Perspectives

A valuable website illustrates the power and speed of using virus genomes to track and understand the global spread of #Covid19.

Considerations around ‘value’ assessment for gene and cell therapies in rare diseases was a theme addressed by several speakers, to close the 1st day of a CAR-TCR Europe 2020 Summit meeting in London, yesterday.

Imagine being told that you are about to be dropped into a deep and deadly hole with nothing but a grappling hook to pull yourself...

Pondering those cancer circuitry maps such as the one from the updated classic "Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation" by Hanahan and Weinberg (Cell, March 2011), one might be excused from a certain dizzying sense of awe, and a very real sense of terror at the complexity of tumor cells. And this complexity, rendered simplistic in the graphic, represents only a static snapshot. The temporal and contextual dynamics of cancer's heterogeneity and fluidity are not captured. So my reference to reductionist thinking in Part I of this piece is therefore not an indictment of anyone but the sobering realization of the practical considerations we have had to make in challenging Cancer (capital "C" here).