Protein Converts Pancreatic Cancer Cells Back Into Healthy Cells 52
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists working in the area of pancreatic cancer research have uncovered a technique that sees cancerous cells transform back into normal healthy cells. The method relies in the introduction of a protein called E47, which bonds with particular DNA sequences and reverts the cells back to their original state. The study (abstract) was a collaboration between researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, University of California San Diego and Purdue University. The scientists are hopeful that it could help combat the deadly disease in humans.
Cancer vs common cold (Score:3)
I bet we find a cure for all kinds of cancers before we find a cure for the common cold.
Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that neither cancer nor cold are of "common" types: there are quite a few types of each.
One man's cancer could be quite different from another man's, even if they are both found at the same place in the body. The pancreatic cancer mentioned in the article is only one type of pancreatic cancer, although it is the most common form that would originally form there. Cancer in the pancreas could also be another type of cancer that was formed elsewhere and metastasized.
Similarly, there are many different viruses that can cause "cold".
Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but they also have certain commonalities. Just like almost all gas engines have a fuel pump, if you want to kill a gas engine, you might want to consider cutting power to the fuel pump. They have have different types of ignition systems, they might have forced air induction, they might be 4, 6, 8 cylinders, etc... but most cancer cells do share a lot of common pathways.
That's a good point. Mind if I forward your post to my doctor?
Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:4, Informative)
The commonality amongst cancers is that they are aneuploid. This has been known for quite some time but is ignored in studies like this. The cells will not be "normal" after this treatment unless it somehow corrected the aneuploidy (this was not measured, but there is no reason to think it did). Since both point mutation rate and chromosomal instability are increased in most aneuploid cells they easily adapt to treatments targeting specific proteins/DNA sequences over time, leading to drug resistance. This study only observed mice for 5 weeks which is not very long. It may not have been long enough for the cells to adapt. Also, the tumorigenic cells were already expressing the "growth-suppressive" protein when transplanted into mice, the treatment was not applied in vivo.
Even if some way of activating this protein or mimicking it's effects in vivo can be devised, it is unlikely be translated into a cure until there is a method allowing sustained targeting of aneuploid cells. If we had such a method, we would want to get rid of the cells rather than only suppress their growth since a subset is likely to become resistant to any treatment we can apply eventually.
That isn't to say the information reported by Kim et al. is not useful (assuming it is accurate). Rather my point is that the hyping of scientific findings really needs to stop. It is out of control and leading to the spread and sustenance of misinformation. In the researcher's favor, I do note they only talk about "combating" the disease rather than curing it.
Breaking News: They are all doing it wrong! (Score:2)
cuz the arm chair expert just said so!
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Yes, but they also have certain commonalities. Just like almost all gas engines have a fuel pump, if you want to kill a gas engine, you might want to consider cutting power to the fuel pump. They have have different types of ignition systems, they might have forced air induction, they might be 4, 6, 8 cylinders, etc... but most cancer cells do share a lot of common pathways.
The problem isn't that they share certain characteristics. The problem is that they share the same characteristics with healthy cells.
Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.
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Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.
Exactly! This is precisely why this is not a small step, and hopefully will lead to similar research and treatments on other cancers.
Another way to put the significance of this is a magic chemical or drug that turns zombies back into normal people. (Ok, cancer is the opposite of a zombie, but you get the point.)
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True (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the most common type of cancer, and there are many types of it - but for those with this cancer, in this place, it's pretty damn important as there weren't a surfeit of alternatives.
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
The five year survival rate is only 6% [pancreatic.org] although it apparently can get up to ~20% in limited circumstances.
If this works as well hoped, it would be a rather big deal because right now it's practically a death sentence.
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While I doubt that's the exact medical terminology used, it's quite correct. The five year survival rate is only 6% [pancreatic.org] although it apparently can get up to ~20% in limited circumstances. If this works as well hoped, it would be a rather big deal because right now it's practically a death sentence.
Although, for some perspective, from Wikipedia for Glioblastoma multiforme [wikipedia.org] (brain tumor):
GBM is a rare disease, with an incidence of 2–3 cases per 100,000 person life-years in Europe and North America ... Median survival with standard-of-care radiation and chemotherapy with temozolomide is 15 months. Median survival without treatment is 4½ months.
Sure, it's *way* more rare, but treatment options suck. My wife Sue died of this in early 2006, just 7 weeks after diagnosis - her only complaint was a persistent headache and mild disorientation. Remember Sue... [tumblr.com]
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Yep. My grandfather was an outlier - he lived IIRC about 8 years, and about 7 of that pretty good outside of chemo IIRC every 6 weeks. A former cow-orker was diagnosed and didn't make 6 months.
From what I understand, part of the problem with the common forms of pancreatic cancer is there aren't many symptoms until it spreads, and once it spreads, it is aggressive and kills rapidly.
Difficult cancer (Score:2)
But Pancreatic cancer is, on the whole, really uncool.
It's harder to operate on than most cancers and has a higher kill rate. Progress like this is very helpful.
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Even within the same type of tissue, you can have multiple types of mutations that result in the same effect (uncontrolled growth), hence the different "types" of pancreatic cancer for example. The con
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Unlikely. The common cold is a collection of well known rhinoviruses -- a very specific virus and we have quite a few anti-viral and inoculations against viruses. Cancer on the other hand, is the cell division process gone amok and it can happen in many different ways for each cell. If by "kind of cancer" you mean one of the many ways it can run amok then, maybe we will find cures for individual kinds of cancer. Unfortunately that doesn't mean we have cured cancer or even cancer of a specific organ syst
Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:5, Insightful)
I should hope we do.
Pissing about curing someone's sniffle that'll be gone tomorrow when we could have spent that time/money pushing cancer research - no matter how slow and small a contribution - seems a bloody bad trade-off.
Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:5, Insightful)
The cure for a cold is to wait 2 weeks.
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(or not have sex, since... well, you know... they're probably sneezing & have a runny nose at that point, and probably shouldn't be having sex with anybody for a day or two *anyway* as a common courtesy to avoid spreading their cold to others.
The problem with hormonal birth control is that if it fails at the wrong time (ie. when the woman's egg is released), then it's basically failed for the entire cycle. Because there's no easily verifiable way for a woman to check if she's ovulated, birth control failing for a couple of days = need to use condoms for the entire cycle.
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Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:5, Interesting)
Who knows we may use the common cold to actually cure cancer. [wikipedia.org]
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I saw a movie like this once ... it had zombies or something.
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I saw a movie like this once ... it had zombies or something.
I am ready a book series about a Flu vaccine that triggered Zombie outbreaks across the USA. Tim S.
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Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score:4, Informative)
The way this was done was really clever: it uses a virus that causes cancer to treat cancer. Specifically, the retroviral vector is an engineered strain of Moloney Murine Leukemia Virus (MoMuLV), which can cause leukemia in mice (it is not known to cause disease in humans, though retroviral infection does carry at least a small risk of mutagenesis). The viral vector inserts a gene that expresses the protein E47, which acts in a variety of ways to make cancer cells revert to acting like healthy cells.
This is an exciting idea, though as the press release notes, "we are screening for molecules—potential drugs—that can induce overexpression of E47." That's a way of noting that retroviral vector gene therapy is in its infancy, and that it would be much better if we could find a small molecule instead.
And also the above- established tumors notoriously mutate and become genetically heterogeneous over time, greatly increasing the chances that at least some of the cancer cells are resistant to whatever line of attack you throw at them. Cancer cells that have mutant forms of E47's targets wouldn't be reprogrammed. Still, any advance against pancreatic cancer is highly welcome.
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Fighting cancer is fighting evolution itself.
Your body is composed of some 40 trillion cells. Each one comes from a line of cells going back billions of generations, every one of which succeeded in reproducing and projecting itself into the future. DNA is not easily squelched.
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Fighting cancer is fighting evolution itself.
Good, Americans like a war we can really sink our teeth into.
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I bet we find a cure for all kinds of cancers before we find a cure for the common cold.
I would be willing to bet that the big pharma companies will never actually produce a cure for cancer. Treatments, for sure, but not a cure.
The reason being economics - let's say that a person with cancer was willing to hand over every last dollar they own for a cancer cure. Big Pharma would make a reasonably large sum of money off that person, but it is a one-off sale. So to get more money, they need to get it from another poor sod with cancer. Now consider that there is not a cure, but a "treatment" for c
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Big Pharma actually has a very good reason to sell you a cure for cancer (as opposed to a chronic disease treatment): namely, that once cured, you go on living as a once again healthy human being. So you can once again be fully functional, earn money, and hopefully grow a lot older than you would have with chronic cancer.
Once cured of your cancer though, you are no longer a revenue stream for the company. Unless you count the potential for revenue from other illnesses you might contract, but for the typical bean counter a potential revenue stream like that, which would probably be shared with other Big Pharma companies, so do little or nothing for "this" company's bottom line.
As for the whole bean counter argument, that is exactly who runs pretty much all of the Big Pharma companies - accountants and MBAs whose only concern
Just to make it clear a cure for the common cold (Score:2)
It would have to act very quickly since for most people if you do nothing it's over in 7 days.
It would have to be very safe because for most people if you do nothing it's over in 7 days.
It would have to be very cheap because for most people if you do nothing it's over in 7 days.
But sadly, (Score:2)
too late for Randy Pausch.
Sounds like a reverse mad cow diease type deal (Score:2)
I'm sure that oversimplifying it a million times over, but it sounds cool at a reading the headlines level.
Nature? (Score:2)