GENETICS: Comparative Genomics Fine-tunes Noisy Data
With genomic tools, scientists can view all the genetic changes in cancer cells. But they now face the challenge of figuring out which events are important and which are just a byproduct of an unstable genome. Lynda Chin led a study published in the June 30 Cell that suggests the effort of sorting out promising leads in human cancers can benefit from the mouse. Using genomic analyses of a mouse model of melanoma, her team uncovered a gene that helps tumors metastasize.

ONCOLOGY: Attacking Cancer’s Sweet Tooth May Be Effective Against Tumors
An ancient avenue for producing cellular energy, the glycolytic pathway, could provide a surprisingly rich target for anticancer therapies. HMS researchers knocked down one of the pathway’s enzymes, LDHA, in a variety of fast-growing breast cancer cells, effectively shutting down glycolysis, and implanted the cells in mice. Control animals carrying tumor cells with an intact glycolytic pathway did not survive beyond ten weeks. In striking contrast, only two of the LDHA-deficient mice died, one at 16 weeks and the other at just over 18 weeks. Eighty percent of the mice outlived the four-month experiment. The findings by Valeria Fantin (left), Julie St-Pierre, and Philip Leder (right) appear in the June Cancer Cell.

PSYCHOBIOLOGY: Molecular Action of Popular Antianxiety Drugs Probed
Popular drugs prescribed to ease debilitating anxiety in people and to restore a good night’s sleep gave monkeys a serious case of the munchies, reports James Rowlett and his colleagues in the June 17 Psychopharmacology. The findings are the latest details to emerge from a program that aims to separate the therapeutic benefits from the unwanted side effects of benzodiazepines and other drugs that act on the same receptor. The drugs appear to exert different effects by binding more strongly or weakly to different versions of the receptor for the principal inhibitory neurotransmitter.