New Treatment Trains Immune System To Kill Cancer 62
Al writes "A vaccine in clinical trials at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine triggers the human immune system to attack a faulty protein that's often abundant in colorectal cancer tissue and precancerous tissue. If it works as hoped, it could remove the need for repeated colonoscopies in patients at high risk for developing colorectal cancer. The vaccine has already proven safe in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. It works by spurring the body to manufacture antibodies against the abnormal version of a mucous protein called MUC1. While moderate amounts of the protein are found in the lining of normal intestines, high levels of a defective form of MUC1 are present in about half of advanced adenomas and the majority of colorectal cancers."
Beware of the hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Beware of the hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the process of science is not a perfect one. We get leads we follow them and hit dead ends. Sometimes they get really close... Sometime you need to go back a few steps and retweek it sometimes you need to go to the starting board. I am sure any break-threw we find, there will be years of research that goes on, with plenty of failures.
Re:Beware of the hype (Score:5, Insightful)
While I laud this development - we have had multiple form of immune therapy for cancer - including tumor vaccines, cancer antigen vaccines, immunostimulatory drugs, and anti-tolerance drugs for years now. There are some responders, but this field has generally been a disappointment. here's to hoping we eventually figure out how to harness this approach.
Are we going to stop research? Research needs grants, and people don't give grants unless you publish papers showing how your research shows some promise. It may be baby steps in a thousand directions, but they all count, and it will eventually lead to something more productive.
Re:Natural Selection (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a vaccine, so any cells presenting modified MUC1 will hopefully be killed before they proliferate very often and can learn to make yet another form of muc1. That said, the article does point out not all colon cancer cells express the mutant form, so it probably won't completely prevent colon cancer, but if it works maybe it could prevent most of them from occurring.
Maybe the reason they're talking about vaccine instead of treatment is because they do find that if they target the mutant form, there is enough of a population that some cells don't express it and the cancer comes back quickly. That time might be enough though. I've heard that one treatment for gliomas, a very fast cancer, is to inject radioactively-tagged antibodies to cancer-specific proteins, the idea being that the antibodies stick to the cancer cells and kill some of them. I've heard that while it won't kill all the cancerous cells, it can kill enough of them to extend your life from a matter of weeks to a matter of months. Might not sound like much, but the patients and their families often appreciate it I'm sure.
If it walks like a duck... (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. A revolutionary diet therapy. Someone trying to cure cancer by non-medicinal means. So he is practising medicine without being a doctor? There is a name for that: quack. And people like you that (pretend to) believe in it and preach its blessings are instrumental for mr Gersons paycheck.
There is a very good reason alternative medicine is not accepted: it does not work. If you want it to be accepted medically; do the legwork and prove that it works in reproducible double blind tests. If you just want to make a living deceiving other people, you post references on the internets.
Re:I hate these "We've cured cancer!" headlines (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course she'll say that. If we find medical cures for cancer, she'll be out of a job, won't she?