Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

biomarker

Divide and conquer vs lung cancer

Doctors are using a “divide and conquer” strategy against lung cancer, and in some corners of the battlefield, it’s working. A few mutations – genetic alterations in the tumor that don’t come from the patient’s normal cells — have been found for which drugs are effective in pushing back against the cancer.

However, most lung tumors do not have one of these mutations, and response rates to conventional chemotherapy in patients with advanced lung cancer are poor. Generally, only around 20 percent of patients show a clinical response, in that the cancer retreats noticeably for some time.

Johann Brandes and colleagues at Winship Cancer Institute have been looking for biomarkers that can predict whether an advanced lung tumor is going to respond to one of the most common chemotherapy drug combinations, carboplatin and taxol.

“The availability of a predictive test is desirable since it would allow patients who are unlikely to benefit from this treatment combination to be spared from side effects and to be selected for other, possibly more effective treatments,” Brandes says.

Brandes’ team’s data comes from looking at patients with advanced lung cancer at the Atlanta VAMC from 1999 to 2010. In a 2013 paper in Clinical Cancer Research, the team looked at a protein called CHFR. It controls whether cells can reign in their cycles of cell division while being bombarded with chemotherapy.

In this group being treated with carboplatin and taxol, patients who had tumors that measured low in this protein lived almost four months longer, on average, than those who had tumors that were high (9.9 vs 6.2 months).

His team takes a similar approach in a new paper published in PLOS One. Postdoc Seth Brodie is the first author of the PLOS One paper; he is also co-first author of the CHFR paper along with Rathi Pillai. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Cancer Leave a comment