#taxanes

[pharmaceutical0]

Paclitaxel

Paclitaxel is a chemotherapy medication used to treat various types of cancer, including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and lung cancer. https://www.simsonpharma.com/promotions/paclitaxel-pharmaceutical-reference-standards-impurity-standards

[persephone-child]

taxanes replied to your post “dO PEOPLE REALLY THINK NEYMAR IS HOT LIKE OM G”

Yup hr does lool Luke chicken bit ive seen people doing some crazy shit bc of him

yeah i know, there are girls here in brazil that are crazy for him but the rest of the country is like naaaah u r all blind

[seapuke]

taxanes replied to your post: anonymous asked:are you from braz...

Krk de que estado?

paraná!!!

[madfoodscience]

Hazelnuts

You know, I have uncanny luck in picking the magic ingredients I bake with.

Of course, anyone with more sense would research an ingredient to see if it's interesting, and then bake with it. Not me. I do the baking, and then pray that it'll all work out. And with the exception of arugula, it's panned out pretty well for me.

This week, hazelnuts bring us a topic that's near and dear to my heart: cancer-fighting agents! Totally unplanned, but totally awesome.

If you're Italian, you're very familiar with hazelnuts. Nutella, anyone? Or Frangelico? Like most nuts, they're high in protein and good fatty acids, and hazelnuts in particular (per 100 g) are an excellent source of thiamine, Vitamin B6, Vitamin E (100% RDR) and manganese (294% RDR).

But it's not actually the nuts we're interested in this week – it's the shells. A study published in 2007 found that hazelnut shells and leaves were a significant source of chemicals called taxanes. They're called taxanes because they were first isolated from Yew trees of the genus Taxus, and they're a type of molecule used to make chemotherapy drugs.

Taxol (paclitaxel) and Taxotere (docetaxel) are two very commonly-used chemotherapy drugs delivered by IV infusion for the treatment of lung, ovarian, breast, head and neck cancers, and Karposi's sarcoma. They work by stabilizing your cells' microtubule networks – the skeleton or scaffolding that moves things around in your cells. At first blush, stabilizing may sound good, right? Stable is good! No, not really.

The microtubule network inside your cells is constantly moving, building, breaking down and rebuilding in new directions to accomplish new things. An example you may remember from high school biology is mitosis: cell division. Microtubules form from opposite ends of the cell and pull it apart into two, and this is exactly the process we use taxanes to interrupt.

Microtubules in cancer cells get set up to divide, endlessly, as cancer cells do, but then along come taxanes, stabilizing them into rigid structures. Locked, unable to contract and pull the one cell apart into two, the cancer cell is stuck. Mesh your fingers together, squeeze tight, and try to pull your hands apart – it's kind of like that. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, the cancer cell has nothing left to do but either give up on dividing or flip its self-destruct switch and die (called apoptosis). Either way, that's a good outcome for you.

So now, pulling this all back to hazelnuts, the discovery of taxanes in their shells and leaves (normally parts that are discarded as waste) opens up a new opportunity for taxane production. Since drug companies stopped relying on killing and harvesting Yew trees, they've moved to more complex and expensive methods of taxane synthesis. While better for the trees, this isn't always the best for drug availability and price for patients (or in the case of Canada, healthcare systems).

When we can extract taxanes from hazelnuts shells that would otherwise be garbage, everybody wins. More Nutella, more paclitaxel, and most importantly more Frangelico for everyone!

Bap-i-da-boopi!