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Science Technology

A Protein That Terminates 70% Of Common Cancers 48

Posted by timothy from the cancer-sucks dept.
Orne writes "BBC News reports here that researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis have located 'a protein CUGBP2 (that) interacted with the mRNA for Cox-2 in eight types of human cancer cells.' Cox-2 (which is already known to affect inflammation in arthritis sufferers) is involved in growing blood vessels to feed cancer cells, leading to their uncontrolled growth. Raising CUGBP2 to normal levels puts the cancer's 'death' cycle back on track."
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A Protein That Terminates 70% Of Common Cancers More

A Protein That Terminates 70% Of Common Cancers

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  • in related news (Score:4, Funny)

    by pizza_milkshake ( 580452 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @03:36PM (#5158189)
    Microsoft claims Cox-2 has no effect on the GPL. Film at 11

  • good, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by C21 ( 643569 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @03:44PM (#5158233)
    what are the side effects with flooding tissue with this protein?

  • More info here... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Simon Field ( 563434 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @03:45PM (#5158241) Homepage


    See this article [wustl.edu] for a slightly more technical treatment of the item.

  • So this will be useful to today's cancer patients in 20 years for some ridiculous cost, right? *cough*
  • But unfortunately it will have to go through a decade-long FDA approval process and of course be ridiculously expensive because of royalties, despite the fact that it is a hormone that the body naturally produces and it will only be used in concentrations similar to what is found in normal tissue, so it is extremely unlikely it could have any significant bad side effects. On a similar note gene-sequence patenting is absurd and malicious. What if someone had patented Vitamin C?
    • while I agree with you that medical companies have probably gone a bit far with overcharging I really don't see why the medical industry should be that different from other industries.

      If they put billions into research and don't get paid for it then they won't do research.

      Think of it not as "poor people don't get this cause we patented it"

      instead think of it as "rich people pay exhorbitant amounts of money for new treatments so that eventually poor people can have them".
      • That arguments would be more convincing if Big Pharma companies weren't posting such huge profits. If all the money generated by selling drugs at high prices went back into R&D, I don't think anyone would object. But it doesn't -- most of it, instead, goes into increasing the value of the executives' stock options.

        And patenting drugs is fine, but patents on gene sequences are absurd, and should not be recognized by any country. And I say this as someone who works in biotech ...
      • The problem is more than just one of language and cynicism. In the United States, there is a repeated pattern of providing advantage to drug companies to the detriment of ordinary people who are undergoing terrible suffering.

        Anti-viral drug therapies to combat HIV are a good example. Drug companies in the United States sold the materials for early anti-HIV regimens for vast sums of money. So much so, that for a time, gay support-groups found that they could take advantage of the price-differential between the United States and Europe by sending someone to France to pick up the same compounds.

        Drug companies based this on the two-part claim that the cost was justified by having to recoup research and development costs and that the complexity of the processes involved in making the drugs also justified their expense. Critics of the companies that manufacture prescription drugs have pointed out that reality bares out neither of these assertions because the funding for the research into the drugs was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health, while Indian researches who reverse-engineered the compounds found that they could produce them at a small fraction of the cost at which those drugs were being provided to American Citizens whose tax-dollars had funded the research that provided them. If memory serves, the price differential was by not less than a factor of ten.

        With this in mind, someone's ranting about how unfair, how sordid, and how squalidly nasty he expects the distribution of the drug or therapy to be is not unjustified by publicly-available past experience. You can almost state it as a formula: the expense and rarity of a therapy are in direct proportion to the sufferer's desperation.

        Research into methods of curing disease and lessoning suffering are a wonderful source of pride in human achievement, but once those stunning, original thoughts leave the ivory tower they very often end up in the mud.

      • or think of it this way...

        Who is going to fund studies into remedies that can't be patented? Isn't the medical industry biased towards expensive cures rather than those easy fixes that might bring greater benefit at least cost. I think the skepticism of the drug company's motive is warranted.

        What if eating carrots and tomatoes every other Tuesday cured cancer? Do you think the drug companies would be rushing out the door to secure the funding for that study?
        • I have wondered for a while how many diseases and afflictions mankind suffers because treatment is more profitable than the cure...
          Of course, I think that if there is a cure, the public eventually finds out about it, but not until a great many people have suffered a life not quite as fullfilling.

          On very specific case I'm thinking of is in dealing with headaches and ulcers. The best (and by best I mean fastest and with the highest degree of relief) way of dealing with these isn't with drugs, it's with muscle relaxation techniques.

          Someone who is properly trained can "turn off" a stress-related headache and turn down the stomach acid in a matter of minutes (depending on the severity; most headaches are mild enough that a few seconds is probably enough). Yet we have "maximum strength" (and harmful, if taken in large enough doses) pain-killers to deal with the problems.

          In fact, many problems related to pain can be dealt with mentally far more effectively than physically using techniques that any child can learn (it's much more difficult for most adults because the initial stages of use require a strong imagination). Considering the pervasiveness of pain as part of life, shouldn't it be considered as something that every child learns?

          But then, what would Tylenol do in 60 years when none of the adults have ever taken one?
      • The expensive R&D argument would be more convincing if they were actually spending more on research than on marketing.

        Do search: pharmaceutical research marketing spending

        Well maybe they view marketing as research into how to develop more suckers.

        They seem to think it's 2-3 times more important than what we'd normally call R&D.

      • That's accurate in theory, however drug companies spend twice as much on marketing and whatnot than on research [familiesusa.org].

        I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."

    • But unfortunately it will have to go through a decade-long FDA approval process
      Yes that is so companies don't market drugs tht don't kill people, I think that is probably a good thing
      and of course be ridiculously expensive because of royalties
      Because the company has spent the last 10 years and millions of dollars researching and developing the drug.
      If you don't let companies protect their investment in these therapies they will just stop bothering to research. In a wonderfull happy magical land of make believe people would make these things freely avaliable, but the world doesn;t work like that
      • I'm sorry, but that argument just never sat right with me. Companies that don't do research never create product. Companies that never create product, go out of business (see dotCom era). Companies therefore having a vested interest in committing research, simply on a survival basis.
        Pfizer would still research new therapies for drugs, except instead of patenting the process, and 20 years later the process enters the public domain, or Pfizer retains a trade-secret to, say, the cure for cancer (ala the Coca-cola recipe) and we pay Pfizer until the end of time (or some do-gooder leaks the process to /.).

        I don't expect things to be free. I just know that progress is not going to stop because we don't have patents or copyrights or trademarks. (See Renaissance, c. 1300-1600)

  • Any way to volunteer for tests? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cyclone66 ( 217347 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @05:21PM (#5158678) Homepage Journal
    It's probably to early but anyone who knows people with inoperable cancer would probably love to try anything.. just the hope it would give them would make there last days/months/years of life more bareable.

  • Too soon to tell, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by geekwench ( 644364 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @06:11PM (#5158913)
    I'm in favor of anything that provides even a minor stepping stone toward a reasonably non-toxic cancer treatment. Chemotherapy is probably the most effective bullet in the current arsenal, but the damages that it causes to healthy calls can be permanent. Depending on the organ, and the severity, the cure has the potential to be not much of an improvement over the disease.

    None of the articles mentioned a timeline to human testing (at least not that I could find). I'm going to be watching this research closely. I've seen too many people succumb to their own bodies going haywire.

  • Why isn't this front page?? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25, 2003 @07:30PM (#5159302)
    After some of the things that have made front page lately I'd think that a way to stabilize 70% of cancers would make it. It's no flying car, but hey, it's nice.

  • UD.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by olman ( 127310 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @08:39PM (#5159564)
    I wonder if all those UD packets I crunched had anything to contribute. Probably not.
    • The comment about UD packets isn't offtopic, for those who modded it such.

      The United Devices (UD) Cancer Research project [ud.com] allows people to crunch data (much like SETI@Home [berkeley.edu]) but instead of finding alien life the idea is to find a cure for cancer. The software (as far as i can tell) models how various chemicals interact (IANAChemist, so I can't really give much more detail than that - check out the site [ud.com] if you're interested of course).

      Though this post to clarify the previous one may be getting offtopic :p

  • Interesting Statistics (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frodo.20 ( 168268 ) on Saturday January 25, 2003 @09:52PM (#5159828)
    The protein doesn't kill 70% of common cancers, it kills 70% of the cells of the 8 tumor types it was tested in.
    A) This means that 30% of the tumor survives the treatment. This is a good start for a treatment but alone it is not a cure as the remaining 30% will continue to grow and spread.
    B) There are many more types of tumor which it hasn't been tested in so this is not exactly the mythic magic bullett.

    In addition this has not been tested in a physiological situation. While it is a natural substance you can't just throw it at patients and see what happens. The dose of this protein required to reach the correct level in tumor cells may in fact push the level in normal cells to extremes. Killing 70% of a tumour is not good if it also causes 70% of your kidney to whither away and die.And delivary stratagies targeting specific cells have still not been well worked out.

  • Misleading headline (Score:4, Informative)

    by halothane ( 200070 ) on Sunday January 26, 2003 @12:31AM (#5160298)
    If you actually read the report, it says "70% of cancer cells", not "70% of cancers". Big difference.

  • I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gamasta ( 557555 ) on Sunday January 26, 2003 @11:09AM (#5161926)
    if cancers can evolve, eventually becoming immune to these proteins. I think not, but nature is often quite surprising.

    • Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by wilgamesh ( 308197 )
      Very insightful. You would be describing the case of Gleevec, among I'm certain other cases. Gleevec is the wonder drug that's been shown to have great effects on leukemia (CML). However, patients will develop resistance to it during the course of treatment. The source of resistance, it turns out, is the mutation of the Gleevec target (a protein) such that it binds Gleevec differently.

      One story: http://www.researchmatters.harvard.edu/story.php?a rticle_id=510

      There's also the common idea that many cancers are multi-mutational events. That is, many mutations conspire in the cellular network to produce a cancerous cell. What that means is one cancer cell may have one method of producing all the right cell factors to proliferate wildly, while another cell employs a slightly different mechanism of doing so. This would mean that any single-prong approach to treating cancer would not be entirely successful. Hence, the article mentions that "multi-prong" approaches are a possible next step.
  • If you want to understand how the mind-body can be helped in restoring its own health, here you go.

    http://www.newhopeclinic.com/

    http://www.newhopeclinic.com/pages/psychoneuroim mu nology.html

    Key points:

    Do not overlook the importance of keeping your lymph system flowing. You probably think your blood stream is important - your lymph system is more important in maintaining your health.

    Angiogenesis attempts to thwart the support of cancer cells. Classic western medicine. Got weeds. Apply weedkiller. We dare not consider enriching the soil, so the grass can grow and weeds simply don't have a chance to thrive - why that would be too natural. Next season. More weedkiller.

    Chemotherapy never completely removes cancer cells because the body can only harbor the drugs for short periods of time and cancer cell flawed differentiation occurs on a continuum. Conventional western medicine usually follows up with radiation on the area to finish the clean-up.

    Of course, you can still end up with the same cancer again, if you don't deal with the underlying reasons why the cancer developed in the first place.

    The above article on PNI is worth a read. Combine the ideas in their with positive life style changes, including daily lymph system stimulation and you'll start feeling better than you ever have.

    Stay happy!
  • Not trying to sound cynical or pessimistic, but don't hold your breath waiting for a treatment that would actually treat 70% of all cancers. The causes (viruses, mutation, etc.) and characteristics of cancers (specific gene over/under expression) vary far too much for a 'cure all' in the near future, if ever. Working at the University of Michigan, I'm working with a very promising chemo drug for head and neck cancers, and only about 70 percent of head and neck cancers are responsive to this new drug, one of the most promising we've ever seen. Treatments will not really be universal, besides traditional 'kill em all' type chemos that just damage DNA wherever the drug is delivered.

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