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Monday, 16 September 2013

Cancer Research & The Idea Of Drivers

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By Rob Sutter


An article was posted on Futurity.org and it went into detail about drivers and how they play into cancer research. It was the kind of subject that I was unfamiliar with, so I decided to read on and I found myself learning more and more about these drivers. Basically, each one is linked to a related condition and when the driver itself is brought down, along with it goes the condition. However, talking about glioblastoma is a more complicated matter and there are a couple of reasons for this.

Out of the many ideas that have been connected to cancer research in the past, glioblastoma has got to be the most common. The reason for this is not only is it seen as a prevalent type of growth but it is also the most aggressive in the field. As you can imagine, organizations the likes of Voices against Brain Cancer have given this idea a great deal of focus. "Drivers" is an interesting idea, though, and one worth granting the utmost attention to as well.

Well, the aforementioned article talked about how 15 percent of glioblastoma cases could be helped with current drugs. They are deemed safe as well, seeing as how they are FDA-approved, so in theory there should be no reason as to why patients should not be helped by them. However, it seems like earlier attempts have seen limited success because of how intricate these growths are. Being able to target all of the "drivers" may be seen as a challenge but I feel as though there is potential.

There was a study done by the Columbia University Medical Center and it was able to put a couple of ideas into practice. The article said that a combination of high throughput DNA sequencing as well as statistical analysis was able to prove helpful. The reason for this is because a short list of driver candidates were created, therefore making research methods that much more essential. The study in question was massive, seeing as how almost 140 tumor types were looked into with the utmost focus.

Cancer research is immensely important and I feel as though the idea of scope should be kept in mind. You never want to limit said scope because this is what is needed in order to bring the best results to the surface. The more that you're able to bring to the table, the greater that your findings are and the more you'll be able to learn about cancer in general. It is clear that the "drivers" are looked into with great focus and I think that it's easy to see why.




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