- According to an American Cancer Society report, cancer is the number one cause of death in the Hispanic community.
- One breast cancer subtype shares many genetic features with a hard-to-treat ovarian cancer.
- Here’s a video of Dr. Harold Varmus addressing the effects of national debt and the federal budget on cancer research.
- The National Cancer Institute has an in-depth interview with Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos about the recent ENCODE research project.
- Certain genes may cause faster disease progression in obese patients with prostate cancer.
Resource Highlights: ClinicalTrials.gov
Clinicaltrials.gov has a new and improved interface with added features. For detailed expanations of the enhancements, take a look at the NLM Technical Bulletin on the makeover.
ClinicalTrials.gov is the authoritative source on demographic, PI contact, and trial type information pertaining to registered clinical trials worldwide. The revamped interface offers a more organized homepage and an intuitive results screen. In addition, there is an easily accessible help section on how to use the search results list. This added information allows users to feel comfortable manipulating and filtering their results without blindly doing so.
The view of each study record has also been altered to include more space and tabs for more specific information about trial itself. Again, there is a help page on how to read a study record. Users of ClinicalTrials.gov can feel more comfortable getting information from the resource with these added informational sections.
Give the new ClinicalTrials.gov interface a try the next time you’re looking for RCT information on a specific treatment or intervention. The resource can be accessed from the Library homepage by searching within the DATABASES tab or from the catalog (Tri-Cat) by searching for ‘clinicaltrials.gov’ as a keyword.
Blog Buzz: September 15 – September 21
Catching my eye this week…
From The Daily Scan, ENCODE Goes to Court shows the ripple effect of the project’s recent findings. Did flawed communication of complicated new science lead to distortions in the media and now the legal system as well? Yikes! How can scientists work to ensure that the public – journalists and lawyers in particular – have a clear understanding of what new findings mean for all of us?
The NY Times Bits blog covered the new app updates rolled out by Twitter this week.
Another of their blogs, Well, posted a story about the difficulties in effective pain treatment for cancer patients.
And for some Friday fun…The 2012 Ig Nobel Prizes, celebrating “achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think”, were awarded this week. Visit Improbable Research to learn about this year’s winners (along with pony tails, government reports, chimpanzee bottoms and salmon brains).