Training an Immune System To Kill Cancer: a Universal Strategy 201
New submitter Guppy writes "A previous story reported widely in the media, and appearing both on Slashdot and XKCD, described a novel cancer treatment, in which a patient's own T-cells were modified using an HIV-derived vector to recognize and kill leukemia cells. In a follow-up publication (PDF), a further development is described which allows for a nearly unlimited choice of target antigens, broadening the types of malignancies potentially treatable with the technique (abstract)."
Mad science (Score:5, Funny)
it works, biatches.
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Yes!
Note: In case of zombie breakout, call Jill Valentine.
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it works, biatches.
I'm just picturing a news conference in my head... a man in a white lab coat, Oakley shades, and a big gold chain that says "Biochemists Do It Mitochondrially" struts out into the stage. He pulls out a microphone and shouts, "WHAT UPPPP, MEDIA BITCHES! YO WE MADE THAT BITCH ASS NIGGA CANCER OUR BITCH!"
Then, Snoop Dogg comes out and talks about the growing biomedical field in Compton./p
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Then, Snoop Dogg comes out and talks about the growing biomedical field in Compton./p
What's he growing in a field in Compton for medical purposes?
Re:Mad science (Score:5, Insightful)
All joking aside, even if it actually worked like that... with modern AIDS treatment that might actually be preferable to cancer, especially some of the nastier varieties of leukemia.
I'll take HIV over terminal cancer any day (Score:5, Insightful)
If somebody said: "SirWired, we can cure your otherwise-hopeless terminal cancer, but at the cost of being infected with HIV", I'd take the HIV any day of the week. Treatments for advanced cancer are often considered breakthroughs if they extend life by a few months. HIV, on the other hand, is getting very close to being a chronic long-term condition not much more serious than Type-I diabetes. (As in, if you have the treatments available and use them, you'll live a pretty normal, albeit likely shorter, life.)
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This seems kinda like a "vampire" thing... you know? You're dying, you can live, but instead you have to live with this thing that's gonna make your life difficult to manage.
Not convinced... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not convinced.
What if this turns man into a race of zombies? We can't count on Will Smith always being around to save us.
Re:Not convinced... (Score:4, Funny)
Sigh. Slashdot puts up a cutting-edge medical story and OMG ZOMBIES comments come up.
Re:Not convinced... (Score:5, Funny)
The United State's CDC [cdc.gov] takes Zombie Apocalypse seriously. I'm just heeding the warning that my government is giving me. It's part of being a responsible citizen.
Re:Not convinced... (Score:5, Funny)
Service guaranties citizenship. Would you like to know more?
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Don't Panic all, I have read the “The Zombie Survival Guide” so I will survive. The rest of you are screwed, but I will live. So long suckers, but remember, Don’t Panic
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So long suckers,
You're thinking of vampires.
Re:Not convinced... (Score:5, Funny)
I have small children that have been in daycare and public school for seven years. I've been exposed to every cold, flu, and communicable disease going around.
I bike to work. Road spray.
I dive in the ocean. Our sewage treatment is screening + dilution.
I work out at the Y.
I get exposed to so many germs and bugs that I get sick less often than the veterans here who got the military-grade boosters.
My estimation is that I'll be bitten on day four but it won't take.
Re:Not convinced... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not convinced... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather do something else on Milla Jovovich. But whatever gets you math freaks off, I suppose.
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My thoughts exactly. Whenever I read about this story I think both of "I am Legend" and "Resident Evil" movies. Even if they are fantasy I think the "do not mess with viruses" message still holds true.
(P.S. I did check and the plural of virus is viruses not viri nor virii).
Re:Not convinced... (Score:5, Funny)
then we will finally have a world where Brains are a valued resource.b
Boo-YAH!
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Wow (Score:3)
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I just hope that all those experimental results will also be approved. Even if the treatment is completely dependable, You know how those pharmaceuticals like to bitch..
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I just hope that all those experimental results will also be approved. Even if the treatment is completely dependable, You know how those pharmaceuticals like to bitch..
Your drugs are talking back to you?
Better back off on the dose there buddy.
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Pharmaceutical company [wikipedia.org] happy now?
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Your drugs are talking back to you?
Ssh. Don't give them ideas. I could entirely see a pill that talks to the user getting traction in the product development boardroom.
But then, modding them to say "eat me" might be fun...
Better back off on the dose there buddy.
Yes, if you have talking pills, you should really share.
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no, they like to make money.
The C*O of the first company to put a cancer cure on the market will be 10's, if not 100's of millions of dollars.
Unless you propose the people at the top are so kind they would be happy to let the next CEO, or some other company make the money.
Hurrah for science! (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone that has any kind of issue with this, please pack your things and get out of the civilised world. You don't deserve to live past 30 in a heated home with running water, electrical appliances and the ability to communicate with someone more than 20 feet away.
Science, people - it's the shizzle.
Re:Hurrah for science! (Score:5, Insightful)
Remaining issues are
Hasn't yet been show statistically effective to treat cancer in humans
Hasn't yet been shown safe in humans
Requires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained.
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While I agree that it's potentially dangerous I think that it's very promising. The fact that many people are condemned to certain and painful death without this kind of treatment makes pursuing this treatment critically important. Human trials on volunteers with no hope otherwise makes sense in this case.
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1. Correct.
2. Correct, though from the only tests I heard of in the past none damaged the patient in an unexpected way.
3. Yes but that will take time and I believe even if there is a 100% chance of that happening, your future will still look brighter with the treatment rather with small cell lung cancer.
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2. Correct, though from the only tests I heard of in the past none damaged the patient in an unexpected way.
Not unexpected, but at least one of the patients ended up in the ICU for a couple weeks as his body effectively fought off the most massive infection (from the immune system's point of view) a human has ever seen. You can't have 10 lbs of cancerous mass dissolve off your body in a week without there being some pretty serious repercussions to the rest of your body.
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Is it different then the non smokers who get cancer, and other illness, from second hand smoke?
As opposed to "safe" cancer? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Requires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained."
Given that virulent cancer is far more dangerous than even the nastiest strains of HIV, the HIV would be pretty much always preferable. As long as they start with a strain that is easily controlled via existing drugs, I'd say we'll be fine. Heck, maybe they can dig some out of the vault that even AZT can control long-term.
Being afraid of this treatment because it starts with HIV makes little sense. Yes, more precautions need to be taken than working with, say, E.Coli, but frankly a syringe full of HIV isn't any more dangerous than some of the drugs we use as cancer treatments. (Some chemo formulations are downright scary...)
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Nobody's saying you should go out and get HIV if you happen to be diagnosed with Cancer. Science is all about being careful, taking detailed notes, doing tests, tests and more tests, etc. Sure, mistakes happen but that's why it's important to do as much research as possible into as much as we can.
I only have issues with those who condemn something simply because they either don't understand it or are afraid of what it MIGHT do. Computers might one day enslave us, but does that mean we should stop using them
You do know... (Score:4, Informative)
You do know that they are not actually infecting people with HIV, right? Instead, they're extracting T-cells from a human, then reprogramming them with a modified strain of HIV, letting them replicate, and then inserting the T-cells back into the body.
Granted, there are different problems for each type of vector that is used for modifying cells...but the whole HIV thing is pretty much overblown, from what I have read.
Medicine often rejects real science. (Score:5, Interesting)
William Coley, the father of immunology, cured fully metastasized cancers in the early 1900s. Look it up - Dr. William Bradford Coley. We had a cancer cure, and this article is about a similar potential cure. Coley mixed up highly individualized brews of dangerous disease organisms and shot them into cancer tumors, and trained the patient's immune system to recognize cancer cells as something to be destroyed. You want to know why we outlawed Coley's system and are just now rediscovering it?
Because nuke shills [wikipedia.org]. That's why. Nuke shills [wordpress.com], like the fission-obsessed irrational numptys [wordpress.com] who reauthorized Price-Anderson and are unwilling to fund LENR or clean fusion research. Science is no match for politics [truth-out.org] and propaganda [austinchronicle.com] - if it was, we'd have progressed past fossil fuels and corporate nuclear fission decades ago.
Re:Medicine often rejects real science. (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how vocal you are, but completely bereft of an actual point except being anti-nuke.
Outlawed? I don't see that in anything you've cited. If you mean, rather, that it isn't FDA approved, I think you need to blame Coley himself.
A lack of reproducibility is FATAL to a scientific claim and any sort of study. You might as well claim you saw a unicorn in the forest.
Unless you're going to now claim the article has been surreptitiously changed by "nuke shills" to discredit him. Chances are he was on to something, but failed to appropriately document it in a way that was useful. Then, unsurprisingly, an effective solution came along and overshadowed his work.
But you didn't post this to highlight his work. You came to scream OOGA BOOGA NUKULAR.
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Such utter nonsense. Many doctors and scientists are Christians and certainly most Christians partake of medical treatment on a routine basis.
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OK, most of the Christians.
Better?
No. I believe the Christians you want to kick out make up about 0.0001%. That would be about the percentage that rejects science and believes the earth is roughly 6000 years old. However, note that these people are idiots and their religion has nothing to do with it. There are just as big of idiots that are non-religious or belong to some other religion, like Scientology or Heaven's Gate.
In my church, for example, I was told that the universe is roughly 13 billion years old, the earth is about 4.5 billi
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No. I believe the Christians you want to kick out make up about 0.0001%. That would be about the percentage that rejects science and believes the earth is roughly 6000 years old.
While I agree with your larger point that treating all Christians identically is silly, I'm afraid you're off by several orders of magnitude here. Evolution has never been accepted by a majority of Americans at any point in our history. Here's some more recent data:
http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm [pollingreport.com]
There are some inconsistencies in the answers. People are more supportive of evolution and related ideas when asked about it in isolation. But if you give a choice between humans evolving naturally vs. bein
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You are apparently almost completely ignorant about Christianity.
Re:Hurrah for science! (Score:4, Funny)
You are apparently almost completely ignorant about Christianity.
You're probably right. I've read the bible.
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Re:Hurrah for science! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're probably right. I've read the bible.
Contrary to what protestants in general, and American ones in particular, want to believe, this isn't usually enough by any means. You see, any major literary author or work, such as Shakespeare, requires a ton of research to be properly understood, so much so you have entire academic departments dedicated to properly analyzing them. Sure, you can just take a "complete works of [author name]", read it once cover to cover, and think you understood it, but it's almost certain you didn't. Now, given major religious texts are way more complicated than "simple" literary works, the complexity expands geometrically. This is the reason why older branches of those religions usually recommend you don't directly read said texts without at least some previous preparation. It's better to first read some introductory ones to get an overall idea on the techniques used to approached the major work as well as the proper contexts, and only then dwell into it.
Please note this way to deal with such works is valid independently of whether you actually believe or not on its attached religion. Academic comparative religious studies are usually as much atheistic as everything else in academy nowadays, and yet they follow proper study patterns when dealing with such works. This is so because otherwise the results at which you'll arrive will be quite random to say the least, and overly colored by your own cultural background, always a poor way to go about analyzing anything located outside it.
By the way, please also note, for whatever it's worth, that I'm not a Christian, so this isn't preaching.
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I've read the bible.
Then you have an incredible problem with reading comprehension and material retention.
And BTW, Mr Dawkinsfollower, last Sunday MY preacher spoke of the work our church is doing in Kenya. "I saw a lot of Catholics, and Methodists, and Baptists, and even Muslims, but I didn't see s single athiest, agnostic, or secular humanist."
There's a sig somewhere around her that says "Satan's greatest triumph was convincing the world he doesn't exist." Good sig.
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Woah, dude, you have to put down the... whatever it is. Angry juice? (Whiskey?)
Sure, some religious people use their religion as an excuse to be assholes to each other. That's because some people are assholes, and some are sanctimonious assholes. The vast majority of religious people use their religion as a justification to make the world a better place. I believe, like most religious people, in love, forgivness, and in making the world a better place than we found it. The difference is that I'm a Hum
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You know, your anti-religion trolls would go a lot farther on a different messageboard.
Do you require men who rape women to marry them and support them?
You, sir, are an idiot and the wost sort of troll. What the fuck is wrong with you God damned people, anyway? Nobody likes a flaming evamgelist, and your evangelical antitheism is worse than the Jehova's Witnesses. All I have to do to avoid them is not answer the door, you God damned fucktards are all over the internet.
Unlike all theist religions, I have no
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Sigh. Sure man, you are welcome to your opinion if it makes you feel superior. Maybe you'll enjoy this video of the former head of the Human Genome project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ml0FqyFYfrU [youtube.com]
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Sigh. Sure man, you are welcome to your opinion if it makes you feel superior.
What if it doesn't make me feel superior?
Re:Hurrah for science! (Score:5, Informative)
First point: doctors are not scientists. Not remotely. Some doctors happen to be scientists. But this is a separate career, and they frequently are unprepared for it. This is the subject of a separate debate.
Second point: this is of course unrelated to the fact that scientists are mostly atheists. Even in the US. It is irrelevant that there are theists doctors and theists scientists: there is variation in any population. It just happens that when you say that, you obscure the greater truth that overwhelming odds are they don't believe in gods. source: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.pdf [stephenjaygould.org]
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First point: doctors are not scientists. Not remotely.
I hated biology too.
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I am not completely sure what it is you are trying to say. To clarify my point: medicine is not a science.
Sciences are constructed around the formulation of theories, themselves bases for models and predictions. Doctors do pattern-matching and deal with human interactions. It is a useful and important job, but not science. So-called "scientific medicine" really is just large scale application of statistics, which is a huge progress compared to listening to voices in your head, but does nothing to advance sy
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All of the practise of medicine is not science. The topic itself has some scientific roots, but ironically, "scientific medicine" is really not a science. Compiling correlations does not a science make ;)
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This is my personal, unauthorised opinion. I am not a biologist, though I know a lot of them and even occasionally collaborated. Biology is transforming itself into an exact science: molecular simulation, protein folding, DNA sequencing and heavier use of mathematical models are fundamentally changing how science is practised in this field.
So memorising stuff will go away like it went away in physics. Incidentally, though, if your biology classes were only about memorising stuff, you had pretty bad courses
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This is a problem?
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Christian bashing, oh look, how new and novel. What a fun way to comment on something, yay.
First off, a huge number of scientists are Christians, nothing precludes science as a profession for Christians, and Christians regularly enjoy the fruit of science and engineering without a second thought. No one would have an issue with this in the Christian world except the few thousands of nut jobs who, by the way, are reflected in every sector of society, who won't take medicine of any kind.
Cripes. Just because C
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But the fact is that the scientists themselves overwhelmingly do not believe in gods. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.pdf [stephenjaygould.org]
So in a sense, science and technology are the gift of non-theists to theists.
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s/Christians/evangelicals/
FTFY. Corrected statement now includes fanatics of Islamic and Scientology faiths.
Unfortunately the correction does not include all the word worshipers of any faith. But closet fundamentalists of any stripe are generally tolerable, so long as they keep their self-imposed limitations on where the mind should be allowed to wander to themselves.
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Define "Good Christian" - is that the self-proclaimed or those that other proclaim to be "Good"?
One of my teachers in school (a Biology teacher at that) in the US when I first moved over here wrote on a review that I am a "Good Christian Boy" - does that mean I need to be kicked out too?
/ Disclaimer- I've never been a Christian of any kind and was partially amused by the comment. (part of me was peeved that it was assumed that I was "Christian" because I was "Good".
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Define "Good Christian" - is that the self-proclaimed or those that other proclaim to be "Good"?
No, you do it.
One of my teachers in school (a Biology teacher at that) in the US when I first moved over here wrote on a review that I am a "Good Christian Boy" - does that mean I need to be kicked out too?
/ Disclaimer- I've never been a Christian of any kind and was partially amused by the comment. (part of me was peeved that it was assumed that I was "Christian" because I was "Good".
Obviously not. But the biology teacher should be put to death immediately.
You just go on the no "fly to heaven" list. That is until you define what a "Good" Christian is. Then you will be forced to join the atheist youth, we'll get you a sexy brown uniform with an atheist symbol on the shoulder and a taser. You can set up roadblocks and arrest people with Jesus fish on their cars.
You can do whatever you want to them. We'll set up prisons, like the excellent ones they have for immigr
Pneumonia Wins Again (Score:5, Interesting)
If we can commercialize the treatment AT LOW COST, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry, and it will allow millions of people to remain productive. That is the good part.
Hopefully it doesn't make the various worldwide retirement systems go bankrupt (though some will anyway because citizens allow governments to erect Ponzi schemes).
With fewer cancer deaths Pneumonia will take the lives of even more people, not that we will be able to do anything about that.
In other words, we are still guaranteed to die of something.
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Hopefully it doesn't make the various worldwide retirement systems go bankrupt (though some will anyway because citizens allow governments to erect Ponzi schemes).
Medical evolution without making politicians and money brokers look stupid is infeasible. So yes, that will happen. But look at the bright side. Maybe political and macro economic interests won't allow such a treatment to be legalized :-)
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Thank you mods for drawing my attention to this.
Re:Pneumonia Wins Again (Score:5, Informative)
Cardiopulmonary will still top the list (including your pneumonia), accidents will probably move from third to second (If you count strokes in the first category by including the vascular system). It's tough to decide if people surviving cancer will be taken out by the ticker or a bug in the lungs. A reasonable assumption will be an even distribution among remaining causes.
Heart disease: 599,413
Cancer: 567,628
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
Alzheimer's disease: 79,003
Diabetes: 68,705
Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 36,909
Data from the CDC [cdc.gov]
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The interesting part of the pneumonia equation is that a great deal of any internal organ failure (other than a suddon stoppage of blood to the heart or lungs) often results in lung failure via pneumonia, as the other organ conditions cause lung problems, some of which you note above.
This "pneumonia clue" is why doctors worldwide almost universally pick up the stethoscope to hear the lung sounds and heart sounds as an easy clue to internal organ problems.
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Stats are from the past? you don't say.
Anyways, those are 2010 numbers for Americans. how many American dies last year do to war? a few hundred? how many american where killed in an act of genocide? I'm thinking 0
Frankly I would put people who died in wars of 2010 under self inflicted. Hey, they signed up to go kill people in hostile environments.
Had they been conscripted, then you would start to have a point.
"s nothing to suggest that human population growth will be any different,"
you mean besides the fact
Nevermind low cost... (Score:2)
Honestly, if the treatment works, and we can commercialize it at ANY (finite) cost, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry. In 1980, there was no amount of money that could sequence the human genome in a year, and in 1995 there was no amount of money that could buy the technology in a modern cell phone. If a broad spectrum, effective cancer treatment can be shown to exist, the price -will- fall.
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Ponzi schemes are intentional fraud.
So... knowingly screwing future generations to buy votes in the current round of elections(and perhaps the next few rounds as well) is not fraud?
I am not sure either way on the technicalities, but it sure sounds close enough for that to be a useful label.
I rather expect that if a private company tried to run a retirement system the way social security is run, that that company would probably be shut down for fraud.
If you want to find intentional fraud, take a good hard look at the notion that the average working person has sufficient excess income AND sufficient investment expertise AND sufficient good luck to not have the economy and those investments collapse right before retirement.
Um, there has never been an 18 month period where the stock market is down. Even at the lowes
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If you would look at the the math and the plan you would see that it doesn't actually 'screw' future generations. It is in no way a ponzi scheme..but man, that certainly is an emotional scare word! so it must be right!
I pretty sure 18months after '29 the market was lower . And 18 months after 40, and 18moth after 2006.
If you invested in 98, ou just now getting back. so that's 14 years of.. nothing. You could have stuffed the money in you mattress and be right where you where. Or put in int a 1% interest s
Hmm... (Score:2)
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You have to undergo chemo to get rid of the regular T-cells otherwise they kill your modified ones. So unless it was worth going through chemo before...
I'm not sure about the applications for HIV, as that is a virus, not a eukaryotic cell.
big pharma will lobby to ban this (Score:2, Interesting)
Altering the immune system to actually cure things and fix other problems instead of treating them virtually guarantees they will lobby to stop it.
Why do you think illegal drugs are illegal? Because RX drugs are often the same thing only controlling them protects their revenue stream.
Why are phages all but outlawed for human use? They aren't drugs, can literally be made in a Russian basement so market entry is easy and they actually cure and prevent disease.
There's little profit in cures for big pharma, i
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Really?
Cannabis is still illegal, and more illegal than meth. It has medical benefits, but very few can be studied because the funds and DEA approval are very hard to obtain. Most of this can be directly, and easily, traced to pharmaceutical companies (and the MIC), but if you think pharmaceutical companies don't drop millions in lobbying and other other actions to keep competitors out of their markets, you should just go back to contemplating your grass (which may or may not be growing and/or opressed).
Lab Science it Stays (Score:2)
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Because there is a lot to do before it even gets to the point of 'unleashing them' Also unleashing them means no controls, so it gets hard to say which worked. And then they are often target for specific cancers and so on.
You don go "Hay, this working in this one lab under these condition, lets give it to people.
You know what else kills cancer in the lag? heating it to 1000c. Maybe we should unleash that?
Science generally moves at 1 baby step at a time.
Or in other words... (Score:4, Interesting)
So (study of) HIV may make curing cancer possible.
If it were to work, thanks to HIV for existing? If an incurable, but avoidable, illness is useful for curing an incurable, unpredictable, unavoidable and much more common one, wow!
Insert kill switch? (Score:2)
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There are a number of inducible suicide genes (for instance, the HSV1-TK gene, inducible with Acyclovir) that have been developed for this very purpose. I believe the group at U. Penn mentioned that they would like to incorporate such a feature -- but as a long-term possibility; no such "kill switch" is being used in their current treatments.
Not suprising (Score:2)
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Cancer is uncontrolled replication. If the body is regularly destroying the cells, it's hardly uncontrolled, is it?
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Why to involve T-cells? There are better ways... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dr Zheng Cui (Wake Forest University of Medicine in North Carolina) discovered that human innate immune system is very effective at killing a wide range of cancer cells. About 15-40% of human population is naturally cancer resistant. Granulocytes kill 97% of injected cancer cells within 24 hours.
The most important discovery is that such cancer resistance can be transferred via simple blood transfusion. Here are some articles:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7003019.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/12/granulocyte-infusion-therapy-spreading-into-clinics-beyond-the-us.php [fightaging.org]
Few human patient clinical trials are in progress right now:
http://www.bmscti.org/cancerpatients.htm [bmscti.org]
http://liftcancertreatmenttrial.com/scientific-background/previous-studies-in-humans [liftcancer...ttrial.com]
http://www.novacellsinstitute.com/ [novacellsinstitute.com]
And there are some exciting news about patients with 'cancer in full remission':
http://www.novacellsinstitute.com/articles/Beating%20Cancer%20-%20New%20Form%20of%20Immune%20Therapy%20is%20Working%20-%20for%20NOVA%20CELLS%20website.pdf [novacellsinstitute.com]
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Not giving people wild-type HIV (Score:2)
Yay, someone who knows what they're talking about! (Score:2)
So many posts are all worried about giving people HIV. It's good to see someone knows what they're talking about.
Not only is the HIV replication-deficient, but it's not even given to the people. They extract the T-cells, reprogram them outside of the human body with the modified HIV, then put the modified T-cells back into a human. This should allow them to double-check whether the modified T-cells are safe before inserting them back into a patient.
Wiki has a good article on various viral vectors. http: [wikipedia.org]
Cynical "yeah but..." (Score:3)
I realize this is cynical but...
According to the WHO ~7.6 million people die of cancer each year: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs297/en/ [who.int] and according to the National Cancer Institute ~1.6 million of them are Americans: http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html [cancer.gov]
That's a huge revenue stream for the drug companies to just ignore because "hey, it's cured!" I just don't think the drug companies won't start looking for ways to kill this or put it out of reach of most people. They haven't exactly proven to be altruistic and wholly forthcoming thus far; they're just for-profit companies in the same old "corrupt American capitalist" system.
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Re:Mutation? (Score:4, Funny)
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Every time one of your cells divides there is a small risk of a (series of) horrible mutation(s) that kills you, which would include the T-cells mentioned in TFA. However untreated leukemia is guaranteed to kill you. Choose.
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Yes, and I hear they can also activate your latent introns and cause you to de-evolve.
Fortunately, the chance of either is acceptably low.
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> Smoking takes about 50 years to give you cancer
On average, maybe, but the standard deviation is rather high, which makes the probabilities you discuss difficult to calculate with (any meaningful precision and) much accuracy.
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Mostly.
But not necessarily. I knew a kid in high school who got lung cancer from smoking. Just depends on luck of the draw...
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As this is largely American research, parent post is asking the wrong questions.
The right questions are:
1. How can this be made profitable?
What parts of the process can be patented?
This research will not get out of the early clinical trial phase until these important questions have good answers.