Online Medicine

HOUSTON -- (April 29, 2008) -- The lesson learned in eradicating dandelions from your yard could apply in treating breast cancer, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears online today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

"It's not enough to kill the dandelion blossom and stalk that appear above ground," said Dr. Michael Lewis, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology and a faculty member in the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Cancer Center at BCM. "You have to kill the root beneath the soil as well."

In a study involving women with breast cancer, he and colleagues at BCM showed that while conventional anti-cancer drugs can kill the bulk of breast cancer tumors, they leave behind many of the breast cancer stem cells from which tumor cells arise, setting the stage for the tumor to come back.

"What we found is that one reason chemotherapy frequently does not work is that you kill the bulk of the tumor but leave many of the stem cells behind," said Lewis. "It appears that these cells, by their nature, are resistant to the effects of anti-cancer drugs."

However, treatment with the drug lapatinib and anti-cancer drugs appears to kill both the tumor and the stem cells, reducing the threat of relapse in patients whose tumors carry a protein marker called HER2, Lewis said.

In their study, he and colleagues took biopsies from the tumors of patients before and after treatment.

The study had two parts. In the first, 31 patients whose tumors did not have the HER2 marker received conventional chemotherapy. In the second part of the study, 21 patients whose tumors carried the HER2 marker, received treatment with lapatinib and two other common breast cancer drugs. (The HER2 marker meant that the tumors would be susceptible to lapatinib.)

The researchers stained the samples to highlight the subset of tumor cells that contained the stem cells, which can be identified by the presence of certain markers on the cell surface. This enabled them to estimate the percentage of stem cells in the biopsy. In addition, stem cells in the laboratory can grow into colonies of cells that scientists call mammospheres. Because of this, they could also measure those to estimate what proportions of stem cells are present in a sample.

In the group that received conventional chemotherapy, the number of tumor cells decreased markedly. However, after the treatment, the proportion of cancer stem cells (identified by special markers and mammosphere formation) to differentiated tumor cells was greater than before treatment. In other words, there was a higher percentage of stem cells because the chemotherapy killed the regular tumor cells but left stem cells behind.

In the group that received lapatinib, the number of tumor cells again decreased dramatically. However, the percentage of breast cancer stem cells did not change or even went down slightly (although the change did not reach statistical significance). Consistent with this, the percentage of patients who received lapatinib had significant tumor shrinkage at greater rates than that seen in patients who received conventional therapy.

"The tumor shrank dramatically," said Dr. Jenny Chang, associate professor of medicine at BCM and medical director of the BCM Breast Care Cancer Center. "But in contrast to treatment with conventional chemotherapy, the relative proportion of stem cells did not go up. This means the stem cells were killed off with the same frequency as the bulk of the tumor. This is the first time this has been demonstrated."

Finding drugs that work specifically against stem cells is a course for the future, said Lewis. He plans to start by characterizing the markers specific to breast cancer stems cells, and inhibiting them one-by-one.

Others who took part in this work include: Xiaoxian Li, Jian Huang, Carolina Gutierrez, C. Kent Osborne, Meng-Fen Wu, Susan G. Hilsenbeck, Anne Pavlick, Xiaomei Zhang, Gary C. Chamness, Helen Wong and Jeffrey Rosen, all of BCM.

Funding for this work came from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Emma Jacobs Clinical Breast Cancer Fund, Helis Foundation, NCI Breast Cancer Special Program of Research Excellence, National Cancer Institute, Glaxo Smith Kline, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

This article is available at http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/.

During your pregnancy it’s common to experience a range of emotions from anxiety, irritability, to pure joy.  The yoga breath is calming, centering, relaxing, and highly beneficial for keeping your emotions in balance.  Try this simple breathing exercise below.

Balancing Breath
Seated comfortably (you may place pillows underneath you or sit in a chair), close your eyes and sit with your spine tall.  Inhale a deep “complete breath” in through your nose and exhale the breath completely out of your lungs with your mouth closed.  As you inhale imagine the breath rising to the top of your head, and as you exhale imagine the breath sinking to your tail bone.  Repeat the breath a minimum of 8 times or as long as needed.

HOUSTON -- (April 27, 2008) -- A new technique that marries a fast-moving laser beam with a special microscope that looks at tissues in different optical planes will enable scientists to get a three-dimensional view of neurons or nerve cells as they interact, said Baylor College of Medicine scientists in a report that appears today in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

"Most microscopes can only study cell function in two dimensions," said Dr. Gaddum Duemani Reddy, an M.D./Ph.D. student at BCM and Rice University and also first author of the study. "To look at different planes, you have to move your preparation (of cells) or the objective lens. That takes time, and we are looking at processes that happen in milliseconds."

To solve that problem, he said, they developed a "trick" to quickly move a laser beam in three dimensions and then adapted that laser beam to the multi-photon microscope they were using. That allowed them to "see" the neuron's function in three dimensions, giving them a much better view of its activity.

A multiphoton microscope looks much like a conventional, upright microscope but it has an adaption that allows it to look at tissues in sections. A conventional multiphoton microscope does that very slowly, he said.

"With ours, you can do it very quickly. We are starting to see how a single neuron behaves in our laboratory," he said. The next step, he said, will be to use to it to look at clusters or colonies of neurons. This will enable them to actually see the neuronal interactions.

"At present, the technology is applied in my lab to study information processing of single neurons in brain slice preparations by 3D multi-site optical recording," said Dr. Peter Saggau, professor of neuroscience at BCM and the paper's senior author.

He is collaborating with two other labs on using the technology in other ways. In one, he said, researchers plan to use the technology to monitor nerve activity in the brains of lab animals in order to study how populations of neurons communicate during visual stimulation. Another study attempts to use the technology to monitor stimulation of the acoustic nerve optically. Those scientists hope to reinstate hearing in lab animals whose inner ear receptors do not work.

Others who took part in the research include Keith Kelleher of the University of Houston and Rudy Fink of BCM.

Funding for this work comes from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

The full article can be found at http://www.nature.com/neuro/index.html.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re tired you crave high sugar foods and coffee?  It’s because your body is needing sleep, but you’re forcing it to stay awake.  In turn you’ll crave coffee and sugary foods to keep your body “up”.  The problem is coffee is a diriuretic so it’s easy to mistake hunger for thirst, and craving sugary foods are high in empty calories that result in packing on the pounds.  The solution?  Get more zzzz’s!  Most of us need about 8 hours to function at our best.  If you can’t get all 8 hours during the night, fit in a cat nap instead of doing an unnecessary task.  Now that you know that lack of sleep can lead to unwanted pounds, there’s more motivation to get your sleep!

BANGALORE: Life sciences company Avesthagen Limited today announced the launch of clinically validated bioactive "Teestar", aimed at promoting wellness through better blood sugar management.

Teestar, made from 100 per cent natural ingredients, would be available as dietary supplements as well as in cracker (biscuit) categories in the third week of May, the Bangalore based company's Founder, Chairperson and Managing Director, Dr Villoo Morawala Patell, told reporters.

Avesthagen said it used two of its patent technologies to develop Teestar.

They are 'Adept', a database that brings together traditional medicine with modern systems biology and 'MetaGrid', an algorithm that enables constituent profiling of the plant extracts, the company said.

"In the field of functional foods, we made the next level achievement by introducing Teestar, the product evaluated after understanding science behind activity and designing the clinical studies to prove the concept of keeping all parental variables in check using Avesthagen technology", Patell said.

The company said whole wheat crackers, enriched with Teestar, the proprietary ingredient that has been clinically proven to signficantly reduce blood glucose levels, are being launched through its subsidiary, Avestha Good Earth Foods Pvt Ltd.

Meanwhile, Patell would be bestowed the award of Officier de L'Ordre National du Merite (Officer of the National Order of Merit) by the Ambassador of France to India Jerome Bonnafont here this evening.