A 3D model of human breast cancer

This has been covered in a few places like the BBC and ScienceDaily. It seems that some researchers at Queen Mary College in London have recently come with a non animal 3D human breast cancer model.

This is interesting at more than one level. Their research was funded by a research charity (Dr Hadwen Trust) that supports the development of methods that avoid animal experiments. Working with rats is not that satisfactory for ethical reasons and also because there are many cases in which the results of rat experiments cannot be extrapolated to humans (seems we are not so similar in some respects after all). It is also much more realistic than just taking some human cancer cells and studying them on a petri dish.

Being capable of performing experiments using realistic 3D models quickly and efficiently is one of the holy grails of theoreticians since it would make experimental validation of our models much easier (confusingly enough what theoreticians call model, eg, equations or computer rules, is not what experimentalists understand as a model, eg. rat, arabidopsis or drosophila). This validation is quite complicated as I have already mentioned in another post. Making this validation easier and more convenient will go a long way in terms of making our work more reliable and quantitative.

The links between scientific disciplines

I have just found this amusing article about how some guys took more than a million and a half scientific papers from 776 different branches of science and came with the graph included in this post. You can find a larger version (5Mb) of it at this site. It shows how often papers from different disciples are cited by the same paper so it can give a measure of what fields are more likely to inspire interdisciplinary work.

Most of the research seems to be in Medicine and biochemistry (including all the -omics stuff). Math seems to be more unconnected to many other branches of science that I thought but to be honest I am not very sure about the methodology. More about it can be found in Mapofscience.com.

Telomeres, cancer and aging

One quite fascinating thing in animal biology is the question of immortality or, to be more precise, the lack of it. While most unicellular organisms can divide for as long as they have the luck to find resources and space to do so, human cells can divide only a limited amount of times (approximately around 50 times, although this does not apply to stem cells that can divide an unlimited amount of times). In principle the limitation in divisions for most human cells is due to a mechanism that has been evolved and is not an intrinsic limitation. The cancer hypothesis is that the limitation makes the appearance of cancer more unlikely. If a cell is limited to just a few divisions, if it acquires a mutation that mutation is unlikely to spread to far.

The reason for this limitation are the telomeres, situated at the end of the chromosomes, that get shorter each time the cell divides. Once these telomores reach a critical size and become to small the cell will enter a state called senescence by which they will not divide again.

This is an interesting link in which they talk about this and how in the next few decades we might know enough about the effects of limited cell replication in human life expectancy, how to increase it (maybe for ever) and how to do that avoiding nasty side effects (like increased probability of dying from cancer). The website in which this is hosted is covering all sorts of news, many of them of dubious scientific interest, but the information in the link looks sound.

On the other hand in a more reliable source (PNAS) there is a nice study on how telomere dysfunction can cause genetic instability. They work on a disease known as Werner syndrome but it is quite useful stuff for cancer research. This Werner syndrome results in people aging prematurely and researchers at the Salk institute have found how extra short telomeres can be the source of the problem.

We are big news!

We are big news. Ok, I am personally not included but it seems that the theorical medicine community starts to be noticed.

I browse a tech-news website, called slashdot, very often. One of the entries today is the following: "Computer simulations of cancer growth". There they talk about research performed by Sandy Anderson (Dundee, part of the Marie Curie Network in which I am involved), Vito Quaranta (Vanderbilt, I talked about him in my post on the Lyon workshop in late September) and colleagues. They have just got a paper published in Cell of which I will talk about it in a later post.

At any rate, it looks impressive than sites such as Slashdot report on mathematical and computational models of cancer research. The audience of Slashdot is reputed to be very competent in matters of IT but I could see that some of them are medically competent too (I mean, enough to convince a computer scientist like myself, not necessarily more than that), even if, as in many news in Slashdot, people tend to concentrate on what they want to say regardless of the news they are supposed to comment on.