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Biotech Science

Cure for Cancer? 78

Posted by Hemos from the fixing-the-machine dept.
Ensign Regis writes "MIT's Technology Review is reporting that an Israeli institute has developed "molecular-sized" computers that can detect and eradicate cancer cells. Right now, it only works in test tubes, but it may soon be developed for humans."
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Cure for Cancer? More

Cure for Cancer?

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  • Cures (Score:2, Funny)

    by Leffe ( 686621 )
    Interesting, first a cure for HIV, and now one for Cancer, what's next, the cure for 1337 5p34k?

    • Re:Cures (Score:3, Funny)

      by p4ul13 ( 560810 )
      AIDs, cure on the way. Cancer, cure on the way.

      Ok, it's time to start playing the lotto.

      • Totally OT, but Wow, seeing someone named p4ul13 answering a comment talking down on 1337 speech, I expected something more than a comment on lotto. :( You can do better than that! Sheesh! ;(
    • Seriously, I think that this just means we won't have cancer & hiv problems anymore in the next 10..20 years. With this many cures coming at you at constant rate, something that actually works must come along at some point.

      Let's just hope we don't end up hoping we wouldn't had eradicated cancer and hiv in the near future... Some disease has to come up, possibly even more lethal and easily spreading than any of the current virii, bacteria or other diseases.

      • Re:Cures (Score:5, Insightful)

        by obeythefist ( 719316 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @09:56PM (#9179853) Journal
        Seriously, I don't. Give me a test tube full of cancerous cells and I'll give you a million ways to kill them.

        Killing cancer cells in a test tube: Easy.

        Killing 100% of all cancer cells in a living human body whilst leaving the rest of the cells unharmed with no life critical side effects: Near impossible.

        It's a long, long way to go yet.
    • <wittyComment>That's why we have mod points</wittyComment>


    • SHIFT LOCK.

      • I found the cure for shift lock long ago.

        It looks like this:

        REGEDIT4

        [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Keyboard Layout]

        "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,2a,00 ,3a,00,00,00,00,00

  • Cancer is one of the largest health problems in the near future, thow we have seen a lot of information about "new inventions" solving stuff.....project david....huh huh. Great it its true!

    • Re:cancer i the future (Score:3, Interesting)

      by raffe ( 28595 )
      "The molecular-scale computer could take 10 years to reach clinical trials, according to the researchers. "....hrmppfffff
      • Yes - unfortunately it seems to take a LONG time of testing, testing more, and then do some more testing before inventions like this can be 'released' for the benefit of mankind. There's also the financial aspect of it... All the large companies wanting to cash in on something like this.

  • Let's all hope it won't be abused (Score:3, Insightful)

    by e-Trolley ( 771869 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @10:14AM (#9173581) Homepage
    Given the perversion of mankind, let's all hope they use it for medicine and not for politics.
  • Fark's gonna need a new cliche for studies of the useless

  • Progress... (Score:5, Funny)

    by p4ul13 ( 560810 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @10:30AM (#9173740) Homepage
    Right now, it only works in test tubes...

    While it is great that this may one day cure cancer in people, I think it's fantastic that in the mean time we can keep our test-tubes healthy.

  • Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doug Dante ( 22218 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @10:32AM (#9173754)
    The molecular-scale computer could take 10 years to reach clinical trials

    If I were dying of cancer in 5 years, and I weren't likely to make it another 5-10 years for this treatment to be deemed "safe and effective", could I try it at my own expense?

    My uncle died of inoperative throat cancer. About a year afterwards, I read about a treatment that had just been approved by the FDA using radiation and finely controlled robots that could have saved his life. It was a long shot, but I don't think that he ever had the chance to consider it.

    I know that this opens the door to all sorts of criminals, but it could save a lot of lives. Just a modest rant.

    • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @10:55AM (#9173953) Journal
      You can do pretty much anything you want to yourself -- the limitation is that researchers (academic or industry) have ethical constraints under which they work and are forbidden from helping you out in any way that isn't authorized by the relevant ethical review board.

      Clinical research is caught between a rock and a hard place. If a therapy turns out to be dangerous in human trials, the researchers are heartless murderers; if a therapy isn't instantly available to everyone whom it might benefit, the researchers are heartless murderers. The compromise we have works that way for a reason.

      By the way, has anyone read the Nature article and understood what this thing does? It looks like incredibly clever work, but it's presented with so much hype (the repeated references to "drug release" instead of whatever actually happens -- cleavage of an oligo, transcription?) that it's hard to make sense of. Maybe the third time this story is posted here, it'll be clearer.

      • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @11:59AM (#9174504) Journal
        I think that's pretty much his point.

        "I'm going to die soon. You have a treatment that needs testing. F*** it, if I'm going to die anyway use my as a test subject so hopefully others can benefit from what you learn."

        "Oh no! We can't do that. It has to be approved for human trials first! We wouldn't want to harm you..."

        "I'm going to die anyway! How much could you possibly harm me?"

        "It doesn't matter, it would be unethical."

        "But thousands of people die of this disease every year. Is it perfectly ethical to let this potential treatment sit on a shelf for ten years before you even start testing it?"

        "Of course! We wouldn't want to harm anybody. It doesn't matter how many people die while we drag our feet through red tape. As long as we haven't touched them, we aren't responsible for their deaths!" ...F'ing semantics.
        =Smidge=

        • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @12:45PM (#9174962) Journal
          I understand all that, and maybe in an ideal world people could be trusted to weigh the benefits and risks for themselves and take complete responsibility for their choices. (Maybe)

          But in practice, doctors and researchers _are_ expected to not actively kill people and subjects _wouldn't_ take full responsibility for the consequences of any crazy-ass scheme they volunteered for. Therefore, we don't have a system where people read about pre-pre-pre-clinical research like this, show up in the lab and have a grad student start injecting god-knows-what into them.

          • Therefore, we don't have a system where people read about pre-pre-pre-clinical research like this, show up in the lab and have a grad student start injecting god-knows-what into them.

            Yeah, cuz then we'd have Spider-Men, Hulks, and what not running around _everywhere_. ;)

          • Otter,

            I bet it's using anti-sense mRNA to interfere with protein production of some protein that contributes to the continuation of cancer. So not really a drug..more like RNA interference.
            The article doesn't mention names (??), but I wouldn't be surprised if it came out of the Alon group.

            I don't like it when the media portrays DNA hybridization as 'computation'. It's really a giant misnomer.
            • do you know where this specific research has been published? it might be antisense mRNA or another oligonucleotide antisense agent, but it could be something different, many researchers are working on different techniques.

              if it's just what you've described, it's not terribly new research. antisense mRNA techniques have been around for a while in vitro, the problem has been developing something that will work in a living organism
              • Well, I don't know where it's been published (or even if it's true), but I do know that the Weissman Institute is working on 'DNA computers' (ie. computation via hybridization of DNA strands and excising using restriction endonucleases). It's just one more step to using the same principles to 'detect' and treat cancer.

                I think it's more hype than reality, though.
        • Yeah, but I let you test it and it kills you, your family will sue me for not only every penny I own, but every penny I would ever make plus infinity.

      • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:5, Informative)

        by datababe72 ( 244918 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @12:16PM (#9174693)
        I don't have access to the paper itself (that requires a subscription), but Nature news has a slightly more informative article [nature.com].

        It looks to me like the computer part is single-stranded DNA that base pairs with the mRNA for certain cancer genes. Presumably when a high enough level of these mRNAs is sensed, another DNA molecule is released. This one is supposed to prevent expression of the cancer genes... I'm guessing it is an antisense molecule, but the news article doesn't say. The news article also has no detail on how the drug is released. My guess is its a cleavage event. DNA enzymes capable of self-cleavage have been created in the past.

        To me, it looks like the advance here is the "computer" part, not the drug part. And even that is still very much in the pre-clinical realm. The Nature news article says that it only works under particular salt conditions. Also, they haven't looked at how the immune system would respond to these computers. The immune system does respond to some DNA molecules, so that is definitely a concern.

        Its interesting work, though. I may have to head over to my local university library and get my hands on the actual paper.
        • It looks to me like the computer part is single-stranded DNA that base pairs with the mRNA for certain cancer genes. Presumably when a high enough level of these mRNAs is sensed, another DNA molecule is released.

          Right. It's like a miniature microarray assay, and the "computer" senses expression of multiple genes, integrates them and makes a binary decision.

          I'm guessing it is an antisense molecule, but the news article doesn't say. The news article also has no detail on how the drug is released. My guess

          • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by datababe72 ( 244918 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @01:22PM (#9175320)
            I went and found someone with a subscription to Nature, and got a hold of the paper. Its actually a short Letter. They don't spend much time on the chemistry, being more interested in the logic. However, they do put their methods in the supplementary materials. They are still a bit vague for my taste, but maybe I've just been out of the wetlab for too long! So take the following with a grain of salt... I'm not really sure I understand their chemistry yet, and I had to stop trying and get back to my real work. (:

            It looks to me like their recognition molecules are engineered to include a FokI (restriction enzyme) recognition site. So when the recognition molecule binds to the diagnosis molecule, a dsDNA is created with the FokI site. These causes a portion of the diagnosis molecule to be cleaved.

            This can happen with recognition molecules each of the four mRNAs considered to be diagnostic of the type of cancer they are "curing" (prostate cancer). If all four positive recognition molecules are processed, enough DNA is chewed away by FokI to release the drug, which is an antisense ssDNA for MDM2 or another previously studied antisense drug.

            They have opposite logic in DNA attached to a drug suppressor (presumably the anti-antisense?), providing additional diagnostic control.

            For effective drug administration you need the diagnostic molecule to release its drug, and the drug suppressor molecule NOT to release the suppresor.

            What I have yet to figure out is how the recognition molecules are generated when the correct mRNA levels are sensed. The diagnostic state for prostate cancer has two genes downregulated and two genes upregulated. So a positive diagnosis is supposed to occur when the concentration of the first two genes is zero and the concentration of the other two genes is non-zero. But as I said, I haven't yet understood how these inputs are turned into the correct recognition molecules.

            All of this work is being done with synthetic DNA and RNA in a test tube.

    • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by orn ( 34773 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @11:32AM (#9174275)
      Yes, you can. But it's hard.

      Here is an excellent book written by a friend that has been pushing for his own cure:

      Racing to a Cure [amazon.com]

      And his web site:

      Ruzic Research Foundation [ruzicresea...dation.org]

      It's actually a very slashdot concept. You learn everything there is to know about the disease. You find researchers working on the disease. You critically evaluate their research and then either emulate them or convince them to use you as an experimental subject.

      Very, very hard. I'd say it's worth it. If I'm diagnosed with a life threatening disease, I fully intend to take this route and fight it right to the end.

      Rudy

      (ps. the book link is an amazon associates link because I highly recommend the book.)

      • Good links, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily quite so difficult.

        My grandmother died of a relatively rare form of lupus, and she got into an experimental treatment program fairly easily. They flat-out told her it wouldn't cure her, and that they were mostly just collecting data, but she agreed anyway. Effectively it prolonged her suffering (and her quality of life wasn't very good during that time; usually she didn't know who we were or who she was) but she stuck to it in the hope that it would help othe
    • These kind of things have been shown in tv-movies before. People trying to get into a clinical trial because while there is a huge risk that is still better then certain death.

      Problem is of course that goverments are rightly worried about experimenting on humans. So such trials are always small and need very strict guidelines for wich candidates are accepted. They don't want candidates who have multiple diseases since then they wouldn't know what is curing wich and wich other medicines are interering.

      The

    • Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fireduck ( 197000 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @03:10PM (#9176585)
      A friend of mine is essentially doing this (although in a very much DIY manner). He was recently profiled on NPR's All Things Considered [npr.org]. Basically: med student develops incredibly rare nasal cancer which is almost always fatal. No one's doing much research on it, so the guy decides to research it himself, by first trying to grow his cancer cells in the lab. he's nowhere near the "try cure on self stage", but one has to start somewhere.
  • Hmmm...Small machines in your bloodstream killing cancer cells. I wonder how long it will be before there are small machines in your bloodstream killing ALL your cells.

  • researching the wrong thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hak1du ( 761835 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @10:51AM (#9173922) Journal
    Having a general purpose mechanism for killing cells with specific, detectable differences is nice, but it isn't exactly new: most of cancer therapy is based on that premise. This particular mechanism sounds like it may give you more specificity, but there are already lots of ways of targeting cancer cells with high specificity.

    The problem is that the more complex you make the molecules that kill cancer cells, the harder they get to deliver. You can think of RNAi [biospectrumindia.com] as a simpler version of this "molecular computer", something that would probably already help in many cancers, and we can't even deliver something that comparatively simple reliably.

  • Wonder achieved ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Johan Buret ( 767788 ) <[rf.eerf] [ta] [terub.nahoj]> on Monday May 17, 2004 @11:14AM (#9174120)
    Weizmann Institute of Science disovers Cure for Cancer.

    +1 happy citizen in each Israeli town.
  • Even though i'm excited about the prospect of curing cancer, this type of technology scares me. What is out there stopping people from modifying these little computers to kill say.... white blood cells? It seems to me that this is a very possible negative side affect of this type of technology. Do my worries have any factual basis?

    • Re:Negative Consequences? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Eccles ( 932 )
      Even though i'm excited about the prospect of curing cancer, this type of technology scares me. What is out there stopping people from modifying these little computers to kill say.... white blood cells?

      The fact that bullets, poison, etc., are a hell of a lot cheaper? It seems we have plenty of ways to kill people, and adding the potential for a few more isn't that big an issue.
    • There is probably a negative application for every medical innovation. If somebody wanted to make this kind of thing harmful they could. It would probably be simpler to alter an existing virus like smallpox. Compared to nuclear weapons developing a bio weapon is much cheaper, and has the potential for a much bigger impact.

  • Yeah, right! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Black Rabbit ( 236299 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @11:47AM (#9174404)
    The ONLY thing that will remotely cure cancer is to get rid of the environmental concerns that are causing it in the first place. Each and every one of us is sucking in carcinogenic dioxins into our body every second of every day. That's just for starters. Meybe if we started treating the causes, not just the symptoms, we might start getting somewhere.

    • Re:Yeah, right! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <<ieshan> <at> <gmail.com>> on Monday May 17, 2004 @11:53AM (#9174452) Homepage Journal
      Come on. Read the news? Everything is fucking carcinogenic.

      Sure. Lets get rid of cars, and power plants, and computers, and cell phones, and rocks, and trees, and dirt, and other people. And french fries. Don't forget the french fries.

      No, but really. I mean, Cancer is one of those diseases that has probably been around and mislabeled for thousands of years, and now that people are living longer, they're more likely to contract it over time.
    • Evolution has been trying to get around cancer for millions of years. It's not some new problem caused by idustrialization. The sun causes cancer, backgrond radiation causes cancer, bread causes cancer, if you stay alive for long enough you're eventually going to get cancer.

  • Would you want to know (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Uma Thurman ( 623807 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @11:59AM (#9174500) Homepage Journal
    Suppose this nanomachine could tell you that you would be dead from cancer in 10 years. Would you want to know? I mean, if it's incurable, wouldn't it be better to find out just before you died, rather than having to worry about it for 10 years?
    • Obviously, you don't have children. If you knew that you would be dead in 10 years, you may do things differently to prepare for it, like saving money for their college instead of for your retirement. It changes things when you know you don't have to prepare for some things, but have time to prepare for others.
    • I already know I'm going to die, and through my country's average life expectancy I have a very rough statistical probability on which to base my assumpations as to when. Having some nano-computer-bot thing telling me its probably in ten years means a few adjustments to that, so of course I would want to know. However that prediction itself won't be accurate as of course my environment and so many other variables won't be in the equation (oh and not to mention that damn bus hurtling towards me)...
    • Although for obvious reasons not extremely close experience, I think most people would prefer to know.

      Lets face it everyone knows they are going to die and if they are really smart they even know it might be at any moment.

      The people I have been with that learned they had a terminal illness went ofcourse through all kinds of emotions. Despair, anger, acceptance, apathy. And it ain't in stages either. Especially during critical moments, like when a last hope cure doesn't work out, they can change between em

    • I think the real question is: Would you rather die in 10 years from cancer that you didn't know about, or in 20 years from cancer that you fought? Even incurable cancer can sometimes be slowed. Either way, I think it's a personal decision.

  • Cure the common DUPE... (Score:3, Informative)

    by malakai ( 136531 ) * on Monday May 17, 2004 @03:31PM (#9176807) Journal
    Cowboy Neal did this April 29th.
    DNA Computer Detects, Treats Disease [slashdot.org]

    i know how hard it must be to search the Old Stories link for something as obvious as 'cancer'...

  • "molecular-sized" computers that can detect and eradicate cancer cells....

    (queue up the snare drum:)
    I might try to wait for the first fix pack. (bang!)
    And I hope it has passive cooling - those fans can be painful. (ka-boom)

    And what about DRM? Will the drug companies continue to own the product so that sharing bodily fluids is punishable under the copyright act?

    There is so much that medicine has to learn from our industry!!
  • What's so interesting to me is how powerful DNA is. We carry the most powerful computer on earth on our shoulders, all programmed with DNA.

    The greater understanding we gain about genetic engineering, the more amazing things we can do. Eventually being experianced enough to create something more powerful than our own brain. We do in fact operate on a quaternary system, more efficiant than binary.

  • Maybe by then I can affford health insurance.

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