Reading time: 5 minutes Ryan Ripsman For most people, developing cancer is the result of bad luck. For people with cancer predisposition syndromes cancer can be an almost guaranteed part of life. Cancer predisposition syndromes encompass a wide variety of disorders that all increase a person’s likelihood of developing cancer. There are many different... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Anthony Tao In a world polarized by ethnopolitical tensions, we may be comforted to think of science as a stonewall against ethnic and social biases ‒ to imagine that scientific data speaks with an impartial voice. However, this is far from the case. The history of modern science is plagued with... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Sneha Das We are our genomes! Our genome is the DNA comprising roughly 3 billion genetic letters, called bases, that appear in a specific order to make us humans. The DNA encodes messages to make proteins and other biomolecules that work in concert to perform important bodily functions. But sometimes this... Continue Reading →
Namrata Nilavar Reading time: 5 minutes During the COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers have ‘simulated’ the progression of the pandemic, which often involves researchers using a computer program that allows them to understand how the pandemic might pan out. These programs can help us predict ‘real-world’ scenarios. Similarly, we can simulate or imitate the progression of... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Vicky Tan Cancer severity and therapy responses can be influenced by both the cell of origin and its location. Melanoma is a skin cancer that arises from pigment-producing cells, called melanocytes. Melanoma is predicted to become the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in Australia, while in the US, 100,000 new cases... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Gabby Budziszewski Proteins, the molecular machines that perform functions within our cells to keep us alive, are all encoded in DNA, but only 1-2% of our three billion base pairs of DNA encode proteins. For many years, the other 98-99% of DNA was referred to as “junk” DNA. However, we now... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Keighley Reisenauer One of the “hot button” topics right now in the cancer therapeutics industry is precision medicine. This is a practice whereby a tumor’s genetics, immune landscape, and biomarkers are compiled and evaluated holistically in order to more accurately make treatment decisions. Breast cancer especially has benefited from the targeted... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Aishat Motolani Cancer is a heterogeneous genetic disease notorious for dodging several bullets of treatments. Tumors can develop in different organs and tissues of the body. As a result, there are over 100 types of cancers according to the National Cancer Institute. One of the current approaches pursued to solve cancer... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Suchitra Mitra Normal cells grow, age, and ultimately die to be replaced by new cells. Cancer cells, on the other hand, experience cell cycle malfunctions and grow out of control to become invasive, spreading undesirably and harmfully. This anomalous cell proliferation is a consequence of genetic alterations, or changes in the... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 6 minutes Aishat Motolani What if I say a floating DNA in the blood could broadcast a glimpse of a diseased system’s future, particularly that of cancer? Diagnosing cancer commonly involves the use of invasive procedures, such as tumor tissue biopsy. This involves the examination of tissues extracted from a primary or metastatic... Continue Reading →
Nisitha Sengottuvel Reading time: 4 minutes A study by Mitchell and colleagues published in Clinical Cancer Research sought to understand how the genetic differences between African Americans and European Americans could be changing the way lung tumors behave. In order to answer this question, the researchers looked at seven different Baltimore hospitals that had about... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Chris Wang Unlike the Merriam Webster definition of promiscuous, describing a kinase inhibitor as promiscuous actually refers to the number of kinases it inhibits. The more promiscuous an inhibitor is, the higher number of off-targets it has. Traditional drug development strategies avoid promiscuous compounds because off-target effects can lead to side... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Rachel Cherney Six feet. Two meters. This is the length of DNA we have in each one of our cells. That’s almost the height of Michael Jordan! But those six feet of DNA need to fit into a tiny space that is between 5-10 micrometers. To put it into perspective, that's... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Daniel Zhong Before we believe headlines proclaiming “Cancer is cured”, it is crucial to understand that developing a therapy that universally cures all cancers is highly unrealistic as our knowledge surrounding mechanisms of cancer progression advances. While we do have non-curative treatments for some types of cancer such as chemotherapy and... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Varshit Dusad Gene therapy has rapidly become one of the most promising new medical developments of our time. It has significant advantages over traditional therapies including the potential for one-time dosage instead of recurring treatment and higher specificity compared to traditional chemotherapy. Cancer is a genetic disease! It occurs when normal... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Aishwarya Subramanian Breast cancer has shown to be a really aggressive condition. About 12% of the women in the US are known to develop invasive breast cancer, where the disease spreads into surrounding healthy tissues [a]. Now it is well established that breast cancer is a very heterogeneous disease. Genome studies... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Jessica Desamero From the start, our mission here at OncoBites has been to share the complicated nature of cancer with our readers and to shed light on breakthroughs in understanding and treating the disease. One of our biggest messages has been that “cancer” is really a family of different but related... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Varshit Dusad There is no denying that cancer is a genetic disease and genetics is hereditary. So is cancer hereditary as well? Unfortunately, the answer is yes! If your ancestors had cancer, you have a higher risk to get cancer than someone who does not have cancer in their family history... Continue Reading →
Taylor B. Poston Childhood acute leukemia is the most common pediatric cancer in the developed world. It accounts for one-third of all cases and affects 1 in 2000 children under the age of 15. More specifically, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common pediatric leukemia and case numbers have been increasing steadily at 1%... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Rachel Cherney At Oncobites, we write about current and cutting edge cancer research and how various lifestyles may affect cancer risk. However, we don’t often talk about the types of data that are generated from cancer research or how they can be used. Large informative data sets can be used to... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney CRISPR-Cas9 is the molecular gene editing system that has inspired hopes for a solution to genetic disease. By studying how bacteria use the CRISPR-Cas system to defend themselves against bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), scientists have developed methods to use those same molecular scissors to cut out human genes... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 6 minutes Manisit Das Sometimes double agents can be critical players in changing the course of conflicts, wars, and history. If you are a Potterhead like me, you are probably aware of how Professor Severus Snape played an important role in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. He instigated many of the major... Continue Reading →
Varshit Dusad Imagine a dystopian world. Here, some citizens of an otherwise well-functioning state have gone rogue and are running an anti-national agenda. They are always plundering the natural resources meant to be evenly distributed among the population. They are quite cunning as they start slowly by deviating from the laws of their natural order... Continue Reading →
Manisit Das In earlier OncoBites articles, we discussed how genetic testing is increasingly used to guide cancer management. Cancer arises due to changes in our DNA sequences that make up our genes, which we refer to as gene mutations. By analyzing the genetic signatures within the tumor, clinicians can make better-informed choices to streamline the... Continue Reading →
Varshit Dusad 'All models are wrong, some are useful!' - George Box The advancement of biological research relies on understanding how the different moving parts interact with each other, forming an integrated system. To better understand a system we often resort to models which help us develop a logical framework of these interactions, offering us... Continue Reading →
Yitong Li How to treat cancers has always been one of the biggest challenges in modern medical practice. While current chemotherapies and radiotherapies have shown significant progress, not all patients survive treatment, and only a portion of those who survive do so without suffering from significant trauma. Hence, early diagnosis and safer treatments are the... Continue Reading →
Rachel Cherney Most of us have been affected by cancer, whether we ourselves or someone we know has been diagnosed. It can be caused by various lifestyle habits, external or environmental factors, and genetics, and it’s extremely prevalent; as of 2015, 1 in 6 deaths worldwide was due to cancer. As described in a previous... Continue Reading →
Jason Tetro What causes cancer? It’s a question that has been asked for millennia (Sudhakar, 2009) yet no concrete answer has been found. In the 4th Century BCE, Hippocrates believed the answer lied in the presence of “black bile,” which to him was one of the four major humors in the body. Over the centuries,... Continue Reading →
Manisit Das Not long ago Tamara mentioned in her OncoBites article that it is often hard to determine what factors drive cancer. Even after a mutation responsible for fueling cancer growth is identified, we do not always know how that mutation contributes to tumor formation. Understanding these mechanisms is however quite important. As we gain... Continue Reading →
Beth Rogoyski Most would consider a blood test a bit of a pain in the arm, but except for the fantastically needle-phobic, generally not something that would keep you awake at night. Contrast that to the sentiments that spring to mind when you hear the word chemotherapy, and the two couldn’t seem more dissimilar. Despite... Continue Reading →
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