On Library Journal, Lisa Peet posted on the continuing saga of the illegal paper sharing site Sci-Hub, explaining the situation that lead the AAP to censure a university librarian for his comments about Sci-Hub. Many thanks to library student and MSK Library employee Kaitlin Kehnemuyi for bringing this excellent post to my attention.
In 1975 a cat co-authored physics paper (which is now open access), according to this Atlas Obscura post. But wait- there’s more!! Read to the end for the joke from the APA.
A hotly debated topic among clinicians and information professionals is the usefulness of medical websites in providing patient information. Dr. Martin Weiser, MD, the Vice Chair for Education and Faculty Development and the Stuart HQ Quan Chair of Colorectal Surgery at MSK argues that “for patients who feel a loss of autonomy, medical websites help them gain a sense of control at a scary and sometimes helpless time” in his NYT Room for Debate piece. He balances that with the point that many of these websites are not without issues, but at the end of the day it is his job as the clinician to inform and educate the patient about the treatment of their disease.
Dr. Sarat Chandarlapaty, MD, PhD, discusses the role of the PI3K pathway in metastatic breast cancer. A less common mutation than AKT, he states that developing a drug that targets these mutations may help difficult to treat patients.
A new device, the CytoSorb, is a blood filtering system intended to decrease the risk of inflammation, one of the main causes of life-threatening diseases like sepsis. Intensive care therapies currently work as supportive, in order to get to patient back to where they can recover on their own. However, Dr. Neil Halpern, MD, Chief of Critical Care Medicine at MSK points out that ” “what we need are new medicines and technologies that target the root cause of these diseases.”
A wall of 80,000 falling paperclips with a poem written by a young man who lost his battle to cancer designed by Silver Springs, Maryland artist Francie Hester welcomes patients and visitors at the new Josie Robertson Surgery Center. “Wordfall” was created as a memorial to Brendan Ogg from Silver Springs who died of a brain tumor in 2010 at the age of 20. Brendan used poetry as a means to cope with his illness and his poem L’Chaim was featured in “Wordfall”.
Scientists at Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have developed nanorobotic agents with the capability of going through the bloodstream and administering a drug with precision by specifically targeting the active cancerous cells of tumors. Further discussion is found in Nature Nanotechnology.
Cancer survivors have long complained of cognitive decline following chemotherapy. This effect has been dubbed “chemo brain.” A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, set out to investigate the effects of chemo brain over a longer period of time. Their findings provided one of the first animal models to demonstrate the long-term cognitive deficits resulting from a chemotherapeutic treatment used in treating humans for breast cancer. The results were published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.
Cancer overtakes heart disease as number one cause of death in 12 European nations. The report can be found in European Heart Journal.
A randomized study published in the NEJM, found that the MammaPrint test that analyzes the 70 critical genes identified in breast cancer, demonstrated improved prediction of clinical outcomes for early-stage breast cancer in women. The study involved over 6000 patients, 1500 of which were identified as low risk based on genomic factors. These 1500 were later randomly assigned to two groups where one group received chemo and the other group did not. After five years, survival rates were similar.
The New York Times recently published a series of articles that explore the novel uses of immunotherapy to combat cancer: