Scientists in St. Louis have decoded the entire genome of a woman who died of leukemia and in the process, they identified several mutations that probably caused the disease, accelerated its progression or rendered it resistant to chemotherapeutic agents.

The researchers sequenced DNA from the woman’s leukemia cells and her non-cancerous skin cells, and then compared them side-by-side. The comparison revealed 10 mutations that were present only in the cancer cells.

“This is the first of many of these whole cancer genomes to be sequenced,” Richard K. Wilson told the New York Times. Wilson is Director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University and a senior author on the paper published in Nature. “They’ll give us a whole bunch of clues about what’s going on in the DNA when cancer starts to bloom,” he added.

The scientists’ strategy to sequence the entire genome of a human cancer cell represents a break from previous approaches that had focused on a few hundred “likely suspect” genes. The strategy has been enabled by recent advances that make it far cheaper and quicker to sequence large amounts of DNA. The advantage of the new strategy is that it eliminates the possibility that the genes actually associated with cancer are not among the “likely suspects.”

Indeed Wilson’s group found that 8 of the 10 mutations in their study were not considered likely suspect genes.

The woman’s sequenced DNA will be made available for other research projects. Before her donation, the only fully sequenced human genomes had come from Craig Venter, the founder of the Institute for Genomic Research, and Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist James Watson.

Lots of people woke up with headaches the day after Barack Obama’s historic victory, including the Big O himself. Had Malia upped her negotiation stance to a Great Dane?

It wasn’t that bad, but it was an Excedrin moment nonetheless when those intemperate Russians announced just hours after the polls closed that they’ll deploy Iskander tactical missiles close to the Polish border if the Obama administration proceeds with plans to build a missile defense system in Western Europe.

Talk about raining on the parade!

To an extent, we can cut Russian President Dmitry Medvedev a break here. The poor guy feels put-out because his nation’s 75% stock market tumble in the last 6 weeks has completely extinguished the adrenaline rush he got from his moment in the Georgian sun last summer.

But did he have to go on national TV and say that right then?

Whatever, it presents an early test for the Big O, who during the campaign provided lukewarm support for a US-built European missile defense system designed to protect Western Europe from rogue states like Iran.

Moscow believes the missile defense system threatens its national security, to which the lame duck US president responded that the system would be no match for an all-out Russian nuclear attack so why worry?

Oy vey! January 20th cannot come fast enough.

Meanwhile, Medvedev was quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “I want to stress that these are forced measures. We want positive cooperation…we want to act together against common threats. But they unfortunately, don’t want to listen to us.”

Obama had no comment on the matter. He’s got to deal with Puppygate first.

When guitarist Diana Levine visited a clinic in April, 2000 complaining of nausea, she received an intramuscular injection of Phenergan, an antiemetic made by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

The shot didn’t work, so a provider gave Ms. Levine a second dose, this time directly into a vein in her arm. Or so he thought.

The FDA-approved label for Phenergan warns that giving Phenergan “IV push” can be dangerous because if the drug is injected into an artery rather than a vein by mistake, it can cause gangrene and necessitate amputation. The label describes how to avoid such a mishap.

But the worst happened. Ms. Levine lost her arm and her livelihood.

Ms. Levine sued the clinic and the parties quickly settled. Then she sued Wyeth in state court, arguing that the company should have strengthened the warning on its label to prevent the mishap, even though the FDA had signed off on the label as it was. The jury agreed with Ms. Levine, and she pocketed $6.7 million.

Earlier this week, the US Supreme court began hearing Wyeth’s appeal. Central to the Court’s deliberations will be whether a jury that is forced to deal with a disastrous but exceptional case like Ms. Levine’s is positioned correctly to establish precedents governing the function of entire medical care systems where benefits, costs and risks play out every day and bad things sometimes happen despite everyone’s best efforts.

This notoriously pro-business Supreme Court will be inclined to limit an individual’s right to sue and reaffirm the pre-emptive powers of federal regulatory agencies in the process. But it can’t overlook the fact that regulatory agencies like the FDA can get things wrong.

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