Monday, September 15, 2014

CANCER CELLS SHOULD JUST GROW UP!

Mt. St. Helens, a few years ago.
If that tree is vertical, then the concrete pillar is snuzzling up to her.
Weird
 
The link above will lead you to an interesting and very informative article in the New Yorker Magazine.  It is written by a journalist who specializes in medicine and biology.  It is easy to understand.  Like all New Yorker articles it is over-long; it says in 23 pages what the Economist would say in two, and The Week might stuff into two terse paragraphs.  But read it anyway.  You will be glad you did.
I am sure that New Yorker authors are paid by the word.
The main point here seems to be that there is a new way to deal with cancer.  Mainly, of course, we try to avoid it entirely.  We stop smoking.  We have our fallopian tubes removed.  We avoid asbestos.  We stay thin.  We eat “right” (whatever that is.)  We try to avoid having a family history of cancer.  (Well, that is impossible, of course, but it would help if we could.)  But sometimes we get cancer, anyway.  Then what to do?
Well, heretofore our only recourse in that event is to kill the cancer cells.  We cut them out, poison them with chemo drugs, blast them with X-rays, and pray.  According to this article there is another route: we can teach the damned cancer cells to behave themselves.  We can persuade (trick? force?) them to grow up and behave like normal cells.  There are several drugs in clinical trial or on the market that attempt to do just that, with encouraging results.
I am going to quote from the article.  The author was once a practicing physician, specializing in blood diseases and oncology.  He  states that”
“In medical school we were taught that, although cancer comes in many forms, it has one immutable characteristic: it is composed of immature cells”.
 I underlined the word “immature” in the previous sentence because it is the cornerstone of this sort of therapy: the drugs being developed force the cancer cells to “mature”.  How they do it is interesting and complicated: I will let you puzzle it out for yourselves.  However: here is a hint.  Molecules responsible for cancerous behavior can do so because they have a certain precise shape, enabling them to glom onto other cells and shut them down, activate them, or otherwise change their behavior.  If we humans can devise other molecules with precisely the right shape to glom onto these bad actors and immobilize them before they do their damage, then – game over!  I have been gloomy lately (about cancer, that is); this article has cheered me up. 
Joanne Ingwall alerted me to this essay.  She and Dick keep me busy – for which I am very grateful.
Finally, I have recently engaged in an email exchange with a former graduate student and valued colleague, who told me that he enjoys the pictures I put in my blog.  When I thanked him and mentioned the text he said, in effect “Oh?  Is there text?”  Well, I mostly made that up, but it serves my purpose - I know many of you enjoy the picture, then say "Oh, what is he on about this time?" and cut to Facebook.  I can't really blame you, but - please read this one.  It's good.


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