Monthly Archives: February 2014

Cancer Research News

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Here are a few highlights of cancer research news that have recently caught my attention:

  • Researchers at Fred Hutchinson found that young women who smoked for at least 10 years are a high risk of developing ER-positive breast cancer.  The full study is published in the journal Cancer.
  • Major study published in the British Medical Journal cast doubt on the value of mammograms. The project involved 90,000 women and spanned twenty-five years.
  • Prostate cancer patients may experience more complications as a result of radiation than those patients that are treated with surgery.  Findings were published in the journal Lancet Oncology.

Please feel free to contact Marisol Hernandez for comments on the latest cancer research news.

Adjusting to Google Glass, Useful Slides Shared via Twitter, and more…

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In this latest edition of blog buzz;

In Between Google Glass and a Hard Place, Librarian and long-time early adopter of new technologies, Jenny Levine discusses her experience of slowly adjusting to using Google Glass.

Bidding has begun between locations in contention to be the future site of Obama’s Presidential Library, where his papers and presidential archives will be housed for future scholars. This story from NPR’s weekend edition discusses potential contenders (including one right here in Manhattan) and the beginnings of the Presidential Libraries.

And now, two amazing resources from the twitterverse;

Korey Jackson (@koreybjackson) of Oregon State University shared this resource for “thinking about computational data review”, Victoria Stodden’s (@victoriastodden, Dept of Statistics at Columbia) slides from a recent conference at UC Davis on the future of scholarly and academic publishing (hashtag #publishperish14), entitled “Reproducibility in Science [;] why all the fuss?” [pdf].

For those of you who are interested in leveraging social media as oncologists and who like myself) missed Robert S. Miller’s (@rsm2800) grand rounds talk, the slides from, “Connectivity, Collaboration, and Disruption: Social Media and the Oncologist“. (hashtag #msk_hcsm14).

Dr. Charles L. Sawyers, Eminent MSK Researcher, Had a Decisive Role in the Development of Three Innovative Cancer Drugs and more…

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  • An article on Charles L. Sawyers, chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at MSK, points out  Dr. Sawyers’ crucial contribution to the discovery of three cancer drugs.  The most recent one, Xtandi, is for the treatment of metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer.  With the development of these three drugs, Dr. Sawyers has helped to bring about a novel approach to cancer treatment.
  • In a study carried out by Jianda Yuan and colleagues of Memorial Sloan Kettering, serum levels of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) of patients with metastatic melanoma were analyzed before and after treatment with ipilimumab.  Patients with high levels of VEGF before treatment with ipilimumab have poorer survival than patients with lover VEGF levels.  Serum VEGF may be a predictive biomarker for ipilimumab treatment. Continue reading →