Friday, October 16, 1998
Community Briefs
Cold virus could help cancer treatment
Physicians at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center Thursday launched a
new experimental treatment for inoperable pancreatic cancer using a
form of a virus that causes the common cold.
‘Unfortunately, most patients with pancreatic cancer cannot be
cured by surgery,’ said Dr. J. Randolph Hecht, lead investigator
for the study at the Jonsson Cancer Center and an associate
professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine. ‘Usually, by
the time the disease is detected, cancer cells have traveled beyond
the pancreas or have spread too close to important blood vessels,
making it impossible to safely remove all of the cancer.’
Pancreatic cancer kills approximately 95 percent of the more
than 25,000 Americans diagnosed each year with the disease, he
said.
Rather than using surgery, the experimental treatment relies on
a genetically engineered adenovirus  called ONYX-015 Â
that attacks only cells with alterations in, or an absence of, a
gene called p53. (An adenovirus is a kind of virus that can cause
the common cold.) Hecht described the new strategy as one that
strikes pancreatic cancer at its Achilles’ heel.
‘Alterations in or the absence of the p53 gene can leave cancer
cells  unlike normal cells  vulnerable to attack by a
virus engineered to destroy only cells which lack functional
p53,’Â he said.
Roundworms may hold clues to human aging
UC San Francisco researchers have made a significant finding in
roundworms that may offer insight into the way in which genes
regulate aging and life span in humans.
In a study published in the Oct. 16 issue of Cell, they report
that a gene already known to play an important role in controlling
aging in roundworms does so not by acting within individual cells
to control each cell’s fate, but by acting within certain cells to
coordinate the aging process of the whole organism.
‘Our study indicates there is a mechanism that causes all of the
cells in the animal to reach a consensus,’ said the senior author
of the study, Cynthia Kenyon, PhD, the Herbert Boyer Professor of
Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. ‘And that mechanism appears to
be sparked into action by particular genes acting within certain
types of cells.’
The researchers conducted their study on a gene known as daf-2,
which Kenyon’s lab had previously determined plays a significant
role in controlling the aging process and life span of the
roundworm known as nematode C. elegans.
Fertile roundworms with partially mutated, or ‘knocked out,’
daf-2 genes grow to be active, fertile adults that live more than
twice as long as normal. And roundworms still in a larval stage of
development, with more severely mutated genes, enter a state of
extended prepubescence known as dauer diapause, in which larvae do
not feed, are able to withstand harsh environmental conditions and
live a long time.
What the researchers have now discovered is that if the level of
daf-2 activity is lowered in just a small group of cells, the life
span of the whole animal is extended.
Law conference to be held this weekend
Prominent Latino lawmakers, attorneys and others will join
Latino law students from throughout the nation to discuss
educational and political issues at the second annual Latino/Latina
Law Student Conference to be held through Oct. 18, at UCLA School
of Law.
State Sen. Richard Polanco, chair of the Latino Legislative
Caucus, delivered the keynote address Thursday at 6 p.m. Other
speakers scheduled to speak during the conference include U.S. Rep.
Xavier Becerra, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Los
Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina.
Compiled from Daily Bruin staff reports.
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