know how that happened. (okay, I ate a lot) And now I'm up to 193 and am supposed to see my doctor on Monday. ...

In a weird and deadly twist, cells thought to protect against cancer may actually promote it. Macrophages, a component of our immune system, should help fight and kill cancer cells. Instead there's recent evidence that these macrophages, or at least a subpopulation of them, actually help malignant cancer cells spread to distant sites in a process called metastasis. According to a press release from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Jeffrey W. Pollard, Ph.D., one of their research professors, has shown that macrophages can act at the primary tumor site to enhance tumor progression and malignancy. So they've shown that macrophages can essentially become traitors, enhancing the worst aspect of cancer... metastatic tumor growth. According to the press release: Dr. Pollard and his colleagues propose that their discovery offers a potentially useful new target for anti-cancer therapy. What they've found is a vulnerable step in the cancer process that might be blocked by dr...

Here's an excerpt from an article on the American Physiological Society's website . It's very exciting and might indicate a huge step forward in the fight against cancer. In fact it's so impressive that I find myself having trouble believing it--but the source of the news is very credible and the researcher is a good one. In any case, Dr Vesely will present his research at a symposium April 9 at the Experimental Biology 2008 conference in San Diego. According to researcher David Vesely , a doctor at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa and a professor at the University of South Florida (USF), hormones produced by the heart eliminated human pancreatic cancer in more than three-quarters of the mice treated with the hormones and eliminated human breast cancer in two-thirds of the mice. Vesely is the hospital’s chief of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism and is also professor of medicine, molecular pharmacology and physiology at USF. Using colon, ovarian, breas...

There's some exciting cancer related news coming from University of Kentucky . Yesterday they published a press release with the following lead paragraphs: A mouse resistant to cancer, even highly-aggressive types, has been created by researchers at the University of Kentucky. The breakthrough stems from a discovery by UK College of Medicine professor of radiation medicine Vivek Rangnekar and a team of researchers who found a tumor-suppressor gene called "Par-4" in the prostate. The researchers discovered that the Par-4 gene kills cancer cells, but not normal cells. There are very few molecules that specifically fight against cancer cells, giving it a potentially therapeutic application. That's pretty exciting news. We currently fight cancer by applying chemicals or radiation that kill fast growing cells. While this approach does target the rapidly dividing cancer cells, there's also a lot of normal cells that are also killed as collateral damage. Using gene th...

There's an interesting story on Reuter's today regarding a clinical study published in the May 21 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. Here's some tidbits from the Reuters article: "You don't have to invade the body in any way. We can actually obtain this information in a noninvasive manner," said Dr. Howard Chang of Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in Monday's issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. Chang and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, compared images from radiology scans such as CT scans commonly used to track cancer with lab tools called DNA microarrays -- gene chips -- that screen thousands of genes at a time. What they found was a way to translate the data from the images into a computer model that could predict what was going on with the genetic material within the tumors. The researchers said the technique may help eliminate the need for a biopsy, a procedure in which a needle is inject...

There's an interesting article on Sonic Hedgehog in the January 18 issue of Nature . I'm used to seeing this gene mentioned when discussing mammalian function or development but not fish--although the article refers to cartilaginous fish only. While both humans and cartilaginous fish are vertebrates we diverged so long ago from the chondricthylans that it's easy to forget that we still share quite a few genes. One of those genes is Shh, commonly referred to as Sonic Hedgehog , pictured over there to the left. Shh, in mammals, encodes a signaling molecule that plays a central role in developmental patterning, especially of the nervous system and the skeletal system. It's highly conserved and mutations in the gene result in serious maladies such as holoprosencephaly type 3. I'm familiar with Sonic Hedgehog due to its being implicated in causing tumors and thus of interest to cancer investigators. Getting back to the article in Nature, it demonstrates how Shh is conse...

I work in cancer research and of late I've been investigating the affects of some chemicals on angiogenesis, particularly as it relates to breast cancer. Now I'm a technician, not a PI, so my nose is to the ground and I often miss the big picture since my concerns are oriented towards the day-to-day research. As a result, I often get tunnel vision and only look at cancer through the prism of my research. In this case that means that I frequently think of cancer as only developing when there's plenty of oxygen available--which is reasonable since as a fast dividing group of cells, a cancer tumor needs lots of energy which would seem to imply oxidative reduction, not glycolysis--which requires sufficient vascularization and thus angiogenesis. However the cancer picture is more complex than that and the Warburg Effect is one example of that. Some tumors actually preferentially grow in the absence of oxygen and use glycolysis as their primary source of energy. They do this by b...