Stuart Buck with a fascinating piece on the seemingly simple but deceivingly hard process of replicating studies. Two labs were collaborating on a breast cancer study, and ran into surprising challenges getting the same results with (what they thought were) the same inputs:
They were frustrated: “Despite using seemingly identical methods, reagents, and specimens, our two laboratories quite reproducibly were unable to replicate each other’s fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) profiles of primary breast cells.”
They tried everything: The instrumentation. The “specific sources of tissues…, media composition, source of serum and additives, tissue...
In my practice, we typically encourage average-risk individuals to get a colonoscopy by age 40, but even sooner if anything suggests they may be at higher risk. This includes a family or personal history of colorectal cancer, a personal history of inflammatory bowel disease, and hereditary syndromes such as Lynch syndrome and familial adenomatous polyposis.
I was diagnosed in 2017 during a colonoscopy (age 35 at the time). It was stage IV by the time it was seen, in my case the disease was in the sigmoid colon. Even with the...
This talk from Jonathan Lim gives a good overview of how the newest treatments for cancer work — radiation/chemo, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, and ecDNA.
I wrote about my experience with immunotherapy and how it’s different in The Infinity Machine a couple months ago, but this video gives a good animated visual example of how it works.
This one is part book review and part reflection on some personal experience, a chance to write about some science related to a harrowing past experience.
A couple of years ago I had a run in with genetics-gone-wrong, a life-altering encounter with cancer that would’ve gone much differently if I was older or had the run-in in the wrong decade. The short version of that story (which I still plan on writing more about one day on this blog) is that I made it through the gauntlet. A stage IV diagnosis, 6 months of chemotherapy, and 2 major surgeries, and...
Dr. Keith Flaherty is an oncologist specializing in targeted therapy treatments, with a background in studying and treating varieties of melanoma. I listened to this extended interview with him on Peter Attia’s The Drive podcast, which was an excellent deep dive into lots of oncology subjects.
Keith dives into the topic of immunotherapy, probably the most exciting recent development in cancer therapy, and also provides us a rundown of his notion of a different approach to cancer that attacks all the essential pillars of cancer growth and survival.