Leukaemia cure lies in cancer pill?

TNN | May 15, 2013, 02.04 AM IST
READ MORE the rest|Indigenous|Cancer
KOLKATA: An indigenous drug therapy developed by a team of city researchers holds out hope for acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) patients. Studies have shown that the medicine blocks the pathway of a gene that resists drugs and is responsible for a relapse which is common in AML. Of all the various kinds of leukemia, AML is considered to be the deadliest since it recurs in 70% of cases.

City scientists Aditi Karmakar, Sudeshna Gangopadhyay and GS Bhattacharya have found out that rapamycin - a drug commonly used in the treatment of liver cancer - inhibits mTOR, the pathway for a multi-drug resistant gene that causes a relapse in AML patients. The researchers administered the drug on 25 AML-affected blood and bone marrow samples. These samples were cultured and observed for 96 hours. The results were pretty astonishing. In 16 of the 25 samples, the mTOR cells were destroyed.

"Just 2% of the cells remained while the rest had just vanished. This is indeed encouraging for it was done with a locally available drug that doesn't cost much. Thousands of lives can be saved if a relapse can be prevented," said Sudeshna Gangopadhyay. The research team will present a paper on the study at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in July.

"AML stunts the normal development of cells. So, the purpose of any therapy is to help the cells grow, instead of killing them which usually happens in cancer," explained Subrata Banerjee, scientist at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. It is the most common form of acute leukemia in adults, and its incidence increases with age. While 5% of the country's total 25 lakh cancer patients suffer from leukemia, the number of AML patients is believed to be 50,000.

If a drug can help to neutralize mTOR, it would indeed be a path-breaking discovery, said Banerjee. "mTOR is a signaling pathway that triggers the drug-resistant gene. Once it's active, no effort to make the stunted cells grow will work. Even if they grow, the process will eventually stop and AML will recur," said Banerjee.

The research team is now planning to carry out a trial on patients. "We have sufficient laboratory data and results. A trial on patients is the next step and we are contemplating it," said Gangopadhyay. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has been approached to fund the research that has so far been supported by a central government undertaking.


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North Pole shifts due to global warming

, TNN | May 15, 2013, 12.31 PM IST
READ MORE University of Texas|NASA|journey|Jet Propulsion Laboratory|global warming
The North Pole has shifted east because of ice sheet loss caused by rising temperatures, a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters has found, according to the scientific journal Nature.
The pole drifted southeast toward northern Labrador, Canada, at a rate of about 6 centimeters per year between 1982 and 2005. But since 2005, the direction and speed of the pole's journey changed. It started moving rapidly east towards Greenland at a rate of more than 21 centimeters per year.
There has been huge ice sheet loss in the polar regions due to global warming.
The study was carried out by scientists from the University of Texas, Austin, using data collected by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).
Earth's two geographic poles do not have a fixed location. As the distribution of snow, rain and humidity changes every year, the poles too wobble around, usually in a circular manner. Besides this seasonal drift, there is a long range movement which scientists believe is driven by continental drift - the movement of land plates relative to each other.
GRACE's twin probes measure changes in the Earth's gravity field, which can be used to track shifts in the distribution of water and ice, Nature said. The researchers led by Jianli Chen, a geophysicist, used GRACE data to model how melting icecaps affect Earth's mass distribution. They found that more than 90% of the post-2005 polar shift was because of increasing ice loss and sea-level rise.
The explanation for this is that when mass is lost in one part of a spinning sphere, its spin axis will tilt directly toward the position of the loss, according to Erik Ivins, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California quoted by Nature. This is exactly what was observed in the case of the North Pole.
These findings have opened the way to estimate long term ice loss by studying polar drift. Scientists can locate the north and south poles to within about 0.9 millimeters by using Global Positioning System measurements to determine the angle of the Earth's spin. Since polar shifts have been recorded for almost a century, Nature says, it is possible to study ice losses for that period. Direct records of ice loss in Polar regions do not go back that much in time.
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Who is Samsung trying to kid? There will NEVER be a 5G network

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Not just satellites nobbling 'fifth-gen' smartmobes
By Bill Ray • Get more from this author
Posted in Mobile, 14th May 2013 10:46 GMT
Analysis There will almost certainly never be a "5G" mobile broadband network, but that hasn't stopped Samsung using the trendy moniker to describe its 1Gbit-per-second wireless experiments.
The South Korean giant managed to achieve that data transfer rate through two kilometres of air in the 28GHz radio band, thanks to some advanced antenna boffinry. The Android smartphone maker declared it a "5G" breakthrough.
Too bad such an ultra-high-speed mobile internet service will never exist under that name in all likelihood. Let's look at what we have today: "3G" is already a regional term - quite how it works depends on where you live in the world - and the definition of "4G" has fragmented to the point where some network operators won't bother using the term at all.
Slapping "5G" on the outdoor experiment is just a headline-grabbing technique that means nothing - and that's a shame for the boffins at Samsung who have probably done something quite clever that has been obscured by the hyperbolic claim.
The technology in question allows the use of the relatively unpopulated 28GHz band, mitigating atmospheric signal loss with 64 dynamically adjusting antenna elements. Impressive stuff, but hardly enough to justify the language with which gadget maker announced it:
"Samsung’s new technology will allow users to transmit massive data files including high quality digital movies practically without limitation" explains the announcement, focusing in on the adaptive antenna which apparently "sits at the core of 5G mobile communications" which will enable "a wide range of services such as 3D movies and games, real-time streaming of ultra high-definition (UHD) content, and remote medical services".
But don't throw away your existing kit just yet because even Samsung reckons 5G isn't going to happen until 2020, and that's assuming one accepts Samsung's definition of what "5G" is.
The newspapers and telly news led with the "5G" breakthrough claim, although some clever chaps at the University of Surrey managed to get a word in to explain that Samsung's demonstrated radio tech was just one piece of a phone network jigsaw. Those academics should know: they're spending more than £11m in government cash, along with private sponsorship, to find out what technologies will dominate the future iterations of wireless connectivity.
The next generation is already here: known as 4G or 4G LTE, it has been deployed in the US in the 700MHz band; the UK is waiting for Freeview TV to shift out of the way to free up the airwaves for 4G networks. The Wi-Fi Alliance wants the "4G" name for its 802.11ac wireless networking, New Yorkers are trying to put 5G in the even-higher 80GHz band, and Japan claims 5G should rightly run at 11GHz.
Some networks are even calling LTE Advanced "5G", despite the fact that LTE Advanced is a collection of technologies several of which haven't been developed let alone deployed.
Getting terrestrial connections working at 28GHz is impressive, but unlikely to be used for mobile phones any time soon given its lack of penetration through solid materials - Samsung has it working through the atmosphere, but pushing it through walls and buildings is equally important.
The 28GHz band is filling up with satellite communications, as such signals that spend most of their time in a vacuum and are strictly line-of-sight, but there is lots of unused bandwidth in the upper bands waiting for the right technology to utilise it.
Mobile signals need to penetrate buildings, or bounce off them to find a reflected route, so a combination of high and low frequencies along with reflection techniques will be needed to provide ubiquitous coverage. The 28GHz slot may well prove useful, but not any time soon and not "and the core of 5G". ®
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