Follicular Genetics

The pumpkins are carved, the decorations are up, the candy bowls are filled, and my very creative children will be putting their costumes on soon: Flamingo Girl (superhero alter-ego, whose signature move is The Devastating Kick of Goodness); Scottish Richard Nixon Goat Man (don't ask); and an accident victim.

That last one got me thinking: just how offensive would it be to dress up for Halloween as a cancer patient? I've never seen it done, but I'm not sure even I would go there.

(Then again, I could pull it off by just going as myself and asking for candy. Play that cancer card, baby.)

Anyway, this bit of news is way more treat than trick:

A VERY cool post on the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, by Ed Yong, from Discover Magazine online.

The post is called "From Unknown Cancer Gene to Potential Cancer Drug," and it explains research on Follicular Lymphoma conducted by Dr. Elisa Orrichio of Sloan-Kettering in New York.

Yong is very excited about this research, and its future implications for Follicular NHL, but also for some other types of cancer.

The research by Orrichio and her colleagues looks at the genetic changes that take place in the DNA of fNHL cells. Yong gets into more deatil about it, but Orrichio's big discovery was that there is a particular gene called EPHA7 that was missing from the fNHL DNA. (She did some very creative research to come to this conclusion, as Yonmg's post describes.) This strand, it seems, keeps fNHL at bay, so when it is missing, the lymphoma appears.

This is a major discovery. But it's only a first step to a treatment. How, for example, do you get a strand of genetic material back into a cell?

Dr. Orrichio actually figured out a way -- at least for the mice that she was working with. Of course, doing so in a lab sample is different from doing it in a real patient, but the research does provide some excellent news.

The take-away from all of this is multi-fold: we may have a pretty big clue as to what causes Follicular NHL, at least for some patients; we may have a start of finding a treatment and maybe a cure for those patients; we may have a headstart on helping some other cancer patients as well: EPHA7 is known to be a missing gene in several other types of cancer.

Overall, a really promising piece of news.

I'm going to celebrate by eating 12 fun-sized Baby Ruths.