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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."
Well, if we're to believe the article, only cells with "an activated RAS pathway" are consistently affected by the virus. Now, I suppose that most cells don't generally have this, and that's why they are unaffected. But... are there any non-cancerous conditions in which this happens? They you've just got a very, very effective way of killing whatever set of cells that is...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Ok, I am not a biologist, and have no scientific basis for this, but...
According to the FAQ:
4. Where does the reovirus come from?
Reovirus is found naturally in shallow pools of water, lakes or streams or in the sewage system.
So assuming that we could naturally ingest these Reoviri, would someone in a cleaner environment be at a higher risk for cancer (or more to the point, a higher risk from dieing before the Reovirus healed them)? It would be really interesting to find out that drinking bottled water and organtic foods is actually increasing the risk of death from cancer.
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2B1ASK1
Reading the article (which by the way puts one in the top 1% of /. readers), it seems this reovirus is quite common, and that non-cancerous cells kill it off quite readily. I wonder though if this reovirus has ever "wandered in" on cancer cells in a patient and led to remission in that patient.
You always here anecdotal stories about some people recovering in cases where others haven't, and it's usually attributed to God, positive thinking, a close family, and so forth.
Maybe it's been these little buggers all along.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Using viruses to attack diseases is a technique from the early 20th century. It was widely used in Russia, but fell out of favor when anitbiotics were discovered. It appears to be reviving.
I've seen the effects too -- my father died of cancer, my mother had breast cancer (caught it amazingly early fortunately), I worked on an oncology floor at a local hospital for three years, and one of my coworker's kids has leukemia (in the last stages of treatment, fortunately, and doing well).
The chemotherapy and radiotherapy is nasty, and this looks a lot better (at least, as long as it doesn't mutate as viruses are wont to do). But very few people actually die from the chemo/radiotherapy, at least not directly. A lot of people don't find out that they have cancer until the cancer is well formed. Once the cancer metastatizes and starts to spread there's very little that modern medicine can do for you (this may change that, as may the nanotech "bullets" I read about earlier today). All chemo and radiation can do at that point is attempt to minimize the suffering -- and I question that they do this for the most part.
Anyway, it's not the chemo/radiation that gets you. It's the side effects. By and large we use the same chemo drugs that we've used for decades, as well as the same radiotherapy methods. We've refined the dosages, but that's about it. Where the real breakthroughs have been is in the medicines to treat the side effects of the chemo -- nausea, dizziness, low white blood count, and so forth. And we've made strides on drugs to treat the side effects of those drugs. And so forth. Cancers that were fatal (as in 0% survival rate) twenty years ago now have an 80% survivability rate (my coworker's son is one such case). That's pretty amazing.
Even so, if there's a better solution out there, with fewer side effects, let's go for it. I hope the testing goes well. I'd also like to know what you need to do to be put on the human testing list. My sister's mother-in-law has been given less than 6 months to live, in part due to cancer that has metastatized and is pretty much everywhere now. It's likely that the cancer's done too much damage for her to recover though... and we don't have a magic bullet to cure that issue. Yet.
Worse than that is this:
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- A Sandia National Laboratories researcher has discovered a material that could potentially mean a new AIDS treatment. The material, called niobium HPA, can attach itself to the AIDS virus in the bloodstream, preventing it from harming other cells. May Nyman stumbled onto it accidentally while investigating filters for liquid nuclear waste at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The idea of using the discovery for medical purposes is intriguing, said Craig Hill, a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta and an expert in a class of materials called heteropolyanions, or HPAs. "If the thing has a lifetime of hours [in the blood] versus minutes or seconds, then it is very likely to have interesting anti-viral properties," said Hill, who said he would be interested in testing the material at Emory. "There's a reasonable chance that its toxicity may be fairly low."
So the big bad nuclear power plants so reviled by hippies may cure AIDS. Oh the irony.
it's not necessarily different by country... it even varies by state. My state, for instance, just passed malpractice caps on noneconomic damages... and even despite that, I'm in the process of losing my malpractice insurance (despite having NO claims against me). They are dropping me like a bad habit, and if I want to stayed insured, it's going to cost me double what it was before (that's if I can even get insured).
Most of these unlabeled uses of drugs/viruses/devices are done under compassionate use protocols of one type or another. There is also "emergency use," which can even be done before clinical trials... try this link for some more info.
Even so, you should read the fine print. Even for emergency use, you still have to consult your IRB (that's "institutional review board" for you non-medical folks... they can veto what you want to do), and at least one other physician before submitting the paperwork... and who knows how long before your approval comes back? I've not personally submitted one of these (I am not an oncologist), so I won't speculate on the time frame, though I'd hope they would bypass the usual beauracratic delays.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
This helps back my (otherwise unfounded) theory that too many of these anti-bacterial cleaning supplies will doom the human race. Of course, I was looking at it from the point of view that if we raise children unexposed to filth they'll be far more susceptible once they are exposed. This study gives the possibility that there may be more naturally occuring aids that we are destroying through our ignorance.
Consider: if Alexander Fleming had been more conscientious about cleaning his petri dishes, he may never have found penicillin. (Reference - I'd heard it was an accident, but never knew it was on a dish in a sink waiting to be cleaned.) Reading this article, it also occurs to me that while no one can (probably) patent a naturally occuring virus, they probably can patent an effective growing/harvesting process.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
What a load of crap.
Yes, a company could patent the usage of this retrovirus for curing cancer. Sure, the virus has existed for some unknown amount of time, but the usage of it as a method to cure cancer would certainly fulfill the "new" and "non-obvious" requirements for patent law.
And, hey, maybe they'll make some money on doing so as long as they license it widely at some low cost. After all, they certainly spent some money in finding out that the retrovirus causes the anti-cancer effect, and paid for the trials, and whatnot to go forward. Shouldn't they receive some compensation for doing so?
And what will happen if they try to charge too much for it? Particularly if the retrovirus can be easily manufactured from existing natural sources?
They'll discover that countries will nationalize their patent and they'll get bupkis. It's happened before, both in and outside of the US, and it'll happen again. And even for similar causes. Numerous South American and African countries do not recognize the patents on various HIV medications. The drug companies have been told that they can either sell it for a fixed price (or, more likely, be paid a fixed amount by the government regardless of how much is administered) or the government will simply nationalize the patent and the drug companies will get nothing. Generally they go for the settlement.
Of course, it's not that simple. Every time this occurs it's a disincentive for the drug companies to actually produce miracle cures, or even to produce treatment drugs for maladies. Do you spend $100M on research for degenerative neural disorders like Alzheimer's and MS, knowing that if you succeed you might never see the money back, or do you spend it on a drug to reduce anxiety, depression, or other sociological problems -- which aren't likely to ever be nationalized? And while I agree that drugs are often overpriced, the flip side to that is it's hideously expensive to actually get a new drug approved by the FDA and its counterparts (mostly in Europe). It costs millions of dollars. And most of them fail to get through the process. You can look at streamlining the process, but then you run the risk of having drugs with very bad side effects slipping through.
Do you want to leave actually finding cures up to purely governmental/good will efforts? Especially when a lot of the best are going to go into private industry because the pay is better?
Sorry, the real world isn't as simple as your flippant "intellectual property" comment. It's far more complex, and there are no easy solutions.
Patrick Lee, the scientist behind all of this, has been researching the reovirus for over twenty years. We (that's the University of Calgary, my alma mater) just lost him to Dalhousie University, and they haven't stopped bragging since.
When the first word of this treatment hit the papers five years ago in 1998, his colleagues at other universities (read: his competitors) were quoted saying (I'm paraphrasing) that if Patrick Lee has published, you know the science has to be solid. The peer-reviewed journals agree: he's been published in Cell, Nature, Science and Nature Cell Biology, among others.
This is the real deal. I've put my money where my mouth is, too: several thousand dollars of my own money is banking on this.
but nice try at turning a complicated issue into a cheap political shot at the intelligence of "US citizens (and Republicans)."
Malpractice lawsuits have nothing to do with the increase in premiums? Please... losses directly affect premiums in virtually any insurance arena, though not always in the short term. Notably, my state has seen its total number of malpractice insurers drop from 15-20 to only 3 in the last ten years.
Also, state law where I practice limits the amount of assets an insurance company can place in the stock market. They are required by law to keep certain amounts liquid and available to settle claims, while much of the remainder of their assets goes into the much-less-volatile bond market. This state also prevents insurers from recouping investment losses via premium hikes, thus discouraging any sort of wild futures trading, or risky investment nonsense. Many insurers used to resell policies, much like banks resell loans... but the worldwide reinsurance market has also taken a beating in the last five years, preventing insurers from reshuffling some of their exposure.
It's a complicated problem... but that doesn't mean malpractice caps are not useful. Unless, of course, you are a med-mal attorney, in which case your self-interest is obvious. My personal preference would have been to institute some form of loser-pays, or a malpractice review board made up of laymen, attorneys, and physicians of various specialties to vet lawsuits for merit BEFORE they go to trial.
Blaming it soley on evil corporations losing money in the stock market makes you sound like a ABA lobbiest.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.