This is actually something that happened a few months ago, but I didn't blog about it then because I wasn't sure how public the information was. Anyway, my former Boss S, who supervised me during my PhD, showed up in Stockholm. I went to hear her talk, being curious to know what had happened to the project I started after I left. And it turns out that she's achieved some pretty stunning stuff.
She's found two drugs with clinical potential, and one of them turns out to be an inhibitor of something called a sirtuin. Sirtuins are super, super trendy right now; they're involved in marking the DNA at a level which is termed epigenetic. They also seem to play a major role in ageing, as well as being master controllers of which genes are expressed.
She's got a very nice paper in Cancer Cell which comes out this week. Unfortunately Cell Press are still operating on the model of making people pay to read articles, so you'll only be able to see it if you're in an academic institution. But anyway, the point is that it's very satisfying to feel that the work I did was the starting point of a project that has real, practical results, that may even help to make patients better.
Boss S' career is going very well at the moment, with this work and some other impressive achievements in the past few years. There's a possibility she might take up a position here in my institute, which would be rather cool, especially as she'd likely be working with the people I collaborate with anyway. I managed to feed her dinner and catch up on some of the gossip from Dundee, so I'm pleased that worked out.
Thinking of this has given me a motivation boost to get on with the stuff I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. So I'll leave LJ and get back to that.
She's found two drugs with clinical potential, and one of them turns out to be an inhibitor of something called a sirtuin. Sirtuins are super, super trendy right now; they're involved in marking the DNA at a level which is termed epigenetic. They also seem to play a major role in ageing, as well as being master controllers of which genes are expressed.
She's got a very nice paper in Cancer Cell which comes out this week. Unfortunately Cell Press are still operating on the model of making people pay to read articles, so you'll only be able to see it if you're in an academic institution. But anyway, the point is that it's very satisfying to feel that the work I did was the starting point of a project that has real, practical results, that may even help to make patients better.
Boss S' career is going very well at the moment, with this work and some other impressive achievements in the past few years. There's a possibility she might take up a position here in my institute, which would be rather cool, especially as she'd likely be working with the people I collaborate with anyway. I managed to feed her dinner and catch up on some of the gossip from Dundee, so I'm pleased that worked out.
Thinking of this has given me a motivation boost to get on with the stuff I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. So I'll leave LJ and get back to that.
