Implant Raises Cellular Army To Attack Cancer 193
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a sneaky new approach to getting the immune system to fight cancer. An implant releases a 'molecular perfume' irresistible to messenger immune cells, which enter the implant where they are given a sample of the cancer's 'scent' and a disperse signal that sends them scurrying to the nearest lymph node. There they convince other immune cells to start attacking anything that matches the sample they picked up."
uhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
this is pretty amazing to a layman such as myself..
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Funny)
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Time to quit quitting smoking!
My thoughts exactly... or almost. I was actually thinking:
WooHoo! I DON'T need to quit smoking!
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Not to rain on your cigar, but lung cancer is only a tiny part of the ways smoking kills. The tar in your lungs will give you asthma, while the nicotine is toxic, addictive and constricts your arteries, resulting in circulatory disease and eventually heart failure.
Re:uhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, except for the whole, smelling like a walking ashtray, coughing up nasty flem, and annoying the hell out of everyone around you thing.
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
And the litter. Too many smokers are too lazy (or something) to use a damned ashtray and just flip their butts out into the world.
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The film The Abyss [imdb.com] uses a plot device where the divers use an oxygenated liquid to manage the affects of deep diving. Apparently this is a real world technology. "Researching" this post led me to the article [wikipedia.org] on it.
Given then, that liquids can be used in the lungs over periods of time, what is to stop this liquid having some kind of detergent introduced to it?
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Coca Cola isn't pleasant when you inhale it, but look at the cleaning properties. Use O2 instead of CO2 and we could be on a winner.
I also had a thought about how to introduce and remove the liquid without such evil choking as depicted by the film.
A mild anaesthetic could be used in the liquid for a few seconds, invert the patient, then introduce air through the tube. Numbing the trachea should help drainage and removal of
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I wonder if, since detergents alter surface tension there could be some ill effects on gas diffusion across cell membranes?
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My grandfather started smoking from those cigarettes, survived the war, and died of lung cancer some years back.
As for "and annoying the hell out of everyone around you", you are just conditioned to that view now from modern marketing from government and medical institutions who now realise that smoking costs them money.
American physicians *endorsed* cigattes in
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Most of those problems sound like problems for people who are invading your personal space more than anything else.
If you're outside in the open air and some one smoking bothers you, the issue is with you, not with the smoker. Step back 2 feet. If the pollution bothers you, consider that the time you spend sitting at just about any give stop light in your car produces far more pollution than a smoker does in a week.
I say this, being smoke free for the last 4 years, and seriously annoyed by smoke at this p
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Yet I'm not one of you douchebags who walks through a parking lot, sees a smoker 60 feet away, downwind, and starts coughing, which I'm guessing would be the category you fall into.
Dunno about the OP, but I usually don't see a smoker 60 feet away until after I've had a lungful of polluted air and looked around to find the addict.
I do know my heightened chemical sensitivity means I'm the proverbial canary in the coal mine. That doesn't mean nobody should pay attention to the fact the canary's getting sick...
(and re the cars - I'm so looking forward to electric cars)
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I disagree. Id hate to deal with someone who needs a sudden influx of a stimulant like nicotine just to get by. That includes caffeine. The Jr Tweakers at my old job drove me crazy. There's nothing worse than trying to deal with someone who is an emotional speedball, cant sit for a minute, cant relax, and stinks of coffee breath.
Even if you remove the smelly smoke its still a addiction someone has to manage day in and day out. You can do heroin and your whole life and not have any unhealthy effects as long
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Informative)
I would want to read a real paper on it in a journal.
If you're that fussy about your sources, at least read down to the bottom of the article to see if they have citations. Like this one:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat2357.html [nature.com]
Unfortunately... (Score:4, Interesting)
However after RTA I did see that all of the control group died and the mice with the implant 90% were cured.
I hate to say it, but that's over-interpreting. This appears to have warded off imminent death in the mice, which is a result that is very encouraging. Unfortunately, it likely did not -cure- the mice. When we see data indicating these mice have a 5-year survival which is greater than the control (uh... or whatever the equivalent is since even healthy mice maybe don't live 5 years) then I too will be celebrating.
The immune system would sort of be vaccinated against markers on the cancer cells, but there's no guarantee that every cancer cell will have the marker and will keep it. You can imagine that if 99% of the cells in a tumor do have it, the tumor may be killed by the primed cells, but that 1% that doesn't will repopulate a while later.
Of course, this may have a feedback effect. I'm no immunologist, but I would hazard a guess that if a tumor were being attacked in this manner, the increased activity in the area may start targeting that 1% too. Maybe. That could also be a downside, as you can imagine if the immune system is primed but learns the wrong marker, you suddenly have an autoimmune disease on top of the cancer. Once again, I'm not an immunologist, so I don't know whether that's pure crap or not.
So it's another good finding, and of course a way to fight tumors is a miracle to a patient even if it's not a complete cure. It might be a total cure, but let's not set ourselves up for dissapointment.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why we haven't cured the disease yet. The tumor evolves and all that our treatments do, if they are unable to kill off the entire tumor, is select for cells that are resistant. I'm not an oncologist, although I am involved in medical research, but it seems to me that a more effective strategy would be to select for cells that are specifically weak to conventional treatment prior to administering it. Just as in machine classification*, a combination of individually effective treatments that work in different ways should tend to perform best, especially if resistance to one implies weakness to another.
*Because cancer treatment is really just one big classification problem: you want to kill all of the cancer cells and none of the normal ones. Get the sensitivity to 100% (all cancer cells killed) with a high enough specificity (most normal cells left alone) and you win.
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I am a bit worried about how close cancer cells are to regular cells ... Could this cause complications where the immune system goes after the rest of the body?
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to say it, but that's over-interpreting. This appears to have warded off imminent death in the mice, which is a result that is very encouraging. Unfortunately, it likely did not -cure- the mice.
"did not -cure- the mice" is an understatement.
FTFA: In tests, the researchers implanted cylinders with a diameter of 8.5 millimetres into mice and two weeks later injected the animals with highly aggressive melanoma cells.
All of this is academic until they can inject the mice with cancer then stick an implant in them and get a 90% cure rate.
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Wow, I really read that backwards the first time! That is a bit of a puzzle... Still an encouraging preliminary study.
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That could also be a downside, as you can imagine if the immune system is primed but learns the wrong marker, you suddenly have an autoimmune disease on top of the cancer.\
It's not lupus.
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"You can imagine that if 99% of the cells in a tumor do have it, the tumor may be killed by the primed cells, but that 1% that doesn't will repopulate a while later".
It seems this new treatment, if able to eliminate 99% of said tumor would work well in combination with current treatments like chemo and radiation where you could then use much lower doses to kill the remaining % with less harm to the patient.
Don't get your hopes up... (Score:2)
Mice don't usually live longer than 2 or 3 years, whereas humans do. The human body might already be doing stuff like that or even superior stuff.
So there's a high chance that what works for mice for age related problems won't work for humans.
Analogy: Researcher says, "hey I've just found that steel and concrete allows us to make bigger and taller mud huts", and then saying "We should use steel and concrete to make skyscrapers bigger
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
"Say... your body just starts literally killing ALL cells... cancer and normal... "
How do you think chemotherapy works? Or radiation therapy?
Both treatments kill *all* cells. The idea is to kill the cancer cells *first*, before the treatment kills the patient.
Re:uhhh (Score:4, Informative)
Both treatments kill *all* cells. The idea is to kill the cancer cells *first*, before the treatment kills the patient.
Not quite. The current generation of drugs do have a tendancy to affect any DIVIDING cells in the body, but not all of them. Big difference, your mature brain cells and your heart muscles should not directly be targeted. The fastest dividing cells in the body will generally be affected the most, that's cancer cell. It also helps that they're less stable than healthy cells and succumb to genomic damage faster. The lining of your gut, your fingernails, hair, and skin are also fast-dividing, they also will be affected, but I believe they divide slower than most cancers, and they are more resillient than cancer cells. There's also a numbers game though, cancer can be beaten back to one cell and still recover, you need most of your stomach lining intact. So you're right in that you should kill the cancer cells before you kill the patient, but it would take an extremely high dose of any chemotherapy to start killing EVERY cell in your body, and you as an organism would be dead at much lower doses.
I, for one (Score:3, Funny)
welcome our new cellular overlords.
Re:uhhh (Score:5, Interesting)
There has been recent work to treat autoimmune diseases by "erasing" the immune system's "memory" (e.g., memory B cells) by attacking the marrow with chemotherapy, then reseeding the system with harvested haematopoietic stem cells. Here's an example I find after a fast search [clinicaltrials.gov]. Of course, it leaves the patient with 0 immune system while it regenerates from the stem cells, and I'd imagine you'd have to redo all your vaccinations, etc., but I suppose that could do the trick. -- Paul
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Complete with the "Pwnt by viruses within 10 minutes of booting up".
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Including the potential for your system (body) to be pwnd before you reload your anti-virus (vaccinations)? Hope you have a good firewall installed (live in a bubble)!
(Though, really, no one here will understand any of this unless we can force it into a car analogy...)
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One joy of implants is that they can usually be removed if things are not going so well.
That being said there will always be a few people who have very severe and unusual reactions to anything at all. A strawberry, a speck of fish oil, or a touch of tomato or peanut is enough to kill certain people. Very high tech. products are not different in that respect. Even the very best items will always be lethal to someone, somewhere. That does not imply that those p
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However the article states that the implants were inserted two weeks before the cancer cells. Would it have worked if the cancer cells had been injected first? Otherwise this is not a cure but a vaccine - pretty useless for someone who already has cancer.
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Cancerous cells, being defective already, tend to be more susceptible to further damage. So it takes less radiation/chemical to be lethal to a cancer cell than to a normal cell.
The treatments are still pretty savage on the normal cells, but it at least gives you a decent shot at killing the tumour before you kill the patient.
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Not only that, but you can stop administering chemotherapy and your body recovers. There is no known way to stop your immune system from attacking your body without leaving you open to all kinds of shit...
TGN1412 (Score:2, Interesting)
It'll be interesting to see how human trials go. The last time I saw cytokines referenced, it was in relation to this drug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412 [wikipedia.org]
Looked great in animal studies; not so great for the humans involved.
All well and good... (Score:2, Informative)
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Psst, they weren't using viruses or anything contagious. Hard to see how small plastic inserts and protein could spread from person to person. Even if it did, it would cause an autoimmune disease, not reprogram you to be a vampire/zombie. And there are worse apocalypse scenarios than Will Smith hitting on mannequins.
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The Stand.
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Last Stand by Stephen King
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That movie was all well and good until the very end... suddenly in the last half hour it was like whoever was writing it said "fuck it, magic happens". Until then it was more or less your standard epidemic/apocalypse film (excepting the slightly supernatural visions some people had) and it was doing it well.
The religious overtones I was ok with. I could just about handle the none-too-subtle divide into the lawful society-rebuilding good guys led by God (speaking through a magic old black lady) and the anarc
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If this were the internet... (Score:2)
Response from messenger cell: "not ur personal army"
ah, what about immunocomplex? (Score:2)
I am not a doctor, however -- isn't the main problem with cancer cells being that they have the same protein coating as normal cells that identify them to the immune system as "yours" versus "other"? The only way to kill a cancer cell that way would be with something that actually enters the cell and can then interact with the malignant protein. On the outside, cancer cells "look" the same to the immune system. Or is there a protein that expresses in cancer cells that can be differentiated from non-cancer c
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There are some differences...in fact, using reoviruses to cure skin cancer has been attempted - it was mentioned earlier [slashdot.org] on Slashdot.
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Bah, linked wrong article. Meant this one: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/04/1816227&tid=191 [slashdot.org]
Mod Parent up -- Thanks for the link (Score:2)
tnx
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So yes, MHC is exactly this system you conjecture!
Easily abused as a biological weapon. (Score:3, Interesting)
Incorporate this in bullets and you get 100% lethality.
"cellular army bullet" enters body, tip takes sample of nearby healthy cells, programs immune system to attack own body, person dies horrible death to both his own immune system and the pathogens which are now left alone by the distracted immune system.
Re:Easily abused as a biological weapon. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easily abused as a biological weapon. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would already be trivially easy to make bullets that contained a lethal toxin, the reason we don't do it isn't because of inability. Yes, you could misuse this research (just like any other advance) but it certainly wouldn't be the bio-weapon of choice due to sheer inefficiency and slowness of effect.
that's the beauty of it. It's a terror weapon.
it will leave you in agony for days, weeks, or months knowing you will die.
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Au contraire, as numerous studies and thousands, perhaps millions have discovered, there is little deadlier than discarded munitions, especially after war is already over.
Re:Easily abused as a biological weapon. (Score:4, Informative)
Incorporate this in bullets and you get 100% lethality.
Well in terms of pure combat standards, an injured soldier is actually worse than a dead one, since the dead one can be carried off later, wheras the injured one needs immediate medical attention.
Your body releases cytokines every time you get cut, or shot. Your immune system manages to avoid killing you in those cases, usually.
Why bother with this roundabout way anyhow? If you absolutely want to kill everyone you shoot, it would be much easier and quicker to make a poisoned bullet.
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Incorporate this in bullets and you get 100% lethality.
Well in terms of pure combat standards, an injured soldier is actually worse than a dead one, since the dead one can be carried off later, wheras the injured one needs immediate medical attention.
Your body releases cytokines every time you get cut, or shot. Your immune system manages to avoid killing you in those cases, usually.
Why bother with this roundabout way anyhow? If you absolutely want to kill everyone you shoot, it would be much easier and quicker to make a poisoned bullet.
in this scenario you get the best of both worlds.
Wounded soldier then gets carried off to hospital, where they tell him the bullet has given him an auto-immune disorder and he has X months to live.
News gets back to the front lines. Morale drops, and the will to fight dwindles.
Given how the effects would look like an auto-immune disorder, this gives totalitarian elements in "democracies" (do they actually represent ANY of us anymore?) the way to untraceably dispose of political opponents.
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Given how the effects would look like an auto-immune disorder, this gives totalitarian elements in "democracies" (do they actually represent ANY of us anymore?) the way to untraceably dispose of political opponents.
Crazy conspiracy theories based on undeveloped technology aside, soldiers on battlefields are not political opponents (at least not for several years). As far as applications to real intrigues, remember almost anything will give you cancer, some substances are far more potent at that than smoking. If you really wanted to take out a political opponent and wanted to make it look natural, there are far more effective and easy ways to do it. In fact, I'd bet good money that there are more effective ways to m
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Doesn't usually work that way.
The line response is usually a level of insane fury toward the other side which results in massive cases of prisoner abuse, and the strategic response is to develop terror weapons of their own.
Atrocities tend not to break the will of the people they're perpetrated against, terrorist ideology to the contrary.
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This technique has been used for assassination [wikipedia.org].
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Wow a deadly bullet??? Now that's innovation! Hopefully your tinfoil hat is thick enough to deflect these bad boys. /sigh
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If it was that simple, you just need to aerosol the "disperse" signal, which the summary implies makes your immune cells immediately attack anything that matches what they were near at the time...fortunately for everybody, it's not nearly so simple. If it was, how could the chemical signal in question possibly exist? If your body ever released it, SOME cells would be closer to each other or other important cells! Almost as though the summary was a dumbed down explanation of how it sort of works? Plus
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If it was that simple, you just need to aerosol the "disperse" signal, which the summary implies makes your immune cells immediately attack anything that matches what they were near at the time...fortunately for everybody, it's not nearly so simple. If it was, how could the chemical signal in question possibly exist? If your body ever released it, SOME cells would be closer to each other or other important cells! Almost as though the summary was a dumbed down explanation of how it sort of works? Plus if you want a poison bullet just fill it with cyanide? Or nicotine, which is a much more concentrated poison?
Anyways, how this works is, these cells are exposed to concentrated antigens, specifically targeted and formulated in the lab before injection. Cancer is mostly just like your own body. But cancer cells make their own proteins. The body ignores them sometimes, saying "oh they're coming from me, must be harmless," which is bad. But if you rub your immune systems nose in it and say "Spread the word", as it were, it can be forced into attacking it whatever is making these proteins. I believe there's been limited success with just injecting large amounts of antigen, but your body doesn't always get the hint. What we see here is a combination of getting high concentrations of antigen, with a technique for making sure the body actually sends immune cells to investigate! I'm not sure what happens if you gather up a large concentration of natural bodily proteins, but I think in most cases it won't trigger an autoimmune response. And you certainly have to do that concentration in a lab, not in a bullet ;)
Interesting, but you can bet your life the pharma companies are going to fight any efforts to certify such a technique tooth and nail. They make too much money off "treatments" to have an actual cure floating around.
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Unleashing the beast (Score:5, Insightful)
The human immune system is a pretty potent beast to unleash. Getting it to attack cancer cells is genius. I would be worried about side effects, specifically the immune system getting confused or over-stimulated and attacking other things, but that's just speculation and surely for highly aggressive cancers like the ones they tested in the mice the risk would be more than worth it. We already use 'cures as bad as the disease' to treat cancer.
On the same note, though, I was encouraged by the teaser at the end where they suggest using similar techniques to 'reprogram' the immune system to correct auto-immune disorders. Learning how to put the immune system back in its cage could be just as useful as being able to send it after a target.
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As someone with severe allergies I enthusiastically agree! Presumably, if they can give instructions to attack then they can give instructions to stand down.
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I Am Not A Doctor, but I believe once your immune system is trained to attack a particular type of something, it will always attack it whenever it discovers its presence. The immune system has no central dictionary of things it will or will not attack, but rather, is like a peer to peer system every component of the immune system shares some of the information of the entire body's list of "bad things."
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I would agree, except for the fact that allergies can disappear (or greatly reduce) on their own. Just like we can get a new allergy at any point in life, they can also disappear at any point. So there must be some way to defuse the overreacting immune system.
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As a sniffling, sneazing, waking up with a faucet on my face and puffy eyes comrade - I hope so too.
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Yes, when the allergen is no longer present, your body stops responding to it.
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The human immune system is a pretty potent beast to unleash. Getting it to attack cancer cells is genius. I would be worried about side effects, specifically the immune system getting confused or over-stimulated and attacking other things, but that's just speculation and surely for highly aggressive cancers like the ones they tested in the mice the risk would be more than worth it. We already use 'cures as bad as the disease' to treat cancer.
Lets wait for the clinical trials first. If you develop minor allergies, that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make in order to get rid of a life-threatening inoperable tumor.
The bigger issue will probably be that this will kill most of the cells of the tumor, but there will be a resistant fraction of cancer cells left that will repopulate, which you could feasibly seed again I guess...
yeah but once they have a taste for blood (Score:4, Funny)
If watching three seasons of Dexter has taught me anything, it's that once someone gets a taste for killing, they have a need to kill again. What happens with this army after it kills the cancer? Who does it kill next? You're going to have a mercenary army running loose in your system desperate for another kill....
Re:yeah but once they have a taste for blood (Score:4, Funny)
If watching three seasons of House has taught me anything, it's that once someone gets a taste for lying, they have a need to lie again. What happens with this army after it lies about curing cancer? Who does it lie to next? You're going to have a mercenary army running loose in your system desperate for another fabrication....
Re:yeah but once they have a taste for blood (Score:4, Funny)
Watching three seasons of House should have taught you that if doctors think it is cancer, then it's not cancer, unless it turns out to actually be cancer. Also, the first five treatments they try will probably make things worse, and ultimately the patient will only be cured because of some random remark.
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Whats scary is the frequency in which House is a somewhat accurate representation of real life.
No, some asshole genius doesn't step in and figure it out in the end based on some comment made by a random staff member, but rather based on some seemingly random fact brought up by the patient or family member that finally sets the case apart from all the others.
The reality when dealing with the human body (or any other life form in general) is we really don't know how it works and our idea of medical diagnost
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If watching three seasons of "Knight Rider" has taught me anything, it's that the Cancer cells will all have goatees, look like David Hasslehoff, and your immune system will emerge from this with a tricked out new trans-am.
Just thinking out loud... (Score:2)
A long way from human use (Score:2)
Obviously a long way from use in humans. But I am impressed with the out of the box thinking in this approach. It seems dramatic changes in health care are coming in then next decade.
http://pbrewer.blogspot.com/2008/12/dec-18th-lunch.html [blogspot.com]
"Molecular perfume"? (Score:3, Funny)
As opposed to the nonmolecular kind?
The right approach (Score:3, Informative)
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Your immune system already does suppress cancers to some extent, killing off damaged cells before they turn cancerous, or before a tumour grows too large. I heard of a case a while back where someone had a kidney transplant, and because of the anti-rejection drugs suppressing their immune system a previously dormant cancer started to grow. When it was discovered they had to come off the suppressant drugs, which sent the cancer into remission but meant they lost the kidney.
When a person "gets cancer" it's
Looks a lot like a vaccine! (Score:2)
Vaccines work much the same way, I'm surprised it took until now to come up with this.
Of course, one has to wonder what the reprogrammed cells go after once the cancer's been eaten, since "cancer" is defined as the abnormal growth rate of otherwise-normal (at least for the location they were supposed to be in) cells. I could see an immune reconstitution-style problem popping up. Point a bunch of 'redirected' immune cells at lung cancer, for example, and there's a possibility they will "finish" the cancerous
Thy apply the cure before the illness happens? (Score:2)
"In tests, the researchers implanted cylinders with a diameter of 8.5 millimetres into mice and two weeks later injected the animals with highly aggressive melanoma cells."
This sounds ok for research, but in real life you would detect the cancer first and then implant the capsule.
The logical way to carry that experiment would be to implant the cancerous cells first and then, after some time, implant the capsule. I guess they would have done it first that way and if it is not on the report, that means that i
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So it's a vaccine rather than a cure? Meh, still pretty good. Won't help those who already have it, but people with high risk could be given it in advance.
I AM LEGEND (Score:3, Funny)
Did anyone else think of the latest movie version of /I AM LEGEND/ when reading about this miracle cure for cancer?
I'll begin hording food and guns now.
To Clarify how Biologic cancer drugs work (Score:5, Informative)
Background info....Think of these antigens the article is referring to as extremely unique binding sites ("locks"). A cell can have a variety of locks on the cell surface. Some exist to bind to only one other molecule or binding site of another specific cell. So for anything to bind this lock, it must work like an incredibly precise lock and key mechanism. Our immune's adaptive systems (that is, T cells) go around with their "set of keys"** to every cell they come across and see if they fit into the "cell's lock" (remember, that's the antigen). These T cells have keys to fit the "locks" of bacteria, viruses, tumors, or any foreign, non-human cells that's there. That is why when you come across the same flu virus you were immunized against, the T cells, already having the right "key" made, can bind to the cell and cause cell death. But if it's a new flu virus, with the lock even slightly modified by a few DNA mutations, the T-cell's keys must be made to fit once again (this takes ~2 weeks and requires B cells, antibody production, etc).
Now to get to the tumor part....Tumors with tumor-specific antigens (TSAs) will fit the keys of T-cells once the keys are made. I recall someone asking "what if the immune cells kill healthy tissue?" There are "locks" called TAAs (tumor associated antigens) that are present on normal and tumor cells...they will all be destroyed. (Thankfully you can regenerate most of your healthy tissue--the rationale behind using toxic chemotherapeutics that target healthy and cancer tissue).
Now to actually explain the article's research....So effectively what this research is trying to accomplish IS THIS: release a barrel of locks around the tumor that will ONLY bind to the tumor. ALLOW your T-cells and other immune cells to use their "keys" to BIND the huge number of locks and activate cell death of the tumor cells. Currently, most research of biologic cancer drug development is focused on producing the right "key" for the naturally occurring "locks" that are present on cancer cells. Let me say that this research is a great approach--why not make and put the locks there?
Side note and extra info for fun....It's easy to think that one method of research is going to replace another. But the new trend is hitting cancer cells with EVERYTHING at once. That is, chemotherapy + biologic + barrel of "locks" + whatever else is out there. In addition, another trend that may occur is treating cancer like a CHRONIC illness, like diabetes. You've all seen how at best we can only kill 90-99% of tumor cells (at least, our imaging technology can only pick up small malignancy, not individual tumor cells)....so imagine getting cancer treatment intermittently every 2-5 years, but never experiencing symptoms of cancer (ie sickness, death)...I just thought I'd share that extra stuff. Now that I'm done with my essay I guess I should get back to my cancer research. Thanks for reading all the way through, and please comment.
**For the science geek: Yes Yes, I know the role antibodies play as the "set of keys" T-cells use...I think it would compromise the easy of explanation if I got into all that
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I can see why you are cynical about pharmaceutical companies, with respect to the epilepsy you have had to deal with. Epilepsy is one of the most distressful neurological diseases there is. The drugs available are horrid and brain surgery to sever the corpus callosum for a chance to relieve seizures is so drastic. And it doesn't help that the major neurological drug companies are spending money to treat mostly psychological problems, rather than truly high risk brain diseases.
But let me defend the evil phar
Star Trek - Episode (Score:2)
May also work as a "cure" (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't this kind of old hat? (Score:2)
Once you get past the misleading science-journalist talk of "scents" and so on, this sounds an awful lot like the "antibody-based therapeutics" [mediwire.com] that have been around for decades. But I'm no scientist, and I only even know of this stuff because my dad's an immunologist who works on it. Could anyone out there explain if/how this is anything new or different?
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I know, right? The Visitors would have given us their cancer cure ages ago, if it wasn't for that stupid Donovan guy.