Earlier this month I posted (8/13/10) about new developments in using bacteria to fight melanoma, but a more recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a new drug may change the the way that doctors treat melanoma. Researchers administered a new drug (designed to target a gene called BRAF that exists in some 50% of melanoma patients) to some 48 patients, and of these, 37 evidenced shrunken, and in some cases, eradicated, cancer growths. This new study builds on recent findings that Gleevec (commonly used to treat Leukemia) and ipilimumab are effective treatments for people with certain genetic mutations and/or specific strains of melanoma. Image of a melanoma cell captured by ScientificRelevance. Read more at Science News…
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Discoveries
A relatively recent study featured in Nature suggested that the feet of people who habitually run barefoot strike the ground in a way that tempers impact and smoothes the running movement. Previous research suggests that people who run barefoot first land on the front or middle of their feet (“forefoot strike”), before they lower their heels and move their body weight to the backs of their feet before shifting forward again. Enter the spongey, springy running shoe in the 1970s, as in the picture on the left, and instantly runners were able to land on their heels before shifting forward (“heel strike”), thereby bypassing the forefoot strike. The introduction of running shoes profoundly changed running gaits. Daniel Lieberman, the first author of the article that appeared Nature and a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said of heel-strike running, “the stiff landing hurts.” Read more at Lieberman’s Harvard webpage dedicated to barefoot running or in the journal Nature…