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A Protein That Terminates 70% Of Common Cancers
Orne writes "BBC News reports here that researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis have located 'a protein CUGBP2 (that) interacted with the mRNA for Cox-2 in eight types of human cancer cells.' Cox-2 (which is already known to affect inflammation in arthritis sufferers) is involved in growing blood vessels to feed cancer cells, leading to their uncontrolled growth. Raising CUGBP2 to normal levels puts the cancer's 'death' cycle back on track."
Microsoft claims Cox-2 has no effect on the GPL. Film at 11
what are the side effects with flooding tissue with this protein?
this is not a sig.
See this article for a slightly more technical treatment of the item.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
You're probably right, although I doubt it will be 20 years. But, if it upsets you that it won't be useful to today's cancer patients, maybe they should just stop their work and give up? After all, nothing good can come from research.
Honestly, what is the deal with the extreme negativity and cynicism from the Slashdot crowd?
Wouldn't you be cynical if you had never been laid and still live in your parents' basement?
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It's probably to early but anyone who knows people with inoperable cancer would probably love to try anything.. just the hope it would give them would make there last days/months/years of life more bareable.
None of the articles mentioned a timeline to human testing (at least not that I could find). I'm going to be watching this research closely. I've seen too many people succumb to their own bodies going haywire.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
After some of the things that have made front page lately I'd think that a way to stabilize 70% of cancers would make it. It's no flying car, but hey, it's nice.
I wonder if all those UD packets I crunched had anything to contribute. Probably not.
The protein doesn't kill 70% of common cancers, it kills 70% of the cells of the 8 tumor types it was tested in.
A) This means that 30% of the tumor survives the treatment. This is a good start for a treatment but alone it is not a cure as the remaining 30% will continue to grow and spread.
B) There are many more types of tumor which it hasn't been tested in so this is not exactly the mythic magic bullett.
In addition this has not been tested in a physiological situation. While it is a natural substance you can't just throw it at patients and see what happens. The dose of this protein required to reach the correct level in tumor cells may in fact push the level in normal cells to extremes. Killing 70% of a tumour is not good if it also causes 70% of your kidney to whither away and die.And delivary stratagies targeting specific cells have still not been well worked out.
while I agree with you that medical companies have probably gone a bit far with overcharging I really don't see why the medical industry should be that different from other industries.
If they put billions into research and don't get paid for it then they won't do research.
Think of it not as "poor people don't get this cause we patented it"
instead think of it as "rich people pay exhorbitant amounts of money for new treatments so that eventually poor people can have them".
That arguments would be more convincing if Big Pharma companies weren't posting such huge profits. If all the money generated by selling drugs at high prices went back into R&D, I don't think anyone would object. But it doesn't -- most of it, instead, goes into increasing the value of the executives' stock options.
...
And patenting drugs is fine, but patents on gene sequences are absurd, and should not be recognized by any country. And I say this as someone who works in biotech
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you actually read the report, it says "70% of cancer cells", not "70% of cancers". Big difference.
The United Devices (UD) Cancer Research project allows people to crunch data (much like SETI@Home) but instead of finding alien life the idea is to find a cure for cancer. The software (as far as i can tell) models how various chemicals interact (IANAChemist, so I can't really give much more detail than that - check out the site if you're interested of course).
Though this post to clarify the previous one may be getting offtopic :p
if cancers can evolve, eventually becoming immune to these proteins. I think not, but nature is often quite surprising.
reason defies logic
The problem is more than just one of language and cynicism. In the United States, there is a repeated pattern of providing advantage to drug companies to the detriment of ordinary people who are undergoing terrible suffering.
Anti-viral drug therapies to combat HIV are a good example. Drug companies in the United States sold the materials for early anti-HIV regimens for vast sums of money. So much so, that for a time, gay support-groups found that they could take advantage of the price-differential between the United States and Europe by sending someone to France to pick up the same compounds.
Drug companies based this on the two-part claim that the cost was justified by having to recoup research and development costs and that the complexity of the processes involved in making the drugs also justified their expense. Critics of the companies that manufacture prescription drugs have pointed out that reality bares out neither of these assertions because the funding for the research into the drugs was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health, while Indian researches who reverse-engineered the compounds found that they could produce them at a small fraction of the cost at which those drugs were being provided to American Citizens whose tax-dollars had funded the research that provided them. If memory serves, the price differential was by not less than a factor of ten.
With this in mind, someone's ranting about how unfair, how sordid, and how squalidly nasty he expects the distribution of the drug or therapy to be is not unjustified by publicly-available past experience. You can almost state it as a formula: the expense and rarity of a therapy are in direct proportion to the sufferer's desperation.
Research into methods of curing disease and lessoning suffering are a wonderful source of pride in human achievement, but once those stunning, original thoughts leave the ivory tower they very often end up in the mud.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
If you want to understand how the mind-body can be helped in restoring its own health, here you go.
m mu nology.html
http://www.newhopeclinic.com/
http://www.newhopeclinic.com/pages/psychoneuroi
Key points:
Do not overlook the importance of keeping your lymph system flowing. You probably think your blood stream is important - your lymph system is more important in maintaining your health.
Angiogenesis attempts to thwart the support of cancer cells. Classic western medicine. Got weeds. Apply weedkiller. We dare not consider enriching the soil, so the grass can grow and weeds simply don't have a chance to thrive - why that would be too natural. Next season. More weedkiller.
Chemotherapy never completely removes cancer cells because the body can only harbor the drugs for short periods of time and cancer cell flawed differentiation occurs on a continuum. Conventional western medicine usually follows up with radiation on the area to finish the clean-up.
Of course, you can still end up with the same cancer again, if you don't deal with the underlying reasons why the cancer developed in the first place.
The above article on PNI is worth a read. Combine the ideas in their with positive life style changes, including daily lymph system stimulation and you'll start feeling better than you ever have.
Stay happy!
Not even close; it was created over 50 years ago by a Swiss researcher working for an ordinary pharmaceutical company.
See this timeline , for instance.
It's true that the US government (military, CIA, etc) did do some rather illicit experiments with various hallucinagens (and other drugs, and radioactive treatments, and diseases, etc).
But they didn't invent any of those things.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary