Felix Janeway
Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds. Completed my PhD in metal complex synthesis and I am now focussed on pedagogic research and laboratory skills.
Musical theatre nerd and board game enthusiast
Location Leeds
Activity
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Felix Janeway replied to Mako Tamura
Absolutely, Mako, but I think there is also a larger question of whether this is what we want to be the motivator for the production of drugs. Richard mentioned orphan drugs in the Q&A and he's quite right that some diseases are not having drugs developed for them on the basis of not being financially incentivised to do so!
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Felix Janeway replied to Dhinesh Kumar T
The major side effects of imaging are largely cumulation of damage from ionising radiation, and this largely comes from techniques that involve high energy light such as X-rays or scans which involve nuclear medicines, however MRI and Ultrasound have very few side effects from the process itself, and largely the stress comes from the patient lying in the...
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Felix Janeway replied to durga prasad
That's exactly right Eleanor, cells will self-destruct when they're not working properly, and imbalances can be things like having too much acid in the cell or not enough oxygen.
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Felix Janeway replied to Bobbie-Lyn Crocker
Hi Bobbie Lyn, an angiography of the retina sounds very unpleasant, but hopefully the issue was resolved?
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Felix Janeway replied to Liz Jenkins
Hi Liz, glad to hear that you are on top of monitoring your condition, I'm also intrigued by which agent they might use, but I imagine it will be a Gd contrast agent to see the blood flow?
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I hadn't seen any pictures of the colour X-rays, but your link led me to look at these, too. They're really cool!
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Felix Janeway replied to siobhan o'donnell
Hi Siobhan, thanks for your question.
In general the brain is protected from substances in the blood by the blood-brain barrier. Usually the only substances which can cross this barrier are water, gasses, some large fatty molecules as well as sugars and amino acids. When there is damage to this barrier due to the growth of a tumor or bleeds in the brain or...
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Felix Janeway replied to PYONE PYONE YEE
Great, can you explain why one molecule with lots of binding sites is better than many molecules with only one binding site each?
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Felix Janeway replied to Aaqarsh Aiyyar
Dear Aaqarsh,
Good research and well explained!
Felix
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Felix Janeway replied to Snehaja Venkatesh
Dear Snehaja,
This is a good analogy. Can you explain why use the contrast agents in the first place?
Felix
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Felix Janeway replied to Goretti Salabarria
Dear Goretti,
The shield analogy is great, thank you for your comment.
Felix
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Felix Janeway replied to Terese B
Terese, this is an excellent explanation. This is also exactly how metals are removed from the blood stream of patients who have been poisoned with heavy metals, too. We add a chelating agent to the blood stream in order to make the metal recognisable to the excretory system to be removed. Did you ever watch House M.D.? He was always ordering chelation!
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Felix Janeway replied to William Broadfoot
Hi William,
Good to hear your thoughts. Just a couple of small corrections here for your interest. Usually gadolinium contrast agents are introduced by injection into the vein rather than drinking so that the complex isn't affected by the acid in the stomach and we can ensure a the correct concentration in the blood stream, which could not be controlled if...
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Felix Janeway replied to Yousuf Kalo
Hi Yousuf,
Thank you for the feedback. Do you mean materials additional to those in the "see also" section below?
Felix
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Felix Janeway replied to Goretti Salabarria
Hi Goretti, this is an interesting question! I had heard this before but I wasn't sure what the answer was. Very few metals are magnetic in any state that is stable enough to inject into a person, except for iron, which seems to be a common element of tattoo inks. Tattoos with iron oxide inks can indeed interact with the magnet and are certainly visible in the...
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Felix Janeway replied to Mike Hosken
Hi Mike, apologies for the frustration. The captions and transcript should read as follows:
"These soundwaves BOUNCE off tissue, with different tissues reflecting the sound to varying degrees. The contrast agents used in ultrasound are CALLED 'microbubbles', which have pockets of encapsulated inert gas surrounded by harmless organic material. They are...
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Felix Janeway replied to Vanessa Omer
Hi Vanessa,
The difference between the two drugs I would say is that chemotherapy drugs are trying to change the body, while targeted therapies are trying to get the body to change itself.
The usual side effects with chemotherapy drugs usually come from the fact that they are not targeted at all, i.e. they affect all cells in the body and not just those...
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Felix Janeway replied to durga prasad
A cell becomes cancerous when it is unable to function properly (usually because the DNA of the cell has somehow changed) and so cannot undergo normal cellular functions such as self terminating. Usually when a cell's chemicals become imbalanced, the cell is able to open a small sack in the cell called a Lysosome which will release a substance which is able to...
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Felix Janeway replied to patricia hawyes
You're absolutely right, although at least most cancer is not like a pathogen, a treatment that is ineffective for one person will not slowly become ineffective for all, but more one treatment can slowly become ineffective for one person.
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Goretti, that sounds really interesting! Were you using chromatography or another method to separate the compounds?
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Felix Janeway replied to Alex Dow
Alex, thanks for sharing more information! The tastes thing is very interesting, I have a friend who got ill and not cannot stand the taste of milk chocolate, she can only eat white chocolate! I'm glad to hear the symptoms have lessened, I never really knew that the side-effects lasted so long after treatment has ceased!
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Felix Janeway replied to Bobbie-Lyn Crocker
Bobbie-Lyn thank you for the additional information, I look forward to reading it!
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Felix Janeway replied to Bobbie-Lyn Crocker
Terese, I loved Bad Pharma, it also heavily influenced my thinking. There are lots of interesting things going on in the world, especially the US which represents 58% of the pharma market. Luckily their government is stepping up with things like the Orphan Drugs act, though this president has also suggested that he would like to remove 75-80% of all...
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Alice, you're quite right it is very difficult to grow single crystals of proteins. I have a friend who did her PhD in trying to get the structure of a specific protein and eventually she found that adding a little horsehair managed to seed some nice crystals.
It is very difficult to guess what the exact shape of the protein would be without the crystal...
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Felix Janeway replied to Alex Dow
Alex, thank you for sharing your experiences, it's important for all of us to know about the experiences of patients and I wish you good health into the future.
It seems that Fluorouracil is a particularly difficult drug to administer as every patient reacts to it differently. Yet another thing to think about as we continue to explore practical chemotherapy!
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An interesting question to which I had no answer, but I had a look around and found this interesting paper from the Journal of Theoretical Medicine.
http://www.emis.de/journals/HOA/CMMM/Volume1_3/784139.pdf
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10273669808833020In this paper Panetta mentions that there is a severe effect of chemotherapy drugs on...
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Felix Janeway replied to Amella N
Good find Amella, you're quite right that the side effects are far reaching. Thanks for sharing!
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Felix Janeway replied to Sybil Goodkin
So sorry to hear about your sister Sybil, best of luck to her and your whole family.
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Felix Janeway replied to SUBHASH BHATIA
Nanochemistry is going to be a huge player in the drug market in the next few years, and we're already seeing some good results. I recently read about Dr Mark Davis' human trials in caltech/UCLA CCNE.
The aim of nanotechnology as you say is to capture and carry some drugs to a cell and then insert the drug. There are drugs which are sensitive to the...
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Hi Toluwase,
Very true, there are as many types of cancer as we have cells in our body (just over 200!) we're not even close to finding a treatment for them all.
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Felix Janeway replied to Tinus Fourie
Hi Tinus, you have made an excellent point, surgery does carry some risks that you may accidentally spread some cancer cells around the body and cause the cancer to spread, however it can also often be a very effective solution!
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Felix Janeway replied to Bobbie-Lyn Crocker
Terese, your post was very interesting. I think you bring up an important point about the cost of inhibitors vs chemotherapy drugs. Why do you think they're so expensive?
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Felix Janeway replied to Bobbie-Lyn Crocker
Very sorry to hear about your father, but I am so glad to hear that your child is healthy.
You have brought up a very interesting case study which I have enjoyed reading.
Did you know that there are very strict rules around drugs trials called the Declaration of Helsinki? In these rules a drug can only be tested against a placebo if there is no other...
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Felix Janeway replied to Felisha Murphy
I'm very sorry to hear about your loss Felisha, I hope that you find some comfort in learning a bit more about cancer on this course and keep joining us in the fight against cancer!
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Thanks for the translation Alex!
Sorry to hear about your sad loss Darwin, and I hope you find some comfort in knowing a little more about cancer and its treatment during this course.
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Felix Janeway replied to Annie Smitha P.T.
Very good point Annie, there is a lot of nonsense medicine around as well as proven medicine, we have to know who to trust!
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Felix Janeway replied to Young Bon
Nice to see you Gu Hiddong! I hope you find what you are looking for!
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Felix Janeway replied to Zunaira Amjad
I never knew that, I'm surprised that this happened so long ago in 1939! We're still prescribing Warfarin today!
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Felix Janeway replied to IMAD SARRAKHI
Society definitely needs to keep going with producing new drugs, though we also need to think carefully about how companies are motivated to discover the drugs!
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Felix Janeway replied to Rob Fennell
Interestingly cisplatin was also discovered accidentally. Dr Barnett Rosenberg was looking at bacteria cells under a microscope, he had a hunch that if he passed electricity through them it would stop them growing, and so he inserted platinium electrodes into the solution, turned on the electricity and waited to see what happened. He found that the bacteria...
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Oduro makes a good point, we certainly do have to weigh the risk of side effects against the symptoms of the condition being treated at all times, and this is why the patient must be informed of the risks as well as benefits!
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Felix Janeway replied to Wasili Gomani
Interestingly cisplatin was also discovered accidentally. Dr Barnett Rosenberg was looking at bacteria cells under a microscope, he had a hunch that if he passed electricity through them it would stop them growing, and so he inserted platinium electrodes into the solution, turned on the electricity and waited to see what happened. He found that the bacteria...
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Felix Janeway replied to Terese B
That's so cool, I'll have to check it out!
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Interestingly cisplatin was also discovered accidentally. Dr Barnett Rosenberg was looking at bacteria cells under a microscope, he had a hunch that if he passed electricity through them it would stop them growing, and so he inserted platinium electrodes into the solution, turned on the electricity and waited to see what happened. He found that the bacteria...
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Felix Janeway replied to Karen Ma
This is a very good point, a great many metals have been tried for anti-cancer properties and some of them work very well, but platinium seems to be the best.
The property of the metals that make them good at fighting cancer is the fact that they are attractive to electrons via a process called chelation (you can read about this in the glossary if you...
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Felix Janeway replied to patricia hawyes
It's a mind bending thought, isn't it? While the cells have no real mechanism with which to think (as far as we know anyway!) there are simply millions and millions of them. One of the destructive things about a cancer cell is that it is fantastic at surviving and then multiplying. All it takes is for one to just so happen to have a mutation which allows it to...
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Hopefully this link will work, but this is what a 3D map of one type of human insulin molecules look like. You can change the 'style' type to see the individual atom, or a general idea of the shape of the molecule.
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When you have so many molecules all stacked neatly, we can use X-rays to probe the structure. Light is refracted when it passes through materials of different densities, like when a straw looks more bent because it is in a glass of water. Light can also change angle when it goes through areas of dense electrons. If we know how large this change in angle is, we...
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I can't resist talking a little more about crystallography, I love it!
A crystal is a neat arrangement of molecules, stacking on top of each other regularly into a SINGLE lattice (a pattern) of molecules. Each molecule has the same 3D shape and so, through attractions of their electrons, tend to stack together neatly in a highly ordered fashion. What you...
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Goretti, that sounds really exciting, can you tell us a little more about what you did in the experiment?
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Very good point! The body is constantly repairing itself via immune response, it would be great if we could help the immune system fight disease more strongly.
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Felix Janeway replied to patricia hawyes
I hope this statistic hasn't worried you, though I completely agree with the sentiment Patricia!
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Hi Pauline, great to hear from you, I imagine you have lots of stories from the front line!
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Felix Janeway replied to Mifta Jyoti
I hope you find the course stimulating Mifta!
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Felix Janeway replied to Linda Jones
Great to hear from you Linda, what have you been doing since your degree?
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Felix Janeway replied to Annie Smitha P.T.
Hi Annie,
I'm very sorry to hear about your family suffering not only with cancer, but the burden of paying for it.
During the course we'll be discussing the methods of action of cancer drugs, and perhaps you will be able to share your experiences of the side effects of some treatments in the comments.
As a chemist myself I'm completely the opposite!...
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Hi Bobbie-Lyn, I hope you enjoyed Science Writing. I hope you'll consider sharing your experience from your previous studies in the next few weeks in these comments!
