Striking the Heart of Hydra with miRNA

Cancer has long been depicted as a nasty crab.  Now Colin Barras describes it as a “distant animal ancestor, a ‘living fossil’ from over 600 million years ago.”  If cancer is an organism, it is an alien in our bodies.  An alien believed by many to be driven by cancer stem cells on an engine of endothelial-mesenchymal transformation (EMT) phenotype. 

Understanding resistance to targeted cancer therapies via systems biology

On a good day only a small fraction of patients completely respond to modern cancer therapies targeting defined targets, such as EGFR, VEGFR, etc.  The tumors escape, cancer becomes resistant, not only due to accumulation of mutations in the target, but due to reliance on alternate cancer cell survival pathways.  EGFR signaling network is a good example of various pathways cross-talking with each other, creating redundancies and feedback loops.  Robust alternate survival pathways result in poor prognosis for patients.  

Random Finds: A Roadmap of Cancer Systems Biology by Edwin Wang

A Roadmap of Cancer Systems Biology, by Edwin Wang

". . . When an accident occurs on a busy road during rush hour in a big city, such as Montreal or New York, traffic is blocked for a short time. Soon, however, drivers begin to turn around and use alternative roads to reach their destinations. A road map of a city is a web, a collection of intertwined roads that allows for identification of alternative routes. Increasing evidence (see Chapters 4-7) shows that, similar to roads, molecules in cells are also networked. This structure suggests that biochemical pathways are interconnected, which may allow cancer to bypass the effects of a drug. . ." (Read full article at Nature Precedings, 2010, here or click here)

Cancer is (NOT) a modern, man-made disease

Last week, what started as a press release by the University of Manchester to publicize an opinion article by its faculty, and picked up by some ‘reputable' media (like Telegraph), led to a tsunami of rebuttals and jabs all over the blogosphere.