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Slashback: Cancer, Cats, ICANN
Australia's mystery cat demystified. Bitsy Boffin writes "Back in October Slashdot ran a story from the Herald Sun about the shooting of a mystery "Big Cat" in Australia. At the time the tail (the only part the hunter brought back) of said cat had been sent off for DNA testing. The Herald Sun reports the findings of those DNA tests which show that the mystery cat wasn't a leopard or jaguar, just a really, really big feral cat."
US backs Microsoft in Korean antitrust case. CODiNE writes "Stating that 'Korea's remedy goes beyond what is necessary or appropriate to protect consumers' the Justice Department's antitrust division rejects the recent Korean FTC ruling. 'Sound antitrust policy should protect competition, not competitors, and must avoid chilling innovation and competition even by "dominant" companies.'"
RedHat follows Indian investment trend. An anonymous reader writes "After several other companies have decided to invest in the Indian economy it looks like RedHat will be following suit. According to the article, RedHat plans on hiring about 300 people for an investment of about $20M."
ICANN community slams VeriSign deal. Rob writes to tell us that an overwhelming amount of the ICANN community recently took a stand against a proposed deal that would allow VeriSign to raise the price of .com domain names by up to 50%. VeriSign accused ICANN of illegally "regulating" its business. ICANN had previously blocked services VeriSign wanted to launch on the grounds that they would harm the stability of the internet.
Clinical results from cancer-killing virus. just___giver writes "Results from human clinical trials show that terminally ill patients with aggressive metastasized cancer are receiving benefit from the recently covered virus that kills cancer when it is administered intravenously. They still have higher doses to test in this ongoing study. This safe, naturally occurring, unmodified virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Numerous other third party studies show that the Reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers. It is patented, easy to manufacture in large quantities, and even increases the effectiveness of conventional chemo and radiation therapy. Numerous phase 2 studies are being planned for 2006." OncolyticsBiotech also has a short video describing the process.
In the ever hot battle to be included in the Oxford American Online Dictionary (login reqd.), Podcast beat out Lifehack and Rootkit (It will be added in 2006)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
- You patent the method of isolating it
- You patent the method of delivering it
- You patent its use as a cancer treatement etc.etc.
Even McDonalds is investing in India now.(100 million dollars approx)
Article
So all you guys hoping that you can get a job at McDonalds asking "Do you want fries with that"... think again;);););).
Um, google for "florida panther".
Now, maybe that ranger was clueless or maybe by "the region" he meant central Florida -- the Florida panther's range is more southwestern Florida -- but it's not like the critters couldn't walk from A to B if they had a mind to.
If that is what you saw, consider yourself lucky to have seen it. (There probably wasn't much risk to you -- if the behaviour is anything like the mountain lions around these parts (Colorado), it'd leave two adults on bikes alone. A kid or a dog on its own, on the other hand...)
-- Alastair
I sent the link to my friend who's a cancer researcher, and this was his response:
good concept, but i don't think that it is a real solution for all cancers. while the concept of viral delivery is what most gene therapeutics aims for, selectivity is often a problem. it is interesting that this company uses reovirus to administer 2-aminopurine to cells to inhibit the ras pathway, which is often upregulated in cancer cells. the other problem is that this technique absolutely cannot be used on immunocompromised patients that have cancer (e.g., an AIDS patient with Kaposi's sarcoma, or an organ transplant patient who happens to be unlucky enough to develop cancer while under immune suppression therapy--a common method for organ transplant procedures). however, there are a few specific issues that are limiting to this approach.
1) i'm not sure whether it's true that all human cells have the viral response that is efficient enough for total viral clearance. i'm not all that familiar with reovirus... if it were the case that all normal human cells could completely neutralize and clear reovirus, then reovirus would not be able to continually inhabit the respiratory and bowel systems of human beings, as this company claims (because our cellular responses would have totally cleared it out).
on the other hand, if the reovirus is a natural part of the flora of our respiratory and bowel systems, then profusing patients with this reolysin would in theory cause a crapload of damage to those systems of our body (because then the engineered virus could "naturally" replicate and spread through those areas.
2) also, reolysin targets the ras pathway....while ras is often either constitutively active, or overexpressed in cancer cells, it is unfortunately not the only gene which is upregulated. many other genes are often overexpressed. these genes are called oncogenes (or tumor promoting genes). there are several other genes that are often overepressed, which are separate from the ras pathway. furthermore, there are another class of genes called tumor suppressor genes, which are often inhibited or permanently lost from cancer cells. unfortunately, stopping the ras pathway will not stop cancer cells which are driven by these phenomena.
however, i think that on a case by case basis, this may be a good therapeutic in combination with other therapies. otherwise, i think that using this therapy alone may be a way of selecting for cancers which do not depend completely on the activated ras pathway for propagation.
in any case, if their statistics are true from their clinical trials, it sounds promising, but definitely more basic science and clinical studies need to be done to ensure that this is a safe therapy for general cancer use.
another interesting and developing technology in both britain, and our institute as well as i think two or three other places in the US, is called peptide homing. basically our ex-ceo and another major british bigwig scientist have been mapping out the human body by protein sequence signatures that are specific to every organ, tissue, and even the specific blood vessels that pass through a specific organ. so rather than use viruses (which can often mutate and do things that we don't want), we use these nanoscopic spheres that are coated in antibody that specifically seeks out a certain protein sequence (kind of like a ball covered in velcro). the little spheres can hold payloads of anti-cancer chemicals or protein inhibitors which are then released at the target site. the limiting issue at the moment is how to get specificity of cancer cells. while these little nanospheres can deliver the drugs/inhibitors to a very specific area, it is ideal to have exact cell specificity. so scientists are now working really hard to identify surface molecules displayed on the membranes of cancers cells, but not normal cells.
The exact blurb in the article summary was posted on the yahoo finance message board for ONCY, see here. The post asks for people to spread the word. When accused of attempting to pump the stock, he replies Well the last time I got published it added a few million to the market cap. here.
There are also some funny comments asking what kind of editor would post a review like that... well of course slashdot would!