Linda encounters a cow
Did you miss me? Sure
you did.
I haven’t posted a blog in over two weeks, owing to the
happy fact that I have been scrounging a leisurely life from my daughter Linda
and her husband Paul, at their splendid farm in western Wisconsin. It was wonderful, sitting in the warm sun on
their patio, watching birds, reading and just snoozing now and then – while
Paul and Linda worked their butts off. I
guess being 85, which I turned while there, has its privileges. Frankly, in a second I would gladly trade whatever those privileges might be for
another crack at 60!
But, anyway, I can now identify Holstein, Hereford, and Black
Angus cows, and I know what CRP stands for.
How about you?
So, here is a little blip about PARP inhibitors and
pancreatic cancer.
There is a drug, rucaparib, that has recently been approved
for treating ovarian cancer in patients with BRCA1,2 mutations. It is a PARP inhibitor – and you know what
that means* It turns out that BRCA
mutations are somehow implicated in some types of pancreatic cancer, and early trials indicate
that rucaparib is helpful here as well.
Helpful – but not a cure.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the worst afflictions God and/or
nature has inflicted on us. Past time we had
some uplifting news.
*PARP is an enzyme that repairs double-stranded breaks in
DNA. As such, it is a good guy. However, in the case of cancer – rapid growth
leads to lots of breaks, but the cancer deploys its own PARP regiments to allow
it continue to grow. Hence PARPi, which
inhibits the PARP molecule, thus preventing it from doing its job.
How it does this is beyond our pay
grade.
I should have pointed out that this is an example of a hopeful new development in oncology: fitting the therapy to the genomic mistake that caused the cancer, and not to the locality where it arose. THIS, I think is real progress.
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