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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."
Hope *is* better than nothing. New treatments are tried on terminal patients all the time: just like the person in the before and after links. However, non-terminal patients are not given experimental treatments until the studies are completed based on the effects experienced from the first group: the group everyone hopes they're never in. Once the medical community is convinced that this really works and once they have a handle on the side effects then the treatment will move outward from the most critically ill to other may benefit from it.
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.
You must not live in the same country as I do. I can see someone using this treatment, dying (either related or unrelated to the treatment, it doesn't matter), and the surviving family sues for millions. Waivers be damned, because whenever you beleive something is unthinkable, there is always someone out there who thinks they are entitled to something. The United States is the land of malpractice insurance (!!!), after all.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
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.
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.