Curtis Pickering

I posted another HNSCC article in the Blue place. This is the recent phase 1/2 trial from the Johnson lab.

I just posted another HNSCC article over in the Blue place. This one is from the Brakenhoff lab.

I'm going to be posting a HN research paper each week at the Blue place. The first one is up now. It's from the Scheff lab at Pitt. @HSkinnerMDPhD @nicole_scheff bsky.app/profile/cpicke…

I haven't been posting much on here lately, and now I'm going to be mostly at the Blue place. There still isn't much of a head & neck cancer community over there, but there can be if you join us. I'm going to be posting a HN paper each week at the Blue place.

1. This summer I've been thinking a lot about "cognitive load" which is term that has multiple definitions but for me means something like "the amount of processing, analysing, thinking, & deciding I can do in a day before my brain stops working" here's a short thread about that

@duvvuri_md @nyugrossman Thanks for coming. It was a great meeting. There is so much good work going on around here.

First (hopefully of many) Northeast Head & Neck Oncology translational science meeting! Big thanks to @crpickering & Dr. Barbara Burtness for putting on this amazing program. Wonderful science in the space. Great talk by Markus Schoper @nyugrossman on SOX-2 in HNCa

Very useful thread. Know your data. The goal of biological data analysis is not just to find something statistically significant, but to find what is biologically meaningful. Truly understanding the data can help you find the important things within it.

@JSheltzer Do you know if the winning research topics changed over time, perhaps from more basic science to more technology? Similarly, did the student mentors change over time from more academic to more industry? Those kinds of shifts could change the perspective of the winners.

An interesting trend I found: Among the top 10 national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002, 66% of them are now in academia. Among the same group from 2003 to 2014, less than a third are academics.

@Jeff_Mold @duvvuri_md Here's the link to a review by Bissell on this topic. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19009245/ The ratio of laminin to collagen in the ECM influences cell polarity, organization, and cancer-like features. Tissue stiffness, controlled by ECM, can also be a factor.

@duvvuri_md @Jeff_Mold I think a reasonable explanation is selection for that phenotype. Mina Bissell did a lot of work on breast epithelial cells in the early 2000’s to show that COLL expression promotes cancer phenotypes in epithelial cells. We only see the ones that express COLL and thus grow.

@Jeff_Mold Its a fascinating question. Outside of hand waving ‘explanations’, we don’t really know. We see various COLL genes dysregulated in squamous ca, w/o a clear reason. Is it an epi-phenomenon?

@HSkinnerMDPhD @UPMCHillmanCC @PittTweet Congratulations Heath!

As a small contribution to the good news coming out of @UPMCHillmanCC @PittTweet #Radiation Oncology, I was delighted to receive the NOA for our #R01, "Targeting non-canonical #p16 signaling to improve #radiation response and outcome in head and neck cancer," which helps us to build and expand on our previous work (bit.ly/3rCoVjG). Many thanks to @NIDCR and my colleagues!

Yale just increased their starting postdoc salaries to $65,000. Come join my lab at Yale! Contact me if you would like to work on translational genomics of head and neck cancer. Cell/molecular biology and/or computation experience desired. postdocs.yale.edu/policies/postd…

@pipcosper With a different genomic instability mechanism in HPV+ tumors, do you think this leads to selection for different events, i.e. drivers? Is there any benefit of the CIN for HPV+ tumors, or is it all negative (genomic instability, immune activation, radiation sensitivity)?

@crpickering Good question! CIN is not aneuploidy. Polar chromosomes lead to whole chromosome missegregation and we showed that HPV+ tumors have more of these changes than HPV- (TCGA). Copy # changes can be due to many different factors.

My two favorite things, CIN and #HPV, together in my (our) paper. Here, I found a curious phenotype in HPV+ H&N cancers and cells which led us on a chase to find the mechanism... pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Has anyone used a digital business card? Would you recommend it? Which platform is best for academics?

@MuthrNaturzSon @Nature Nice tweetorial and very interesting work. Thank you for sharing it. FYI, Yale Cancer Center is has an open faculty search in Cancer Biology with a March 15 deadline, apply.interfolio.com/119912.

@JSheltzer I'm generally inclined to include people as coauthors if they contribute to a manuscript, but there is a small space between work and contribution. You didn't specify the level of skill/experience. Trustworthy results = include. Questionable results = more training.

@Elkabetslab @CR_AACR TP53 wt is also associated in TCGA, but the need for it and the mechanism are still unknown. One possible mechanism is that HRAS induces TNF or TRAIL. That could be independent of TP53 status.

@crpickering @CR_AACR No we haven’t.. but to do this, I guess the cells must be tp53 wt, right?

New paper alert! Exciting findings on #CancerMetastasis in #headandNeckCancer (HNC) published in @CR_AACR. Our research shows how HRAS mutated cancer cells can spread to lymph nodes and lungs. aacrjournals.org/cancerres/arti…

@JSheltzer Also cisplatin by Rosenberg at Michigan State (Go Green!). This was discovered somewhat by accident during experiments with Pt electrodes .

@JSheltzer Interesting question. I don't know all of the history but a few possibilities come to mind. Prions by Prusiner PCR by Mullis Microarrays by Brown H. pylori in ulcers by Warren/Marshal (working together)

Many big scientific discoveries are races. Consider splicing - co-discovered by Sharp & Roberts, with many others close behind. Erase one and the discovery still happens within months. What breaks this pattern? “If not for X, it would have been decades before Y was discovered.”