Understanding Cancer » cell

Cell Journal – 60 Day Free Trial

Avril — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:58:09 +0000

This is a geeky post aimed at the scientists, the journal “Cell” is trying out a new way of showing scientific articles online and (in my opinion), it looks great. Normally you have to pay a lot of money to read Cell (an online only individual subscription for one year costs about £180). For [...]

Does morphine make cancer cells grow?

Avril — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:10:22 +0000

I am a bit reluctant to write this post as I don’t want to scare people. Morphine based pain killers are often used to treat cancer pain and this recent news report does not change any treatment your consultant or doctor may have prescribed.

This week the BBC news website had a story “Morphine [...]

New BBC TV Series -”The Cell”

Avril — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:11:50 +0000

I don’t know how I missed this, I don’t watch a lot of TV (and most of what I do watch is Cbeebies, but that’s another story…) The BBC are airing a new, short (3 episode!) series called “The Cell“. It is about the scientific attempt to study the building blocks of life, in [...]

Understanding how cells communicate

Avril — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:17:29 +0000

A research paper caught my eye this week (this is a geeky post…) it was published in Nature and shows that something called “TERT” talks to the “WNT” signalling pathway. You can read more about this on the Nature website “Telomerase link to WNT signalling“ You can read a slightly more reader friendly summary [...]

Why does chemo cure some cancers and not others?

Avril — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:38:25 +0000

Why does chemo cure some cancers and not others? A good question and one that we still can’t answer fully. I read a recent technical article about why some cancers are cured with chemotherapy and others aren’t in the Journal “Nature Clinical Practice – Oncology“. It was freely available in a sample issue in [...]