Using Spider Venom to Fight Breast Cancer

by Alex A. Kecskes

If you’re an aspiring medical researcher, your career may lead you to cancer breakthroughs using some unconventional approaches. In the fight against breast cancer, for example, researchers have begun investigating the use of spider venom—extracted from funnel-web spiders and tarantulas.

Cancer researchers at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience hope the “cocktail of molecules” in specific spider venoms might just offer a more natural way to fight breast cancer. The two-year trial involving venom from funnel-web spiders hopes to isolate as many as 300 molecules in the venom and expose them to cancer cells. Spider venom molecules have evolved over millions of years to target very specific sites, and the hope is that some of these sites could include cancer cells.

Scorpion venom has already been shown to bind to cancer cells in mice. Researchers have made the cells glow, which allows surgeons to more clearly identify brain tumor cells. Scientists hope that spider toxins will highlight and even kill breast cancer cells.

Medical researchers have discovered that natural poisons, toxins, and venoms contain chemicals that can be used to create a variety of drugs for treating chronic pains and cancers. Take the cone snail, for example. Its venom is loaded with nerve-debilitating conotoxins, which can be lethal, yet the toxins have led to the development of a new painkiller. Then there’s contortrostatin, a peptide extracted from the venom of the southern American copperhead snake. The disintegrin peptide could possibly stop cancer cells from adhering or sticking to one another and arrest their growth.

If you have any thoughts on venoms used as anti-cancer agents, feel free to share them in the comments section.

Alex A. Kecskes has written hundreds of published articles on health/fitness, "green" issues, TV/film entertainment, restaurant reviews and many other topics. As a former Andy/Belding/One Show ad agency copywriter, he also writes web content, ads, brochures, sales letters, mailers and scripts for national B2B and B2C clients. Please see more of his blogs and view additional job postings on Beyond.com.

Researchers identify gene linked to autism and epilepsy

Some of my fellow Canadians are making huge waves in the healthcare community this week with the identification of the gene linked to both autism and epilepsy. Neurologist Patrick Cossette, a professor in the faculty of medicine at the Université de Montréal, and his research team had been looking for the genes responsible for epilepsy when they discovered another connection in the complex genetic architecture of autism. Several genes have already been linked with many forms of autism. An estimated one in 1,000 people suffer from a severe from of autism and about a third of them also have epilepsy. But until now the reason why these two diseases exist together has been a mystery. In the online edition of Human Molecular Genetics, Cossette explains that the defect in both is a deregulation in the function of synapses and the communication process between neurons in the brain. The gene plays a crucial role in the development of membrane surrounding neurotransmitters, which travel between two neurons. The discovery is expected to open new doors in the understanding of brain pathology and offer a new focus for treatment. Bambi Blue is a freelance writer, editor, and social butterfly living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. When she's not blogging her little heart out for HealthCareJobsite.com, she moonlights as a jazz musician and most apparently a weisenheimer. Loves to cook, hates to clean, and can easily be found on Twitter. To read more of Bambi's posts, head toHealthCareJobsite.com and see additional job postings at Beyond.com.

Could The Cure For Cancer Be In The Stars? Astrobiology Has New Ideas For Cancer Research

Last month, I wrote about how medicine had finally been able to actually cure a man of HIV. Although medical research is typically the job of people who work in the Healthcare field, other scientist have recently been collaborating with medical experts to bring new ideas to the table. Now, it looks as though researchers in the fields of cosmology and astrobiology have made a new breakthrough in cancer research.

Paul Davies, the director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University have worked together to publish a new cancer research theory in the journal Physical Biology.

Although they aren't primarily medical researchers, they had the idea to step back and take a larger look at the big picture in an attempt to trace the origins of cancer. Their thought is that finding out where it came from and how it started would be a way to find new approaches to treatment and prevention.

The astrobiologists, working alongside American oncologists, are suggesting that on a molecular basis, cancer resembles ancient forms of life. By looking at the type of multicellular lifeforms that flourished 600 million years ago, they are trying to find ways to help the oncologists discover new ways to approach cancer research. The problem with the disease is that the cancer cells themselves are very difficult to eradicate completely and are constantly changing and coming up with new defenses.

According to their paper, the scientist suggest that the genes that control the behavior of these types of organisims are still inside our own bodies, it's just that we have developed more recent genes that keep them from growing unchecked. The researchers speculate that cancer cells emerge when our newer regulatory genes become damaged or mutated.

If their theory is right, it would help explain why cancer cells are so quickly able to defend themselves against attacks by chemotherapy. In the paper, Lineweaver said:

"The number of genes that can cause cancer are limited. They have evolved very early, and they're very sophisticated. They're very good at surviving. It's no mystery that cancer knows when it's attacked by a chemical, and that it knows how to get rid of it.
"How does it know how to do that? Because we knew how to do that a billion years ago. And the cells have essentially reverted to an earlier stage of only partially differentiated life forms."

The researchers hope that their theory will be able to help oncologist unravel the origins of cancer and will be able to come up with better ways to combat it. The problem is that cancer is sort of a “moving target” in regards to treatment because it appears to be continually changing. This breakthrough will open doors to changing the treatment protocols and researching ways to strengthen the natural suppression mechanisms we all have that keep these genes from becoming active. By changing the focus of their research from finding newer, more aggressive ways to directly attack the cancer cells themselves to ways to boost the bodies natural suppression, oncologists may be able to find a way to treat cancer and cure patients of the disease completely.

Sources:

LifeScientist

By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for Healthcarejobsiteblog, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.