The Beauty of Cancer

Most people would not describe cancer as beautiful or elegant, particularly those of us that have survived the disease.  Even more, battling cancer may affect your sense of beauty, may alter your own body image. 

Jacqueline Firkin, associate professor in theater and film at the University of British Columbia wanted to give women something beautiful, something that opened the discussion surrounding cancer, beauty, and body image, something women could identify with.  She created 10 ball gowns fashioned after microscopic images of cancer cells and cellular processes hijacked in cancer.  The results are beautiful.

Next Generation Sequencing in the Laboratory

With next generation sequencing (NGS) comes the power to change medicine, to personalize patient treatment, to improve patient outcomes.  But before we become overly optimistic, recall what we learned in our last discussion – that use of NGS in the clinic possesses some limiting factors, one of which is our incomplete understanding of cancer.  For personalized medicine to be effective, cancer scientists need to have an in-depth understanding of the biology behind cancer.  For those of us toiling away in the research field, utilizing NGS has become a new tool for deciphering intricate cancer networks.

In today’s discussion, we’ll uncover how a group of researchers based in Portland Oregon used NGS to assess the RNA levels or transcript levels of genes controlled by the tumor-promoting oncogene c-MYC in a breast cancer cell line (for an explanation of the relationship between RNA and DNA, look here).  In this report, the use of RNAseq (the NGS technology used to looked at RNA levels) composes only a small, though critical, fraction of the overall study.  It also represents the utility of NGS technology in basic research.