Linda, interesting geese, and flowers - in England
Note monkey puzzle tree at left.
Mine is bigger
Boy, the Bellingham Herald is morphing into the Pacific
Northwest Journal of Medicine; at least its Sunday edition is looking that
way. Today they printed a long article
entitled “Exceptional Responders” guide
researchers to cancer therapies. Naturally they didn’t write it; rather,
they simply reprinted it verbatim from the Washington
Post. Here is the latter’s article;
it has better adds attached:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/looking-for-answers-in-cancers-exceptional-responders/2015/06/13/9cf0ec78-0571-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html
In a small nutshell, people at Dana Farber in Boston decided
to investigate why a woman with a nasty disease, anaplastic thyroid cancer got better and so far has stayed better
ostensibly by taking a drug called everolimus, whereas all the other patients
in her clinical trial died taking the same concoction. Gene sequencing being hot stuff these days,
the Dana Farber researchers combed her DNA and located the very mutation that
seemed to be causing her problems.
Everolimus apparently helps overcome the effects of this mutation. So far, so we’ve seen all this before.
The next thing the D.F. people did, however, was
creative. They sequenced the DNA of
other of their cancer patients – and found another woman, suffering in this case
from ovarian cancer, who had the same mutation.
They gave her everolimus and, you guessed it, she got better, too. Very encouraging.
The article ends with the usual cautions: not everybody that
takes everolimus for a cancer having this mutation will get better; cancers
often are home to many, many mutations, and some of them may contribute. Also, it is not certain that the improvement
wrought by everolimus is permanent.
Maybe it will only buy time – but time, lived healthily, is precious.
Surely this is more strong evidence that the way to conquer cancer is to thoroughly understand it. Progress is being made.
By the way, I wrote about this same discovery almost three
years ago. At the time the “exceptional
responder” was called an “outlier”. Read it yourself:
Now here is a new research wrinkle that really catches my fancy. As far back as 2012 I wrote about the possibility that the study of the genomics of “outliers” (now called “exceptional responders”) might provide a window into the biochemical world of cancer. Well, work has gone on apace, and now there even is an annual conference on the subject. I am excited. Read this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2017/exceptional-responders-progress?cid=eb_govdel