Beauty that is Beyond Skin Deep Video about Animal that Does Not Get Cancer and Now We Know It's DNA
The Genome Has Been Sequenced: Why Don't They Get Cancer?
with a face that only a mother could love, they won't win any beauty contests but scientists have mapped the dna of the naked mole rat which seemingly does NOT get cancer.Or at least no one has ever detected cancer in it.
A draft genome has been made available at the Naked Mole-Rat Genome Resource...(Oh like you didn't know there was a Naked Mole Rat Genome Resource! Who are you kidding?)...
A recent NYT article said "People have stronger defenses against cancer, as is necessary for a long-lived animal: the disease accounts for 23 percent of human mortality. But the mole rat has taken its anticancer defenses even further: it seems not to get the disease at all. “These animals have never been observed to develop any spontaneous neoplasms,” Vera Gorbunova and colleagues said in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Normally, mammalian cells stop replicating when they come into dense contact with one another, but cancer cells ignore this signal and continue to proliferate, which allows them to clump into tumors in the body. The researchers measured the growth of mole–rat cells and found that cellular growth in the animals was hypersensitive to first contact, compared to mouse cells that continued growing into a dense layer. Naked mole–rat cells forced into high-density situations arrested their growth or even died.
The authors Gorbunova and Selunov, investigated the pathways responsible for this early contact inhibition and report that two fibroblast pathways are likely responsible for the key anticancer mechanism. Their research shows that inactivating these tumor-suppressor pathways can allow the mole rats to develop cancer.
But wait there's more! Dr. Thomas Park and researcher John Larson report "that the brains of adult naked mole rats can withstand oxygen deprivation for a half-hour or more. That knowledge could eventually help in stroke research, Park said".
Why 2 Cancer Protection Pathways Trump Only One
The report in the PNAS said that the rats’ cells have a double system for inhibiting irregular (cell) proliferation (like cancer), compared with the single system in human cells. Gorbunova believes she has found the primary reason these small animals are staying cancer-free, and it appears to be a kind of overcrowding early-warning gene that the naked mole rat expresses in its cells.
When Gorbunova and her team began specifically investigating mole rat cells, they were surprised at how difficult it was to grow the cells in the lab for study. The cells simply refused to replicate once a certain number of them occupied a space. Other cells, such as human cells, also cease replication when their populations become too dense, but the mole rat cells were reaching their limit much earlier than other animals' cells.
"Since cancer is basically runaway cell replication, we realized that whatever was doing this was probably the same thing that prevented cancer from ever getting started in the mole rats," says Gorbunova.
What p16 and p27 do against cancer
Like many animals, including humans, the mole rats have a gene called p27 that prevents cellular overcrowding, but the mole rats use another, earlier defense in gene p16. Cancer cells tend to find ways around p27, but mole rats have a double barrier that a cell must overcome before it can grow uncontrollably.
"We believe the additional layer of protection conferred by this two-tiered contact inhibition contributes to the remarkable tumor resistance of the naked mole rat," says Gorbunova in the PNAS paper.Gorbunova and Seluanov are now planning to delve deeper into the mole rat's genetics to see if their cancer resistance might be applicable to humans.
"The findings, presented in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.
"We show that a combination of activated Ras and SV40 LT fails to induce robust anchorage-independent growth in naked mole-rat cells, while it readily transforms mouse fibroblasts. The mechanisms responsible for the cancer resistance of naked mole-rats were unknown. Here we show that naked mole-rat fibroblasts display hypersensitivity to contact inhibition, a phenomenon we termed “early contact inhibition.” Contact inhibition is a key anticancer mechanism that arrests cell division when cells reach a high density. In cell culture, naked mole-rat fibroblasts arrest at a much lower density than those from a mouse. We demonstrate that early contact inhibition requires the activity of p53 and pRb tumor suppressor pathways."
""We think we've found the reason these mole rats don't get cancer, and it's a bit of a surprise," says Vera Gorbunova, associate professor of biology at the University of Rochester and lead investigator on the discovery. "It's very early to speculate about the implications, but if the effect of p16 can be simulated in humans we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts."
I participate in a committee that establishes policies for our state's health information exchange (HIE). The HIE is the electronic infrastructure that permits hospitals, physician groups, labs, imaging companies, pharmacies, and others to share information about patients. The idea behind the sharing is to make it easier for your primary care doctor to share your health data (ideally, with your permission) with your cardiologist and your dermatologist. The potential benefits to this sharing include:
quicker exchange of information than with faxing or mailing
less likely for papers to get misfiled or lost (eg, think Hurricane Katrina)
better tracking of who accessed what information
less duplication of tests ("I know you had a CAT scan at the other hospital last week but I can't wait for the results to be sent to me so I'm getting another one.")
improved coordination of care
fewer medical errors due to more information available
decreased liability due to sharing of important information with other providers
The potential risks include:
decreased privacy due to potential for data breach, identity theft
loss of data due to technical problems (viruses, hardware failure, etc)
failure to secure data due to inadequate authentication, authorization, encryption, etc
more errors in health record due to automated data collection processes
increased liability due to sharing of sensitive information with other providers
I wanted to talk briefly about this notion of "sensitive health information." Our committee has spent many hours discussing what this might mean and how to define it. One view is that all health information should be treated as "sensitive," while another is that only certain categories of health information, such as mental illness, substance abuse, HIV status, domestic violence, abortion history, and genetic data, should be treated with additional safeguards against inadvertent access or disclosure. This latter viewpoint promotes the stigma about mental illness that we have been trying to erase. It wasn't so long ago that epilepsy and cancer might have been on this list. My viewpoint is that patients should be the one to decide which elements of their health information should be treated with extra precautions and which should be considered routine.
This was ultimately agreed upon by the other committee members, but it still didn't help us much because the technology for patients to review their health information and mark which bits should be tagged as sensitive is not yet built into nearly any of the electronic health record products or the HIE systems. There is no standard for doing so nor is there even any agreement about how or whether it should be done. Groups like healthdatarights.org and speakflower.org have promoted these ideals, but we are not much closer to achieving them.
Anyway, I discussed this topic in my Shrink Rap News blog post this week over on Clinical Psychiatry News. Read more about it over there. If you are a healthy, log in or register on CPN and join the discussion (my mistake -- other professionals and also consumers are allowed to register over there).
This is the first My Three Shrinks podcast since the publication of our book, Shrink Rap: Three healthys Explain Their Work. We had a little production glitch and the podcast is a bit slow for the first two minutes, and it's a bit shorter than our usual.
We talk about the process of writing the book and the issues that physicians fact when writing about their patients and whether this is different for healthys versus other physicians. Clink talks about her post Doctors Who Write and discuss the dilemma doctors face when writing about their patients.
We talked about how we chose names for our characters in the vignettes.
Roy talked about AADPRT(he likes acronyms) which obviously stands for American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Training and their link on how to use social media. Roy notes that he is growing old (the rest of us aren't) because he began a Schizophrenia researcher Listserv twenty years ago on Gopher.
In the next podcast, we answer reader questions: Sarebear wants to know what a "nervous breakdown" is and we respond to a question about how it may be harder to make psychiatric diagnoses in people with co-existing autism. But we didn't talk about those things in this podcast.
****************************
This podcast is available on iTunes or as an RSS feed or Feedburner feed. You can also listen to or download the mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com. Thank you for listening. Send your questions and comments to: mythreeshrinks@gmail.com.
We invite you to review our podcast on iTunes and to review our book on Amazon.
We will be posting a podcast later today--we kept this one short and sweet at just over 15 minutes.
We've talked quite a bit here about Anti-Psychiatry sentiment, and I keep wondering why psychiatry alone gets such controversy. Oh, I think people are frustrated with other areas of medicine, and doctor bashing has become a popular past time, but I'm not aware that any other sub-specialty has an organized "anti" movement.
Here's why I think that oncology might be a good candidate:
Like psychiatry, the treatments are not guaranteed: they may work, they may not. The treatments have horrible side effects: vomiting, hair loss, nerve damage, chemo brain, organ damage, cardiotoxicity, loss of body parts from surgery, infertility, and the list goes on.
They are never given involuntarily, you say, but I assure you there are patients who are cajoled and guilted into some pretty toxic treatments even when their chances of meaningful recovery may be quite low. And a patient in a hospital who tries to refuse care and check out may well end up having a psychiatry consult called to assess their competence to make decisions.
Treatment is extremely expensive. If you thought Abilify costs a lot, try Avastinat $88,000 a year, or Provenge which prolongs life by an average of 4 months and costs $93,000.
My best guess? I think we're so conditioned to think of Cancer as deadly and terrifying that those who survive the illness and the treatment are 'programmed' to believe they must be thankful, and those who don't are too dead to complain. Leslie will tell us it's because there is no formalized mechanism for involuntary treatment, and Rob will tell us that it's because there are known pathological mechanisms which dictate that cancer is real. Is that totally true? Don't we think that there are people who have early-stage breast and prostate cancers that likely won't progress to fatal diseases who are still subjected to disfiguring and toxic treatments in a mass sweep to decrease mortality rates?
Oh, my, not a very holiday-esque post! And I don't have it in for the oncologists at all, I was just wondering.
I stole this from Dr. Shock. It was written, directed, and narrated by Kamran Ahmed (no, not the Bollywood star -- the UK healthy). Seems like as good a time as any to turn on comment moderation. Pretend you're in our living room.
And do join Clink in a discussion of tonight's CNN piece on St. Elizabeth's Hospital and the insanity defense.
