in honor of breast cancer awareness month

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but October completely snuck up on me.  I feel like it was only a few days ago that I was grilling for Labor day.  Guess that’s what long days and longer nights in the lab will do to you.  Then I started to notice the changing colors of the new season.

There is pink EVERYWHERE – Breast Cancer Awareness Month is here in full force.  As if I might miss a pink ribbon here or there, my Houston Texans decided to reinforce the message last Sunday night.  Unfortunately, the game was a minor disaster, but for a city doing such profound cancer research, it was inspiring to see such a display from the hometown crowd.

And so, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month, I return from my small hiatus to share some research being done in the Bayou City with novel therapies for treating breast cancers. Continue reading

brain scans reveal why women get more migraines than men

I’ve come to realize recently that it’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to update miGENE.  My apologies.  What, with this whole running experiments, working on a thesis, and generally trying to graduate and move to the next phase in life, I’ve been a bit busy.  It’s really enough to give someone a headache.  I promise, I’ll keep up as much as I’m able, but as I near the end, the posts may necessarily come a bit less regularly.

<Insert smooth transition> Speaking of headaches, have you ever wondered why women seem to get them more readily, particularly migraines?  It is, in fact, true that almost three times more women than men suffer intensely painful headaches.  Neuroscientists at Harvard and Children’s Medical Hospital in Boston wondered the very same thing.  In the August issue of the neurology journal, Brain, they describe how differences in brain structure between the sexes are behind this phenomenon. Continue reading

secrets of the infant immune system revealed for frazzled mothers everywhere

If my Facebook newsfeed is any indication, apparently my generation has gotten to the point of testing the waters of parenthood.  Also evident is that I should have been a pediatrician, because it seems your poor little ones always have to go to the doctor .

Parents of all ages are surely aware of how often infants get sick.  To put it lightly, their immune systems are weak.  Dr. Yasmina Laouar’s lab at the University of Michigan School of Medicine is working to figure out why.  They describe molecular signals that prevent maturation of certain immune cells in infants in a paper published recently in Nature Immunology. Continue reading

male contraceptives are one step closer to reality

For the man who is not ready for a child in his life, there are several wonderful options available for family planning.  These include condoms, herbal remedies, vasectomies, prolonged heating of the testicles, and, of course, the infamous withdrawal method.

Obviously, most of these are either a tad final or woefully ineffective.  Except for the condom, which protects against a range of STD’s as well, men really don’t have a highly effective, reversible means for contraception.  Women, of course, have “The Pill,” and scientists have long been working to develop something similar for men.  Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston reported their findings today in Cell that may very well bring us one step closer. Continue reading