We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end to them.
Once you have these notes in your heads,
you can sing a million different tunes by mixing them up.
When you know the notes to sing,
You can sing most anything.
~Do-Re-Mi (The Sound of Music)
For cancer cells, genetics alone is poor indicator for drug response
"Genetics are permanently heritable, while these protein levels are temporarily heritable," says Sorger. "But this temporary inheritance can make all the difference in the world when it comes to the effectiveness of certain medications."
"We knew that there were clearly factors at work here that were not genetic," says Spencer. "Genetic resistance would remain uniform in subsequent generations. But the factors at work here were clearly more dynamic."
"For decades biologists have had this notion that cells produce proteins in orderly, uniform ways, like an assembly line, but they don't," says Sorger. "Rather, cells produce proteins in fits and starts, and the timing and degree varies from one cell to the next—even cells that are identical in every way. This randomness is something that we're just beginning to appreciate."
Harvard Medical School (2009, April 14). For Cancer Cells, Genetics Alone Is Poor Indicator For Drug Response. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/04/090413083417.htm
Just as no two humans are the same, a Purdue University scientist has shown treating mice more as individuals in laboratory testing cuts down on erroneous results and could significantly reduce the cost of drug development.
Mice have long been used as test subjects for treatments and drugs before those products are approved for human testing. But new research (done by Joseph Garner, a Purdue assistant professor of animal sciences, and professor Hanno Würbel of the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen in Germany) shows that the customary practice of standardizing mice by trying to limit environmental variation in laboratories actually increases the chance of getting an incorrect result.
"In lab animals, we have this bizarre idea that we can control everything that happens," Garner said. "But we would never be able to do that with humans, and we wouldn't want to. You want to know if a drug is going to work in all people, so you test it on a wide range of different people. We should do the same thing with mice."
Garner said human testing uses a broad range of subjects, giving scientists an idea of how a drug or treatment might affect different types of people. But scientists often use mice that are basically genetically identical and try to limit internal and external environmental factors such as stress, diet and age to eliminate variables affecting the outcome.
Purdue University (2009, March 31). Mice And Humans Should Have More In Common In Clinical Trials. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/03/090330142422.htm
The mouse is a stalwart stand-in for humans in medical research, thanks to genomes that are 85 percent identical. But identical genes may behave differently in mouse and man, a study by University of Michigan evolutionary biologists Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang reveals.Have you ever wonder is there any connection between the failure of a drug or compound in clinical trials with the price of a marketable drug?
"Everyone assumes that deletion of the same gene in the mouse and in humans produces the same phenotype (an observable trait such as presence or absence of a particular disease). That's the basis of using the mouse to study human disease," said Zhang, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
"Our results show that may not always be the case." "To our surprise, 22 percent of the 120 human essential genes are nonessential in the mouse," Zhang said. "I expected there would be some, but I never expected the percentage to be so high."
University of Michigan (2008, May 15). Mice Can Do Without Humans' Most Treasured Genes. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/05/080514124110.htm
When mouse testing creates a false positive, leading a researcher to believe a drug has worked, the drug could be sent to further animal testing and human clinical trials at a cost of millions of dollars. Drugs that fail in clinical trials cannot be marketed, and the money is wasted. To recoup those losses, drug companies must increase the costs of marketable drugs.So, what is your comment??????
"Drugs aren't expensive because they're costly to make," Garner said. "They're expensive because the company has to recoup the costs of the other drugs that have failed in human clinical trials. Numbers are hard to estimate, but for every drug that reaches the marketplace, well over 100 have been abandoned at some point in their development." Purdue University (2009, March 31). Mice And Humans Should Have More In Common In Clinical Trials. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 4, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/03/090330142422.htm
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have created the first genetic blueprint of domestic cattle, saying on Thursday the map may lead to tastier beef, better milk and even new insights about human health.Regarding cancer, I am quite curious how this scientific finding helps to prevent or reduce cancer incidence in human.
The Hereford cow's is the first mapped livestock animal sequence, and the researchers think it will help explain how cattle evolved, why they ended up with a four-chambered stomach, and why they almost never get cancer.
"Having the genome sequence is now the window to understanding how these changes occurred," said Harris Lewin of the University of Illinois, who worked on the research published in two reports in the journal Science.
The cancer stem cells, is a small subset of cancer cells, which constitute a reservoir of self-sustaining cells with the exclusive ability to self-renew and maintain the tumor. These cancer stem cells have the capacity to both divide and expand the cancer stem cell pool and to differentiate into the heterogeneous nontumorigenic cancer cell types that in most cases appear to constitute the bulk of the cancer cells within the tumor.In order words, they are......
Source: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/66/19/9339
are cancer cells (found within tumors or hematological cancers) that possess characteristics associated with normal stem cells, specifically the ability to give rise to all cell types found in a particular cancer sample. These cells are therefore tumorigenic (tumor-forming), perhaps in contrast to other non-tumorigenic cancer cells.These cancer stem cells, currently, is believed as one of cause of cancer recurrent after anti-cancer therapy been stop when a cancer patient been certified as cured from cancer. This is mainly because these cancer stem cells still remain in the cancer patient as these cells are resistance to most conventional chemotherapies widely used to date.
Source: Wikepedia
Viewing these phenomena, till late, very little is known about all these cancer stem cells and researches are on-going to understand them further and to discover novel therapy that specifically targeting these cells.
Caramel, in fact the caramel that I am referring to is Caramel (2007), a Lebanese film directed by Nadine Labaki. It is a wonderful movie, is a movie of love, of how much a girl and women can scarify for their love ones.
In order to please a married man, his lover was willing to scarify her dignity; to ensure her husband doesn’t question her virginity, she opted for an cosmetic revirgination surgery, to ensure her mentally-ill sister was well take care of, she scarified her long-waited love, and of course, she became brave to try out something new that she was afraid of, all these, are what a girl and a women would do merely just to keep a relationship.
On the other hand, men often never truly appreciate all these and just merely let the lover suffered by letting her constantly waiting for him, been ignorant and let-go too soon and easily.
When I write until here, suddenly LEVONELLE wrote by Xialu Guo, which I posted on Thursday, April, 9, 2009; suddenly came to my mind......
LEVONELLE, Xiaolu Guo (2002)
If your man
Lives at the end of a road
Or a section of the railway terminal
That is the most dangerous thing to have
If the road is blocked
Or the railway is derailed
You will never be able to reach your love
~LEVONELLE, Xiaolu Guo (2002)
I have made such a mistake years ago, perhaps that is why I really touched while watching Caramel......
