Final Exit: This doctor sees death daily – but should he help suffering patients end their lives?
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| Cover of Final Exit |
Full article: click here
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Full article: click here
Friday, December 6, 2013
Are 'Super-Enhancers' The Key to Cancer Therapy?
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| Image via CrunchBase |
"Nancy Simonian, MD, CEO, Syros Pharmaceuticals elaborates on the breakthrough discovery of super-enhancers, large groups of transcriptional enhancers that drive expression of genes that define cell identity. "
Link to video here.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Tumor Paint: Changing the way surgeons view and fight cancer (CNN)
"Olson and his team were able to identify a small protein, or peptide, in the scorpion's venom and use it to produce Tumor Paint. They grew a brain tumor on a mouse's back and injected the "paint" into a tail vein; within an hour, the cancer was lighting up. Tumor Paint was 500 times more sensitive than an MRI, and it didn't just work for brain cancer but breast, skin, prostate and colon cancers."
Link to full article here.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Dexamethasone a Potential Treatment for Cancer-Related Fatigue (JOCO)
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| Dexamethasone (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Highlight:
"Prior research demonstrating the benefit of steroids in advanced cancer patients is limited, and there are no validated studies using fatigue as a primary outcome,” he said. The study he led (senior author was Eduardo Bruera, MD) used validated tools in a controlled setting that met National Cancer Institute and National Comprehensive Cancer Network criteria. Moreover, the study demonstrated that dexamethasone at 4 mg twice daily was effective in treating cancer-related fatigue for a period of two weeks."
Link to full article here.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Watson Arrives in Medicine: First Stop Oncology and Chemotherapy Recommendations
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| Jeopardy vs Watson Computer History Museum (Photo credit: iChris) |
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| English: IBM's Watson computer, Yorktown Heights, NY (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
From iMedical Apps"
" IBM and MD Anderson announced the development of a prototype of a platform designed to provide treatment recommendations for and help guide the management of oncology patients."
"By identifying and weighing data-driven connections between the attributes in a patient’s profile and the knowledge corpus of published medical literature and guidelines in Watson, MD Anderson’s Oncology Expert Advisor can provide evidence-based treatment and management options that are personalized to that patient, to aid the physician’s treatment and care decisions."
Read the full story here.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Tricyclic Antidepressant Imipramine May Combat Small Cell Lung Cancer (Stanford University School of Medicine)
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| English: Cancer cells photographed by camera attached to microscope in time-lapse manner. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Excerpts:
"...The phase-2 trial is now recruiting participants with small-cell lung cancer and other, similar conditions like aggressive gastrointestinal neuroendocrine cancers. The “repositioning” of an existing drug to treat a disorder other than the one for which it was originally approved is an example of how extremely large genetic and biological databases are changing the face of medicine."
"...Specifically, the drugs activated a cellular self-destruct pathway that killed the cancer cells."
"...The pipeline works by scanning the hundreds of thousands of gene-expression profiles (gathered by multiple researchers and stored in large databases) across many different cell types and tissues — some normal and some diseased, some treated with medications and some not. Alone, these profiles may not mean much to any one investigator or group, but when viewed together, researchers can pick out previously unsuspected patterns and trends."
"Jahchan tested the effect of a tricyclic antidepressant called imipramine on human small-cell lung cancer cells grown in the laboratory and growing as tumors in laboratory mice. She found that the drug was able to potently activate a self-destruction pathway in the cancer cells and to slow or block metastases in the animals. The drug maintained its effectiveness regardless of whether the cancer cells had previously been exposed, and become resistant, to traditional chemotherapy treatments. Another drug, an antihistamine called promethazine, identified by the bioinformatics screen, also exhibited cancer-cell-killing abilities."
"Further investigation showed that the drugs appear to work through a class of molecule on the cancer cells’ surfaces called G-protein-coupled receptors, but the researchers are continuing to investigate exactly how the drugs specifically kill neuroendocrine cancer cells."
See more at: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/september/antidepressant.html#sthash.OzJhnFka.dpuf
Link to full article here.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Lab Notes: Chemo Patients Going to the Dogs
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| English: Author: Andrew Ryzhkov Rotation of the model of the Paclitaxel molecule generated by the ViewMol3D program. http://redandr.ca/vm3/viewmol3d_gallery.htm (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
From Dog Food to Chemo?
"A chemical commonly used as a preservative in dog food prevented the development of peripheral neuropathy associated with treatment with paclitaxel (Taxol) in a mouse model.
The majority of patients given paclitaxel for malignancies such as breast cancer experience painful neuropathy, which can be dose-limiting and can seriously impair quality of life. So a group of researchers from Johns Hopkins led by Ahmet Hoke, MD, PhD, screened some 2,000 compounds for neuroprotective effects in various cell lines.
They identified the antioxidant ethoxyquin -- approved by the FDA for use in animal feed 50 years ago -- as having the most pronounced effects. When they co-administered ethoxyquin with paclitaxel in mice, the intraepidermal nerve fiber damage that predictably occurs in the animals' paws didn't develop.
Hoke's team then were able to identify heat shock protein 90 as the molecule that mediated the neuroprotection through its effects on the levels of two proteins known as ATXN2 and SF3B2.
These findings suggest that ethoxyquin and its derivatives might be suitable for development to help prevent chemotherapy-induced nerve damage in the clinical setting, the researchers suggested in the Annals of Neurology."
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