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A field emission scanning electron microscopy image of a primary breast cancer cell beginning to invade the surrounding extracellular matrix by extending filopodia. This issue includes a focus on cancer technologies. Credit: Lilian Soon.
Since the discovery of circulating tumor cells in 1869, researchers have been able to do little else beyond count them. This is about to change, as advanced technologies for harvesting and analyzing rare cells from blood are opening the window for characterization. Jim Kling reports.
Coinciding with last month's annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, at least one business launched with a plan to use genetic information from patient tumors to help guide treatment. Michael Eisenstein investigates.
Academic researchers often need to stand out to advance, but the corporate world calls for team players. Moving from one world to the other can be a culture shock.
In an environment where the regulatory and reimbursement authorities continue to raise the bar for new oncology therapies, how are sponsors adapting clinical trial designs?
The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) has developed innovative, collaborative business models to reshape the R&D enterprise with the single-minded focus of accelerating the development of new treatments for patients to extend their lives and lead to a cure.
Calculating absolute copy numbers in cancer genome sequences identifies disease-associated genes and provides insights into tumor evolution and heterogeneity.
Single-molecule sequencing technologies can produce multikilobase-long reads, which are more useful than short reads for assembling genomes and transcriptomes, but their error rates are too high. Koren et al. correct long reads from a PacBio instrument using high-fidelity, short reads from complementary technologies, facilitating assembly of previously intractable sequences.
The multikilobase reads that can be produced by single-molecule sequencing technologies may span complex, repetitive genomic regions but have high error rates. Bashir et al. use these reads to organize contigs assembled from accurate, short-read data, facilitating the analysis of clinically important regions of an outbreak strain of cholera.
Khmelinskii et al. describe tandem fluorescent protein timers for measuring protein turnover and trafficking in living cells. Data from a single time point are used to determine protein stability, allowing the authors to screen for components of protein degradation pathways.
Chambers et al. use a combination of small-molecule pathway inhibitors to rapidly differentiate human pluripotent stem cells into nociceptors, a type of sensory neuron. The conversion occurs about three-fold faster than during development, suggesting that pathway inhibition may offer a general approach for speeding up the generation of specific cell types in vitro.
A manager's ability to provide knowledge workers with the personalized goals, motivation and tools they need to perform at their best will bring outstanding results.
Increased understanding of the molecular defects associated with malignancies is opening up new opportunities in diagnosis and therapy. This focus issue of Nature Biotechnology highlights a selection of new technologies that promise to facilitate the development of more effective cancer treatments.