(2) Cynthia Koons and Jared S Hopkins, A Cancer Cure Could Start in the Thermosphere.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/f ... tart-in-outer-space
Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: The advantages of pharmaceutical research on the International Space Station
(ii) Print and the online version are identical.
(b) "Shou-Ching Jaminet, a molecular biologist and former researcher at Harvard Medical School, spent almost a year preparing an experiment for her small biotech startup, Angiex [based in Cambridge, Massachusetts], to study the effects of weightlessness on a potential cancer drug. By June she was nervous with anticipation, readying her project for launch on an International Space Station resupply mission powered by a SpaceX Falcon 9 [which was launched at 5:42 am, June 29, 2018]. * * * The company, which Jaminet co-founded with her husband and a former Harvard colleague, would soon be among the more than 2,400 research projects started on the ISS since it went into service in 1998. * * * (Resupply missions also ferry food; Angiex's flight included maple[wood]-smoked salmon at one astronaut's request.) Jaminet's drug is intended to cut off the blood supply to tumors, thereby killing them. In space, she wants to observe how endothelial cells, which provide this blood, behave in microgravity. When a person has cancer, these cells can proliferate, promoting tumor growth. But it's not possible to run tests on them in a nonproliferating state on Earth. Jaminet's hypothesis is that they won't grow in culture aboard the ISS, making them similar to the cells in a healthy person’s blood vessels. Then, if the drug doesn’t harm these dormant endothelial cells, she’ll have evidence that it won’t damage patients' blood vessels on Earth, either, adding to the likelihood that the treatment will be safe."
(i)
(A) Shou-Ching Jaminet, PhD. Director of Multi-Gene Transcriptional Profiling, Center for Vascular Biology Research (CVBR), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Instructor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School.
cvbr.hms.harvard.edu/researchers/shih.html
("Shou-Ching S Jaminet earned her PhD in Cancer Immunology from Newcastle University, Newcastle, Australia in 1994. After post-doctoral research at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she became an Instructor at Boston Children's Hospital, in 2000. She joined BIDMC in 2005, where she established and leads the Multi-Gene Transcriptional Profiling Laboratory")
The alma mater is unheard of. Her email and street addresses indicates her laboratory is in the hospital, one of may teaching hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School (HMS). Her rank at HMS indicates her academic heft is insubstancial.
(B) "Shou-Ching was born in Korea to Chinese parents, attended college at National Taiwan University in Taipei": from the Web
Her maiden name is unknown.
(C) Her husband is Paul Jaminet, PhD is "a MIT- and Berkeley-trained astrophysicist” (from the Web; no longer doing astrophysics, though), and founder and CEO of Angiex.
(ii) She has money to burn. Since ancient time (whenever it is, when cancer became known), people knew cancer was supplied with nutrients in blood that came with new blood vessels (of course), and hope to figure out a way to stop formation of the new blood vessels. Nobody can (my hypothesis is of course not, because cancer cells are every bit like normal cells of the same person except for its uncontrolled growth. Incidentally, blood vessels large and small are lined with endothelial cells; capillaries are made up of "a single layer of flattened endothelial cells."
Capillaries. In The Histology Guide. University of Leeds, undated.
https://www.histology.leeds.ac.uk/circulatory/capillaries.php
(iii) The lesson: Do not believe in hypes.
(c) There is no need to read the rest.
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