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Killing Cancer With a Virus
just___giver writes "The U.S. National Cancer Institute has just decided to fund multiple human clinical studies to test the reovirus. This naturally occuring virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Here is a before and after picture of a terminal patient with an actively growing neck tumour that had failed to respond to conventional treatments. This tumour was eliminated with only a single injection of the Reovirus. Researchers at Oncolytics Biotech have shown that the Reovirus can kill many types of cancer, including breast, prostate, pancreatic and brain tumours. Human clinical trial results indicate that there are no safety concerns and that the reovirus shrinks and even eliminates tumours injected with this virus. Numerous other third party studies show that the reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers."
If this is a miracle, then why not approve it for people who will die without it. I mean, if I was in severe pain and going to die, I'd try it in a second.
Hope is better than nothing.
How do they know of any long-term effects this virus might have? I imagine it would take at least a few years to observe any feasable side-effects. Am I wrong?
I have long suspected that the best cures for the worst diseases would be "surgical strike" techniques instead of the all or nothing approach of radiation and chemotherapy type solutions.
I wouldn't be surprised to see nanotech get involved in the action at some point.
Anyone looking to invest in companies for the long term should pay attention to companies that do this type of work.
Hopefully this won't create any kind of virus-resistant cancer. As if normal cancer isn't bad enough, we sure as heck don't need a mutant super-cancer running around.
This seems to me to BE nanotech. It's just produced by nature instead of someone in a lab coat.
The really cool thing to do with this virus (assuming it really is harmless to normal human cells) would be to create an implant with a hospitible environment that 'feeds' it and keeps a minimum population of viable viruses in your body for an extended period of time to whack cancers as they start.
I have recently had a relative and family friend die from cancer.
In the case of my friend he only found out nine months before his death that he even had cancer. They tried every treatment available, but it had spread too far.
Something like this would have been wonderful. Once they had found out that it was far too wide-spread for normal treatments Ronnie would have jumped at a chance for this.
Some may say that we should try it without knowing the long-term effects, I disagree. With terminally ill patients there is no hope. This provides a double solution -- not only should the virus kill the cancer, it provides the patient with a reason to keep on fighting.
I hope they get this to all the terminally ill patients that they can ASAP.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Maybe because it's a horrible thing that NEEDS to be cured?
;)
I know it's fashionable to be so cynical, but some people do occasionally do things JUST to help society. Scary, huh? Some people do things for reasons other than money... Look at Linux
your point, while funny, begs an interesting question of why big tobacco doesn't invest heavily in cancer research; finding a reliable cure would render the biggest argument against smoking moot.
I too know the effects of cancer first hand as well as those of chemotherapy. Most everyone that I have known that has been though chemo, said that if the cancer comes back and they are left with the choice to take the chemo or die, they'd choose death. While they might change their minds if/when the situation does come it speaks of the need for a better type of treatment. I am not against chemotherapy as it's the most effective treatment at the time, but it is so painful and takes years away from the patients life. Hopefully this treatment will be as promising as it sounds and in 100 years people will look back and see chemo as a barbaric, however effective, cure. Hopefully....
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Yes, the reovirus is naturally occuring - in fact it's quite common. It is one of the viruses causing what is generically known as "common cold". Runny nose et caetera.
However, how many cancer patients caught the common cold and were thus cured? Right, none. The virus that they're using in the trials is definitely genetically manipulated, not native. And that's patentable (and rightfully so).
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
If a company or person invested billions of dollars of research developing or discovering this virus(Didn't happen in this case), why shouldn't these people deserve a patent?
The purpose of a patent is so these people can get their R&D money back exclusivly for a period of time. Most people who get patents don't sit on them, they sell them. I can assure you there would be no problem getting a hold of the cure.
I don't see any problem with people having to shell out 1,000 or 10,000 for a cure for cancer for a while until these people who developed it get their invested money back. There are real people behind the development of these things, they have families and mouths to feed too.
Mother diagonsed with a rare form of Breast Cancer, and caught in stage 4 despite regular check ups and mamagrams.
Very ill due to chemo treatments. Made an effort to see my marching competitions, but couldn't be around large crowds.
Had to drop out of several activities because she was in and out of the hospital including an audition for a music scholarship to college.
Day of prom, rushed to the hospital, discovered the tumor has spread to her brain. Spent my senior prom in an emergancy waiting room.
Made it through graduation, but couldn't walk without a walker and after my graduation party went into the hospital that night. Found the cancer in her spine, didn't respond to any more treatments and watched my mother waste away for the next month at home until she died exactly 1 month after my high school graduation.
Some how I managed to regain enough will to enter college just over six weeks later.
I hope this isn't some marketing/investment blitz and that this might be a giant leap forward in cancer treatment. Sometimes I wonder if these companies want to find a cure. I mean, research is profitable business. Just look at the March of Dimes. Their orginial goal was to help find a cure for Polio and after one was discovered, they had to find a new mission.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Ah yes,socialized medicine is great, as long as you do not have to pay the price of research.
That's the kind of misinformation we often hear from the IP/investment-led corporate bullshit classes, but hopefully most technical people can see through it.
As an ex-researcher, let me tell you about research. Researchers do not develop ideas in a vacuum, and their pay packets do not magically transform into inventions. And the stuff from which ideas are made is not created by dumping invester's money into labs.
Ideas come when good researchers interact with other clever people working in that area across the world. In part it's interactive, but of vastly more significance is the continuous process of staying on top of the massive torrent of world literature, which is a treasure chest of untapped riches. It's a sea of ideas out there, with everyone's contributions pushing the wavefront of knowledge along just a little bit further. Sometimes just a quaint turn of phrase or even a linguistic mistake spurs a line of thought. How many dollars have been invested in one's lab figures far far down the lists of important contributions.
It's typical company bullshit to try to take all the credit for research done in a company's labs by one's paid employees. It just shows how most company people are totally clueless on how the scientific creative process works.
No matter how brilliant the person that records a new scientific discovery is, and no matter how much his company is paying him nor how many trillions they have spent on his lab, that idea arose only in very small part from his own work. 99% or more is a direct result of his standing on the shoulders of a world full of very bright people, and it's largely immaterial who delivers the final brushstroke.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
And after the stock and bond markets rebound, the insurance companies won't reduce the rates, even though the reason for the increases no longer apply.
They can raise the rates, then cut off payoffs via the "torn reform" bullshit, and finally refuse to lower the rates even after the "reform" has taken place as their stock investments are soaring!
PROFIT!
And Americans fell for it. The insurance companies are looting us.
We are so stupid, we all deserve to lose health coverage.
99% or more is a direct result of his standing on the shoulders of a world full of very bright people...
All of whom would be flipping burgers if people weren't paid to do research.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
is that my dad died 3 years ago from terminal cancer.. it was in his lungs and kidney..
he developed all sorta of crap and ultimately died of complications..
well, at least there will be more people who wont have to deal with what I've had to go through.
and maybe my mom wouldnt have had to have that surgery either, but of course, she wouldnt have stopped smoking if she hadnt... and if my dad hadnt died, I wouldnt be using a computer right now (he was afraid of them) so things happen for a reason I guess.
It's amazing that a virus, something that often plagues us, kills off another problem that plagues us.
another classic case of fighting fire with fire.
People die from cancer because we don't die from other things. How many people do you know in their 20s or 30s that have cancer? Now exclude those that are HIV positive. The number is probably awfully close to zero.
Now realize that until the late 19th century the average life expectancy was in the early to mid 30s. People didn't die of cancer because something else got them first -- mostly disease, accidents, or (for women obviously) childbirth. As we started reducing those incidents we started seeing more people die of other conditions -- generally attributed to "old age", but most likely heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, and so forth. As we've slowly beaten back those diseases we're seeing cancer become more prevelant. And when we beat cancer we'll still have to deal with dementia, alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other central nervous system afflictions. And I'm willing to bet that when we tackle those we'll find other issues too. Eventually we may get to the point where one of the old killers becomes the most prevalent cause of death once again.
Accident.