This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Oncology: Cancer drug resistance
Genetics: Prenatal genetic test that doesn’t need to know who the father is
Astrophysics: New light on dark matter
And finally... Rapid disappearance of a warm, dusty circumstellar disk
· Geographical listing of authors
[1] & [2] Oncology: Cancer drug resistance (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature11183
DOI: 10.1038/nature11249
Substances secreted by the tumour micro-environment can cause resistance to a range of anticancer drugs according to two independent reports in Nature this week. A finding with immediate clinical implications is the discovery of the factor that causes resistance to targeted treatment in a subset of melanomas. The mechanism leading to resistance is identified and combined therapy is recommended as a way to overcome resistance.
Personalized therapies that can target specific cancers have shown potential for the future of cancer treatment, but resistance is a challenging problem in most clinical trials. In separate studies, Todd Golub and colleagues and Jeffrey Settleman and colleagues show that the secretion of growth factors from the tumour micro-environment mediates this resistance. Both papers provide evidence that hepatocyte growth factor produced by BRAF-mutant melanomas confers resistance to BRAF and RAF inhibitors by activating a specific tumour pathway known as MET. Settleman and co-workers show that a combination of RAF and MET inhibitors can reverse resistance, and they suggest that this combination should be tested in melanoma patients.
Both papers extend these findings to other factors and other tumour cell types, demonstrating that this resistance mechanism may be common.
CONTACT
Todd Golub (The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA) Author paper [1]
Tel: +1 617 714 7050; E-mail: [email protected]
Jeffrey Settleman (Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA) Author paper [2]
Tel: +1 650 467 7140; E-mail: [email protected]
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[3] Genetics: Prenatal genetic test that doesn’t need to know who the father is (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature11251
Sequencing of a fetal genome using genetic material found circulating in the mother’s blood is described in Nature this week. Unlike a similar recently reported technique, the approach described this week doesn’t require knowledge of the father’s genetic information. Current approaches to diagnosing fetal genetic diseases require invasive sampling, which carries certain risks to the health of the fetus and the mother. Early diagnosis of genetic diseases in a fetus can allow clinicians to pre-empt whether treatments are needed immediately after a baby is born.
DNA in a pregnant woman’s plasma is a mixture of maternal and fetal DNA; Stephen Quake and colleagues apply a chromosome counting technique (used for detecting diseases such as Down syndrome) to identify the individual parental chromosomes, or haplotypes, transmitted to the fetus. They can even determine which haplotype came from the father in the absence of additional paternal information, which may be useful if the father’s DNA is not available. The authors are able to sequence whole prenatal genome or the exome — the coding portion of the genome — which can enable screening for clinically relevant gene variants or mutations associated with genetic diseases.
CONTACT
Stephen Quake (Stanford University, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 650 736 7890; E-mail: [email protected]
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[4] Astrophysics: New light on dark matter (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature11224
The detection of a dark-matter filament connecting two main components of a supercluster of galaxies is reported in Nature this week. Although galaxy clusters have been predicted to be at the intersection of large-scale structure filaments, detection of these filaments has remained elusive.
The concordance Cold Dark Matter cosmological model predicts that galaxy clusters live within a ‘cosmic web’, growing at the intersections of threads of matter. These dark-matter filaments are predicted to contain more than half of all matter, but previous attempts to detect them have been unsuccessful. Jörg Dietrich and colleagues confirm the existence of a dark-matter filament connecting the two main components of the Abell 222/223 supercluster system. The estimated mass of this filament is consistent with models of overdensity in galaxies (due to invisible dark matter).
The authors detected this filament from its weak gravitational lensing signal. Gravitational lensing is an effect whereby light heading towards Earth from a distant large object, such as a galaxy, is bent by gravity as it passes another large object and may be magnified.
CONTACT
Jorg Dietrich (University Observatory Munich, Germany)
Tel: +49 89 2180 5942; E-mail: [email protected]
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[5] And finally... Rapid disappearance of a warm, dusty circumstellar disk (pp 74-76; N&V)
Observations of a young, Sun-like star that has undergone dramatic dimming within just a few years are reported in this week’s Nature. This star seems to have gone from hosting a substantial amount of dense warm dust to a meagre amount of cooler dust. These results may provide insights into rocky planet formation processes.
Stars begin their life in a cloud of gas and dust that form circumstellar disks, which eventually give rise to planetary systems. Understanding how these disks evolve may help in the development of planet formation theory that can explain the variety of planetary systems known to exist. Carl Melis and colleagues report a 30-fold reduction in the amount of infrared flux from a star TYC 8241 2652 1 and a rapid disappearance of dusty debris in a region equivalent to where planets are hosted in our Solar System. They note that these findings suggest the system has undergone a dramatic event. No such rapid phase of ejecta evolution has been previously predicted or observed, and no currently available physical model satisfactorily explains the observations.
CONTACT
Carl Melis (University of California, San Diego, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 858 534 6627; E-mail: [email protected]
Margaret Moerchen (European South Observatory, Santiago, Chile) N&V author
Tel: +56 2 463 3068; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[6] Reduced airway surface pH impairs bacterial killing in the porcine cystic fibrosis lung (pp 109-113)
[7] IDH1(R132H) mutation increases murine haematopoietic progenitors and alters epigenetics
DOI: 10.1038/nature11323
[8] The human CST complex is a terminator of telomerase activity
DOI: 10.1038/nature11269
[9] An epigenetic silencing pathway controlling T helper 2 cell lineage commitment
DOI: 10.1038/nature11173
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GEOGRAPHICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS…
The following list of places refers to the whereabouts of authors on the papers numbered in this release. For example, London: 4 - this means that on paper number four, there will be at least one author affiliated to an institute or company in London. The listing may be for an author's main affiliation, or for a place where they are working temporarily. Please see the PDF of the paper for full details.
AUSTRALIA
Parkville: 9
Weston Creek: 5
CANADA
Toronto: 7
FRANCE
Montpellier: 9
Paris: 9
GERMANY
Düsseldorf: 7
Garching bei Munich: 4
Munich: 4
SWITZERLAND
Lausanne: 8
THE NETHERLANDS
Utrecht: 6
UNITED KINGDOM
Edinburgh: 4
Oxford: 4
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Los Angeles: 1, 2, 5
Pomona: 5
San Diego: 5
South San Francisco: 2
Stanford: 3, 4
Sunnyvale: 3
Georgia
Athens: 5
Iowa
Iowa City: 6
Maryland
Chevy Chase: 1
Massachusetts
Boston: 1
Cambridge: 1, 7
Michigan
Ann Arbor: 4, 7
New Jersey
Nutley: 2
New York
New York: 1, 7, 9
Rochester: 7
Ohio
Athens: 4
Tennessee
Nashville: 2
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PRESS CONTACTS…
From North America and Canada
Neda Afsarmanesh, Nature New York
Tel: +1 212 726 9231; E-mail: [email protected]
From Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Taiwan
Eiji Matsuda, Nature Tokyo
Tel: +81 3 3267 8751; E-mail: [email protected]
From the UK
Rebecca Walton, Nature London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail: [email protected]
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