#chemotheropy

[strawberryoc]

everybody say thanks to Henrietta Lacks. Her cells were taken from her without her consent, but they were immortal and billions of them were used to create vaccines and and assist in chemotheropy and antidepressants and advanced the medical field spectacularly. although she isn't credited for the trillions of HeLa cells she has created, her family wasn't compensated, and she was barely ever mentioned in media, she is a notable figure that deserves to be known.

A beautiful black woman who sadly passed to cancer, she is the reason that many of us are alive today

[brainycomics]

http://Fact-Daily.tumblr.com

[rkrehn-blog-blog]

Scientists Engineer Algae To Produce New Targeted Cancer Therapy

If traditional cancer therapies like chemotherapy are the WMDs of medicine--powerful, indiscriminate killers--targeted drug therapies are the assassins, trained to seek out and destroy enemy cancer cells, one at a time.

Scientists recognize the clear advantage of the assassin approach, of course, and have successfully engineered several targeted cancer-killing drugs over the past few decades.

The problem is, assassins ain't cheap. A single course of targeted drug therapy can cost upwards of $100,000. That's largely because the drugs take a lot of effort to create--scientists have to first grow human antibodies capable of recognizing enemy cells, and then equip those cells with a weapon by attaching them to toxic molecules. The process is, apparently, as hard and time-consuming as it sounds.

But recently, a group of scientists at University of California, San Diego engineered algae to produce a human antibody with a built-in toxic weapon--a ready-made molecular cancer assassin. The researchers produced the new therapy by embedding the genetic code of the toxin P. aeruginosa into a human antibody gene, which they then spliced into the algae's DNA.

Read more at http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-12/scientists-engineer-algae-produce-new-targeted-cancer-therapy