The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

Biotechnology, Health and Business in Canada, the United States and Worldwide

Tag Archives: cancer

Friday Science Review: June 4, 2010

New fixes for spinal injury, Staph infection and cancers… Spinal Cord Self-Repair: A natural repair mechanism in our bodies may be the key to treating spinal-cord injuries.  Following a spinal cord injury, there is an increase in expression of serotonin receptors and the receptors are spontaneously active even in the absence of serotonin.  This autoactivation [...]

Friday Science Review: February 19, 2010

Hunks and pigs highlight this week’s research wrap-up… HUNKs Stop Cancer Metastasis: Researchers screening tumour cells found that expression of the enzyme HUNK (Hormonally Up-regulated Neu-associated Kinase) is significantly lower in cancers.  When they reconstituted HUNK into metastatic cancer cells, it decreased their metastastic potential when tested in mouse cancer models.  Its actions block the [...]

Friday Science Review: January 8, 2010

I am starting the new year and decade by recognizing the accomplishments of two distinguished scientists… Two outstanding Canadian scientists were recognized for their valuable contributions to the global research community. Dr. Andras Nagy’s innovative technique to reprogram mature body cells into stem cells – called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells – was [...]

Friday Science Review: December 4, 2009

Universal Cancer Signalling Pathway: This is an interesting new twist on cancer signalling that may make scientists rethink how to tackle the disease.  It is thought that there is no single cure for cancer as the hetergenous disease may arise from mutations in a number of different pathways.  In this report, however, researchers demonstrate that [...]

Friday (the 13th) Science Review: November 13, 2009

No bad luck here in unraveling new genetic and proteomic links in disease… Gene Variants Linked to Hearing Loss:  A genetic link to hearing loss in children who are being treated with the chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, has been identified.  Cisplatin is a widely used anti-cancer drug but one of the harmful side effects is hearing [...]

Friday Science Review: November 6, 2009

Just two stories this week – a cancer pathway and innovative dipsticks… New Relationship between Tumour Suppressor Genes: Knocking out genes in mice believed to play a tumour inhibiting role would intuitively result in rapid cancer development.  However, it was a surprise to McGill researchers that mice lacking the tumour suppressors 4E-BP1 and 4E-BP2 were [...]

Friday Science Review: August 28, 2009

A Montreal flavour this week… Critical link between EGFR and Src oncogenes: On the heels of last week’s Friday Science Review post on Stat3 in breast cancer, Dr. William Muller’s research team at McGill University has published another significant find linking well known oncogenes, Src and EGFR/ErbB2.  Among their results, they demonstrated how Src can [...]

Trends Update — Personalized Medicine: DxS’ Latest Companion Diagnostics Deal

As personalized medicine inches toward becoming the standard of care for cancer, the question of who pays for the genotyping becomes more important.  A deal announced Friday between DxS, a molecular diagnostics company, and Boehringer Ingelheim suggests that pharma companies will end up footing at least part of the bill by paying for the development (and marketing?) [...]

Friday Science Review: January 23, 2009

Interesting science developments in and from Canada this week:

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