Steve Piccolo's Blog » Research

My Second Paper!

admin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:57:29 +0000

Last year I went to a conference in St. Louis and presented some research I had worked on with some colleagues in the Genetic Epidemiology group at the University of Utah. It’s not tied directly to my dissertation work, but it was a good opportunity to collaborate with some great people and learn some new things. As a result, we also got the paper published in a journal called BMC Proceedings. This journal is not published in paper format (I don’t think). It just serves as a way for conferences to publish results.

Anyway, the idea behind the paper is to explore how well you can predict whether someone will have cholesterol problems based on their genetic profile. We expanded on some work that others have done by adding weights to the genetic markers. Here’s a link to the paper if anyone is interested. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2795945/?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_SingleItemSupl.Pubmed_DiscoveryDbLinks&ordinalpos=1&tool=pubmed

Immunotherapy as a Cure for Cancer?

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:19:13 +0000

For part of my research, I spent some time learning about a technique called immunotherapy, which is being tested as a means to kill tumors, etc. It has been used successfully in a few trials, but it is too early to tell whether this method will be successful. The basic idea is that a person’s own immune system is trained to kill cancer cell, rather than using something external like chemicals (chemotherapy).

Here is an article about a technique that has been extremely successful in a few prostate cancer patients at the Mayo Clinic. http://discoverysedge.mayo.edu/de09-2-kwonblute/ The first part is that they trick the immune system into sending more T cells to the area of the tumor. But tumor cells have a way of counteracting those T cells. So the second part is to counteract the tumor’s ability to suppress those T cells.

It’s still too early to tell whether this dramatic success will generalize to other patients and other types of cancers. But it’s promising, in my opinion. I think that these types of immunotherapy approaches will eventually be a cure for most types of cancer. That might take decades, but at least there’s more reason for hope.

My First Publication!

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:35:05 +0000

Some of you heard that I presented a paper at a conference last November. It was in Washington D.C. at the Fall Symposium for the American Medical Informatics Association. The title of my paper was “Somatic Mutations of Cancer.” It has been made available online, so below is a link where you can read it if you’re interested.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=18999255

The idea behind this paper is that mutations are known to play an important role in how tumors start and progress. As tumors get more and more mutations, tumors generally get worse. Lots of researchers are studying mutations in individual cancer types (e.g. lung cancer, brain cancer, leukemia). Recently some researchers in the United Kingdom put together a huge database that combined the results from thousands of these papers. My research was to use computer algorithms to try to find meaningful patterns in the data.

I learned a lot in the process, and it was fun to have others be interested in it.

My co-author, Dr. Lewis Frey, is my PhD advisor at the University of Utah. He’s been instrumental in guiding this research and getting it accepted.