They’ve Got A Nit To Pick

In what Harel calls the “busy season” for nits, her LiceBusters staff carefully plucks the bugs from a young client’s hair.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Every Rosh HaShanah, as Dalya Harel welcomes friends and relatives from abroad into her home from abroad, she eagerly awaits the arrival of some other New Year favorites — apples, honey and head lice..

“It’s a very busy season,” she said. “I had guests from Israel, and I cannot tell you what they brought me.”

But these guests couldn’t have chosen a better place for their High Holy Days visit. Harel, the maven behind Lice Busters NYC, runs a thriving delousing business through her home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she says she receives customers from all over the country.

The crowded nature of local camps and schools, both public and private, make New York a convenient city for lice spread, according to Harel, though she says that infestations are even more prevalent in Europe and Israel, where schools don’t check students. Harel first decided to start her company in 1995, shortly after the two oldest of her nine children came home from school with lice.

“They came home and I couldn’t go to sleep at night,” she said. “You can’t sleep at night if your kids have nits in their hair.”

Harel isn’t the only leader in Brooklyn’s lice-slaying business. Her colleagues — other Orthodox women — offer equally popular delousing services throughout the densely populated borough. Some of these women include Susan Sherman at LiceBGoners, Adie Horowitz of LiCenDers and Abigail Rosenfeld, the “Lice Lady of Brooklyn.” Others include Lice Be Gone in northern New Jersey and Licebeaters, with locations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Florida.

“There’s work for everybody,” Harel said.  Continue reading…

Man Of Science, Man Of Faith

Shorr, both a rabbi and a research scientist, brings God to his laboratory as he fights against cancer.

by Sharon Udasin

Staff Writer

When it comes to curing cancer, one scientist gives God all the credit as he moves one step closer to slaying the resilient killer.

Rabbi Dr. Robert Shorr, 55, the CEO of Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals, is overseeing the Phase I/II clinical trials of his newly developed cancer combatant drug, CPI-613, produced in conjunction with researchers and technology at Stony Brook University’s Long Island High Technology Incubator. Aiming to target pancreatic cancer and a wide array of other diseases, doctors are testing CPI-613 both alone and in conjunction with gemcitabine, an already standard chemotherapy treatment for pancreatic cancer — the disease that recently killed actor Patrick Swayze after a 20-month battle.

Meanwhile, as Shorr dives headlong into cancer research, the Orthodox biochemist remains a practicing rabbi, teaching students for free through the Partners in Torah over-the-phone learning service.

“I try to infuse in my professional life not [just] learning the Torah, but living it, and that’s a sanctification of Hashem’s name,” said Shorr, who finds no conflicts between matters of God and science.

For Shorr, the biggest obstacle in developing cancer drugs is the fact that no two cancer cells are the same. “Even within a single patient not all the cancer cells are going to be the same,” he said.

But Shorr’s new drug works to destroy a resource that every cancer cell needs for survival — adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy-transferring molecule that cells produce through glucose conversion.

“Without ATP, cells can’t do anything and they eventually die,” Shorr said. “What our drug does is turn off the ability of cancer cells to make ATP — a catastrophic shut-down of ATP synthesis.”   Continue reading…

Searching For The Right Genes

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Women with breast cancer have seen a modest increase in survival rates over the past decade, as both prophylactic and combative treatment options become more widely available, and as expertise in genetics and molecular biology continue to expand on the clinical level.

In this context, Jewish women in particular may benefit from genetic testing to determine whether or not they have BRCA1 and 2 gene deficiencies, which make one more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers. Worldwide, breast cancer patients can also benefit now from hormonal chemotherapy treatments like tamoxifen, which inhibits estrogen from binding to its receptor, and herceptin, which inhibits the over-expressed HER2 cancer-causing growth factor receptor protein.

But what about those women — and men — who don’t respond to these targeted drugs, and therefore must be subjected to general chemotherapy? (While the majority of breast cancer patients are women, men also get breast cancer.)  Continue reading…