biotinylated

Hah! Actually most of the time I just want something to hold my boobs in, but I haven't had much luck with VS bras. They tend to be pretty, but not very functional. It's hard to feel sexy when the bra doesn't provide support. Would you say VS products are more about form than function? How frequently do you see customers of larger sizes (not fat, busty. Like 34E busty)?

Until very recently I worked as a research assistant in translational medicine/personalized genomics at Stanford. I consented patients and families at Packard Children's Hospital for studies supporting translational research, and encountered a lot of barriers to the process of not only consenting patients but also collecting samples. Surgeries in particular were very difficult to coordinate (as opposed to lab draws) but most essential for the types of tumors we were interested in (sarcomas). As I'm sure you know only too well, primary patient samples are essential to the process of translational research. Are there well-established processes in place for recruiting, consenting, and collection of patient samples at your organizations? Are they "top-down" pipelines or did you have to scramble to figure out how to get your program up and running? Do you have your sequencing done "in-house" or do you export to industry locations? Thank you and best of luck in your research!

I'm with you. It's way too complex to have a blanket "cure" for even a sub-classification of cancer. My understanding is that we've barely scratched the surface of personalized genomics, but in the little progress we've made we've realized that there's WAY more going on than we thought.

Until recently I worked in translational/personalized medicine in pediatric oncology, and much research is being done on blood tests as a tool for assessing cancer progression. Circulating tumor cells are the area of interest for this, especially for metastatic disease, and I'm sure there are some molecular markers being investigated too.

There's a lot of conflict within the cancer research community about "cancer stem cells." Some groups prefer the term "tumor propagating cells." It's still very much a fuzzy term. It'll take a lot of time and research before we (the scientific community) really even know what we mean when we refer to "cancer stem cells."