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Common Cold A Cure For Brain Tumors?
JackMonkey writes "According to this article at CNN, scientists have genetically engineered a cold virus to kill inoperable brain tumors in mice. 'The effects were so stunning that the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are rushing to test the approach in people with brain tumors.
If it works, it will be the first treatment for malignant glioma, the deadliest form of brain cancer. '"
Those rats are poor little creatures indeed, taking brain tumors for mankind and being dissected after 140 days of life. But like the dying soldier on the battlefield, their deaths have meaning and significance.
I certainly hope this treatment works without problems, but that it is being reported by CNN doesn't really give me much confidence.
I have been pwned because my
Actually, it's brain tumors that are a cure for the common cold.
The article said 60% died in 140 days vs. 20 days without treatment. Is this their normal lifespan?
If we had cured the common cold we may not have stumbled upon this...
Research into the common cold has skyrocketed due to SARS. How is this related? Is it at all?
If researchers are finding benefits to viral infections, is there a benefit to SARS? how about Polio, Smallpox, or any of the other diseases we have wiped out? Does AIDS have an intrinsic benefit?
I am not advocating research into the above points, but am merely interested in benefits to supposedly harmfull viruses.
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Don't get me wrong here. I am all for genetic engineering... but I have play devils advocate for a moment here...
IANAS but they are takeing a cold virus... and makeing it kill BAD brain tissue? What happens if the virus ends up killing normal brain tissue for some reason? Mutation or oversight on their part?
Not that I am saying this could or would happen... but what if? Especially if this thing managed to spread much like SARS has been doing?
It would be pretty damn scary if the next plague was caused by people having their brains eaten away =)
Of course, then again... Benificial genetically modified virii are probably very much our future. Could you imagine one day going in for innoculations... where the innoculation is a host of ACTIVE virii designed with keeping specific things in check? (Cancer and etc.) Or even more interesting... becomeing innoculated just by hanging out with a friend who went in for the shots? LOL
Luke
David Webber this time, (not the only, or the first I would bet... but,) from his popular Honor Harrington series, one planet used this "primitive" form of genetic engineering to harden the population against heavy metals.
The only problem was that a gene that was manipulated by this gene-altered-cold virus also happened to cause an abnormal number of male-embryos to be miscarried. (8 out of 9 failed mail pregnancies or something like that) blah blah blah, read the books for more info.
Point being: If this sort of thing does become a reality, (as it most likely will) how will we set standards to PREVENT massive *accidental* deaths/infections of something that *could* be harmful to *some* people?
Some scientists used a similar virus technique to insert a gene into mouse liver cells, convincing them to be pancreas cells and produce insulin, thereby curing their diabetes. Good stuff.
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Science can be a beautiful thing...
Yahoo article. Sounds incredibly promising as the death rate for this form of cancer in humans is so high (sounds like 100 percent according to the article).
Infectious vector that can swap genes with a similar virus spreadable through air - therapeutic brain-SARS is what the doctor prescribed! - I hope that I won't become bystander, once we get this common cold that could whack our glial cells!
Do you remember that antibody therapy recently that worked so great on Alzheimer patients (removing their plaques by immune activation) that they all started dying due to immediate brain inflamation? That was non-infective therapy.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I have one question. How did these mice get tubers in their brains? I know my mom used to tell me that my ears were so dirty, I could grow potatoes in there, but I did not think it would really work... I guess I did not realize it was such a problem.
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had this been announced 2 years ago my dad would still be alive. no shit. i don't know wether to feel regret, hate, or to be relieved that there is now a cure for this terrible, terrible disease.
moox. for a new generation.
these things never ever have an impact on clinical medicine. All these press releases do is please the ego of the biologist. Clinical medicine is mostly untouched by "discoveries" like that.
Further mutations of the virus might enhance Tumors, even kill ordiniary cells. I wonder if these experiments are being carried out in China and HongKong...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
This is old news. The phrase "Sneezing my brains out" has been around way before copyrights protected new old discoveries.
My girlfriends uncle has glioma and it also runs in her family. Her mother is in remission and her aunt survived it. My gf and I are also starting to get worried, she's been seeing signs(one eye totally losing sight for a few hours, seeing lights and headaches) that something may be wrong. She's going in for a MRI once her HMO approves it. We are hoping this treatment becomes available in the near future, but most likely it will be too late for her Uncle. He's been given till november at the latest.
I feel really lucky to have the only thing passed down in my family is a beer belly, no cancer on either side of my family. All strong heathly polish-americans people. My great grandma died last august at the age of 99 and my other great grandma is 95.
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The way it works is this: In order to replicate, adenoviruses need to shut down some pathways inside a cell--one of them is mediated by p53, another by Rb. If you get rid of the genes in the virus that do this (E1B and E1A, respectively), you get a virus that can only replicate and kill cells that have defects in those pathways. Not coincidentally, mutations in those pathways are extremely common (almost ubiquitous) in cancer cells, so the virus kills tumor cells with a selectivity higher than any chemotherapy. The most famous of these viruses is the Onyx-015 virus, which could be googled for information. IIRC, Onyx-015 had E1B deleted and therefore targets p53 deficiency, while the virus in this study had an E1A deletion, so it targets Rb deficiency.
One stumbling block has been low infection efficiency. This has been partially solved by incorporating RGD domains into the proteins on the surface of the virus, enabling the virus to use a different method to infect the cells.
To everyone talking about the dangers of genetic engineering, that doesn't really apply here. These are weakened viruses that have been engineered to infect different types of cells. If you inject a large amount of normal adenovirus into a person's brain, it will be fatal. The difference here is that the viruses are weakened so that they only kill the tumor cells. The largest danger to the patient would probably be that the immune response to the virus would damage the brain or cause a stroke or something, but I would argue that's a risk worth taking.
Don't pay attention. The dude is just jealous. He has to post on /. anonymously and doesn't have a gf.
In the desperate attempt to be on-topic:
After reading about this potential "cure" yesterday, I have spent some time pondering the ethics of communicable cures. We are, after all, discussing what could be a communicable cure for cancer. That is an amazing thought - This line of research could not just cure cancer, but it could potentially cure everyone in the world's cancer by giving one guy in India a shot in his arse.
But who would profit?
If no one profits, what is the motivation for persuing this type of cure. In fact, if these modified cold viruses cannot be made to be non-communicable, is there a possibility that this "cure" could be tossed away because it will destroy billions of dollars of potential revenue for a more manageable cure?
These and other issues could fill tomes... I think this subject deserves some very serious brainpower devoted to it.
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