Blog Buzz: July 8 – August 15

Can you guess the theme of this mid-summer Blog Buzz?

Last month, Myriad sued companies that had released competing BRCA tests in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on the patenting of human genes. Timothy B. Lee of Wonk Blog discussed the two universities that also signed on to these lawsuits because of their financial interests in patents and licensing with Myriad (and scolds them). Now one of the companies, Ambry Genetics, is countersuing Myriad for acting in bad faith to maintain a monopoly. A clear explanation and links to the case are on The Pathology Blawg.
Apple lost the e-book price fixing case and the Department of Justice later proposed guidelines on how to enforce the ruling. Publishers have since filed a brief arguing against the DOJ’s suggestions, and David Pogue wrote that the end of the color Nook means trouble on the e-book horizon.
Have you seen this fascinating Nature News item “Archaeology and the Milk Revolution”? A genetic mutation allowed some people to digest milk and just a few thousand years later, roughly one third of all people can digest milk. WOW!
Check out this ScienceDaily item on a study of librarians’ attitudes toward search engines and how it changed over time along with their professional identity.

Cancer Research News: July 31 – August 13

MRI allows for real-time gene therapy for brain cancer, performed at the University of California, San Diego.
Some autistic patients have a mutation of the gene PTEN, which can lead to cancer as well.
In a recent editorial in JAMA, authors suggest the word “cancer” be eliminated altogether from some common diagnoses.
From PLoS Medicine, there is research that proposes new statistical models for cancer decision-making. An editorial co-written by MSKCC’s Dr. Andrew Vickers has also been published.

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Mark

MSKCC’s Dr. Larry Norton was quoted in a U.S. News & World Report article about the resulting debate that occurred after a panel of experts writing in the July 29 online edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association expressed that widespread cancer screening programs turn up too many growths that would not progress to a lethal stage and are considered “indolent.”
Visceral pleural invasion (VPI) significantly increases the risk for recurrence and reduces overall survival (OS) in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), reported MSKCC’s Prasad Adusumilli and co-authors in a June 2013 article published in Chest.
The RBC Decathlon benefiting MSKCC, visited the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square.