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Cancer Resistance Technique Moves To Human Trials
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Jun 29, 2008 11:01 AM
from the of-men-and-mice dept.
from the of-men-and-mice dept.
TaeKwonDood tips us to news that a new cancer resistance treatment is going into clinical trials after being quite successful at eradicating cancer in mice. Researchers discovered that certain white blood cells called granulocytes from cancer-immune mice were able to cure cancer in other mice. Now, doctors are putting out the call for healthy granulocyte donors in order to test how well it works on humans. The article quotes lead researcher Zheng Cui saying, "In mice, we've been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors. Hopefully, we will see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans."
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Fast-Track Immunization? (Score:5, Interesting)
This strikes me as a kind of fast-track immunization, i.e. getting the relevant antibodies into a person's immune system quickly before an infection can take hold. Rather than having to spend time developing the relevant treatment, simply borrow from another human who already has the necessary lymphocytes. Nice!
I'm aware of the correlation between infection and various cancers - I had Hodgkins Lymphoma a few years ago myself.
Super Race of Granulocyte+ Smokers (Score:5, Funny)
How do I get tested for whether I've got the granulocyte cancer immunity? I've always wanted to take up smoking. If I could sell my granulocytes, I'd afford to buy a carton of cigarettes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A Heartwarming film about a group of plucky (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
who discover that the real cure for cancer was inside of them all along!
So it's a movie about cannibalism then?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, finally a reason to start carving up young scientists. Imagine all the other cures that could be found inside young scientists.
Now where did I leave that bone saw.
Granulocytes, (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
No right, but no reputable MD. will participate either.
I am Legend in 3, 2, ... (Score:2)
Obviously
Enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
So, if you're diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, will you restrict yourself to treatments that were available twenty years ago, then? Somehow I kind of doubt that.
Re:Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough of this "We found a cure! We're headed to trials!" crap. We've seen this for the past 20 years, yet NONE of these 'cures' are actually used on a daily basis. Either put up, or shut up.
OK, sure. Have a look at the Kaplan-Meier curves for survival for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia in children. In the 60's your child's chance of long term cancer free survival was less than 10%. Today, your child's chance of long term cancer free survival is in the 90% range. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/support_cancer_research_now.php [scienceblogs.com] Orignial article: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/2/166 [nejm.org]
While big leaps and bounds are great. The progress in cancer treatment and research is made through slow and consistent work at the same problem. More power to these people. But each one of these 'we're headed to trials' announcements is one grain of sand - possibly a big one - working toward grinding the machine to a halt.
Parent
Re:Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past 20 years, we saw a number of surgical and radiologic techniques reach clinical use. When I was doing cancer research, I worked on projects using Gleevec and Zolinza, both now FDA approved. However, both of these drugs currently have very narrow uses; Gleevec is only effective against CML, for example, and Zolinza [aka vorinostat or SAHA] is currently only approved for certain types of leukemia.
I am skeptical of anyone who says they have any 100% Cure For Cancer. As other posters have noted, cancer describes a single overall pathology, uncontrolled growth of cells, that breaks down into many subtypes based on tissue type and further based on the underlying genetic fault. Immunology, in particular, is guilty of following trends (so it's granulocytes this week, huh guys? Have you given up on Tregs, vaccines, etc.?) and pushing for the ultimate single cure.
While it's true that cancer is a disease of the old, and it's increasingly well known that the composition of immune cells changes as you age, I suspect that someone would have noticed by now if it was as simple as transplanting granulocytes. How about a retrospective study of blood transfusion recipients? Shouldn't this population, on average, have a lower incidence of cancer relative to a comparable control population?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if you could get cancer from someone else along with their blood.
Which won't be surprising since if you're getting a transfusion:
1) You're probably not in good shape in the first place.
2) Your immune system isn't supposed to be going "Red Alert!" and blasting away what you just got transfused with.
Sign me up! (Score:5, Interesting)
Definitely glad to see this story. It's the first of a number of techniques to reach clinical trials that actually show real promise.
I don't qualify as a patient participant as I still respond to conventional therapy. Hopefully they'll still be conducting trials if that changes, or will have expanded them to include patients who are still being treated conventionally.
It'll definitely be interesting to see the results if they expand trials to include patients with aggressive tumors. The patient requirements, while not explicitly saying so, eliminate consideration of such patients. Once you no longer respond to therapy treating an aggressive cancer, the likelihood of having a > 6 month survival rating is basically nil (thus disqualifying you from the study). I can understand the rationale to not unnecessarily skew the initial trial results when they can get good data from patients with less aggressive cancers, but if/when the trials go after the fast killers it will definitely show the true potential of this particular cancer weapon.
Here's to hoping for positive results. The other nice thing about this therapy is that, since it is not drug-based, it is not locked up by one single pharmaceutical company. Hooray for open source medical therapies.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's unethical to try this stuff on people who still respond to already tested therapy. If it doens't kill or harm anyone from the infusion of large numbers of WBC ... then they will expand the trials.
It's easy to get granulocytes out, although tedious for the donor. If this works, some of the solid tumor cancers could be suddenly treatibl
Re:Sign me up! (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't claim that it should be tested initially in people currently responding to conventional therapy. I was merely saying that I hope I am able to apply for inclusion in the trials should A) my condition change to make me eligible or B) the eligibility requirements of later trials change to include me should my condition not change.
As for it being potentially harmful or fatal in human trials, the likelihood is much smaller than other first-run clinical trials. Granulocyte therapy is already used in humans to treat other conditions. The only differences in this regard are the targeted conditions and an increased quantity of granulocytes infused into the recipient.
Given the nature of the treatment, the only likely adverse reaction would be an immune response. I doubt that the increased infusion amounts are going to cause more immune responses than already-established granulocyte protocols. They'll probably have a statistically indistinguishable amount of adverse reactions, but obviously establishing that conclusively is one of the points of the trial.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They used similar techniques for antibiotic resistant infection so the safety should be understood. Now its a matter of determining if the method's benefits out weight it's costs and risks.
Graft vs. Tumor effect (Score:5, Informative)
In "Graft vs. Host" [wikipedia.org] there is a specific side-effect known as Graft-vs-Tumor. The effect has been known for some time, with the main problem being the lack of control over whether the transplanted immune cells attack both the tumor and/or the host, as GvH can result in serious or fatal reactions.
In this case, I see the info page for the study mentions that Granulocytes are known to attack tumors without causing GvH, which appears to be the novel part of this study. Let's hope they've got a really efficient method for depleting T-cells from the mix.
Cure for Cancer (Score:2)
If this works, I think it's great.
But also interesting is what would happen to the cancer fundraising industry if all of a sudden all the newspapers' front page headline was, "Cancer Cured". My wife works at the hospital, and she sees that the amount of money that comes into the hospital from charities that raise enormous amounts of money to "fight cancer" is unbelievable. Everyone in the cancer unit gets new computers every year, has all the best equipment, etc., while the units right next to them, also
Animal testing is VITAL for medical advances (Score:5, Interesting)
People who protest against using animals for testing new drugs or therapies would be well advised to take note of how this advance relied on years of animal research. While unnecessary cruelty to animals is to be abhorred (and yes there may be times when suffering is necessary) this shows that the rewards may be significant.
It's interesting that (much of) the scientific community and christian fundamentalists agree upon this point. It's due to the christian fundamentalists' view that God gave Man dominion over all the animals; not because of any appreciation or understanding on their part of the scientific method.
Humans are not big mice (Score:5, Informative)
I just spent 2 days reading a few articles about this general area of research in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, so let me try to explain this to my fellow /.r's who so generously explain to me about warez and the penguin.
Doctors now believe that cancer goes through several stages before it becomes a problem. Cells become cancerous all the time, but usually the immune systen destroys them. To simplify a bit, immune cells such as dendrocytes (which is the hot immune cell these days) recognize cancer proteins. Dendrocytes take a piece of the cancer protein to a T cell, and the T cell kills the cancer cells. There's a great explanation of the immune process on Kimball's Biology Pages http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AntigenPresentation.html [rcn.com], and if you take a few minutes to figure it out you'll understand one of the most amazing discoveries of the last century.
The reason we get cancer is that sometimes that process doesn't work. All it takes is one time during your lifetime when a cancer cell "figures out" a way to evade the immune system, and the cancer takes off.
It obviously occurs to doctors that it would be cool (and probably win a Nobel prize) if they could figure out some way to goose the immune system into fighting cancer, just the way they goose it into fighting viruses with vaccines.
One guy who tried that was Steven Rosenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rosenberg [wikipedia.org] at the NIH. Rosenberg took melanoma cells from patients, and tried to stimulate the patient's immune system with a molecule called interleukin-2 that cells use to signal immune attacks. I remember reading about that around 1984, I think. The cancer slowed down but it came back. Rosenberg has been working on it ever since.
I remember seeing a cover headline in Fortune magazine back then about Rosenberg, to the effect, "Cure for cancer." (No question mark.) Do you suppose the media hype these things?
In order to understand cancer research, you have to understand that they can kill cancer cells in laboratory bottles, they can cure cancer in mice, but when they try to kill cancer cells in humans, time and again, it doesn't work. When it finally works in humans, that's news. The other thing you have to understand is that there are many treatments that make cancer tumors shrink or disappear for a while, but they usually come back. Cancer patients don't want the cancer to go away for 6 months -- they want it to go away forever. There are a few cancers that can sometimes be cured, like testicular cancer and childhood leukemia, and maybe some prostate cancers, but most of the time, for the big 3 (colon, breast, lung) oncologists are just trying to extend life. Of course, if you're 65 and your doctor can keep you alive for another 20 years with colon cancer or leukemia, that's not so bad. Most of the successful treatments for cancer extend the life of a cancer patient from, say, 20 months to 25 months, or 40 months to 45 months, but sometimes they get a really big jump, and for people with chronic myelogenic leukemia, imatinab (Gleevec) can extend their lives indefinitely.
Anyway, the really big news is that somebody actually managed to get a treatment like Rosenberg's to work on a real human with melanoma, who seems to be cured after 2 years. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Treatment of metastatic melanoma with autologous CD4+ T cells against NY-ESO-1, Naomi Hunder et al., 358:2698 http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/25/2698 [nejm.org] In the past, they've gotten melanoma (and kidney cancer) to regress for a while, but it came back. This time it seems to be gone for good -- in one patient.
Basically, they had a patient with melanoma that had spread to his lungs. He had T cells that
Good progress or poor progress? See for yourself. (Score:3, Informative)
Are we making good progress on cancer? Why not look at some actual data and listen to some actual scientists? Here's a great show giving a historical overview of the trends in cancer:
Why Me, Doc? What Scientists Know - and Don't Know - About Cancer [uwtv.org]
And here's a somewhat discouraging outlook from the Nobel-winning head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center here in Seattle:
Medical Research: The Agony and The Ecstasy [uwtv.org]
Why learn about cancer from kibitzers on slashdot, when there are great resources for technical-minded folk to learn directly from scientists?
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
Progress is slow when new medicine is constantly under attack and being made...
illegal: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071900524.html [washingtonpost.com]
'sinful': http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7287071.stm [bbc.co.uk]
and unteachable: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080627-louisiana-passes-first-antievolution-academic-freedom-law.html [arstechnica.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And did you know that there was absolutely NO Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research BEFORE Bush? You act as if he cut off funding that was already there! Bullshit.
He did cut funding that was already there just not up front, he did it around back. He made it a crime to share resources between programs.
So, unlike all other kinds of research, if you wanted to do embryonic stem cell research you had to draw a bright white dividing line around your facilities. In many cases this required entirely separate buildings just for stem cell research. In other words, Bush made it so that any idle resources purchased by other programs must remain idle rather than be used opport
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
Be careful about using absolutes like "anything" or "nothing", "always", or "never". They frequently come back to bite you. Remember, all of this research is extremely nascent, most results are just getting to the human testing phases. Further, embryonic stem cell research receives far less funding (especially in the United States) and what research does occur here is very limited [eurekalert.org]. Even with one hand tied behind its back though:
Ok, I'm tired to cutting and pasting. The list is way too long. And as far as Bush not opposing embryonic stem cell research, your daft if you actually believe otherwise. He's stated as much on many occasions. 8 years ago, embryonic stem cell research was a glint in sciences eye. It's no wonder that funding didn't exist before then.
That we have received funding despite Bush's efforts is not a sign of his support. Simply compare the funding being provided within the U.S. to that being provided in other countries. It's no wonder the U.S. is lagging far behind [genengnews.com] the rest of the world. You know what happens when a societies backwards, ignorant beliefs prevent funding into cutting edge technology? The cutting edge sciencists leave [the-scientist.com].
Parent
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago, your chances were much better than ten years ago. Etc. The general public loses interest when a promising new treatment turns out not to be The! Cure! For! Cancer!, but yes, research does make its way from the lab to the bedside. Probably no new medicine or treatment technique will ever cure all cancer, but there's a good chance it will take care of a significant portion of a certain type of cancers -- which is, of course, of infinite interest to those diagnosed with that particular disease.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oops. My reply was supposed to be to GPP. It is entirely true, of course, that religious objections slow scientific progress in this and many other medical and biological fields. But demand is high enough that in the long run, the research will get done and the medicines will be made available. No way of knowing how much unnecessary suffering and death people will endure in the meantime, of course, because some idiot priest or politician values their own chosen mythology over human life.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that orthodox Jews have lightened up on the blood prohibition, there are probably a few sects there that wouldn't partake, Witnesses will not like it and a few other radical fringe cults. Of course when the whacko extremists are the only ones still dieing of cancers it'll be because of a gov conspiracy to kill them off.
Parent
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course when the whacko extremists are the only ones still dieing of cancers it'll be because of a gov conspiracy to kill them off.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Parent
The Grandmother Hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago, your chances were much better than ten years ago. Etc. The general public loses interest when a promising new treatment turns out not to be The! Cure! For! Cancer!, but yes, research does make its way from the lab to the bedside. Probably no new medicine or treatment technique will ever cure all cancer, but there's a good chance it will take care of a significant portion of a certain type of cancers -- which is, of course, of infinite interest to those diagnosed with that particular disease.
Supporting evidence of how far we've come:
Every single person I have personally known that has had cancer (several people), was able to take care of the issue. This amazed me because in all cases I had the 1990s based feeling that cancer = death. I am slowly coming to realize that unless a person finds out way way late, their chances are pretty good nowadays.
I've heard of others that have died from cancer, but nobody I personally knew, and definitely not as frequent as the successes that must be happening.
Parent
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
"If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago your chances were much better than ten years ago."
This is exactly what I told my father when he was diagnosed 2 years ago w/ stage 3 lymphoma. He's still around and doing well thanks to the hard work of these researchers.
Parent
Re:Cool! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Since the 1960s, survival rates in some cancers have gone from 90%. Is that tenable enough? Simple lumpectomy has a 30-40% cure rate for breast cancer ... add some radiation or short chemo and it's up to 80+%. Is that tenable enough.
This clinical trial is a scary one, a
Yes - tremendous headway has occured. (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently, several people, in clinical trials, have been cured!! from metastatic (widespread) malignant melanoma - which is usually a 1-2 year death sentence after it has metastasized.
Many childhood leukemias have a 80% survival rate, whereas 30 years ago it was a 80% death rate.
Osteogenic and Ewings sarcoma (primary bone cancers) now has an 80% 5 year survival rate, 20 years ago it was a 20% 5 year survival rate. Now, 90-95% of the kids I operate on now get to keep their arms and legs with artificial bones. 30 years ago, they mostly had amputations.
Much of the advances have been from improved detection (MRI/CT/PET scans), and newer chemotherapies - ALL which have been based on animal research (F U PETA!)
Many scientists and MDs feel that immuno-therapy (using the bodies own immune system to fight/kill the cancer) will be the most fruitful research, and probably the most successful in the long run.
Parent
Mice have no cancer??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty much most mice will die from cancer at around 2 years of age in the lab, they generally only live to about one year in nature before they are eaten.
Mice are used in immunology experiments because their immune system is extremely similar to humans.
As far as thinking I'm above nature - don't know much about that. But because humans are omnivores, I don't mind a tasty steak now and then. Don't criticize me on this, or do you also protest that wolves, lions and monkeys eat meat?
Re: (Score:2)
Douglas Adams would approve of your hypothesis
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you've just described 90% of the human race. I guess we're all screwed.
Joking aside, it's an interesting hypothesis. I certainly wouldn't rule out someone's mental state in regard to survivability. Not so sure about it as a causal factor, though I suppose long-term stress could contribute to weaker systems. I'd love to see a proper study done.
Parent
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:4, Insightful)
Please keep in mind that while positive attitude certainly doesn't seem to hurt your chances with cancer, it also really doesn't seem to help at all. Source. [medicinenet.com]
And what the parent post is referring to seems very very far outside the pale as far as any info we have on the causes of cancer. It to me even seems to be a bit of blaming the victim for the disease.
Attitudes like that will not help in any way to actually progress our attempts to cure cancer. Science, like the topic of this thread, hopefully will. That is assuming that this turns out to work. Lets hope.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be rude but you, good sir, are talking out of your ass. My brother was 14 when he died of pancreatic cancer. He wasn't suffering from "psychological conditions," he wasn't "unwilling to forgive someone" for some imaginary event that caused his body to somehow psychosomatically create the cancer that killed him. You want to know what I think caused his cancer? I think it was Doe Run [wikipedia.org] and Dow Chemical polluting the crap [scorecard.org] out of the everything around them [sierraclub.org]. We lived in Herculaneum, MO for the first 10 years of his life, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that was the cause. Your touchy-feely approach on this smacks of New Age "science" with nothing to back it up. "Oh it was their own feelings that did it!" Right. I suppose next you're going to start telling people that Thetans are causing all the world's ills.
Parent
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:4, Insightful)
* Okay the GP is in a whole other league of irrationality, but you're being somewhat irrational at least.
Parent
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:5, Interesting)
Admittedly I do have a somewhat emotional involvement in the situation (I suppose according to the GP's logic I should worried about cancer myself now :-P), but there is evidence that the amount of pollution these companies produce can and do seriously affect the health of individuals who live around them. I provided the links as an illustration of this, so you may want to go back and follow them. I'll even provide you with another [planetark.com], just to drive home my point. As far as having no reason to suspect it wasn't natural, you can't seriously ask me to believe that lead levels like that are normal. Why do you think they don't use lead paint anymore? There is far, far more evidence pointing to pollution causing (some, not all) cancer than there is for any kind of traumatic psychological events that the GP is blathering about.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lead does not cause cancer.
Well, the American Cancer Society says the evidence disagrees with your point of view. http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_1_3X_Lead.asp?sitearea=PED [cancer.org]
Perhaps you should stop talking out of your ass - especially when you are responding to a guy who is expressing a reasonable response to an unreasonable suggestion: that people deserve the cancer's they get because they haven't been forgiving enough.
Moreover even if lead doesn't cause cancer, its still an extremely toxic agent. Saying 'well it d
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be rude or insensitive, but being filled full of chemicals that cause cancer is obviously an alternative method of getting cancer.
As is swimming at "Chernobyl lake".
It does not therefore follow that people "spontaneously" getting cancer may not be effected by state of mind. It does not mean that someone can be "Mr Happy" and not get cancer spontaneously also.
It all about percentages.
I am sorry your bro died so young dude. That just sucks. Doubly so if it WAS from such poisoning.
Parent
Re:This might be a controversial POV... (Score:5, Interesting)
...but I think that cancer is likely to be triggered by some psychological conditions. Well, it might not be the *only* cause, but certainly the psychological aspect should never be underestimated when dealing with *any* illness.
Depression is certainly associated with increased mortality. There have been studies linking psychological states to subsequent cancer incidence, but their findings have been mixed.
The negative physical effects of perceived loneliness has had almost no attention in the scientific literature (as opposed to clinical depression, which gets a lot). I know this because I've recently been looking as part of my own research programme. I'm planning a study of the adverse effects of loneliness in the elderly, and I'm hoping to be able to separate the effects of loneliness and depression caused by neuronal changes, which is surprisingly hard in the clinical setting.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While not exactly what you are talking about, a psychology study found no connection between a positive attitude and survival rates among a sample of patients with head and neck cancers: Article [apa.org]
That's not to say attitude is unimportant in general. It does affect quality of life, which is important to enjoying whatever time you have left. It just doesn't determine how much time you get.
You Started It... (Score:2)
Why would I want to eradicate cancer in mice?
Because capricorn has already been eliminated and the mouse zodiac is completely out of balance, you insensitive clod.