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Kills Tumors Dead
KeelSpawn writes "Today's cancer drugs are notorious for killing healthy cells along with cancerous ones. A new anticancer approach could offer a more precise option: kill just the tumor by choking off its blood supplies. The first drugs based on this approach are now in human trials and, if they work, could provide a virtually side-effect-free means of fighting a host of cancers."
.. an experimental treatment I remember hearing about a few years ago-- A while ago there was talk of a similar approach using thalidomide, a drug banned a few dacades ago. In the 1950's it caused a large number of deformed infants (so-called "flipper babies") when their mothers took it while pregnant.
It works by inhibitiing the growth of blood vessels. Which is fine for adults because grown people don't grow new vessels very often under normal circumstances, but when a tumor is growing, it does need new vessals-- thalidomide inhibits that and the tumour is starved of blood supplies.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Attacking the structure of the blood vessel walls makes sense to starve out the tumor for blood, but I'm curious about the long term effect of these "podgy" blood vessels. Large vessels with compromised physical structures stricking around in the long term seem like potential danger on their own. Not nearly as bad as an inoperable brain tumor though. All-in-all, I've more hope for the anti-angiogenesis drugs for the long term, but its good to have something like this for late-discovered tumors.
There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).
Carpe meam simiam!
might be Genitope. Their method for controlling/curing indolent Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma seem to be way ahead of the curve.
I don't how bitter it sounds to say that this hype does a great job of continuing the funding of cancer research, but the "Breakthrough" of angio-statin in 1998 still hasn't "cured cancer".
For folks here at /. you might appreciate the problem cancer really is (a little better) by an analogy to software.
Every cell has a full copy of the sourcecode for the body. Every day there are billions of errors introduced into this codebase (smoking is the largest cause of bit-rot here btw). DNA can be repaired most of the time if there is enough of the right micronutrients available (the best way to protect yourself from cancer is make sure your diet is rich in these micro-nutrients aka vit-amin(e)s - and stop smoking). But when it can't be repaired and if that specific code is run through the 'compiler' (in this case to produce a protein or what-not), since the code is bunk, the result will not be right. Now remember, this happens billions (if not more) times per day right there inside of you! Billions and billions of such errors over time (like the infinte monkey & typewriter combination) might turn out a source error that doesn't produce something completely garbage, rather that one-in-a-10^x chance produces a change in the cell that disables its built-in function to die at the specified time. One little cell out of the 100 trillion or so, doesn't sound like a problem. But that cell, if otherwise not broken, goes on to make two friends (splits into clones of itself), and they make two friends, and so on, and so on.
This mass of broken-source created cells is generically called "cancer". But as you can see this one "feature" called cancer manifests out of every different kind of cell in the body, all of which respond differently to anti-cancer medicines.
Though there has been a lot of awesome changes to cancer treatments over the past decade, still (in the USA) upwards of 500k people die / annum, and over 1.2M people are newly diagnosed. Over $100B is spent in finding "the cure".
To sum up, I just don't like the kind of hype+hope "miracle cure coming rsn" that sells newspapers, since the 1 trillion dollars that have been spent over the past decade or so on finding this "cure" belays any simple solution at all.
(posting as AC cause it sucks to have been through the experimental trials with that hope-springs-eternal feeling, and to face the worst grief at the end, feeling like "thanks for nothing, science")
2bitter
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DNA & Cancer from the horse's mouth, Dr. Ames (as in the Ames test for carcinogenity!)
numbers
There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).
Actually, that's exactly what anti-angiogenic drugs help fight against. The spreading cancer cells will die off because they cannot find a place to take root and grow before the immune system takes care of them. New tumors require blood vessels to feed them above a certain size. This drug prevents them from building that network of blood vessels.
Anti-angiogenic drugs have been in testing for awhile now. I remember hearing about them a couple of years ago. I'm curious to see if they've tested to see what happens when a patient is injured or works out while using these drugs. In both cases, they will need to regenerate damage to their blood vessels.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This was rather fascinating to follow. The researchers noticed that when a tumor is removed, often times many more tumors sprout up in other locations. They deduced that the original tumor somehow supressed the growth of these other tumors. Some discovered that the original tumor was somehow starving the other tumors of blood. They deduced that the tumor produces a chemical that suppresses blood vessle growth and a chemical that increases blood vessle growth. The later had been observed for a while. The chemical that increases blood vessle growth, however, degrades faster so the net effect is flooding the tumor with blood while starving surrounding tissue. Thus the removal of the original tumor, allows smaller tumors to flourish.
Then the hunt began for a drug that would supress blood vessle growth. Using an existing drug would be easier than isolating a new one so a search began for an existing drug with the side effect of supressing blood vessle growth. One researcher then remembered that Thalidamide caused birth defects because it supressed blood vessle growth. In this ironic twist of fate Thalidamide became the first drug to test this method for combatting cancer. It was successful so the researchers have been tuning the process ever since.
Angiogenesis is old news.
What does "Kills Tumors Dead" mean? Does it meam that it kills tumors, or that it kills "dead" tumors?
Have you read my journal today?
TGF is called tumor growth factor and is secreted by growing tumors. It causes blood vessel growth to the tumor.
If you block TGF, you'll block the creation of the new blood supply (angiogenesis). Old news, I thought of it in 1976 at disneyworld after reading my first scientific american. I was 11 at the time. If an 11 year old can think this stuff up in the 70's, then many others have done the same thing.
- Zav
On the other hand, Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor has a more critical role in initiating growth of new blood vessels - blocking VEGF has been considered to be a more fruitful approach to preventing tumor vascularization. However, this has proven to be very difficult, which is why a pharmacologic approach to kill off newly formed vascular tissue is a welcome strategy.
Recently a friend I have known for 20 years died of stomach cancer. Through this process I learned something about cancer that makes it even more heartwrenching. Cancer cells, once they start spreading throughout the body, taking root and growing in different locations still try to do some of the job that their original DNA programmed them to do as whatever kind of tissue they originally came from. For instance stomach cancer cells, even though they break off and migrate to the lungs or wherever, still try to be stomach cells. Even though they are flawed and their programming is buggy, they still try to do somewhat of a job that stomach cells are supposed to do, and that is to secrete digestive juices to digest the meat they are in contact with. So my friend died ultimately due to dozens of pieces of "little stomachs" all over his body trying to digest the other tissue they were growing in: liver, lungs, pancreas, spleen, brain.