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Science

Kills Tumors Dead 25

Posted by michael from the take-two-call-me-in-the-morning dept.
KeelSpawn writes "Today's cancer drugs are notorious for killing healthy cells along with cancerous ones. A new anticancer approach could offer a more precise option: kill just the tumor by choking off its blood supplies. The first drugs based on this approach are now in human trials and, if they work, could provide a virtually side-effect-free means of fighting a host of cancers."
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Kills Tumors Dead More

Kills Tumors Dead

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  • This remind me of.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xunker ( 6905 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @03:19PM (#3654089) Homepage Journal
    .. an experimental treatment I remember hearing about a few years ago-- A while ago there was talk of a similar approach using thalidomide, a drug banned a few dacades ago. In the 1950's it caused a large number of deformed infants (so-called "flipper babies") when their mothers took it while pregnant.

    It works by inhibitiing the growth of blood vessels. Which is fine for adults because grown people don't grow new vessels very often under normal circumstances, but when a tumor is growing, it does need new vessals-- thalidomide inhibits that and the tumour is starved of blood supplies.
    • "Do not take if you are pregnant, or could become pregnant"

      seems like that's a common warning these days, should work just as well for thalidomide.
    • Actually only the isomers fault. The problems with thalidomide were caused by one of its isomers.

      Thalidomide was marketed as a drug FOR pregnant woman. Easing of morning sickness and stuff.

      Today its used for certain cancers and aids patients to help with their appetite.

  • Attacking the structure of the blood vessel walls makes sense to starve out the tumor for blood, but I'm curious about the long term effect of these "podgy" blood vessels. Large vessels with compromised physical structures stricking around in the long term seem like potential danger on their own. Not nearly as bad as an inoperable brain tumor though. All-in-all, I've more hope for the anti-angiogenesis drugs for the long term, but its good to have something like this for late-discovered tumors.
    • The article says that the "podgy" blood vessels only stay that way for a few hours.
      And binding to tubulin is short-lived--on the order of hours--long enough to halt tumor blood flow but not long enough to kill normal cells, Thorpe says.


      -SS
  • There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).

    • Use Anti-Angiogenic Drugs (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Valdrax ( 32670 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @05:22PM (#3655225)
      There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).

      Actually, that's exactly what anti-angiogenic drugs help fight against. The spreading cancer cells will die off because they cannot find a place to take root and grow before the immune system takes care of them. New tumors require blood vessels to feed them above a certain size. This drug prevents them from building that network of blood vessels.

      Anti-angiogenic drugs have been in testing for awhile now. I remember hearing about them a couple of years ago. I'm curious to see if they've tested to see what happens when a patient is injured or works out while using these drugs. In both cases, they will need to regenerate damage to their blood vessels.

  • Even more impressive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SLot ( 82781 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @04:46PM (#3654858) Homepage Journal
    might be Genitope [genitope.com]. Their method for controlling/curing indolent Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma seem to be way ahead of the curve.

  • The sad truth about "Cancer Cures' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06, 2002 @05:02PM (#3655011)
    As someone who lost their brother and father to cancer, I'm sorry to say that year after year there are "breakthroughs" touted as the Next Big Thing to cure cancer.

    I don't how bitter it sounds to say that this hype does a great job of continuing the funding of cancer research, but the "Breakthrough" of angio-statin in 1998 still hasn't "cured cancer".

    For folks here at /. you might appreciate the problem cancer really is (a little better) by an analogy to software.

    Every cell has a full copy of the sourcecode for the body. Every day there are billions of errors introduced into this codebase (smoking is the largest cause of bit-rot here btw). DNA can be repaired most of the time if there is enough of the right micronutrients available (the best way to protect yourself from cancer is make sure your diet is rich in these micro-nutrients aka vit-amin(e)s - and stop smoking). But when it can't be repaired and if that specific code is run through the 'compiler' (in this case to produce a protein or what-not), since the code is bunk, the result will not be right. Now remember, this happens billions (if not more) times per day right there inside of you! Billions and billions of such errors over time (like the infinte monkey & typewriter combination) might turn out a source error that doesn't produce something completely garbage, rather that one-in-a-10^x chance produces a change in the cell that disables its built-in function to die at the specified time. One little cell out of the 100 trillion or so, doesn't sound like a problem. But that cell, if otherwise not broken, goes on to make two friends (splits into clones of itself), and they make two friends, and so on, and so on.

    This mass of broken-source created cells is generically called "cancer". But as you can see this one "feature" called cancer manifests out of every different kind of cell in the body, all of which respond differently to anti-cancer medicines.

    Though there has been a lot of awesome changes to cancer treatments over the past decade, still (in the USA) upwards of 500k people die / annum, and over 1.2M people are newly diagnosed. Over $100B is spent in finding "the cure".

    To sum up, I just don't like the kind of hype+hope "miracle cure coming rsn" that sells newspapers, since the 1 trillion dollars that have been spent over the past decade or so on finding this "cure" belays any simple solution at all.

    (posting as AC cause it sucks to have been through the experimental trials with that hope-springs-eternal feeling, and to face the worst grief at the end, feeling like "thanks for nothing, science")

    2bitter

    ---

    DNA & Cancer from the horse's mouth, Dr. Ames (as in the Ames test for carcinogenity!) [chori.org]

    numbers [216.239.39.100]

    • If I understood my quick overview of DNA correctly, cancer cells are a very rare but normal consequence of replication, as you seem to point out. However, the body's immune system has the ability to kill off these cells. IANAD, but I suspect it only becomes a problem if some critical threshold is reached where the system can no longer keep up with production. I guess this means that if a person lives long enough, they *will* get cancer. I suppose we all die of something sooner or later, but life doesn't end after death so I wouldn't get too down about it. Besides, from what I hear, and I don't know if this was the case for your relatives or not, they can treat terminal cancer patients with drugs to make them relatively comfortable even through death.

      I do see your point though. I too think it would be unfair to give people false expectations about new "cures", especially if the information affects them personally. People should have a right to know as much as they can understand about the possible benefits and side effects. Different people are going to make different choices about how much they want to fight. I imagine that type of information would be an important part of this decision.

      Incidentally, I thought this whole starve the cells of blood thing has been around for quite a while. Did your relatives participate in any trials that tested this?
    • Actually, everyone already has cancer genes already hardwired into their genetic code. Why? Who knows. Maybe to limit our lifespans so we don't burden our children.

      Cancer is caused when a few of these cancer-protein producing genes are turned on mutations. These genes then begin to pump out proteins, producing a useless, immortal, rapidly reproducing cancer cell.
    • Unfortunately, the cure for cancer will forever be over the horizon as long as American pharmaceutical companies hold monopoly-enabling patents on drugs. As long as there is profit from treating symptoms, there will be no cure. This is the "golden rule" in America -- greed is the only motivation that most Americans can understand.

      - Twilight1
      • greed is the only motivation that most Americans can understand

        So, American greed is the reason we haven't found a cure for cancer, eh? If this is the case, why hasn't a cure been discovered in another country, where everyone is so altruistic?

        Just drop the USA-bashing mentality for a few minutes and realize that cancer is a very complex topic. Oversimplifying the problem to make a quick jab at America does a disservice to the reesearchers who are dedicating their lives to fighting cancer, as well as the millions suffering from the disease worldwide.
        • So, American greed is the reason we haven't found a cure for cancer, eh? If this is the case, why hasn't a cure been discovered in another country, where everyone is so altruistic?

          That wasn't quite the point. Sure, cancer (and many other terrible things) are complex and the why's and how's can't be summed up in a few paragraphs. However, if an American pharmaceutical corporation (and any company/country that follows the bogus IP laws that the US strong-arms upon them) discovered the cure, you can bet your booty that they will delay releasing such information as long as possible. After all, they make a lot of money from treating symptoms. If they cure their patients, quite a bit of their revenue stream has been cut off.

          And, even if they did announce it... first it would be a cure for the rich upper class. Then, slowly over time will the rest of the population be allowed to have access to it. Poor third world countries... they'd have to wait a very long time unless someone decides to challenge the US and produce the drug in violation of the US IP extortion laws.

          Just drop the USA-bashing mentality for a few minutes and realize that cancer is a very complex topic. Oversimplifying the problem to make a quick jab at America does a disservice to the reesearchers who are dedicating their lives to fighting cancer, as well as the millions suffering from the disease worldwide.

          There are good people in the world, and that includes the US. But most good people in the US still end up working for the bad people... the people with the money, the power, and the monopolistic corporations that see treatment only as a revenue stream.

          And this isn't a "USA-bashing" mentality... it's just an observation.

          - Twilight1

      • Let's not be so crass now. Let's try it another way. I was just going through this with my Chinese wife. Instead of saying Americans only understand greed let's say that Americans often seem confused about the meaning of fair competition and there are as many resasons for this as there are diffent people in the US.
        Many people are uncomfortable with the complexity of reality and they habitually try to simplify things. Competition is an idea that often gets represented as a value in and of itself rather than a tool that is only valuable within a carefully managed context. The context part sometimes gets thrown out the window and competition for its own sake becomes a sort of idol worship. In America most people believe that free competition is an important model for growth and the advocacy of a competition in which many may participate with equal chances of succeeding is generally agreed to be a good thing.
        But it's the details of implementing what is and what is not a fair competition that the American system gets ugly to foreign observers. It has happened in the past that the US has given way to out-and-out monopolies. Indeed, most American children become familiar with the term monopoly through playing the board game Monopoly which, in turn, took its name from the abundance of powerful monopolies prior to the previous depression. To some, it seems the US has returned to this state of near total dominance by a select group of monopolies and so I understand your distaste.
        But its truly unkind to suggest that the greed that is reflected in the tendency towards monopolism that so sadly infects our great nation is a characteristic of the people. I would hope that people outside the US would respect the notion that the people of the US must be perhaps somewhat gullible and lenient in their sense of relative prosperity to allow this situation to come into being in such a cyclical manner. Moreover, I would suggest that the people of the US, despite their many shortcomings, are quite capable of cleaning up their own messses and that all will be in order in good time.
        Oh yes, and have a nice day.

  • Saw a PBS special on this... (Score:4, Informative)

    by cornice ( 9801 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @05:23PM (#3655228)
    This was rather fascinating to follow. The researchers noticed that when a tumor is removed, often times many more tumors sprout up in other locations. They deduced that the original tumor somehow supressed the growth of these other tumors. Some discovered that the original tumor was somehow starving the other tumors of blood. They deduced that the tumor produces a chemical that suppresses blood vessle growth and a chemical that increases blood vessle growth. The later had been observed for a while. The chemical that increases blood vessle growth, however, degrades faster so the net effect is flooding the tumor with blood while starving surrounding tissue. Thus the removal of the original tumor, allows smaller tumors to flourish.

    Then the hunt began for a drug that would supress blood vessle growth. Using an existing drug would be easier than isolating a new one so a search began for an existing drug with the side effect of supressing blood vessle growth. One researcher then remembered that Thalidamide caused birth defects because it supressed blood vessle growth. In this ironic twist of fate Thalidamide became the first drug to test this method for combatting cancer. It was successful so the researchers have been tuning the process ever since.
    • I believe that the origional tumer sometimes lets out a chemical that says I am the tumor do not grow. So when the origional/large tumor is removed this chemical level drops and the others race for contol. IIRC there is a drug that can now mimic this chemical

      -- Tim
  • Angiogenesis is old [pbs.org] news [kuro5hin.org].
  • What does "Kills Tumors Dead" mean? Does it meam that it kills tumors, or that it kills "dead" tumors?

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