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Nanoparticles get boost from baseball charity
Baseball players are passionate about winning. Scientists are just as passionate about finding answers. One Major League Baseball team has found a way to use their winning drive to help give researchers a competitive edge against cancer.
Through their official charity, ThinkCure, the Los Angeles Dodgers are boosting cancer research at City of Hope and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. And ThinkCure recently announced a new set of grants aimed at knocking cancer out of the park.
Jacob Berlin, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at City of Hope, is leading one of the studies that received funding. He’s focusing on building a better cancer treatment using nanoparticles.
Berlin builds nanoparticles — tiny tubes each about 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair — with great care. They have to be small enough to get into cancer cells easily, but big enough to carry a payload, such as chemotherapy, into the malignant cells where it is most effective at killing the cells.
Berlin is building different types of nanoparticles using different kinds of atoms including gold and carbon. His aim: to see which type gets taken in by cancer cells the most. The right type of nanoparticle then can be used as a targeted cancer killer.
Part of his efforts also will go toward tracking these nanoparticles using magnetic resonance imaging, usually called MRI, and other methods. This can help prove that the nanoparticles are actually delivering their cancer-killing payload where it’s needed — inside cancer cells — rather than into healthy tissue. And proving that can help speed the new treatment strategy through government approvals, so patients who can benefit from it can get it.
New colorectal cancer screening guidelines mean testing is no longer “one size fits all”
Doctors generally recommend getting regular colorectal cancer screenings starting at age 50, but newly published screening guidelines underscore the importance of tailoring the screening strategy to individual risk factors.
Donald David (Photo by Kaminsky Productions)
The American College of Physicians reviewed screening guidelines from several trusted medical organizations and turned them into a simple message: While most people should get tested every 10 years starting at age 50, people considered at high risk for colorectal cancer should start screening at age 40. They should be screened more often than the average patient, too.
The key is for patients to talk to their doctor about their family history and other conditions that might increase their risk for developing colorectal cancer early.
“Patients with a first-degree relative who had colon cancer, or those with multiple second-degree relatives who had colon cancer, need to be screened earlier and more often — every one to five years, depending on the situation — because those who develop cancer progress to a more advanced stage and develop cancer earlier than the general population,” says Donald David, M.D., chief of the Division of Gastroenterology at City of Hope. This is particularly important if these relatives developed cancer when they were younger than 50.
Physicians learn more by paying attention to failure
Regardless of their years of experience, doctors who learn from their failures as well as their successes become better at picking the right treatment for patients, according to a research team including City of Hope’s Meghana Bhatt, Ph.D.
Magnetic resonance image of a brain.
Scientists led by Read Montague, Ph.D., director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, studied 35 experienced physicians within a variety of non-surgical specialties. They scanned physicians’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the doctors’ brain activity as they made treatment decisions.
Brain imaging showed a clear difference in how physicians think. Some physicians activated their frontal lobes when things didn’t go as expected and their recommended treatments failed, Montague says. That activation showed that the doctors learned from their failures. These physicians gradually improved their performance.
In contrast, the low performers activated their frontal lobes when their selected treatment worked for a patient, says Bhatt. They ignored their failures and only learned from their successful cases, which confirmed what the low performers falsely thought they already knew about which treatment was best.
Only remembering successes and ignoring failures leaves physicians unable to abandon faulty ideas, but these physicians probably can be trained to think more like high-performers, the researchers say.
Notes Montague: “These findings underscore the dangers of disregarding past failures when making high-stakes decisions.”
The research was published in PLoS One, the Public Library of Science open-access journal.
It wasn’t me, it was my evil twin
The stem cell we’re most familiar with is the friendly version that may eventually help us treat brain tumors or cure macular degeneration. Stem cells can make copies of themselves almost forever, and those copies can either continue the duplication or turn into specific new cells that replace old, worn-out ones. It’s one way the body repairs itself.
Chronic myelogenous leukemia cells (Credit: Difu Wu)
Cancer cells can copy themselves almost forever, too. But unlike good stem cells, they steal resources from the healthy cells around them to continue growing out of control. Many researchers think that cancers have stem cells of their own that exist to only make more cancer cells.
Leukemia, for one, has cancer stem cells that can survive most chemotherapy and radiation treatments. These leukemia stem cells hide away in safe pockets in the bone marrow to build up a new swarm of leukemia cells that can start the cancer all over again. Patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) can take drugs for years to suppress these cancer cells, but the treatment often comes with heavy side effects. And sometimes leukemia grows immune to the drugs.
The best hope for a cure without years of drug treatment is killing off those hardy leukemia stem cells.
Ravi Bhatia, M.D., director of the Division of Hematopoietic Stem Cell and Leukemia Research, WenYong Chen, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology, and research fellow Ling Li, Ph.D., discovered a key defense mechanism that helps the leukemia stem cells stay so invincible. They published their findings in the journal Cancer Cell.
The team found that CML cells pump out a huge amount of a protein known as SIRT1. This is where leukemia stem cells get crafty. SIRT1 likes to turn off a gene known as p53, which acts as a security guard for the body against cancer. Normally, when the DNA in a cell is damaged — whether it was simply worn down or harmed by toxins — the p53 gene gets turned on to eliminate the potentially cancer-causing problem: It makes the faulty cell kill itself.
When the researchers cut off SIRT1 in the lab, p53 came roaring back and took out the leukemia stem cells. City of Hope scientists aim to turn those findings into a therapy that tackles CML at its source.
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