The Senate passed a bill banning asbestos last week; it now goes to the House.
One feature: the law would require the National Institutes of Health to establish an asbestos-related disease research treatment network. Yeah!
The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to scientists who pioneered gene manipulation techniques. Their discoveries allow researchers to produce mice called “knockout” mice, which miss particular genes. Over the last couple decades this method has found wide use in the research into the causes of cancer and many other diseases.
ASCO put out a page called “Targeting Molecular Defects May Be the Future of Cancer Therapy”. I don’t know about that choice of language - “molecular defects”? Are there such things? Anyway, the article is mostly about stem cells. Michael Clarke of Stanford pointed out that cancer stem cells may be used to diagnose metastasis in the future, and that treatments may target cancer stem cells. Jeremy Rich discussed the potential inhibition of CHK1 and CHK2 to target cancer stem cells, as the stem cells would be more susceptible than the tumor mass.
In this month’s Scientific American, Peter Duesberg talks about a new theory of cancer genesis. He speculates that changes in chomonsones cause cells to go malignant, not mutations of genes.
Duesberg has a reputation as an outsider in scientific circles because of his maverick theory about the cause of AIDS, but he established his credentials by being one of the first scientists to discover the role in mutations of key genes involved in cell function regulation. His new theory could get around some of the problems with the dominant gene theory of cancer, including the fact that asbestos does not cause genetic mutations, but it does cause cancer.
It’s long been known that more men than women get mesothelioma, and at this was because men tended to work in the jobs where there was asbestos exposure. Pipefitters, shipbuilders, etc. - these were male dominated jobs. Now a study at the University of Western Australia shows that men are actually more likely to get the cancer than women, even accounting for differences in asbestos exposure. Men had more than four times the rate of mesothelioma as women, after accounting for cumulative asbestos. The researchers also found that the people exposed to asbestos as a child were less likely to develop fatal mesothelioma than people exposed as adults.
There is an unusual mesothelioma epidemic in Cappadocia, Turkey. An abstract published in Nature reports that an incredible 50% of deaths in three villiages were due to this form of cancer during the period studied. The area has natural deposits of the mineral erionite. Research showed that certain families were more likely to develop mesothelioma than others.
The Centers from Disease Control just released a report on their sampling of asbestos levels in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attack in New York. It doesn’t sound good. Many of the people caught in the dust cloud have experienced respiratory problems. Mesothelioma has such a long latency period that it will be decades before we know the scale of the crisis for sure, but the EPA found a lot of asbestos dust over a wide area.
Particularly distrurbing was the small size of the asbestos dust particles. The report notes:
“The particle size determines how deeply
a particle can travel into the respiratory tract. Respirable particles with diameters of 4 microns or less (PM4)
are very small particles that can be breathed in and can travel deeply into the air sacs of the lung.”
Alimta is made by Eli Lilly; it is their brand name for the drug pemetrexed. Pemetrexed belongs to the group of medicines called antineoplastics or antimetabolites. The FDA has approved its use in treatment of malignant pleural mesothelioma.
