Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Feb 14, 2007, 11:07a
During my neuroscience interviews at Berkeley yesterday, they gave us a tour of the fMRI trailer. I got there late and foolishly took my wallet, replete with mag-stripe credit and gift cards, into the MRI room. Of course I read the warning *after* I left the room, so I was worried that my magic-inferred plastic was now impotent. I checked ... more »
Read comments (3) - Comment
Kevin Fox
- Feb 14, 2007, 11:39a
Ahh, TMS...
Here's a post I wrote just a stone's throw from the Berkeley fMRI trailer about Prof. Ivry and his demonstrations of the TMS in neuroscience class: http://fury.com/article/1144.php
omar
- Feb 14, 2007, 1:04p
i guess there are many possibilities.. would this work if you were sleeping? induced sleep walking... unconscious assassins... my body doing a workout that i don't want to do..
however, weren't you a bit worried about the possible side effects that are not yet understood? what is the effect of randomly stimulating a very select area of the brain in this manner? i imagine there are no long term studies, yet.. though perhaps migraine sufferers are a good test group.
Kathy Loya
- Feb 23, 2007, 6:38a
I think this has interesting applications, not just for motor stimulation, but possibly for other therapies such as treatment of mood disorders non-invasively, non-chemically, and without need of anesthesia. (ECT is coming back into vogue for treatment of serious depression, but that requires anesthesia and the attendant risks.)
A New Drug For Cancer?
Feb 5, 2007, 9:42a
I just got back from interviews at Johns Hopkins Neuroscience yesterday, which is why I didn't hit my promise-to-post-on-Thursday for the third straight week :( But hopefully this news will make up for it.
According to an article in New Scientist, researchers at the University of Alberta have discovered that a drug called dichloroacetate (DCA) may be used to ... more »
Read comments (3) - Comment
Ken Dev
- Feb 6, 2007, 3:20a
As a cancer researcher in the US, I was very interested in the report. I wrote to the researchers quite sometime ago asking for a copy of any published paper. I also suggested that India may be a good country to run the clinical trials with DCA, since it would cost a fraction of what it would be to run the same trial in Canada or the US.
nikhil
- Feb 6, 2007, 9:25a
Hey Ken,
Thanks for the comment. I poked around a bit, and found these 2 publications:
1) WIPO patent "A Method Of Treating Cancer Using Dichloroacetate" (36 pages) - http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/ia.jsp?IA=CA2006/000548
2) "Spatio-Temporal Diversity of Apoptosis Within the Vascular Wall in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH)" - http://circres.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/98/2/172 - Apparently PAH and cancer are related
So there is a patent for this treatment, though I'm not sure if it's actually been granted or is still in the application process. I suspect that since it's owned by the University of Alberta and Canada has a strong bias toward super-cheap drugs, they won't require the patent to be licensed for manufacture and sale of the drug.
Ken Dev
- Apr 1, 2007, 10:51p
I am sorry-- I picked up your comments only today. Thanks for the refs. I am getting the pdf version of the paper which appeared in Cancer Cell. Unless I look at the patent-- hopefully, I can access it-- I wouldn't know what is new. I thought DCA has been around for a long time. I also read about the two blogs that have been set up [Details in Nature Blog]. It looks like people, who are desperate and are terminal, are buying it, although it has not been tested in humans. It has been approved for use in animals. From what little I read, it seems that it is producing some numbness etc. and apprently it could be because of impurity. Well, even taxol gives numbness! If this very cheap drug can give an extra year or two, it is worth it. India has some world class synthetic chemists and I am sure they can produce it cheaply and scale it up.
|