Check out this great article by Buddhini Samarasinghe on nature.com‘s soapbox series (http://goo.gl/O6csd6). Buddhini explain two barriers to science: the paywall for scientific publications and the jargon-wall. She also describes her efforts in science outreach. If you aren’t following her already, you need to circle her now.
I’ve been thinking of writing a post about OpenAccess journals because I assume that the journals are like the jargon that’s in them. The lay public doesn’t know which journals are reputable and which one’s are so-called predatory journals. Predatory journals send unsolicited emails to scientist, students, etc. saying how great and open their journals are. What they don’t advertise is that it cost quite a bit to publish in some of those journals. My colleague had a situation where he was reviewing a poorly written manuscript and the editor was trying very hard to get my colleague to be more lenient. The fact that, that journal charges $1,000 per manuscript might have been a factor.
Science outreach is one of the reasons I spend a lot of time on G+. It’s one of the reasons I care about G+ as a platform. If you follow me, you might have seen me bellyache about getting notifications from people I don’t have circled and how that interferes with my science outreach (mostly curating #ScienceSunday ). Today I’m going to share an example of why it is important to me for people to be able to notify me about science.
❒ Science Outreach
Michael Davis read an article in TIME magazine (http://goo.gl/elCMSa) and wondered if the claim that chemotherapy would be a thing of the past was true. So he mentioned me in his post and I looked at the article and realized it was another case of sensationalizing some exciting research. The fact that Michael follows my posts enough to trust my opinion about cancer, really pleases me. It is very fulfilling to be able share my knowledge with people who want to learn. It’s interactions like this that make me tolerate any negativity on G+, e.g. trolls. It’s people like Michael that make me want to post more science and get better engagement on my science posts.
❒ Sensational Headlines
The TIME article discusses a recent phase 1-b clinical trial for a new cancer drug. I explain more about it below. The claim that traditional chemotherapy will be a thing of the past is not only premature, it’s also misleading. There will still be cases where current treatment (surgery, radiation, and non-targeted chemotherapy) is an appropriate course of action. Say for example, someone receives a PET scan and it reveals tumors throughout the patient’s body. It doesn’t make sense to biopsy all of those tumors and it is possible that all of those tumors aren’t genetically identical. So some of the advanced targeted therapies would not be applicable. See Buddhini Samarasinghe’s post (The Signatures of Cancerhttp://goo.gl/LmyS0z) to get a sense of the variability in tumors. 21 distinct mutational signatures are discussed.
Many of us have posted about sensationalizing headlines before.
A quick glance at the article suggests they are really trying to say that broad spectrum (to borrow the terminology from antibiotics) are being phased out in favor of targeted therapies. This isn’t really new or news. One example they give is imatinib or Gleevec. Imatinib targets a specific type of enzyme, a tyrosine-kinase inhibitor. You can read the Wiki on it or I can write more later. The important thing is that imatinib builds on knowledge from previous tyrosine-kinase inhibitors like sorafenib, which has an antiangiogenic mechanism. It targets new blood vessels, which the tumor creates. As far as the HIV comment, check out Rajini Rao’s post (http://goo.gl/q4Bk7) if you haven’t already. There’s comments about other gene therapies in there too.
Backing up a little bit, a protein kinase, is an enzyme that’s involved with a process called phosphorylation, where a phosphate group is transferred from a high energy molecule to a specific substrate. A tyrosine-kinase is just a type of kinase where the phosphate group is attached to tyrosine (an amino acid). Phosphorylation is often described as a molecular on/off switch. When a protein is phosphorylated or dephosphorylated it can be switched from on to off or vice versa.
So the new drug in the article, ibrutinib, is a Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor. BTK is essential for the proliferation of chronic lymphocytic leukemia cells. As mentioned in my comment above, it builds on prior knowledge of kinase inhibitors. In my opinion, it’s not a revolutionary breakthrough. It’s an important and fantastic step forward. It is not a silver bullet.
❒ PDX
An example of another targeted drug that’s been around for a while is tamoxifen. It targets estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer. For breast cancer, a biopsy is often taken when there is a suspicious lesion in a mammogram, ultrasound, or MRI. The biopsy might reveal that the lesion is in fact cancer and is ER+. In that case it is reasonable to try tamoxifen. My point here is that targeting is not new, even though the targeting is getting more specific.
A colleague is working on an exciting project called PDX, patient derived xenograft. What that means is that a piece of the patient’s tumor is taken to the lab on ice and implanted in immunocompromised mice. That’s called a xenograft, i.e. grafting from different species. Typically cancer research is carried out on tumor cell lines that are well characterized and have been around for a long time. The problem is that some of those cell lines don’t fully resemble the tumor in the patient scenario. The PDX project has the potential to better model the patient scenario as we know exactly where the tissue came from. More importantly, it allows us to better target that specific tumor. That’s exciting work without making it sensational and it won’t be a silver bullet either as some tumors might not grow in a mouse.
Image source:
V.A. “Vinnie” Musetto “Headless Body In Topless Bar”
Following up on Buddhini Samarasinghe’s knockout mouse post (http://goo.gl/DjWewM) which you should read but I know most of you read it already, here’s a mouse that will knockout scorpions and centipedes. The grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) is an awesome fighter. Besides howling at the moon, they can block the pain from some types of venom.
Nociceptors are sensory neurons that are associated with pain. They used to be called pain receptors but we know now that they are involved with sensing more than just pain. Some venoms bind to the sodium channel in nociceptors, causing intense pain (among other things).
The unique thing about the grasshopper mouse is that it has a mutation that actually uses the venom to block pain, i.e. block the transmission of the signal from the nociceptor to the brain. Now that’s pretty cool.
Hero shrew (Scutisorex somereni): put your back into it
I stumbled onto this amazing story browsing through the BlinkFeed on my HTC One via The Verge http://goo.gl/MQEo8h
Imagine something weighing thousands of times your weight, standing on you? The hero shrew can handle that. I usually don’t like to quote articles in their entirety. However, this is way out of my area and I like the version from The Field Museum news feed.
Over a century ago, explorers in the Democratic Republic of Congo noted a strangely large and hairy shrew – that’s right, a shrew. When they commented on the shrew to the locals, they were told, “We wear this animal as a talisman around our necks, so that we will be invincible.” The explorers, confused as to how such an animal could be thought to make a person invincible, watched in amazement as a full-grown man stood on the back of the shrew for over five minutes, and the animal walked away, unharmed!
Thus, the shrew came to be called the Hero Shrew. Just this week, Field Museum scientists and international collaborators identified a new species of Hero Shrew – the mammal with the most bizarre backbone on Earth.
Its name? Thor’s Hero Shrew.
The remarkable spine of the Hero Shrew is unique among mammals, in that the lower vertebrae are both wider and longer, than those of other mammals. This gives the animal extraordinary strength! In fact, the unique vertebrae of the Hero Shrew make the spine up to four times more robust than other mammals. It’s no wonder the authors gave it a name that invokes Thor, the god of strength in Norse mythology!
Until now, there have been no other species of the Hero Shrew, and the spine has been an enigma to scientists, because it provides no known advantage to the animal. Now, however, scientists suggest that these shrews may position themselves between the trunk and leaf bases of Palms, and use their unique spine to pry the leaf base away from the trunk and gain access to grubs that are otherwise hidden from predators.
The specimen now residing at The Field Museum is a holotype (meaning the single physical example of this particular species that was originally used in its identification), so scientists around the world will use this very shrew as the golden standard for any future research done on this species.
The third image is an example of a hole left behind from a Rhinoceros beetle larvae in a palm tree http://goo.gl/sSYPYy
Based on the hypothesis, the hero shrew would wedge itself on the opposite side of where that hole is (of course the hole wouldn’t be there as the shrew would want it when it’s still a larva).
