A potent drug derived from an evergreen tree may soon save the lives of some patients with the deadliest form of breast cancer. Scientists at UCSB, in cooperation with researchers in the pharmaceutical industry, have discovered the mechanism by which this drug kills cancer cells.
    The team has isolated the drug’s action in the test tube as well as in cancer cells. The results were reported in two studies published in a recent issue of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. The articles feature work performed in the laboratories of Mary Ann Jordan and Leslie Wilson, professors in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
    Early clinical trials show that the drug, called maytansine, shrank the tumors of one-third of the patients in the breast cancer study. The studies explain that the drug works by targeting the microtubules of cancer cells.

	Gregory Ashby and Sebastien Helie

Frontal Lobe is Key to Automatic Responses

Motor skills are learned in one part of the brain, while classroom instruction and information read in a book are acquired in another. The second area of learning is the frontal cortex, where executive function is located.
    A study lead by F. Gregory Ashby, professor and chair of psychology, found that tasks with explicit reasoning behind them were much simpler for test subjects to complete. “When you can’t explain reasoning, it takes test subjects about 10 times as many trials to master,” Ashby said.
    Tasks without explicit reasoning behind them are grasped in a lower part of the brain, the basal ganglia. However, Ashby noted, once a behavior becomes automatic, it becomes cortical. Ashby’s research appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

	Alan Wood, Ryan Hechinger, and Armand Kuris with California horn snails.

Parasitic ‘Warrior Worms’ Discovered in Snails

A research team led by Armand M. Kuris, professor of zoology in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, has discovered a caste of genetically identical “warrior worms” — members of a parasitic fluke species that invades the California horn snail. The findings were reported recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
    “We have discovered flatworms in colonies with vicious, killer morphs defending the colony,” Kuris said. “These flukes have strongly developed social organizatin, much like some insects, mammals, and birds.”

Quantum Computing Research Edges Toward Practicality

Physicists have taken an essential step toward the construction of a quantum computer. Their research involves the entanglement of three quantum bits of information, or qubits. Before now, entanglement research in the solid state has been developed only with two qubits. The finding comes from a collaboration of the research groups of Andrew Cleland and John Martinis, and appears in a recent issue of the journal Nature. .
    The Cleland-Martinis group is studying superconducting quantum circuits and their potential uses in quantum computing. In this most recent work, the team fabricated and operated a device with three coupled phase qubits, using them to produce entangled quantum states.