Word: receptor
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...women undergoing mastectomy for breast cancer, most women did not obtain a survival benefit from preventive surgery in the unaffected breast. Only a specific group of patients - women under age 50 who had early-stage cancer (I or II) and tumors that were negative for the estrogen receptor - saw an increase in their chances of surviving to five years. That increase was small, just 4.8%, compared with women who did not have preventive mastectomy. Further, less than 10% of the breast-cancer population fits these criteria...
...together, this suite of criteria makes sense, says Bedrosian. Women with estrogen-positive cancers can be treated with hormone-therapy drugs like tamoxifen or, if they are postmenopausal, the new aromatase inhibitors, which block the production of cancer-enhancing estrogen in the body. Women whose tumors lack the estrogen receptor, however, cannot take advantage of these drugs, since their cancers are not as dependent on estrogen for fuel. As a result, they have a lower survival rate to begin with. That's why women with these cancers showed a survival benefit from removing both breasts, says Bedrosian...
...that rather than sitting latent for years after infection, as many experts believed at the time, HIV was actively challenging the immune system from Day One. Soon after that revelation, ADARC scientists were the first to add to existing data on how HIV worked by identifying a second, key receptor that the virus uses to invade cells...
...destruction by other cells. Once attached to a CD4, HIV begins an intricate series of steps to gain entry into the cell. Ibalizumab is able to disrupt this intricate molecular choreography by binding to the CD4 and serving as an immunological snare. With the antibody stuck to the CD4 receptor, the virus is physically unable to complete the necessary contortions it must perform to slide into the cell and take over its genetic machinery to pump out more virus...
...Fittingly, the initial discovery of the potentially neurotoxic effect of anesthesia occurred by accident. In the 1990s, scientists discovered that the brain cells of patients in the midst of a stroke were flooded with calcium. Doctors wishing to treat these patients hypothesized that blocking the receptor that enables calcium to enter cells could protect stroke patients from severe brain damage. But in the course of researching this possibility, they found that switching off the receptor in a healthy brain cell led to the death of that cell - an unexpected and troubling result, given that many common anesthetics block the same...