130,699 research outputs found
Waging war against pancreatic cancer: an interview with David Tuveson
David Tuveson, Director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is a clinician-scientist with a longstanding interest in understanding and treating pancreatic cancer. Since developing the first mouse model of pancreatic cancer in 2002, the Tuveson lab has made a series of discoveries that shed light on the molecular drivers of this disease and provide promising therapeutic avenues for a malignancy that is notoriously challenging to treat. In collaboration with Hans Clevers, David developed the first pancreatic cancer organoids, which revolutionized the field by providing a powerful model system for basic discoveries and advancement of personalized medicine. Here, David talks to Ross Cagan about his path from chemistry student to world-renowned oncologist, highlighting how his colleagues, mentors and patient interactions shaped his research interests and unique approach to scientific discovery. As well as discussing the story behind some of his breakthroughs, he provides tips on running a lab and succeeding in or outside academia
The RAS and YAP1 dance, who is leading?
The Hippo‐signaling effector YAP1 was recently found to compensate for oncogenic RAS in certain neoplasms, suggesting so far unanticipated molecular interplays between these major signaling routes. A new study in this issue of The EMBO Journal details KRAS‐dependent control of YAP1 stability as well as positive feedback regulation via the RAS/YAP1/EGFR‐ligand axis as novel molecular mechanisms that could become exploitable for therapeutic strategies
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
Information overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Stromal biology and therapy in pancreatic cancer: a changing paradigm
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) exhibits one of the poorest prognosis of all solid tumours and poses an unsolved problem in cancer medicine. Despite the recent success of two combination chemotherapies for palliative patients, the modest survival benefits are often traded against significant side effects and a compromised quality of life. Although the molecular events underlying the initiation and progression of PDA have been intensively studied and are increasingly understood, the reasons for the poor therapeutic response are hardly apprehended. One leading hypothesis over the last few years has been that the pronounced tumour microenvironment in PDA not only promotes carcinogenesis and tumour progression but also mediates therapeutic resistance. To this end, targeting of various stromal components and pathways was considered a promising strategy to biochemically and biophysically enhance therapeutic response. However, none of the efforts have yet led to efficacious and approved therapies in patients. Additionally, recent data have shown that tumour-associated fibroblasts may restrain rather than promote tumour growth, reinforcing the need to critically revisit the complexity and complicity of the tumour-stroma with translational implications for future therapy and clinical trial design
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
Both spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #11: The ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund
At the May 2014 talk, you will learn about the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund--what it is, why we do it, how it works, and how the program is going so far
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