CancerDW

1. The article begins by mentioning two important people with cancer. Who is Elizabeth Edwards? Who is Tony Snow? (This article was written 03/07/07. As a part of this question find out what has happened in the year and a half since this article was written with respect to the cancer of Ms. Edwards and Mr. Snow. Include a link to your sources.) Elizabeth Edwards is the wife of John Edwards, and she has battled breast cancer that has spread to her bones. Tony Snow is the press secretary for president Bush, and has battled cancer that spread from the colon to his liver. He has since died from the cancer, but Edwards still lives on by undergoing aint-estrogen treatment.

2. What is a metastatic cancer cell? It is a primary tumor. 3. Why does the author call cancer cells barbarians and cannibals? Because they tend to break out of the area they originally possessed. After they breakout they tend to start taking over and eating other cells. 4. What do we know about the events that transform a normal cell to a cancer cell? They continue to divide and do not have the normal chromosomes that tell them to stop dividing. 5. Why is harder to study metastatic cancer cells? the initial stages of malignant transformation can be analyzed in vitro, in the controlled setting of cultured cells, metastasis — which is Greek for “beyond static” — is a matter of cells on the move and ultimately must be studied in vivo, in the bewildering wilderness of the body. 6. How many cells do primary tumors shed each day (in a rodent)? Yet how many metastatic tumors do these rodents have? Millions are seeded each day, but the tumors they actually have can be counted on one hand. 7. Describe two ways metastatic cells can travel through the body avoiding detection from our immune system. They can disguise themselves as parasites, and others gather red blood cells around them rip into rapids of safe pools into tissue. 8. Where is the first site (oasis for the cancer cell) that metastasis generally occurs? Why? Why is it an oasis? (What is an oasis?) The cells first occur in virgin terrain, so they can begin feeding on the rich broth of growth hormones and factors with which wound sites typically teem 9. What is a dormant micrometastasis? Why are they relevant to human health? When the tumor cells seem to go away but, they are still there and have simply adapted to their surroundings. They are relavent to human health because they can come back as cancerous cells. 10. What evidence do we have that metastasis occurs in organs that are similar to the organ of the primary tumor? Give two examples. Micrometastases will not attain macro dimensions unless, among other things, they adapt to their new surroundings and interact with their neighbors enough to exploit them. Breast tumors, for example, are known to metastasize to bone tissue, where the invasive cells perversely take advantage of their ability to gather calcium ions for breast milk and apply it to the rampant dissolution of calcium-rich bone. Malignant melanoma spreads readily to the brain, presumably because neural tissue and the melanocytes that give rise to melanoma both arise from the same class of cells during gestation. 11. Find a current (published in last 2 months) news article (from a national source) about cancer. Post a link to the article and write a 75-100 word summary. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/health/research/06cancer.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=cancer&st=cse&oref=slogin

This article is about how scientist have made an new advancement in studying genes. They were able to compare and contrast two sets of cells, the first from a cancer victim and the other from her normal skin cells. Through this experiment they were able to distinguish 10 mutations that were only in the abnormal cells. These 10 mutations were resistive to chemotherapy, and in the near future doctors may be able to treat or even prevent these mutations. Dr Richard K. Wilson said “That’s personalized genomics, personalized medicine in a box,” he said. “It’s holy grail sort of stuff, but I think it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”