The IntOGen interface

Sometimes, there is a gap between experimental biology and clinical medicine while a continuous interchange would be auspicial to well direct experiments and keep updated the therapies. An interesting tool has been developed at the Barcelona Medical Research Park (Spain).
IntOGen is a frame work that collects, integrates and manages data derived from genome- wide experiments on large scale projects such as the Cancer Genome Atlas and the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Scientists manually annotate all samples by using the International Classification of Disease for Oncology vocabulary, in terms of tumour topography and morphology. Furthermore, they apply statistical methods to identify the most relevant alterations, by analyzing multiple studies on the same kind of tumour. Finally, they consider the role of whole biological modules, such as a pathway, to demonstrate the involvement of a single gene altered. The website www.intogen.org is available for free and allows to know modules and genes important in cancer, share experiments and analyze data in the context of cancer. This interface has been built to fill the gap between medicine and molecular biology. Similar tools should be really useful not only for cancer but also for other kind of diseases, such as neurodegenerative disorders.

Minicells to target tumour cells

A difficult challenge in cancer therapeutics is to develop drugs that can overcome the heterogeneity and resistance of cancer cells. A tumor usually consist on several type of cells that contribute to tumor growth, tissue invasion and metastasis in different way. Furthermore, during a treatment drugs become ineffective because of survival of cells that escape death induced by drug.

Small minicells derived form bacteria was used to targeted delivery of drug into cancerous cells. Antibodies can target minicells to tumor cell surface receptors and release drug at the specific site. A recent publication demonstrated how it was possible to subsequently administrate short hairpin RNA and cytotoxic drug in order to firstly knock down a multidrug resistance protein, then kill the cells made vulnerable. This strategy was tested on xenograft tumor in mice model and gave the opportunity to tune the dosage of cytotoxic drug, diminishing adverse effects. Minicells were not toxic for animals and didn’t compromise their survival: this approach seems promising to specifically treat resistant tumor and the use of shRNA allows to personalize the treatment. Other important challenges in next future will be the discovery of other route to target minicells, because resistance mechanism will be early developed to decrease receptor expression on cell surface.

Risk of skin cancer during sun exposure

During summertime, we spend part of our day to bronze our self, but as reported in scientific literature, UV rays can induce double strand breaks into DNA molecule, causing serious problems. Skin tumour is the most common cancer and between skin cancers non-melanomas are the most diffused.

Basal and squamous cells carcinoma are not lethal and usually don’t spread in metastases; surgical intervention or local chemotherapy are successfully used to care these cancers. By contrast, melanoma is more dangerous and, in some cases, causes death of patients when is diagnosed too late and is already spread in other part of the body. Sunburns is the principal risk factor for all skin cancers that normally appear in region of body that are not often exposed to sun, for instance bell, and can slowly start melanine production and, so, the natural protective process; red or fair hair with light eyes are characteristics of people that more frequently is affected by these tumours. Prevention is essential to reduce risk, in particular it’s essential to limit sun exposure during childhood and, in general, during hottest hours of day from 10AM to 4 PM, always wear protective clothes or sunscreens that block UV rays.