You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The emerging precision medicine approach aims to tailor disease prevention and treatment to each patient on the basis of individual variability, environmental factors and lifestyle. Fundamental achievements in the last few decades have converged to offer nowadays the compelling opportunity to move towards this innovative approach: i) unprecedented improvements in disease modeling in silico, in vitro and in vivo; ii) acquisition of a wide range of biomedical information combined with the development of computational toolsets for flexible and integrative analyses of multi-assay datasets. Our deeper understanding of oncogenic mechanisms has finally begun to have a crucial impact on clinical decisions at several steps, from cancer prevention and diagnosis to therapeutic intervention. However, precision oncology still encounters several unresolved hurdles including tumour heterogeneity and recurrence as well as unexplained drug resistance and lack of effective ways to monitor response to therapeutic treatments. Notably, limitations in biomedical research regulation and governance represent additional debatable issues that need careful consideration.
From humble beginnings over 25 years ago as a lipid kinase activity associated with certain oncoproteins, PI3K (phosphoinositide 3-kinase) has been catapulted to the forefront of drug development in cancer, immunity and thrombosis, with the first clinical trials of PI3K pathway inhibitors now in progress. Here we give a brief overview of some key discoveries in the PI3K area and their impact, and include thoughts on the current state of the field, and where it could go from here
Detailed characterization of fuzzy interactions will be of central importance for understanding the diverse biological functions of intrinsically disordered proteins in complex eukaryotic signaling networks. In this volume, Peter Tompa and Monika Fuxreiter have assembled a series of papers that address the issue of fuzziness in molecular interactions. These papers provide a broad overview of the phenomenon of fuzziness and provide compelling examples of the central role played by fuzzy interactions in regulation of cellular signaling processes and in viral infectivity. These contributions summarize the current state of knowledge in this new field and will undoubtedly stimulate future research that will further advance our understanding of fuzziness and its role in biomolecular interactions.
The laboratory mouse is an important model for addressing questions in cancer biology. In recent years, the questions have become more refined, and mouse models are increasingly being used to develop and test cancer therapeutics. Thus, the need for more sophisticated and clinically relevant mouse models has grown, as has the need for innovative tools to analyze and validate them. This laboratory manual provides cutting-edge methods for generating and characterizing mouse models that accurately recapitulate many features of human cancer. The contributors describe strategies for producing genetic models, including transgenic germline models, gene knockouts and knockins, and conditional and ind...