Why Thriving Communities Require True Fans | Search Engine ...

If you start a blog today with the intention of becoming the next Lifehacker, Problogger, or Copyblogger, you?re likely to fail. Between a lengthy head start and an army of writers contributing to these sites the average person can?t compete. That?s the bad news. ?The good news is that you don?t have to. The future of the social web lies in small, but wildly passionate and loyal communities, ones that have an IMPACT on people?s lives.? Fortunately the ability to build these kinds of communities is available to everybody. The need to cultivate Kevin Kelly?s 1000 true fans is more important than ever.?

Impact vs Reach?

Reach can be bought.?You can buy yourself 10,000 followers on twitter. ?You can buy a million visitors to your blog. But if they have no connection to you it doesn?t have as much value. ?If all you?re interested in is a transaction, then it works.? But to build a truly engaged community it?s going to require cultivating a connection.?

Yes you need traffic. But when your focus becomes building an audience up of numbers instead of one of people, it?s easy to water down your work so much that you cater to the lowest common denominator. You go from impacting lives to interrupting them. In a world where? we?ve gone from 150 television channels to more than 150 million media channels, the impact based approach to marketing, social media, and content creation stands a more significant chance of success.

Infinite Scalability Could Lead to Eventual Mediocrity

Why haven?t the owners of some of the most? popular personal blogs online? brought in a team of writers to replace themselves? It?s not a matter of money. They have thriving businesses. They could easily hire a team of world class writers.??

AJ Leon, who launched his site Pursuit of Everything just 5 months ago is building a cult following.? But ask him about growth, and he has no interest in ?internet fame.? He likes being the ?corner coffee shop of the web.? You might be thinking that sounds a bit idealistic.? Let?s a take a look at some numbers.?

That?s not bad for being the corner coffeeshop of the web. ??

This model of being a publisher may not scale. But it doesn?t have to.? It?s a model based on people instead of numbers.

A Focus on True Fans?

What defines a true fan? How do you know somebody is a true fan?

• The show up every single day
• They tell other people about you
• They? notice when you don?t publish or disappear
• They buy something because it?s made by you. Apple customers are a perfect example of this. People who love Apple will tell you they have plans to buy the iPhone 12.?

Once you start to do work in service of your true fans something magical happens. All of the above just becomes a byproduct of how you show up in the world.

Know, Like, and Trust?

It?s spread through the web like a mantra that people do business with those that they know, like, and trust. Yet too many people look at all the tools and technology as a way to speed up this process rather than facilitate it.

As of two days ago some of you know me. If we?re friends from before I started this column, hopefully you like me. But I?d be a fool if I expected you to hire me? or buy anything from me. The real beauty of blogging, social media and our new technology is it enables us to build trust in a way that we never could before. This status update from Tom Ziglar about selling and trust is a true indicator of how important this is: ??

In Zig Ziglar?s (my Dad!) best seller Secrets of Closing the Sale he points out that the number one reason that people do not buy is a lack of trust. We are all in sales. We may be selling ideas, or selling our spouse or kids on something we want to do, or we may own a company that depends on sales to stay in business. According to Dad, if we are going to be successful in whatever we sell, we have to build trust.

Now, in the connection economy, where we are connected to almost everyone and everything, and transparency is no longer really a choice, trust is essential. Sure, people, governments, businesses, politicians, the media, etc will try to present their version of the truth, but in the connection economy this is becoming more and more difficult. And when trust is broken, in the connection economy everyone will soon know it.

So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to make scaling trust your number one priority? If so, will every action you take, and every word you speak, build trust? In order to live a consistently trustworthy life, you first must be a trustworthy person. This means that situational ethics is no longer an option for you. And this leads to an enormous challenge for many, the realization that there are absolutes.?

- Tom Ziglar

Trust takes time to build, but once it?s been established, it?s a solid foundation for a loyal community.

?

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-thriving-communities-require-true-fans/60694/

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Carbon footprint of grid-scale battery technologies calculated

Mar. 8, 2013 ? Americans take electrical power for granted whenever they flip on a light switch. But the growing use of solar and wind power in the United States makes the on-demand delivery of electricity more challenging.

A key problem is that the U.S. electrical grid has virtually no storage capacity, so grid operators can't stockpile surplus clean energy and deliver it at night, or when the wind isn't blowing.

To provide more flexibility in managing the grid, researchers have begun developing new batteries and other large-scale storage devices. But the fossil fuel required to build these technologies could negate some of the environmental benefits of installing new solar and wind farms, according to Stanford University scientists.

"We calculated how much energy it will cost society to build storage on future power grids that are heavily supplied by renewable resources," said Charles Barnhart, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and lead author of the study. "It turns out that that grid storage is energetically expensive, and some technologies, like lead-acid batteries, will require more energy to build and maintain than others."

The results are published in a recent online edition of the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Most of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Only about 3 percent is generated from wind, solar, hydroelectric and other renewable sources. The Stanford study considers a future U.S. grid where up to 80 percent of the electricity comes from renewables.

"Wind and solar power show great potential as low-carbon sources of electricity, but they depend on the weather," said co-author Sally Benson, a research professor of energy resource engineering at Stanford and the director of GCEP.

"As the percentage of electricity from these sources increases, grid operators will need energy storage to help balance supply with demand. To our knowledge, this study is the first to actually quantify the energetic costs of grid-scale storage over time."

Pumped hydro

The total storage capacity of the U.S. grid is less than 1 percent, according to Barnhart. What little capacity there is comes from pumped hydroelectric storage, a clean, renewable technology. Here's how it works: When demand is low, surplus electricity is used to pump water to a reservoir behind a dam. When demand is high, the water is released through turbines that generate electricity.

Charles Barnhart, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project, has developed a novel way to calculate how much energy is required to build batteries and other large-scale storage technologies for the electrical grid.

For the Stanford study, Barnhart and Benson compared the amount of energy required to build a pumped hydro facility with the energetic cost of producing five promising battery technologies: lead-acid, lithium-ion, sodium-sulfur, vanadium-redox and zinc-bromine.

"Our first step was to calculate the cradle-to-gate embodied energy," Barnhart said. "That's the total amount of energy required to build and deliver the technology -- from the extraction of raw materials, such as lithium and lead, to the manufacture and installation of the finished device."

To determine the amount of energy required to build each of the five battery technologies, Barnhart relied on data collected by Argonne National Laboratory and other sources. The data revealed that all five batteries have high embodied-energy costs compared with pumped hydroelectric storage.

"This is somewhat intuitive, because battery technologies are made out of metals, sometimes rare metals, which take a lot of energy to acquire and purify," Barnhart said. "Whereas a pumped hydro facility is made of air, water and dirt. It's basically a hole in the ground with a reinforced concrete dam."

After determining the embodied energy required to build each storage technology, Barnhart's next step was to calculate the energetic cost of maintaining the technology over a 30-year timescale. "Ideally, an energy storage technology should last several decades," he said. "Otherwise, you'll have to acquire more materials, rebuild the technology and transport it. All of those things cost energy. So the longer it lasts, the less energy it will consume over time as a cost to society."

To quantify the long-term energetic costs, Barnhart and Benson came up with a new mathematical formula they dubbed ESOI, or energy stored on investment. "ESOI is the amount of energy that can be stored by a technology, divided by the amount of energy required to build that technology," Barnhart said. "The higher the ESOI value, the better the storage technology is energetically."

When Barnhart crunched the numbers, the results were clear. "We determined that a pumped hydro facility has an ESOI value of 210," he said. "That means it can store 210 times more energy over its lifetime than the amount of energy that was required to build it."

The five battery technologies fared much worse. Lithium-ion batteries were the best performers, with an ESOI value of 10. Lead-acid batteries had an ESOI value of 2, the lowest in the study. "That means a conventional lead-acid battery can only store twice as much energy as was needed to build it," Barnhart said. "So using the kind of lead-acid batteries available today to provide storage for the worldwide power grid is impractical."

Improved cycle life

The best way to reduce a battery's long-term energetic costs, he said, would be to improve its cycle life -- that is, increase the number of times the battery can charge and discharge energy over its lifetime. "Pumped hydro storage can achieve more than 25,000 cycles," Barnhart said. "That means it can deliver clean energy on demand for 30 years or more. It would be fantastic if batteries could achieve the same cycle life."

None of the conventional battery technologies featured in the study has reached that level. Lithium-ion is the best at 6,000 cycles, while lead-acid technology is at the bottom, achieving a mere 700 cycles.

"The most effective way a storage technology can become less energy-intensive over time is to increase its cycle life," Benson said. "Most battery research today focuses on improving the storage or power capacity. These qualities are very important for electric vehicles and portable electronics, but not for storing energy on the grid. Based on our ESOI calculations, grid-scale battery research should focus on extending cycle life by a factor of 3 to 10."

In addition to energetic costs, Barnhart and Benson also calculated the material costs of building these grid-scale storage technologies.

"In general, we found that the material constraints aren't as limiting as the energetic constraints," Barnhart said. "It appears that there are plenty of materials in the Earth to build energy storage. There are exceptions, such as cobalt, which is used in some lithium-ion technologies, and vanadium, the key component of vanadium-redox flow batteries."

Pumped hydro storage faces another set of challenges. "Pumped hydro is energetically quite cheap, but the number of geologic locations conducive to pumped hydro is dwindling, and those that remain have environmental sensitivities," Barnhart said.

The study also assessed a promising technology called CAES, or compressed air energy storage. CAES works by pumping air at very high pressure into a massive cavern or aquifer, then releasing the compressed air through a turbine to generate electricity on demand. The Stanford team discovered that CAES has the fewest material constraints of all the technologies studied, as well as the highest ESOI value: 240. Two CAES facilities are operating today in Alabama and Germany.

Global warming impact

A primary goal of the study was to encourage the development of practical technologies that lower greenhouse emissions and curb global warming, Barnhart said. Coal- and natural gas-fired power plants are responsible for at least a third of those emissions, and replacing them with emissions-free technologies could have a dramatic impact, he added.

"There are a lot of benefits of electrical energy storage on the power grid," he said. "It allows consumers to use power when they want to use it. It increases the amount of energy that we can use from wind and solar, which are good low-carbon sources."

In November 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy launched the $120 million Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a nationwide effort to develop efficient and reliable storage systems for the grid. The center is led by Argonne National Laboratory in partnership with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford and a dozen other institutions and corporations. Part of the center's mission is to develop new battery architectures that improve performance and increase cycle life -- a direction that Barnhart and Benson strongly support.

"I would like our study to be a call to arms for increasing the cycle life of electrical energy storage," Barnhart said. "It's really a basic conservative principal: The longer something lasts, the less energy you're going to use. You can buy a really well-made pair of boots that will last five years, or a shoddy pair that will last only one."

The study was supported by GCEP and its sponsors -- ExxonMobil, GE, Schlumberger and DuPont.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University. The original article was written by Mark Shwartz.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Charles J. Barnhart, Sally M. Benson. On the importance of reducing the energetic and material demands of electrical energy storage. Energy & Environmental Science, 2013; DOI: 10.1039/C3EE24040A

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/QvQLlhLMIlc/130308111310.htm

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Great Personal Development Tips That Can Help You Reach Your ...

People who are engaged in a program of self improvement are actively trying to improve all aspects of their lives. In order to begin furthering your personal development, you need to be aware of the different self improvement techniques and strategies available, and then you need to find ones that work for you. Read this article to get started on your personal development journey.

Get to know the types of habits successful people use, and have those habits become a part of your life. Start with just a few fundamental habits, and practice them until they become a permanent part of your daily routine. Experts suggest that it takes three weeks to form a new habit, so persevere and you will change your ways.

Keep in mind the power of complimenting other people. If you are kind to other people, you will be kind to yourself.

If you are anxious around large groups or new people, work toward overcoming this by simply going with someone you trust to the movie theater. Movies are social settings, but they do not require conversation or uncomfortable socialization. This will help get you used to being in the same vicinity with lots of different people.

If you don?t take care of yourself, you won?t be able to take care of others. Whatever point you may be at on your journey, it is important to properly care for yourself.

TIP! If you take care of your health you will be able to get the most out of your personal development. You can keep your energy level up with regular exercise, a healthy diet, and getting a good night?s sleep.

Eradicate disorganization from your life entirely. Being organized can make you feel accomplished and it can boost your confidence. Better yet, you will no longer worry about finding necessary things or dealing with the stress that comes with living in a cluttered environment. When everything is organized, there tends to be a calm feeling.

Don?t use shopping as a comfort technique. Instead of spending money, find a hobby. Doing something more productive will help keep money in your pocket and help your stress level.

In order to enhance your own self improvement, work on becoming a leader. There are a number of ways to define leadership, but it is frequently defined as ?influence.? Take a good look at your journey toward leadership. Which events had the most impact on the way you live your life? What changes have occurred thanks to these events? What personality characteristics define you as a team player? If you explore the possible answers to these inquiries, you will become more capable of functioning effectively in a team setting.

TIP! An excellent tip for personal development is to treat your body well. Get regular exercise and eat a healthy diet.

Failing at accomplishing something that was important for you can be hard for your ego. The good news is that failure can be an enlightening learning experience. Failure is only another way of learning about your strengths and weaknesses. In this way, each failure needs to be something that you feel good about, because you are learning more about your true self.

Do not overdo it when you are trying to achieve your self improvement goal. Take your best shot, but know when you have reached your limit. Achieving a goal is not worth throwing away your health. Neglecting the physical requirements of your body will actually work against your self improvement efforts.

TIP! Good leaders possess strength and power, but are also compassionate. There is an element of service that makes up the character of a leader, as it enables them to lead with gentleness.

The advice in this article shows you that you can improve both your life and yourself through personal development strategies. In order to succeed in your own self improvement, you need to learn what strategies will and will not work for you personally. As soon as you start applying the advice from this article, you should start seeing success on your personal development journey.

Source: http://www.activeagingsolutions.com/great-personal-development-tips-that-can-help-you-reach-your-goals/

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Chris Brown Throws A Hissy Fit Over $10 (VIDEO)

Chris Brown Throws A Hissy Fit Over $10 (VIDEO)

Singer Chris Brown went off on a parking valet in Los Angeles, making a scene over just ten bucks! Brown was asked to pay $10.00 at PINZ bowling alley after he had attended a charity function at the venue. Should $10.00 really be major to Chris Brown when he is worth about $25 million? Chris ...

Chris Brown Throws A Hissy Fit Over $10 (VIDEO) Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/03/chris-brown-throws-a-hissy-fit-over-10-video/

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This Motorcycle Helmet Will Help Reduce Concussions

We've shown you 6D's new helmet technology before - elastomeric dampers absorb the forces of low-speed impacts, an area where traditional styrofoam-and-shell helmets fail - now, that function is better explained in this new video. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/01BuE0LPoUI/this-motorcycle-helmet-will-help-reduce-concussions

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Hope in stopping melanoma from spreading: Inhibiting protein prevents metastasis to lungs in mice

Public release date: 5-Mar-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Phil Sahm
phil.sahm@hsc.utah.edu
801-581-2517
University of Utah Health Sciences

SALT LAKE CITY Researchers have identified a critical protein role in the metastasis of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. Inhibition of the protein known as adenosine diphosphate ribosylation factor 6 (ARF6) reduces the spread of melanoma to the lungs in mice, according to a study published in the March 5 issue of Science Signaling online, suggesting that targeting ARF6 may be an effective approach to preventing melanoma metastasis.

Melanoma is the sixth most common cancer in the United States. Approximately one in 50 people will develop melanoma in their lifetime, and the number of melanoma cases diagnosed each year is increasing faster than for any other cancer. While melanoma generally starts as a single skin tumor, cancer cells can spread, or metastasize, to distant sites throughout the body such as the liver, lungs, and brain.

"Metastasis is what makes melanoma lethal, but our knowledge of how melanoma spreads is limited," says Allie Grossmann, M.D., Ph.D., molecular genetic pathology fellow at the University of Utah and co-first author on the study. "By improving our understanding of the cellular machinery responsible for melanoma metastasis, we can better identify targeted therapies that may stop the spread of cancer cells."

Although significant progress has been made in the treatment of metastatic melanoma, currently available treatments still can't achieve long-term survivorship in most patients. Grossmann and her colleagues discovered a new molecular pathway involving ARF6 that promotes metastasis and can be inhibited by a small molecule known as SecinH3.

"The surprising discovery that SecinH3 seems to inhibit the entire metastatic signaling cascade represents a potential breakthrough that may lead to improvements in the efficacy of current drug therapy. Our findings are exciting because the clinical implications extend beyond melanoma to other cancers, such as breast cancer and a type of brain cancer known as glioblastoma, in which invasion is also mediated by ARF6."

Based on the findings of this study and other previous studies by the same group that show the importance of ARF6 in other biological processes, Navigen Inc., a Salt Lake City-based pharmaceutical and medical device company, is investigating new ARF6 inhibitors for pre-clinical studies.

Although SecinH3 itself is not suitable for treatment in human patients, it serves as a useful model compound for demonstrating that small-molecule inhibitors of ARF6 may have therapeutic value in melanoma, according to Shannon Odelberg, Ph.D., U of U assistant professor of internal medicine and neurobiology and anatomy, Navigen scientist, and a contributing author on the study. "Our findings are the first step toward developing potent therapies that may actually prevent or reduce melanoma metastasis," says Odelberg, also part of the Molecular Medicine Program at the University of Utah. "These new therapies could potentially be used in combination with current drugs to produce a more effective treatment for melanoma."

###

This study was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Utah, the University of Notre Dame, Navigen, and the ARUP Institute for Clinical and Experimental Pathology. University of Utah graduate student Jae Hyuk Yoo, co-first author on the study, was instrumental in study design and execution. Co-author Kenneth F. Grossmann, M.D., Ph.D., University of Utah assistant professor of internal medicine, also is an investigator with the University's Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Ongoing collaboration between the University of Utah and Navigen will focus on developing a more detailed understanding of the ARF6 signaling pathway and testing new compounds to prevent metastasis in pre-clinical models of melanoma and other cancers.

Dean Y. Li, M.D., Ph.D., vice dean for research and chief scientific officer at University of Utah Health Care, H.A. and Edna Benning Endowed Professor of Internal Medicine, and director of the Molecular Medicine M.D./Ph.D. programs, is senior author on the study. Li also is an investigator with the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

This study was partially funded by a grant from the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 5-Mar-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Phil Sahm
phil.sahm@hsc.utah.edu
801-581-2517
University of Utah Health Sciences

SALT LAKE CITY Researchers have identified a critical protein role in the metastasis of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. Inhibition of the protein known as adenosine diphosphate ribosylation factor 6 (ARF6) reduces the spread of melanoma to the lungs in mice, according to a study published in the March 5 issue of Science Signaling online, suggesting that targeting ARF6 may be an effective approach to preventing melanoma metastasis.

Melanoma is the sixth most common cancer in the United States. Approximately one in 50 people will develop melanoma in their lifetime, and the number of melanoma cases diagnosed each year is increasing faster than for any other cancer. While melanoma generally starts as a single skin tumor, cancer cells can spread, or metastasize, to distant sites throughout the body such as the liver, lungs, and brain.

"Metastasis is what makes melanoma lethal, but our knowledge of how melanoma spreads is limited," says Allie Grossmann, M.D., Ph.D., molecular genetic pathology fellow at the University of Utah and co-first author on the study. "By improving our understanding of the cellular machinery responsible for melanoma metastasis, we can better identify targeted therapies that may stop the spread of cancer cells."

Although significant progress has been made in the treatment of metastatic melanoma, currently available treatments still can't achieve long-term survivorship in most patients. Grossmann and her colleagues discovered a new molecular pathway involving ARF6 that promotes metastasis and can be inhibited by a small molecule known as SecinH3.

"The surprising discovery that SecinH3 seems to inhibit the entire metastatic signaling cascade represents a potential breakthrough that may lead to improvements in the efficacy of current drug therapy. Our findings are exciting because the clinical implications extend beyond melanoma to other cancers, such as breast cancer and a type of brain cancer known as glioblastoma, in which invasion is also mediated by ARF6."

Based on the findings of this study and other previous studies by the same group that show the importance of ARF6 in other biological processes, Navigen Inc., a Salt Lake City-based pharmaceutical and medical device company, is investigating new ARF6 inhibitors for pre-clinical studies.

Although SecinH3 itself is not suitable for treatment in human patients, it serves as a useful model compound for demonstrating that small-molecule inhibitors of ARF6 may have therapeutic value in melanoma, according to Shannon Odelberg, Ph.D., U of U assistant professor of internal medicine and neurobiology and anatomy, Navigen scientist, and a contributing author on the study. "Our findings are the first step toward developing potent therapies that may actually prevent or reduce melanoma metastasis," says Odelberg, also part of the Molecular Medicine Program at the University of Utah. "These new therapies could potentially be used in combination with current drugs to produce a more effective treatment for melanoma."

###

This study was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Utah, the University of Notre Dame, Navigen, and the ARUP Institute for Clinical and Experimental Pathology. University of Utah graduate student Jae Hyuk Yoo, co-first author on the study, was instrumental in study design and execution. Co-author Kenneth F. Grossmann, M.D., Ph.D., University of Utah assistant professor of internal medicine, also is an investigator with the University's Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Ongoing collaboration between the University of Utah and Navigen will focus on developing a more detailed understanding of the ARF6 signaling pathway and testing new compounds to prevent metastasis in pre-clinical models of melanoma and other cancers.

Dean Y. Li, M.D., Ph.D., vice dean for research and chief scientific officer at University of Utah Health Care, H.A. and Edna Benning Endowed Professor of Internal Medicine, and director of the Molecular Medicine M.D./Ph.D. programs, is senior author on the study. Li also is an investigator with the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

This study was partially funded by a grant from the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uouh-his030513.php

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Video: Changing shape makes chemotherapy drugs better at targeting cancer cells

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Bioengineering researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara have found that changing the shape of chemotherapy drug nanoparticles from spherical to rod-shaped made them up to 10,000 times more effective at specifically targeting and delivering anti-cancer drugs to breast cancer cells.

Their findings could have a game-changing impact on the effectiveness of anti-cancer therapies and reducing the side effects of chemotherapy, according to the researchers. Results of their study were published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Conventional anti-cancer drugs accumulate in the liver, lungs and spleen instead of the cancer cell site due to inefficient interactions with the cancer cell membrane," explained Samir Mitragotri , professor of chemical engineering and Director of the Center for BioEngineering at UCSB. "We have found our strategy greatly enhances the specificity of anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells."

Changing Shape Makes Chemotherapy Drugs Better at Targeting Cancer Cells from UCSB Engineering on Vimeo.

To engineer these high-specificity drugs, they formed rod-shaped nanoparticles from a chemotherapeutic drug, camptothecin, and coated them with an antibody called trastuzumab that is selective for certain types of cancer cells, including breast cancer. The antibody-coated camptothecin nanorods were 10,000-fold more effective than tratsuzumab alone and 10-fold more effective than camptothecin alone at inhibiting breast cancer cell growth.

"This unique approach of engineering shapes of anti-cancer drugs and combining them with antibodies represents new direction in chemotherapy," Mitragotri added.

Mitragotri and collaborators at UCSB, including post-doctoral researchers Sutapa Barua and Jin-Wook Yoo, and former graduate student Poornima Kolhar, looked to human breast cancer cells to examine how shape works in synergy with molecular recognition to perform complex tasks within the human body.

"We were inspired to look at the shape as a key parameter by natural objects. In nature, all key particles such as viruses, bacteria, red blood cells, platelets are non-spherical," said Mitragotri. "Their shape plays a key role in their function."

Their research was performed in collaboration with Yatin Gokarn and Aditya Wakankar of Genentech, a member of the Roche group. "The work of Professor Mitragotri and his collaborators exemplifies the groundbreaking contributions bioengineers at UC Santa Barbara are making in medical research, and of how our model of industry partnership delivers results," said Rod Alferness, Dean of the College of Engineering.

###

University of California - Santa Barbara: http://www.ucsb.edu

Thanks to University of California - Santa Barbara for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127056/Video__Changing_shape_makes_chemotherapy_drugs_better_at_targeting_cancer_cells

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