

Anti-Cancer Agent Stops Metastasis In Its Tracks   - cwan
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1117

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freesciencenow
As another comment mentioned, the full paper is subscriber-only.

Paywalls for scientific research are evil.

Do something people.

Here: <http://209.20.67.195/misc/nature08978.pdf>

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chasingsparks
I'm curious: are you a regular HN user who decided to create a throw-away
login or a person who stumbled across this page and decided to comment?

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freesciencenow
Yes, regular. However, I hope this isn't gonna be a throw-away login: I've
done this before with my regular account, and plan to do it every time I see a
link posted where the paper is behind a paywall, both to help the discussion
and as an act of civil disobedience. So I decided to create an account for
this purpose.

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pingou
It looks promising, but I saw so much articles on new miraculous treatments
that I became a little bit more dubious every time I read an article like this
one.

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ryanhuff
Its interesting (to me) that some of the funding for this work was provided by
the Department of Defense. Is this common for the DoD to fund this type of
research?

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troystribling
The US DoD health care systems supports approximately 10 million beneficiaries
and has a budget of approximately 40 billion dollars,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Health_System>.

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berntb
About the size of Sweden's population -- which also has a state medical
system. :-)

So there is as much socialism in the US as in Sweden? :-)

This gave me a sense of wonder insight into how large the large countries are.

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carbocation
Link to the original Nature article:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature08978.html)

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ryanhuff
Looks like the full article is behind a paywall. :(

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carbocation
You're right :( The article is pretty remarkable for its breadth. Let me try
to give a synopsis:

They synthesize a new biotinylated ketone. They determine that this compound
binds to fascin, which has some molecular biological background as something
that bundles actin, and some population biological background as something
that corresponds with worse survival in breast cancer. They then develop the
crystal structure for fascin both with and without their new molecule, and
they show that their macroketone binds to the actin binding sites on fascin.
They also use electron microscopy to determine that their new molecule indeed
appears to disrupt actin bundling by fascin.

They then gave to immune-deficient mice human breast cancer cells. These cells
typically metastasize aggressively. They gave the mice a 'placebo' and/or
shRNA against fascin and/or their new macroketone. The shRNA and their
macroketone successfully cut the metastatic burden by ~50-80%. (shRNA
ultimately leads to downregulation of the mRNA of target proteins, so their
shRNA should reduce fascin synthesis while their macroketone reduces the
function of already-made fascin.)

It's not a silver bullet against metastatic breast cancer, but it's an
impressively complete story for one paper. And promising, perhaps, as a
therapeutic.

