Cancer Resistant Mouse Provides Possible Cure

Evoluder writes to tell us that scientists at Wake Forest University have found a "cancer resistant mouse" and bred it to make a small army of cancer resistant mice. When transplanting blood from one of these mice to a normal non-resistant mouse they are able to provide "lifetime cancer protection". From the article: "The cancer-resistant mice all stem from a single mouse discovered in 1999. "The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations," said Cui, associate professor of pathology. It also has been bred into three additional mouse strains. About 40 percent of each generation inherits the protection from cancer."

Cancer resistant...

[Chabil Ha' (875116)]

but mortally susceptible to the common cold.

Re:Cancer resistant...

[by Anonymous Coward]

They need to stop this before the mice become resistant to poison and mouse traps.. maybe they'll even become resistant to being hit with a hammer and then what. Huh?

It hits the fan, thats what!

Re:Cancer resistant...

[indifferent children (842621)]

Some damned fool went and invented a better mousetrap, so our scientists had to invent a better mouse.

I for one...

[by Anonymous Coward]

will skip the line you expected here and get right to the point: INVINCIBLE MICE ARMY?!?

Re:I for one...

[From A Far Away Land (930780)]

The old warfrin poison trick still works, don't worry. Plus we could just breed an army of cancer resistant snakes to take care of the mice.
Oh...

Re:I for one...

[soxos (614545)]

> The old warfrin poison trick still works, don't worry. Plus we could just breed
> an army of cancer resistant snakes to take care of the mice.
> Oh...

must... resist... can't...

cancer-resistant mongooses for the snakes
cancer-resistant gorillas to rid us of the mongooses
cancer-resistant tigers to attack the gorillas
cancer-resistant elephants to take care of the tigers
and cancer-resistant mice to scare the elephants

lather, rinse, repeat

Problem

[soft_guy (534437)]

Your loop is leaking scared elephants.

Nice, but...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Will this cure cancer in rats? Because, EVERYTHING causes cancer in rats!

Delicious

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'll take a carton of cigarettes and a shot of mouse blood.

Reference

[btavshan (699524)]

See PNAS, vol. 103, no 20, p7753-7758. VERY interesting work.

Re:Reference

[by Anonymous Coward]

Do you try to pronounce this PNAS as a word or always have to spell it out? In conversation, I mean.

Another cure???

[Pedrito (94783)]

The media is quick to call things like this a cure. The fact remains that, with some exceptions, men are not mice. Back in the late 90s, angiogenesis inhibitors (a class of drugs that inhibit the growth of new blood vessels, needed by tumors to provide nourishment as they grow) were being tested with amazing success in mice, preventing the spread of almost every form of cancer. It was hailed as the coming cure.

Some angiogenesis inhibitors have proven to be very helpful in treating cancer, but they are not a cure. They aren't nearly as effective in humans as they were in mice, it appears.

I'm always skeptical (and you should be too), when you hear about something that isn't even in clinical trials, as a possible cure for some disease people get. People simply don't respond the same as mice.

That said, this does look promising as an avenue, but I wouldn't go out and take up smoking just yet.

Cliche among oncologists

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

They say that if you turn up with cancer you'd be well advised to be a mouse, since the treatments work so much better.

Re:Another cure???

[Pedrito (94783)]

...but sometimes I just wonder if we've already passed up that miracle cure.

It's possible that a cure is out there in some plant in the Amazon, or as some bacteria found at the bottom of oceans. But there is no "one" cure for cancer. Cancer works in various ways which means there are various ways to kill it. Pharmacology has come a long way in the past 30 years. These days, it's very targetted. You pick a way you want to attack the cancer, and then you create a drug that does it.

For example, there's a protein called Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF). Cancer causes the release of VEGF around the tumor that in turn, mediates the growth of new blood vessels around the tumor allowing it to get nourishment and grow. So there are several manners that you can try to prevent this. One manner is to try to prevent the creation and release of VEGF in the first place. Another is that you can "competitively inhibit" VEGF by creating a protein that "looks" like VEGF and binds where VEGF normally binds and causes blood vessel growth, except that your particular strain of protein doesn't actually trigger the growth. But by binding where VEGF normally does, you're inhibiting the VEGF from being able to bind and eventually it will be disposed of.

There are other proteins involved in cancer and other drugs are involved with these proteins. So there are a variety of ways of attacking cancers. The most amazing work along these lines has taken place in the last decade and it's getting better all the time. I suspect it won't be long (a few decades maybe) before cancer is a thing of the past.

Take heed, Slashdotters!

[Guppy06 (410832)]

"The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations"

If you cure cancer, you get laid.

Lifetime cancer protection

[markov_chain (202465)]

they are able to provide "lifetime cancer protection"

I see, so the protection lasts right until they die... from cancer. I think Aleve can do this just as well :)

Eh, probably not Earth-shaking

[SB9876 (723368)]

As exciting as this sounds, it's probably not going to lead to a pancea for cancer in humans. We've cured cancer in mice several times over since the 70s. The problem is that mice are a short-lived species that has very little innate resistance to cancer. After all evolution is not going to have an organism waste lots of energy repairing DNA damage and having pools of immune cells constantly checking for mutant cells if the organism is just going to get eaten by a cat in an average of a few months after birth.
    By contrast, humans are a very long-lived animal species. Our bodies already have a large number of cancer-prevention mechanisms that simply aren't present in mice. Take for example telomeres. The telomere ends of chromosomes shorten with each cell replication other than gamete formation. All your cells have what is known as the 'Hayflick limit' where the telomeres get too short, the chromosomes become unstable and the cell dies. Although this mechanism is probably one of the contributors to human aging, it also does a very good job of eliminating many tumors. Most of your tumors hit the Hayflick limit and simply die off before they can present a threat to you. Virtually all human cancers either mutate so as to find a way to reactivate the telomerase that re-lengthens the telomeres or manages to find a way to preserve their telomere ends through chromosomal recombination. Mouse cells, by way of contrast, have huge telomeres which never get short enough to act as this sort of cancer-prevention mechanism.
    As a result human tumors are much 'tougher' than mouse tumors. The average mouse tumor wouldn't stand a chance in a human. Any tumor that manages to thrive in a human has had to jump a host of hurdles and checkpoints that no mouse tumor does in order to simply survive.
    The problem is that many of these cancer cures in mice already exist in humans naturally. Some of these cures (such as this one, most likely) are simply reactivation of vestigial anti-cancer systems in the mice that have atrophied for the above-mentioned reasons. Others are cancer treatments that attack weaknesses in mouse tumors that are simply irrelevant in human ones. I suspect that this super mouse is simply being more human with regards to cancer and that the end result is that we'll rediscover something our bodies already do.

Re:Blood type issues?

[Ingolfke (515826)]

I don't have a specific answer to your question, but I do know that it all tastes good to me.

Re:Beware.

[EGSonikku (519478)]

Er, gives us a soul? I wasn't aware that the 'soul' was part of our DNA sequence, care to enlighten us heathen atheists as to what scientiffic observations led you in this direction? Also, if my soul is damaged, can I get a transplant donor soul?

Re:Beware.

[Retric (704075)]

"can I get a transplant donor soul?"

Yes.

--Prince of Lies.

Re:Beware.

[drwho (4190)]

Scientists should be wary about trying to genetically modify humans with the knowledge gained from these experiments.

Thinking of a "cancer gene" is misleading. Imagine a net of rubber bands all knotted togethor. Changing one gene will "stretch a rubber band" differently possibly affect all the other aspects of the organism, often unpredictably.

This cancer gene could be the one that also gives humans a soul. We can't tell with a mouse, of course, because they only speak in pips and squeaks, but scientists should know all the risks involved with creating such a possible genetic enhancement.

You're a moron, Mr. Rifkin. Seriously, though, this is the type of comment that lies outside of answering, outside of science, and beyond reason. You can't win an argument with someone like this, and it's not even worth trying. It's a religious matter. For much of human history, such thoughts set the policies of governments. Then, we discovered reason and science. But the pendulum seems to swinging back the other way again.

Re:Beware.

[Anonymous Meoward (665631)]

This cancer gene could be the one that also gives humans a soul.

Hmm, lessee.. no cancer in my lifetime in exchange for something I've never had any use for. Man, hard choice.

Ch-ching!

Next week, maybe I'll get to trade group sex for herpes.

Re:Wireless?

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

It's even worse. Apparantly the cancer resistant gene was found on the 3rd button. Mac users are hosed.

Re:Not for humans

[HotNeedleOfInquiry (598897)]

A better question would be "Are there cancer resistant humans and we don't know about it?"

I know that that there are no cancers on my mother's side of the family despite heavy smoking , coal mining and high-risk lifestyles. Perhaps there is cancer resistant strains of humans and we just don't know about it.

Re:Good Idea/Bad Idea

[BoredWolf (965951)]

It's all in the title of the article... The white blood cells "recognize specific patterns on the cancer cell surface", and flag/attack them as they would any other foreign body. Biology wasn't my strong-suit either, but I would venture a guess that by knowing what sort of mechanism would lead to the white blood cells identifying cancerous/precancerous cells as a risk, the response could be adapted to work similarly (if not identically) in humans. Cancer is not a by-product of evolution, it is a result of malfunctioning cells which replicate uncontrollably. This is generally not a product of 'evolution' as you and I would think of it, but by some sort of damage to the cell which caused it to malfunction. It isn't so much a "death trigger" as replicating without purpose; when you no longer need skin cells at a certain location, and some mutated cell keeps replicating malfunctioning cells, you've got cancer. If your immune system cannot recognize something as a threat, it cannot respond to it, which appears to be the current predicament with cancer in humans.