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Selling a story or working for the cure ??

I have been in different labs over the last 14 years. I have learned good things in all of them. However, in my experience I am worried about the increase of this "selling the story" mode that seems to driving research in a lot of labs right now. Sparse funding has created the need to be more focus, more specialized and work on creating a niche where a lab can develop his own story. I understand this view.

But my problem is that when we're focusing so much on the story, on selling our "vision" to grant reviewers, on adjusting everything to a very small and narrow vision of reality... are we really working to cure cancer?

A few months ago, somebody asked me if the protein I was studying was over expressed or down regulated in lung cancer. I was told that was the basic question that I need to answer in order to build a story. I repeated several western blots and compared expression of the protein in human lung cancer cells against normal cells. Overall, there was a pattern but I did not feel comfortable with this vision that seemed to indicate that my protein was responsible for cancer progression. It was not a moral question... it just did not agreed with other results I had before.

Today, I am looking at a western blot that indicates that under Tarceva, this protein really goes up, and lung cancer cells start to die. But if I silence this protein and treat the cells with Tarceva, lung cancer cells survive. Therefore, the black or white question I was asked before was a very reductionist view of the problem that did not include the effect of a drug treatment.

Some people say that this is not possible. But results are there to prove it. Are we more interested in building a story that we like or do we want to understand what is really going on ??


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About This Project

We are working with a protein that modulates the genetic information to generate different proteins from the same gene. These proteins might even have opposite functions. This process is called alternative splicing.



We hypothesize that alternative splicing could be a novel mechanism of regulation of the resistance to targeted therapy in lung cancer. This project will allow the identification of key elements of this resistance.

Blast off!

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