Word: logical
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These sorts of tightly focused studies are already beginning to make cancer treatment more effective. Last year physicians approached the Maryland biotech company Gene Logic for guidance. They had a patient with esophageal cancer--an especially lethal type--so they wanted to find the best therapy in a hurry. Would radiation be appropriate? What about chemotherapy? And if so, which type? Or perhaps it made sense to go right to one of the new experimental antiangiogenesis medications that cut off a tumor's blood supply...
They went to Gene Logic because the company is one of a handful, along with California's Affymetrix and Incyte, that have developed DNA-chip and microarray technology--in this case, chips that can monitor some 42,000 genes in one shot--and software to analyze the results. Using these powerful tools, Gene Logic scientists tested the patient's cells alongside others from both healthy and sick people. In a few days, they completed the analysis...
...findings are now being prepared for scientific publication, and thus can't be revealed in detail. But Gene Logic will say that based on the genes active in this patient's cancer, antiangiogenesis drugs and most chemotherapy wouldn't work but three drugs would. Moreover, the scientists discovered that this cancer was producing enormous quantities of a particular enzyme that happens to be the target of yet another experimental drug--something to try if chemotherapy failed. The patient is now in remission...
Mounting this kind of operation for a single patient is hugely expensive--this case ran up a bill of $37,000--and the advice that works for one patient wouldn't apply to someone whose genetic makeup is different. That's why scientists at Gene Logic and other firms--Millennium Pharmaceuticals in Massachusetts and Glaxo Wellcome (both in England and the U.S.) are just two examples--are putting together databases of tissue samples to look for one-letter genetic differences. (These differences are formally known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs.) Fourteen drug companies and the philanthropic Wellcome Trust...
...Some students try to pretend Harvard is just like every other college by calling the entryways "vertical hallways." This is deceptive logic, though, since climbing stairs to the fifth floor of Matthews is significantly tougher than gliding effortlessly down a normal dorm hall...