Mission San Luis Rey
My tireless, perspicacious,
miserably underpaid research
assistant, Dick Ingwall, has alerted me to another interesting article in the
New York Times. Not only is Dick
underpaid (he gets nothing), but he is required to furnish his own tools – in
this case, a subscription to the Times which, if comparable to the Wall Street
Journal, costs in the neighborhood of $400/year. To compensate, I let him read my blog for
free. I also give him zucchini
squash.
The title of the article is “Study reshaping ways of
treating breast cancer.” I know it’s
important – it even appeared in the Bellingham Herald. I want to bring it to your attention, partly
because breast and ovarian cancers share many features, but mainly because it it symbolizes advance against cancer on a broad front.
Data for this study come from something called the “Cancer
Genome Atlas.” The Atlas is the
product of a large, federally-funded research effort to map genetic changes in
common cancers. So far there have been
reports on lung and colon cancer. The
breast cancer study involved 825 women.
The down –and-dirty gist of the article reinforces something
we probably had already guessed – there is a lot of variability in breast cancer
(as with most cancers, I suspect.) With
breast cancer the variability comprise four basic types. Each type responds best to its own set of
therapies. Some are highly curable, others less so. One type, in which the tumor cells resemble skin or sweat gland tissue , more
resembles ovarian or lung tumors than other kinds of breast cancer. This kind of breast cancer sometimes is referred to as “triple
negative”. It is blessedly rare – but, I gather – hard to
kill. Researchers speculate that this kind of breast cancer and ovarian cancer may have a common
origin.
So, what good is all this, anyway? Clearly, the more we learn about cancer in general, the
sooner we can eliminate it. There are no extraneous facts in cancer
research. Moreover, by showing that
breast cancers are far from uniform, and by mapping the genetic defects that
cause them, we make targeted therapy (designer drugs, of the good kind) that
much more feasible.
Enjoy!
“This is the road map for how we might cure breast cancer in the future,”
ReplyDeleteSo much hope in this article. I hope testing goes swiftly.
I meant to include some light-hearted material in yesterday’s blog, but I forgot. As usual, I tried to run down the publication upon which the Times news article is based. I intended to find it, print it out, study it, scratch my head, and file it away – odds were strongly against my understanding enough to merit posting anything. However, as it happens, I couldn’t find it. What I DID find, however, is interesting. Using Google Scholar I did a search on two of the authors’ names, plus the words “breast cancer”. I got 3260 hits (that is, 3260 separate papers.) Limiting the search to only papers published in 2012 still got me 526 hits! Top cancer researchers must hire dozens of graduate students just to read and summarize the literature. It only took me 15 years to get completely out of date (in paleomagnetism and tectonics); with breast cancer research it shouldn’t take more than a few weeks!
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I found was something called “Lunatic Fringe Deficiency”. I Googled that and discovered something else called Manic Fringe Deficiency. Both of these Fringes operate on or with something else, called Notch. I stopped here; I was afraid I would run into Hunchback, Hedgehog, or maybe even Dumbkopf (see entry for 9/2/12.) I still haven’t learned what Lunatic Fringe Deficiency is, but I will keep trying.
Perhaps the explanation for these peculiar names is that “naming humor” helps to keep a biochemist sane. After all, it can’t be easy to spend all of a sunny day indoors, carefully manipulate small, expensive globs of organic material. No wonder Linus seemed peculiar (blog entry for 6/29/12)