Killing Cancer With a Virus 662
just___giver writes "The U.S. National Cancer Institute has just decided to fund multiple human clinical studies to test the reovirus. This naturally occuring virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Here is a before and after picture of a terminal patient with an actively growing neck tumour that had failed to respond to conventional treatments. This tumour was eliminated with only a single injection of the Reovirus. Researchers at Oncolytics Biotech have shown that the Reovirus can kill many types of cancer, including breast, prostate, pancreatic and brain tumours. Human clinical trial results indicate that there are no safety concerns and that the reovirus shrinks and even eliminates tumours injected with this virus. Numerous other third party studies show that the reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers."
Then it gets patented. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do they know? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do they know? (Score:2, Interesting)
Orson Scott Card reference (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could cleaner people have higher cases of cancer? (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the FAQ:
4. Where does the reovirus come from?
Reovirus is found naturally in shallow pools of water, lakes or streams or in the sewage system.
So assuming that we could naturally ingest these Reoviri, would someone in a cleaner environment be at a higher risk for cancer (or more to the point, a higher risk from dieing before the Reovirus healed them)? It would be really interesting to find out that drinking bottled water and organtic foods is actually increasing the risk of death from cancer.
Another Recent Cancer Cure Story (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever happen naturally? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading the article (which by the way puts one in the top 1% of /. readers), it seems this reovirus is quite common, and that non-cancerous cells kill it off quite readily. I wonder though if this reovirus has ever "wandered in" on cancer cells in a patient and led to remission in that patient.
You always here anecdotal stories about some people recovering in cases where others haven't, and it's usually attributed to God, positive thinking, a close family, and so forth.
Maybe it's been these little buggers all along.
old soviet PHAGE technique (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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. In other words, would your computer become "allergic" to certain programs?
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Not a computer expert...just thinking out loud...
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Re:good... (Score:5, Interesting)
The chemotherapy and radiotherapy is nasty, and this looks a lot better (at least, as long as it doesn't mutate as viruses are wont to do). But very few people actually die from the chemo/radiotherapy, at least not directly. A lot of people don't find out that they have cancer until the cancer is well formed. Once the cancer metastatizes and starts to spread there's very little that modern medicine can do for you (this may change that, as may the nanotech "bullets" I read about earlier today). All chemo and radiation can do at that point is attempt to minimize the suffering -- and I question that they do this for the most part.
Anyway, it's not the chemo/radiation that gets you. It's the side effects. By and large we use the same chemo drugs that we've used for decades, as well as the same radiotherapy methods. We've refined the dosages, but that's about it. Where the real breakthroughs have been is in the medicines to treat the side effects of the chemo -- nausea, dizziness, low white blood count, and so forth. And we've made strides on drugs to treat the side effects of those drugs. And so forth. Cancers that were fatal (as in 0% survival rate) twenty years ago now have an 80% survivability rate (my coworker's son is one such case). That's pretty amazing.
Even so, if there's a better solution out there, with fewer side effects, let's go for it. I hope the testing goes well. I'd also like to know what you need to do to be put on the human testing list. My sister's mother-in-law has been given less than 6 months to live, in part due to cancer that has metastatized and is pretty much everywhere now. It's likely that the cancer's done too much damage for her to recover though... and we don't have a magic bullet to cure that issue. Yet.
Re:Clarify (Score:1, Interesting)
This is also the country which bans hard drugs... (Score:1, Interesting)
*boggles*
Re:old soviet PHAGE technique (Score:1, Interesting)
http://my.webmd.com/content/article/76/90103.ht
what's next? phlebotomy?
Re:Clarify (Score:5, Interesting)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- A Sandia National Laboratories researcher has discovered a material that could potentially mean a new AIDS treatment. The material, called niobium HPA, can attach itself to the AIDS virus in the bloodstream, preventing it from harming other cells. May Nyman stumbled onto it accidentally while investigating filters for liquid nuclear waste at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The idea of using the discovery for medical purposes is intriguing, said Craig Hill, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta and an expert in a class of materials called heteropolyanions, or HPAs. "If the thing has a lifetime of hours [in the blood] versus minutes or seconds, then it is very likely to have interesting anti-viral properties," said Hill, who said he would be interested in testing the material at Emory. "There's a reasonable chance that its toxicity may be fairly low."
So the big bad nuclear power plants so reviled by hippies may cure AIDS. Oh the irony.
Re:Could cleaner people have higher cases of cance (Score:4, Interesting)
Obvioulsy big bad doses of E Coli in meat kill us so we don't want to run out and do that but you get the point.
Maybe a biologist could explain this better.
Re:Could cleaner people have higher cases of cance (Score:3, Interesting)
As others have pointed out here, the benefits of living in a clean environment most likely outweigh living in filth and contracting a few "beneficial" viruses.
However there is something to be said for not living in a totally pristine environment. If you lived in a bubble and had your environment completely sterilized then you would never get sick (at least not from outside agents). Thus your immune system would never get challenged and the amount and diversity of the various immunological bodies in your system would be reduced. If your bubble got compromised then you would probably get very ill very quickly.
There have been a few science fiction stories which have dealt with this. In one story that I read (I don't recall the author or the story name) there were a group of people who were on a space voyage and the doctor continually released very low-grade illnesses to challenge the crew's immune system. Just stuff like the viruses that cause sniffles or a slight sore throat, nothing that could result in a major illness. This way the crew's immune system would stay "exercised" and ready to deal with any serious illnesses, should they encounter one.
I feel that this is a good explanation for why people who live in pristinely clean environments seem to get some of the worse illnesses. Their immune systems are not challenged constantly by low-grade illnesses and so when one finally comes along it wallops them. Sure people who work closely with large groups of small children tend to get sick more often, but they seem to rarely get serious illnesses. This could be because of the same effect I have been describing.
Re:Okay, lets try it then... (Score:2, Interesting)
Physician perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of these unlabeled uses of drugs/viruses/devices are done under compassionate use protocols of one type or another. There is also "emergency use," which can even be done before clinical trials... try this link [fda.gov] for some more info.
Even so, you should read the fine print. Even for emergency use, you still have to consult your IRB (that's "institutional review board" for you non-medical folks... they can veto what you want to do), and at least one other physician before submitting the paperwork... and who knows how long before your approval comes back? I've not personally submitted one of these (I am not an oncologist), so I won't speculate on the time frame, though I'd hope they would bypass the usual beauracratic delays.
Re:Could cleaner people have higher cases of cance (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the major troubles with removing a tumour is that a small amount will remain, and the cancer will regrow. Early surgery had less of this trouble, because their hygiene wasn't so great, so during the surgery the patient was basically guaranteed to get an infection, and this would lead to fever. Since cancer cells are more sensitive to higher temperatures, the remaining few cancer cells would die of the fever, leaving the patient healthy.
So your comment is somewhat true, but not for the reason you thought.
Incidentally, I don't recommend getting a fever if you just had surgery for cancer.
THC cures cancer (Score:1, Interesting)
(http://americanmarijuana.org/pot.shrinks.tumor
Not only can THC cure cancer, it is unbelievably non-toxic. There's no risk of causing more harm. Chemotherapy on the other hand, is extremely hard on the body.
Re:Could cleaner people have higher cases of cance (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider: if Alexander Fleming had been more conscientious about cleaning his petri dishes, he may never have found penicillin. (Reference [pbs.org] - I'd heard it was an accident, but never knew it was on a dish in a sink waiting to be cleaned.) Reading this article, it also occurs to me that while no one can (probably) patent a naturally occuring virus, they probably can patent an effective growing/harvesting process.
Re:Physician perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Mine went pretty fast. The looked at it and approved it in one meeting, so I had to wait about a month total. I was not giving people drugs, though. I was doing a psychophysics type experiment.
If you're doing something like this, I would expect it to take from several months to a year.
Re:Then it gets patented. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, a company could patent the usage of this retrovirus for curing cancer. Sure, the virus has existed for some unknown amount of time, but the usage of it as a method to cure cancer would certainly fulfill the "new" and "non-obvious" requirements for patent law.
And, hey, maybe they'll make some money on doing so as long as they license it widely at some low cost. After all, they certainly spent some money in finding out that the retrovirus causes the anti-cancer effect, and paid for the trials, and whatnot to go forward. Shouldn't they receive some compensation for doing so?
And what will happen if they try to charge too much for it? Particularly if the retrovirus can be easily manufactured from existing natural sources?
They'll discover that countries will nationalize their patent and they'll get bupkis. It's happened before, both in and outside of the US, and it'll happen again. And even for similar causes. Numerous South American and African countries do not recognize the patents on various HIV medications. The drug companies have been told that they can either sell it for a fixed price (or, more likely, be paid a fixed amount by the government regardless of how much is administered) or the government will simply nationalize the patent and the drug companies will get nothing. Generally they go for the settlement.
Of course, it's not that simple. Every time this occurs it's a disincentive for the drug companies to actually produce miracle cures, or even to produce treatment drugs for maladies. Do you spend $100M on research for degenerative neural disorders like Alzheimer's and MS, knowing that if you succeed you might never see the money back, or do you spend it on a drug to reduce anxiety, depression, or other sociological problems -- which aren't likely to ever be nationalized? And while I agree that drugs are often overpriced, the flip side to that is it's hideously expensive to actually get a new drug approved by the FDA and its counterparts (mostly in Europe). It costs millions of dollars. And most of them fail to get through the process. You can look at streamlining the process, but then you run the risk of having drugs with very bad side effects slipping through.
Do you want to leave actually finding cures up to purely governmental/good will efforts? Especially when a lot of the best are going to go into private industry because the pay is better?
Sorry, the real world isn't as simple as your flippant "intellectual property" comment. It's far more complex, and there are no easy solutions.
Re:Then it gets patented. (Score:2, Interesting)
Suppose, then, that hygiene started to improve, and the recurrence of viral infection by this particular pathogen dropped off, and cancer rates began to rise.
Suppose, then, that some company figured out that this common, essentially non-harmful virus, killed cancer cells and did little else. Does that mean that the company deserves a patent?
Can the bacteria in my gut be patented as a digestive aid? What if antibiotics are killing some pathogen that prevents alzheimers...if we discover that such a pathogen exists, can we patent that, too?
I agree that this stuff is far from simple, but I don't think that leans things any more towards the patentability of a virus or its use as medicine.
OK, I'll bite (Score:5, Interesting)
When the first word of this treatment hit the papers five years ago in 1998, his colleagues at other universities (read: his competitors) were quoted saying (I'm paraphrasing) that if Patrick Lee has published, you know the science has to be solid. The peer-reviewed journals agree: he's been published in Cell, Nature, Science and Nature Cell Biology, among others.
This is the real deal. I've put my money where my mouth is, too: several thousand dollars of my own money is banking on this.
No, actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
Malpractice lawsuits have nothing to do with the increase in premiums? Please... losses directly affect premiums in virtually any insurance arena, though not always in the short term. Notably, my state has seen its total number of malpractice insurers drop from 15-20 to only 3 in the last ten years.
Also, state law where I practice limits the amount of assets an insurance company can place in the stock market. They are required by law to keep certain amounts liquid and available to settle claims, while much of the remainder of their assets goes into the much-less-volatile bond market. This state also prevents insurers from recouping investment losses via premium hikes, thus discouraging any sort of wild futures trading, or risky investment nonsense. Many insurers used to resell policies, much like banks resell loans... but the worldwide reinsurance market has also taken a beating in the last five years, preventing insurers from reshuffling some of their exposure.
It's a complicated problem... but that doesn't mean malpractice caps are not useful. Unless, of course, you are a med-mal attorney, in which case your self-interest is obvious. My personal preference would have been to institute some form of loser-pays, or a malpractice review board made up of laymen, attorneys, and physicians of various specialties to vet lawsuits for merit BEFORE they go to trial.
Blaming it soley on evil corporations losing money in the stock market makes you sound like a ABA lobbiest.
Cancer in Lab Rats (Score:3, Interesting)
More Background (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a student at the tragically underrated University of Calgary, which has come up a few times in this discussion. In the past few years, I've followed this story quite closely - I write news for the school's undergrad paper, The Gauntlet [ucalgary.ca] and I covered two relevant pieces:
Story 1, June 2001 [ucalgary.ca]
Story 2, July 2001 [ucalgary.ca]
The first link is to the original story, which attributed the find to Dr. Peter Forsyth. Later on, Dr. Patrick Lee (who has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion) poached the research and headed for greener pastures at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
The interesting fact is that Forsyth's research found inexplicable gray spots in the residue of the destroyed tumour. At the time, I found it quite unsettling that this fact was completely ignored by the mainstream media in spite of the fact that he spent a significant portion of the press conference discussing the potential hazards that the spots could indicate, including encephalitis.
It looks like the clinical trials at Oncolytics (Forsyth and Lee were directly involved) are optimistic, showing no side-effects, but I urge everyone to temper their excitement for the time being. The allure of jumping to the conclusion that REO virus treatment is a miracle cure is significant, but the consequences of doing so could be disastrous.
This may seem like bitter cynicism, but take a hint from someone who has been on the front lines of this very discovery: the story reported by the mainstream media is never the whole story.
Patrick Boyle
Re:So, what if? (Score:2, Interesting)
The reovirus can be stopped by the body's immune system, but all testing so far has shown that the defence is so weak, there isn't a problem. Should their be to great an immune response, a simple short term immune suppressant (such as cyclosporin) can be used to solve the problem.
As far as the reovirus mutating, it seems that it hasn't yet over the last 4 million years or so. This is partly because it's a DOUBLE stranded RNA virus, so during replication, it has its own built in "error checking".
rjc