Sigma BioBlogs

We are excited to introduce our award-winning CompoZr® Breast Cancer Cell Lines.  By creating these human cell lines with CompoZr Zinc Finger Nucleases (ZFNs), we are able to make targeted and heritable deletions, integrations and modifications to the genome of these cell lines.

Get common cancer targets like TP53, PTEN and HER2 knock out cell lines ready for your experiments. These cell lines even come with their parental cells, giving you an excellent control.

With our CompoZr Breast Cancer Cell Lines you can do basic research, drug discovery and drug development targeting any gene in a clean way.  Using knockout cell lines you can study the response of each mutation to a drug, giving you a test scenario where you have “mini-patients” in your test tube.  With these cell lines, academic researchers can conduct complicated genetic experiments in human cells without having to resort to mouse genetics projects.

The development of personalized medicine can now be accelerated thanks to these genetically defined cell lines.  The ease with which genetically modified cell lines can be created with CompoZr ZFNs now enables you to get your customized cell lines with your favorite disease-relevant mutation incorporated into it. This will enable profiling patient genotypes that are responsive to a drug therapy and to determine genotypes that are resistant to a drug regimen driving the development of personalized medicine.

If you are interested in learning more about our new CompoZr Breast Cancer Cell Lines, complete this survey and one of our Technical Sales Specialists will contact you directly.

To celebrate the launch we are giving away a limited number of BioPink T-shirts to respondents of the survey, to show our support for Breast Cancer research.

Welcome to the second in our blog series on Dr. Reid Hayward of the University of Northern Colorado.

As we mentioned in our first blog, Dr. Hayward is using rat models to study the protective effect of exercise on chemotherapy patients.

One of the side effects of chemotherapeutic treatment with doxorubicin is cardiotoxicity, limiting the effectiveness of drugs by weakening the patient before the treatment can eliminate the cancer. In the use of doxorubicin, cardiotoxicity has taken the form of a weakened heart, with the heart chambers enlarged, and the walls thinned.  Physical activity has been shown to preserve the morphology of the heart during doxorubicin treatment giving the cancer patients a better chance of recovery.

In this video, Dr. Hayward talks about his lab’s findings around doxorubicin’s effects on heart morphology.

This is the first in our series of blogs about Dr. Reid Hayward of the University of Northern Colorado .  Dr. Hayward works with the Rocky Mountain Cancer Rehabilitation Institute (RMCRI) to investigate the protective cardiac effects of exercise on chemotherapy patients who are undergoing clinical treatment at the RMCRI.   The RMCRI has shown that chemotherapy patients who exercise endure the cardiac stress of doxyrubicin and other anthracycline chemotherapeutic agents much better than those who do not have exercise as a part of their treatment plan.

As Dr. Hayward says, “The RMCRI subjects are humans, mine are rats.”  His lab  studies the effects of doxorubicin (DOX) on the cardiovascular system of rats, to investigate what systems, and what molecular components are at work as exercise increases the odds of survival for the patients of RMCRI.

Dr. Hayward investigates morphology and physiology and most recently started to look at the molecular basis for this rehabilitation by studying the effects of exercise on multi-drug resistant protein knockout rats from SAGE™ Labs .

AACR is over 100 years old, with a membership of 30,000+.  The membership is quite inclusive, with a mixture of people from basic science research, clinical research, and also physicians, patients, survivors, and patient advocates all intent on studying and learning more about how to stop cancer.

We got the chance to meet many of them, and a few answered the question “Where does your bio begin? (You can still enter your video too!).

Communication, collaboration, research and education are all a part of AACR’s mission, with 6 Cancer journals for the thousands of scientist who are members, and also CR magazine, to provide information directly relevant for cancer patients, survivors, and patient advocates.

For AACR 2010, the volcanic ash prevented many European presenters from attending, so AACR shifted and met the need by patching the speakers through via video and teleconference.  Some of the recorded talks are here.

Plus an amazing twitter feed which is still active 4 days post-meeting as bloggers sift through their notes and communicate the information that they gathered during the meeting.

The science has come a long way too.  Many traditional topics were under exploration, such as studies around Ras and p53,  there  were also discussions about newer technologies for  such as microRNAs, using biomarkers for early detection,  nanotechnology, and systems biology.

Some blogs of note:

Sally Church’s blog. This lady knows the cancer community.  I got the chance to have coffee with her and she knew half the researchers walking in and out of the conference hall.

Nature writer Brian Maher has a series of short blogs about the sessions he attended.

Another look at Bert Vogelstein’s talk…

This AACR video details some fascinating statistics on cancer research