The Thing from outer space v the biological programming error

garym said:

Speaking of aliens...
Sorry T, I couldn't help myself, hope this doesn't spoil what I found to be a very enlightening approach to a proper mental aspect regarding cancer. The humor from this may elude you over there, different story here.

THE YEAR WAS 1947


This clears up a huge question --
The year was 1947.
Some of you will recall that on July 8, 1947,
a little more than 64 years ago,
numerous witnesses claim that
an Unidentified Flying Object, (UFO),
with five aliens aboard,
crashed onto a sheep and mule ranch
just outside Roswell , New Mexico .
This is a well known incident
that many say has long been covered-up
by the U.S. Air Force,
as well as other Federal Agencies
and Organizations.

However,
what you may NOT know is that
in the month of April, year 1948,
nine months after the historic day,
the following people were born:

Barrack Obama Sr.
Albert A. Gore, Jr.
Hillary Rodham
William J. Clinton
John F. Kerry
Howard Dean
Nancy Pelosi
Dianne Feinstein
Charles E. Schumer
Barbara Boxer
Joe Biden

This is the consequence
of aliens breeding
with sheep and jack-****.

I truly hope this bit of information
clears up a lot of things for you.
It certainly did for me.

And now you can stop wondering why
they support the bill
to help all Illegal Aliens.

Alienation
Dangerous ground Gary - politics best avoided on this sort of forum.

The Roswell story is by now well known the world over, helped I guess by the likes of the X Files. [I still find it amazing to picture Gillian Anderson as a pain-in-the-arse, confrontational, purple-haired punk teenager growing up in Crouch End, London, not far from my original home.]

Did you know that Kevin Spacey has described Bill Clinton as "one of the shining lights" of the political process? (But then maybe you don't share my view of Spacey!)

icemantoo said:

Birther movement
The alledged facts in the above post about who was born in April , 1948 is not based on any facts, only fiction. Much like the Birther movement. Check the facts out for yourself.


Icemantoo

Birther movement
Wow - thanks for the pointer iceman. I suppose the Birther "movement" is something akin to the rocking motion of a paranoid schizophrenic? Do you have a special looney-breeding program over there?

alice124 said:

agreement here
I'm with those believing there could be a traumatic time or experience linked to cancer birth/growth. A couple of months ago I had naievely asked about whether a tumor's age could be determined and was rather surprised that more specific information on tumor growth was not available, only general estimates of growth.

Maybe it's stupidity on my part, but I wouldn't think that the ability to determine age of the cancer/tumor would be too far in the future. With DNA and RNA advances seeping into numerous aspects of our lives, identifying the age of cancer doesn't seem too big a jump.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part, but I believe it's in OUR future.

Tumour growth rate
Improbable Alice. The average rate is around 1/3 cm per year but there is a wide spread, depending on histology for one thing.

Chromophobe is "indolent" so the rate may well be, typically, more like 1/4 cm per year. So, my (first) tumour being chromophobe and 9cm may have been developing for something like 36 years. This would probably not be the case for Chris Boone, who will be getting married in a couple of weeks time. At 21 cm, at a similar rate, his would have been developing since about 50 years before he was born! So I think we can safely assume that his grew a good deal faster than that.

Moreover, growth rate can change dramatically. For instance, mine had become sarcomatoid with the result that the second tumour (similarly sarcomatoid and necrotic) was not visible at my first, open, op on 5th December but when removed (exactly 3 weeks ago) was a hard nodule of 2.5 cm = zero to 2.5 cm in less than 4 months - say 8 cm/year!

In addition, necrotic tissue probably has a different specific gravity from highly vascular live tissue and other compositions. Factor in, further, the fact that we now know there can be varying cell types in the same tumour and it becomes more complex still.

In fact, take a look at almost any recent paper in, say, "Recent Molecular Oncology Articles" per Elsevier at

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/molecular-oncology/recent-articles/

to give you some presentiment of how mind-blowingly complicated the whole domain is. Articles summarised there such as, I suggest, in particular

"Molecular pathology" by Stanley R. Hamilton (Available online 23 March 2012)
"The challenge to bring personalized cancer medicine from clinical trials into routine clinical practice: The case of the Institut Gustave Roussy"
"Molecular imaging for personalized cancer care"
"Omics and therapy – A basis for precision medicine" [this is on cancer genomics]
"Discovery of small molecule cancer drugs: Successes, challenges and opportunities"
"Bioinformatics and systems biology"
"Moving molecular targeted drug therapy towards personalized medicine: Issues related to clinical trial design"
"Individualization of cancer treatment from radiotherapy perspective"
"Cancer biomarkers"
"The biology of personalized cancer medicine: Facing individual complexities underlying hallmark capabilities"
"Systems pathology: A critical review" [which forecasts "an acceleration of preventive medicine as a result of the coupling of personal genomics with systems pathology"]
"Exploitation of the propulsive force of chemotherapy for improving the response to cancer immunotherapy"
"The toxin component of targeted anti-tumor toxins determines their efficacy increase by saponins" [re side-effect limiting]
"Germline pharmacogenomics in oncology: Decoding the patient for targeting therapy" [cheering stuff here' like:


"The recent introduction of total exome sequencing has enabled the identification of patient tumor-specific epitopes generated through somatic point mutations, raising the possibility of targeting tumor antigens in individual patients which are even more tumor-specific. Transcriptional profiling and immunohistochemistry analyses have revealed a subset of patients with a pre-existing T cell-inflamed tumor microenvironment. This phenotype may be predictive of clinical outcome to immunotherapies and offers the possibility of a predictive biomarker. Further analysis of these tumors has identified a set of defined immune suppressive factors which themselves are being targeted with new immunotherapeutics, already with interesting early phase clinical trial results ...... generating a rich set of opportunities for the specific immunotherapy of cancer." Stirring stuff indeed!!!]

"Molecular-targeted nanotherapies in cancer: Enabling treatment specificity"
"Non-coding RNAs in cancer initiation and progression and as novel biomarkers"

This last, especially, reminded me of your speculation and I think this summary would disabuse anyone of supposing that we have much of a handle on this business at the present time:

"Cancer represents a complex group of heterogeneous diseases. While many cancers share fundamental biological processes (hallmarks of cancer) necessary for their development and progression, cancers also distinguish themselves by their dependence on distinct oncogenic pathways. Over the last decade, targeted therapies have been introduced to the clinic with variable success. In truth, single targeted therapies may be successful in only a subset of malignancies but insufficient to address malignancies that often rely on multiple pathways, thus evading single targeted agents. Investigators have recently identified potentially functional components of the human genome that were previously thought to have no biological function. This discovery has added to the already established complexity of gene regulation in the pathogenesis of cancer. Non-coding RNAs represent key regulators of gene expression. Improved knowledge of their biogenesis and function may in turn lead to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of malignancies and eventually be leveraged as diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic targets. MicroRNAs (miRNAs or miRs) for example, have the capacity for the regulation of multiple genes and thus redirection or reprogramming of biological pathways. However, several other members of the non-coding RNA family may be of equal biological relevance. In this review, we provide a perspective on emerging concepts in the clinical application of miRNA and other non-coding RNAs as biomarkers in cancer with an eye on the eventual integration of both miRNA and other non-coding RNA biology into our understanding of cancer pathogenesis and treatment."