ANOTHER BREAKTHROUGH? Let's hope.

Guess where.  Guess when.  Guess what's in that bottle.

Did I ever tell you that the amount of DNA contained in a human cell, if stretched out, would be about 6 fee long?  Probably not:  I usually save up such gee-whiz facts to use when I am a little low on creativity, like right now.  It must be true; I learned it from a Teaching Company course on genetics taught by one Dr. David Savada , a cancer researcher associated with various institutions in the L.A. area.  It is a very good course, and when you have as much free time as I do I’m sure you’ll buy it. 

Anyway, what I got from Dr. Savada and my previous reading  is that DNA (famously arranged in a double helix) is a very long, fragile molecule that must be protected from damage at all cost.  To accomplish this it is armored with something called chromatin, and to save space tightly wrapped around little nodules called nucleosomes, constructed from histone proteins.   That way you can stuff six feet of DNA into a space much smaller than the head of a pin.  Sounds farfetched to me, but that’s what they say. 

Fragile though it may be, pieces of tumor DNA may be detected, extracted and studied – from the blood.  These things are referred to as ctDNA:  circulating tumor DNA.  In a recent study by a group of about four dozen scientists it has been shown that ctDNA can be used as an easily-accessed (needle in the arm) biomarker for various kinds of cancer.  (Ovarian was mentioned.)  Even early stage disease leaves its molecular signs.  This may be the long-sought early-warning biomarker that my group at the Hutch has pursued for years with, I am sorry to say, not a heck of a lot of success.

These ctDNA things have other uses.  They can help determine disease-stage, for instance.  They can help oncologists determine which drugs will work best, and why a drug – once efficacious – suddenly loses its efficacy.  They can do other things, which I probably don’t understand well enough to try to explain.  In short – a wonderful breakthrough!

But it is possible to be gloomy.  There have been other wonderful breakthroughs, most of which have turned out to be modest advances at best.  Some have turned out to be total flops.. I am reading a book right now that recounts and explains some of these historical things.  So far it has been relentlessly negative; I am sure the author is going to conclude with a wholesale condemnation of cancer research in general.   The book, which I will review sometime in the future, is so depressing that I am going to lay it aside and read a spy novel.      

I was alerted to this article by my friend Kathy O’Briant, mainstay of my group at the Hutch.  Thank you, Kathy.