By Sabrina Tavernise (The New York Times) – In a letter to colleagues announcing his departure as the director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Harold Varmus, 75, quoted Mae West. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor,” he wrote, “and rich is better.”
By Bernard Meyerson (Scientific American) From autonomous drones to emergent AI to digital genomes, this year’s list from the World Economic Forum offers its latest glimpse of our fast-approaching technological future
By Gina Kolata (The New York Times) – Chemotherapy and radiation failed to thwart Erika Hurwitz’s rare cancer of white blood cells. So her doctors offered her another option, a drug for melanoma. The result was astonishing.
By Gina Kolata (The New York Times) – More than 200 scientists working on an ambitious federal project have begun to understand the complicated system of switches that regulates genes, turning some on and others off, making some glow brightly while others dim.
By Michael S. Malone (The Wall Street Journal) – The National Academy of Sciences warned a decade ago that young scientists in biomedicine were struggling to launch careers for lack of research money. A NAS report released in January says the situation has grown more “arresting” in all fields:
By Marta Falconi (The Wall Street Journal) – ZURICH—British drug maker AstraZeneca PLC unveiled agreements on Thursday that should enable the pharmaceutical company to tap into a promising, nascent gene technology aimed at making drugs more precise.
By David Kroll (Forbes) – Earlier this afternoon, I had read that in tonight’s State of the Union address, President Obama was to discuss the fruits of the Human Genome Project in the context of what’s become known as precision medicine.
Each fall, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation holds their annual retreat where their Fellows come together for scientific exchange and collegiality. We are pleased to share videos of the 2012 and 2014 classes of Damon Runyon-Sohn Fellows.
By Heidi Ledford (Scientific American) – A mammoth US effort to genetically profile 10,000 tumours has officially come to an end. Started in 2006 as a US$100-million pilot, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is now the biggest component of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, a collaboration of scientists from 16 nations that has discovered nearly … Continued
By Julie Grisham, MS, Science Writer/Editor | Monday, November 17, 2014 – For people with advanced breast cancer, several clinical trials have shown that experimental targeted drugs called PI3K inhibitors can temporarily halt the spread of disease. But eventually the tumors learn to outwit the drugs and begin growing again.