I had a meeting about a year ago with the head of the university's cancer research center, and she told me they had just found a gene that showed a predisposition to get breast cancer. They were looking at it from a detection standpoint, but now I hope they're also looking at it from a drug delivery standpoint.
This is just an awsome result. The results are dramatic and amazing in the few people it helps.
posted
I think the gene testing has to be done after the cancer manifests - it's looking for a particular mutation that causes the cancer cells to replicate rapidly. So a similar test for breast cancer would probably not be directly related to the pre-disposition test.
It does hint at highly-targeted cancer treatments in the relatively near future, though. Very exciting. I expect this will perk up interest in a lot of drugs that are only successful sometimes.
posted
well, actually, the breast cancer gene she's probably referring to is BRCA1. It can be used as a screening tool, but having the gene doesn't mean you will get breast cancer:
"so far, we can only test for 2 of them, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Your risk of getting breast cancer if you carry either of these breast cancer gene faults could be as much as 85% by the time you are 55 years old. Up to 85 women out of every 100 that carry a faulty breast cancer gene will have developed breast cancer by the time they are 55. " (from here
Though, only 5% of new breast cancer patients have the BRCA1 gene, though.
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posted
That's why I said predisposed instead of DEATH IS COMING YOUR WAY.
Dag, I know there's a lot of room between the two, but if this is the approach to designing a drug, that seems like a good place to start looking.
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celia: I wasn't responding to you, silly. I certainly didn't mean to imply you had gotten anything wrong.
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I know, I just wanted to use all caps for something today.
Dag, feel free to expand on that. Or have I managed to miss the thread that was on. I was close to having a research project with clinical trials, but I'm much happier working with cells than with people.
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Anyway, I went to two ASCO annual meetings. Most of our work was setting up and taking down computers in the booths, so I had time to visit some of the talks. The one I remember most vividly was the vision of developing aboslutely personalized cancer treatment, where cancer cells from the particular patient are genetically analyzed and a compound specifically targeted at that cancer would be used. He said there would be something like several hundred different compounds just for adenocarcenoma of the breast. The little I know about this was from the background portion of that speech.
Obviously, we're not even close to this right now. But it's fascinating to think about. So the stuff I put in my first post is really the only level of knowledge I have.
Dagonee P.S. what I liked best about systems analysis and data modeling was how much you can learn about so many different subjects. Construction loans, environmental cleanup, military budget generation - it was fascinating.
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