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Turn the tables?

The first important clues to the strategy came when Riggins and others collaborated about five years ago with renowned Johns Hopkins researcher Bert Vogelstein to try to identify which genes in a cell could be linked to glioblastomas. They discovered that mutations in a gene called IDH1 seemed to play a role in the tumor’s formation. But what did the gene do?

A crucial insight came from another Riggins collaborator, cancer researcher Chi Dang. Dang suspected that IDH1 was producing an enzyme that was using up one of the key molecules needed for a cell’s metabolism, forcing the glioblastoma cell to rely on a different enzyme to get the energy it needed. Riggins and his collaborators saw that as a vulnerability they might be able to exploit. “Cancer cells usually alter themselves to gain an advantage over other cells,” he explains. “Now we saw we might have a chance to turn the tables on them.”

- Turning the Tables on Brain Tumors, HopkinsMedicine.org, November 1, 2011.

2. For the past several months, BlackBerry loyalists have insisted that the new operating system, BB10, would soar at retail. They supported the investor community, which helped raise BlackBerry’s share price by more than 99% over the last six months.

In a poll on Yahoo Finance, 76% of respondents said that they were not interested in BB10. It was also revealed that Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform overtook BlackBerry last fall.