Thursday, September 11, 2008

Exciting research

Today I was supposed to be heading to Houston for several meetings. With Ike poised in the gulf to come storming up I-45 my meetings have been cancelled. I am quite pleased that the meetings were all cancelled as I had visions in my head of seeing cars stacked on the highway going north as I was the single car driving in the south lane. Of course, I would reach Houston just before a mandatory evacuation would be put in place and they would change all of the south bound lanes into emergency hurricane evacuation routes. Regardless, I am quite pleased that all of my meetings have been cancelled.

On another note, I received some encouraging news regarding some neuroblastoma cell line testing that has been going on locally. Several months ago Lynley and I approached a researcher who was experiencing some success in lung and colon cancers. Knowing that neuroblastoma had a similar target we were hopeful that his work would show some effect in neuroblastoma. Well, he stopped by Lynley's office yesterday and let us know that neuroblastoma was adequately obliterated in the preclinical studies. Yes, you heard me. Obliterated.

So, I don't want to get everyone too excited. This stuff takes time. However, we selected this work months ago because of it's promise to dramatically impact the treatment of neuroblastoma. We were not envisioning a first base hit here. We were looking for a home run and these preclinical results seem to indicate that this may very well be something major. That is great news. But again, it will take time. This is a totally new way of killing cancer. It has to make it through human adult trials before we get it into kiddos. The good news is that we have identified a new way of doing it that appears to be extremely effective. I was very happy with the results. Now we just have to make sure that the drug does not have the dreaded side effect of terminating the patient that it is killing the cancer in.

I actually have two other big announcements related to neuroblastoma treatment but I don't know whether I am technically aloud to talk about them yet. So, for those we will probably have to wait a few days. In the meantime I can tell you that things are looking very good for Cook's. I expect to see them in the forefront of neuroblastoma research in the very near future.

On that note I have to run. I have a purposeful proposal to write.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love pioneers. You just keep blazing forward. It is so awesome.