theiconoclast.info

http://toxicopoeia.com/?get=plants&page=&view=expanded&type=medicinal&show=D

Chemotherapy sucks. While it can buy the sick time and even produce cures, patients must endure hair loss, nausea and vomiting, weakened immune systems, nerve damage, and even the risk of secondary cancers, cancers that are caused by the very same drugs designed to treat them. And perhaps most tragically, chemotherapy often fails to cure a patient’s illness, as neoplasias often evolve to both become resistant to treatment and to spread, or metastasize, all over the body. However, there may be a non-chemo based drug, that’s already approved by the FDA and on the market, which can reduce the chance that a cancer will metastasize and develop resistance to chemotherapy. This drug is called digoxin.

Digoxin, which is derived from the flowering plant known as fox glove, is currently approved as a treatment for a variety of heart problems. And although digoxin, because it is not without side effects and risks of its own, is no longer the first choice for patients with heart problems, it remains a safe and effective drug when given at appropriate doses. So how could a drug used for heart problems be used to treat cancer? The answer lies in a condition known as hypoxia, which is oxygen deprivation within a tumor. Research has indicated that hypoxia both increases the chances that cancer cells will be resistant to chemotherapy and metastasize. Digoxin may benefit cancer treatment because it may be able to reduce hypoxia, and thus reduce chemotherapy resistance and metastasis.

How does digoxin reduce hypoxia? At the molecular level, the response of cancer cells to hypoxia is still not completely understood, but scientists do know that hypoxia causes hundreds of genes to become activated. However, many of these genes only become activated because of a transcription factor called HIF-1 a, or “hypoxia inducible factor 1 alpha”. HIF-1-a is one of the first proteins that a cancerous cell makes in response to hypoxia, and because it activates hundreds of other genes it can be viewed as a master regulator of a cancer cell’s response to hypoxia: expose cancer cells to hypoxia and they make HIF-1a, HIF-1a then turns on lots of other genes that make a cancer cell more likely to be chemoresistant and metastatic. Digoxin works because it has been shown to inhibit HIF-1a; turn off the master regulator and you inhibit the hypoxic response.

There are already clinical trials testing the use of digoxin as an adjuvant to chemotherapy and radiation. The hope is that digoxin will be able to prevent metastasis and sensitize cancer cells to treatment. I can’t wait to see the results.

Sources:

http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/10/6/R102

http://www.modernmedicine.com/modernmedicine/Nursing/ArticleNewsFeed/article/detail/574333

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00281021

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20671264

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19938317

http://www.cancer.gov/search/ViewClinicalTrials.aspx?cdrid=682036&version=HealthProfessional&protocolsearchid=8036529

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digoxin#Clinical_use

Picture of Global Warming

Everyone worries about global warming these days. As a direct result of humans pumping trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures are predicted to steadily climb, leading to the melting of the polar ice caps by around 2100 (according to the most dire predictions) and a vast rise in sea level that would put modern coastlines under water. The only chance humanity has of halting the progress of global warming is to cap our emission of carbon dioxide, and even then a significant amount of warming will likely still occur (as a result of the CO2 already in the atmosphere). Or is there another option?

There is… geoengineering. Earth scientists have come up with a multitude of ways that people could cool the climate in order to mitigate or prevent the effects of greenhouse gas-induced global warming. In this blog, I’ll focus on the most likely and most cost effective method: sulfur dioxide emission

How It Works:

·         Using commercial planes, military fighter jets, or even giant balloons,  vast quantities of sulfur dioxide would be transported into the stratosphere daily

·         Once in the atmosphere, the SO2 would oxidize to form sulphate (SO4) aerosols

·         Sulphate aerosols are reflexive, so they will reflect some sunlight from the earth and thus cool the planet

·         This concept has already been demonstrated in principle with the Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991. This eruption unleashed a huge quantity of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and global temperatures fell by half a degree Centigrade a year later.

Potential Drawbacks:

·         Although the sulfur dioxide approach would help with global warming, it would do nothing to combat the ocean acidification that carbon dioxide emission is causing

·         The world would need to come to an international consensus before this plan could be put into place

·         Since current climate models aren’t very accurate, there is a very real possibility that humans could overcompensate with the sulfur dioxide and cause too much cooling

·         The view of the stars with underground telescopes would be obscured because of all of the aerosols in the air… KHS Astronomy Club… Bye bye…

·         Solar power would be less efficient

·         Potential drought; the year after the Pinatubo eruption had the lowest rainfall over land ever recorded

Should we geoengineer? The potential problems are real and dangerous. Still, global warming is just as real and dangerous, and geoengineering may be the only way to stop drastic climate change. As time moves on, people will have to weigh the costs and benefits of geoengineering against the consequences of global warming. For instance, which is worse… The drought that would likely be created from sulfur dioxide geoengineering, or the worse hurricanes and rising sea levels that would result from global warming? More importantly, who decides? Thoughts?

Sources:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-stratospheric-geoengineering.ars

http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=140354

Superfreakenomics  by Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt

http://www.acellvet.com/img/tend_lig_pic.jpg

It would be the ultimate ideal of battlefield medicine: sprinkle some miraculous powder on an open wound, and, in mere seconds, the body heals itself. Sadly, this scenario is still science fiction. But it turns out that wound powder that speeds recovery by promoting the body to heal itself already exists…

A regenerative medicine company called Acell has developed an amazing product called MatriStem ™ Wound Powder. This wound powder, in initial tests, was found to regenerate the tips of fingers (people accidentally slice off bits of finger all the time) as effectively as skin grafts alone. The benefit of course was that no skin grafts were actually used; the body literally regenerated the finger tip. (It is important to note that MatriStem ™ cannot regenerate bone; we’re just talking the very tips of fingers here.)

Sources:

 ·         http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16159805?ordinalpos=17&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_

ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

·         http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16826793?ordinalpos=15&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_

ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

·         http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18837648?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_

ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

·         http://www.acell.com/files/Acute_Finger_Amputation.pdf

·         http://www.acell.com/sci_overview.html

·         http://www.acell.com/

The Iconoclast: Protein Videogame

Chances are, if you read this blog, you are pretty fluent in the ways of a protein.  If not here’s the basics.  Proteins are made of a series of molecules called amino acids.  The sequence of amino acids in a protein determines that proteins unique shape.  The shape of the protein determines its function in the human body. 

            The process by which an amino acid chain twists and contorts itself to produce the final protein shape is known as folding.  Here’s the problem: scientists do not completely understand the process of protein folding.  A protein folds so quickly that it is pretty much impossible to observe.  Knowledge of the process of protein folding could lead to the ability to predict protein structure and ultimately be used to design proteins to combat various diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.  

The inability to observe the process of protein folding did not halt its study.  Armed with the knowledge of the basic principles behind folding, biologists used supercomputers to try to reproduce the shapes that actual proteins had.  The results were close, but not perfect. 

Then came a distributed computing network known as Folding@home (folding.stanford.edu).  Developed by Stanford University, the program draws on the computing power of home computers and Playstation 3’s to simulate protein folding.  If you so feel, download the program from the website and start making a contribution to science, though if you keep reading, you’ll see there is a better way to do this. 

I’d now like to introduce you to the game Foldit, downloadable from the website: fold.it (it’s a pretty nifty URL).  The idea of the game is simple; a computer generates a rough color-coded model of what a series of amino acids will fold into.  Then you, using your mouse and keyboard, tweak the protein into better, more fitting shapes according the basic rules of protein folding.  If you download the game, you’ll be greeted to a tutorial that explains how to do it much better than I can.  Proteins designed by Foldit users have proven to be better than those conceived by the best computers out there.  So give it a try, play some Foldit!

Sources:

http://fold.it/portal/info/science

http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-05/ff_protein?currentPage=all

http://flowtv.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/fold.jpg (picture)

The above article was graciously contributed by Rohit R. .

How does nature organize itself? How do things self assemble? Scientists are seeking the answers to these questions and more, as they coax bits of metal to self assemble into life- like snakes. Check out this article and the pictures below.

Brad Rybinski

Need I write more? Check out the Wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_mouse

Brad Rybinski

To be completely honest, there are a lot of parts of chemistry that I find incredibly boring.  But there are some parts that are incredible. For example, consider the two chemicals hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH). 

Hydrochloric acid is what is known as a strong acid, that is, it ionizes completely in water. It is also extremely powerful and corrosive. Concentrated hydrochloric acid can erode steel, cause burns, and if its fumes are breathed in, cause a person to start coughing up blood.

Sodium hydroxide is what is known as a strong base; it also ionizes completely in water. And although sodium hydroxide is a base, it is just as hazardous as hydrochloric acid, and is capable of attacking living tissues and causing burns.

However, modern chemistry tells us that if one were to take just the right amounts of both hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, and mix them together, a completely harmless solution would be produced. This solution could be drunk. And it covers 71% of the earth. This solution is salt water.

HCl (aq) + NaOH (s)  = H2O (l) + NaCl (aq)

Acids and bases can be interesting; you just have to think about them in the right way.

Brad Rybinski