We had our last meeting with DR CHOI at UTEP!

Yes yesterday was our last face to face meeting with DR Choi a brilliant scientist working at UTEP
with DR Zhang. She is returning to China within a week.  She transformed our world of suspicions into real events.  She has been a dominant force and a matter of facts woman who has key to our project on lung cancer detection kit  development project.
She did the PCR work needed and open us up to new perspective on the 3 genes looked at that not only confirms our suspicions, but opened new perspectives for future research questions related to the 3 genes.
Her findings have reaffirmed that we are in the right path and raises significantly the importance of target therapy, strengthen the notion that Ubiquitylation is critical in the initiation of lung cancers (and other cancers)
and could probably be a potent biomarker ( by its disturbances) to smoking danger to initiate lung cancers.
In the sera of patients  with lung cancers, her findings have been just as stunning and intriguing.  From high Cyclin presence to the presence of antibody for NPM1, p16 and even in minutes amount the presence of 14-3-3  (the same found in Creutzfeld Jacob disease ?).  All these findings were captivating and raising new questions about the specificity and sensitivity of some of our tests.
The level of amplification of these abnormal genes certainly call for a cut of point for amplification that could be primary and be suspected to be neoplastic, or secondary that could be an unintended event subsequent to other gene's amplification whether malignant or not.
When it comes to Antibody, what we suspected was confirmed.  Indeed since the antibody secretion is function of fluctuating lymphocyte reaction, or cellular use of genes involved in raising attraction of the white cells, the levels of antibody is fleeting or not correlating with the presence of gene amplification.   But our findings is that in cancer the presence of antibody is confirmed.  This may help in early detection...
Our discussion also brought to mind the difficulty of perceiving or detecting gene suppression unless your sets include normal tissue (we were offered biopsies of surrounding tissue luckily).  Finding genes that are less expressed is critical.  The example would be the suppression of PTEN in lung cancer, a well published event.  Unless you are comparing with surrounding tissues in the same individual, establishing repressed gene could elude your observation.  And we know how important such an observation represents as in major neoplasia, regulator genes could be suppressed!  Our work is still preliminary, and may be revisiting, but clearly new perspectives have been open and our work will continue no matter what!
CRBCM is progressing deliberately.  Please wait for the publication as it is being finalized!