Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

What We Talk About When We Talk About Curing Cancer

Posted on Tue, Mar 31, 2015 @ 05:01 PM

Last night, the three-night documentary series "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies" based on Siddartha Mukherjee's bestselling book premiered on PBS. In the first episode, the filmmakers traced the disease's history from a reference in a 15-foot, 4,000-year-old Egyptian medical parchment (under cures it reads: "There is none.") to the present, at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, where two families are facing unimaginably difficult decisions about how to treat their children's leukemia.

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Tags: cancer, cancer research, research

Rolling the Dice on Cancer

Posted on Tue, Jan 06, 2015 @ 03:00 PM

Last week, the journal Science published a paper by Johns Hopkins University cancer geneticist Bert Vogelstein and biostatistician Cristian Tomasetti reporting that two-thirds of all cancers are unavoidable.

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Tags: cancer research, stem cells

Venter's Human Longevity Project - Academic vs. Private Genomics Round 2?

Posted on Fri, Mar 14, 2014 @ 12:07 PM

Craig Venter, the scientist who made a name for himself more than a decade ago by challenging the NIH-funded Human Genome Project, has a new venture. Last week he announced Human Longevity, Inc. The company, according to their press release, is “focused on extending the healthy, high performance human life span” and is going to “tackle the diseases associated with aging-related human biological decline”.

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Tags: cancer research, bioinformatics, Genomics, Craig Venter

Cancer Awareness... Ladies First?

Posted on Thu, Nov 10, 2011 @ 06:00 AM

When you hear the word “cancer,” the type that often rests front of mind in the modern era is breast cancer. You can’t escape references to it in popular culture because it is everywhere. Entire merchandising lines of pink-themed items, special events, races, walks, fundraisers and friendraisers abound throughout the year. There is support, there is acceptance, and there is undoubtedly awareness—all leading to ample financial backing for research and treament.  

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Tags: cancer, cancer research, cancer awareness, Movember, no-shave November, cancer statistics, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mens cancer, Movember foundation

An Ambitious Plan for Understanding Cancer

Posted on Thu, Oct 13, 2011 @ 06:00 PM

The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) recently announced an exciting study designed to understand how and why patients respond differently to treatments in multiple myeloma. Multiple Myeloma is a type of blood cancer for which about 20,000 new cases are diagnosed every year in the United States alone. The five-year survival rate is anywhere between 40-70%, depending on how early the disease is caught. There are a variety of treatments including therapeutics and stem cell transplants, but not all patients respond to treatment.

The MMRF was involved in funding a pilot study that used next-generation sequencing technologies on multiple myeloma. The results of that study, which looked at 38 patients, were published in March in the journal Nature. They found a number of recurrent mutations in the cancer cells from different patients. This is a promising result as it indicates that there could be subtypes of the disease that might be appropriate for targeted therapies.

This new study, called CoMMpass, will enroll 1,000 patients and apply next-generation sequencing technologies to look further at the molecular basis for the disease. These technologies are becoming affordable enough that complete sequencing of DNA and RNA from large cohorts of cancer patients has become feasible. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) are beginning to apply these techniques to many different cancer types.

But what separates the MMRF's effort from those projects is their commitment to following patients over longer periods of time and capturing the rich clinical data that is available with frequent follow-ups. TCGA and ICGC both capture some clinical data from the patients who they sequence, but it is typically limited to the specific point in time when the samples were gathered. The MMRF study will keep in touch with patients for at least 5 years so that their progress can be tracked as they are treated. This will make it possible to find connections between their different responses to treatments and potential relapses, and the molecular changes in DNA and RNA in their cancer cells.

I hope we see more of this type of study in the future. I suspect that the combination of a large number of patients, detailed molecular information and comprehensive clinical data will shed light on cancers of all types.

-Will FitzHugh, 5AM Solutions

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Tags: cancer research, cancer study, multiple myeloma research foundation, MMRF, multiple myeloma, cancer genome atlas, international cancer genome consortium, coMMpass

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