Against a descriptive turn.

While description is a valuable aspect of meaningful sociological work, this paper takes issue with Mike Savage's argument that the social sciences, and sociology in particular, should seek to prioritize description over practices of explanation and analysis, and attention to questions of causality.  The aim of this paper is not to take issue with descriptive forms of sociology in themselves, but to argue that the answer to the problems identified by Savage and Burrows in their landmark paper "The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology" is not to follow commercial forms of research by prioritizing practices of description and classification at the cost of asking fundamental questions about the "why?" and the "how?" of social life and politics. Rather, this paper argues that it is imperative that sociology does not simply describe inequalities of different types, but questions, explains, and analyses the structures and mechanisms through which they are created, reproduced, and sustained.

[Expectation about maintenance therapy among the GINECO French ovarian cancer cohort from the European NOGGO/ENGOT-ov22 Expression IV survey].

Background: Expression IV survey evaluated the patients' expectations to a maintenance therapy.

Methods: From January 2015 to March 2016, 401 French patients, in first line or recurrent disease, answered a 24-items anonymous questionnaire. The results were specifically analyzed according to the demographic characteristics and treatment lines.

Prognostic factors for overall survival in elderly patients with advanced ovarian cancer treated with chemotherapy: Results of a pooled analysis of three GINECO phase II trials.

Background: The GINECO led three multicentric prospective phase II studies, Elderly Woman Ovarian Trials 1 (EWOT1), EWOT2, and EWOT3, to evaluate the impact of geriatric covariates on the outcome of elderly patients treated with six courses of first-line chemotherapy for FIGO stage IIIIV ovarian cancer. This pooled analysis was designed to evaluate the validity of the geriatric vulnerability parameters identified in EWOT3 (Falandry et al., 2013).

Predicting everolimus treatment efficacy in patients with advanced endometrial carcinoma: a GINECO group study.

This study aimed to determine whether the expression of various tumor biomarkers of the mTOR pathway predicts tumor response to everolimus in metastatic recurrent endometrial cancer. Tumor blocks from 44 patients of a phase II clinical trial receiving everolimus until progression or toxicity were collected and evaluated at 3 and 6 months for response. Thirty-six blocks were available for analysis of ER, PR, HER2, LKB1, PI3K, PTEN, pAKT, 4E-BP1, p4E-BP1, and S6RP expression by immunohistochemistry, PTEN deletion by FISH, and mutational status of K-RAS, PIK3CA, PTEN, and AKT1 genes.

Direct measurement of the binding of RAS to neurofibromin using a scintillation proximity assay.

Protein-protein interactions are of major importance in many cellular processes. When no enzymic activity is involved, assays for direct binding are required. One such example is the relatively weak interaction between oncogenic Ras and the GTPase-activating protein neurofibromin (NF1).