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Fighting Cancer With The Common Cold?
Roland Piquepaille writes "After 30 years of work, Saint Louis University researchers have genetically engineered a common cold virus to fight cancerous cells while leaving unaffected healthy ones. They received a patent for this research and clinical tests on humans will start soon, according to this news release. Dr. William Wold, chair of the department of molecular microbiology and immunology, received the patent No. 6,627,190 for his work. Preclinical testing has already been done so clinical trials should start soon. We can only hope they will be successful. This overview contains many more details and references about this potential cure for all kinds of cancer. [Note: this is a very different project from the one mentioned by a previous
Slashdot post.]"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's great that this is possible, but I'm not sure it should be patented. What ever happened to research for the good of mankind, and academic recognition?
I know medical research is expensive and all, and inventors/researchers need protection from having their ideas stolen, but what it means is that the technology can be held to ransom by the patent holder. "Yes we can save you, but it'll cost you $5000 a week for the rest of your life, etc."
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Y'know, if I was smart enough to work out how to help people fight cancer, the last thing on my mind would be how to patent the technique. I'd want to help as many people as possible.
All of the news thus far looks to come right off of the press release put out by the pharmaceutical company funding the initial front. I have no doubt this is wonderful information for the relevant shareholders/venture capitalists.
But what about his work leading up to this? I don't read the microbiology journals (not that I would understand them), but I'll bet someone around here does. Is anything relevant to this project peer-reviewed? Have any of his methods been reproduced? Is there anything published relating to this project?
I don't want to sound too skeptical here, but this could be a seriously exciting discovery if 25% of the PR release were to be realized. But until I see some proof (and not a patent award, thanks), I'm going to assume this "scientific discovery" is another turkey-intestines into fuel story.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
[Note: this is a very different project from the one mentioned by a previous Slashdot post.]
How ironic that story submitters are now feeling the need to add flameproofing like this to their submissions, in fear of the duplicate article police.
It's a question of priorities...before cancer or the common cold could be cured we first had to concentrate biomedical effort on making a pill that gives old farts a rock hard meatpipe. Now that that's out of the way, we can concentrate on curing viral infections, hereditary diseases, cancer, etc.
did you learn nothing from the episode of ST:TNG where Geordi saves the planet of the GM people who would have killed him at birth for being "defective"?!?
What do you want? A cold, or cancer?
Ya know, I seem to get at least one cold every year anyway, and it's never a big deal.
If this works out, I could start smoking again guilt free!
I would hope that I'm the type of man that would find my reward in the lives of the people I saved, rather than the wealth that I accumulated watching the less fortunate ones die. Here's hoping that the patent isn't exploited in an overly greedy manner so as to make accessible any treatment that results from it, to as many people as possible.
If you look at the historical records, you will see a marked jump in the percent of people who die of cancer after the introduction of antibiotics.
Hmm, wonder if that's because people are suddenly *not* dying of cholera, tuberculosus, or the plague?
Food does the same thing. In times of famine and wars (for that matter) very few people die of cancer.
Wow, in times of famine, people don't die from cancer? Too bad they're all busy dying of starvation, they could've lived forever!
Too bad you had to lead off with such bizarre statements, since I find myself nodding to just about everything else (including the critique of the overuse of anti-biotics, and that getting the sniffles once in awhile is a good thing).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I'm skeptical, and simillarly cynical in that I am sort of expecting for this work to be proved effective, and then sat on to the tune of (as someone else on this thread put it), "We have a cure, but it'll cost you $5,000 a day for the rest of your life."
That said, simply because it's patented doesn't mean they WILL be greedy bastards. It just gives them more of an opportunity to do so. So i'm waiting before I pass judgement. The developers may honestly feel that patenting the virus is the best way to ensure that it's available to the most people for the least cost. They may be ready and willing to distribute it at-cost.
But yeah, I'm not holding my breath for such an occurance.
-Trillian
Once you've actually *done* something, then feel free to stand up and take your bows... they will indeed be well deserved, but these types of promises for the future do nothing to help the people who are dying of cancer right now, many of whom may not even live to see the development of such a cure.
So instead of wasting time making press releases about the "promise" of a cure for cancer, just shut your yap and *CURE* people... Your Nobel Prize in medicine awaits.
(Sorry... do I sound a tad bitter?)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yes, well, but...
Since
1. The cold virus is a virus
2. Antibiotics are effective against bacteria
This is not an issue
Putting antibiotic resistence markers in a virus would be like giving cough medicine to an oak tree
I'm not usually one to call 'Troll', but...
...or the research would not have taken place until 20 years later.
The whole idea of patents is to protect the person who comes up with an idea. If Dr. William Wold wants to allow the world to use this idea, he will truly benefit humanity. If not, then it is his prerogative not to (Yes, he is allowed to make money).
He shouldn't be forced to share his design so other companies can take the idea and make cheap spinoffs. Where would the incentive to innovate and share ideas come from for those who innovate for profit? (I know, Linus Torvolds Freely gave away Linux, but not everybody has the same mentality.)
If you dont like that, come up with your own unique way to kill cancer and freely share it with everybody.
we will all probably end up with some of it in our system within a decade or so
Hopefully that would not be the case. I dont think the general idea is to let people go around infecting each other with this thing. That would be _very_ dangerous.
Its like releasing a kernel patch that "insert the following four lines somewhere in the kernel". You really should do some version checking before doing so...And also look into where the code is inserted
Patching the human DNA is not something you want to do just like that. Things are very likely to go out of hand due to the complexity of regulatory pathways. Viruses are extremely compact DNA users, often allowing multiple reads of the same code to produce different enzymes/proteins. And since we dont know what other body functions we are affecting, things are likely to go astray.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Sometimes it's better to try and spread a viewpoint rather than enact it in certain ways. For example, my contribution is that I will not now, nor will I ever have children.
Actually, the previous post has this one dead to rights logically. Both logically, and in terms extrapolated from common sense.
I have heard this argument before from well-fed, well-educated people and it never ceases to make me wonder.
If cancer cures are bad because unanswerable wasting diseases are an indispensable way to turn the planet back into what it was: a garden where the universe, organized to the point of looking at itself, again gives way to infinitely various displays of eating and sh*tting, then going on in the world without producing children is still hypocrisy.
The main fallacy here is concealed information: living at all as a human creates environmental damage with the greatest amounts of it coming from the rich western nations; from industrialized or industrializing nations with little thought for environment preservation (Russia and especially our good trading buddy, China) and third-world nations with primative subsistance agriculture.
The rainforests burn, in part, because western farm subsidies keep the price of food artificially high to support agrobusiness profits--certainly too high for south American campesinos to buy it. This leaves them having to grow it in the most environmentally harmful ways possible.
Thus, the initial logical flaw in attacking methods of keeping people alive as a means of 'saving the planet' is simple hypocrisy unless you kill yourself--or at the very least, move to some place where you can do the least harm by using the least energy and consuming the least food--I personally reccomend certain parts of Bangladesh during a really bad growing year. Essentially, if you live anywhere where you can reccomend environmental mass euthanasia on a computer forum, you have already failed to go anywhere near what you are advocating.
It is also poor in terms of common sense to forego having children because, unlike doomsayer hypocrits, it is unlikely but not inconcievable that a child of such a person might actually try to come up with real, viable solutions and damned near any solution is better than stating, 'everyone but myself should die.'
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Unfortunately those press releases are not really intended for patients but for potential funders. It costs a lot of money to run a pharmaceutical research operation and some evil profit-seeking capitalist will have to see their operation as potentially profitable, if they want to continue their altruistic work. That's research for you.
It's not a retrovirus. It doesn't actually alter the DNA of the host cell (like AIDS does). What it does is injects it's DNA to hijack the cell's functions and resources to produce more virus. This eventually kills the cell and releases the virus, resulting in a kind of targeted attack on the tumor (more tumor cells lead to more virus in that area).
I don't read AC A human right
Get real.
1) Without the patent system, it is very possible that this research would never have been developed in the first place.
2) Having a patent does not require you to charge exorbitant rates. It's possible, but it's also possible that he'll decide to give the technique away for free.
3) Patents expire after 17 years. So the absolute worst case is that it becomes available at lower cost in 17 years, not 'several decades'.
4) Medical treatment isn't free, no matter how much we'd like it to be. The reasons that these 'economically deficient' (nice euphemism for 'poor', by the way) regions can't afford treatments for diseases with known cures isn't because of patents, it's because these treatments actually cost money to produce!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Imagine you're a cancer patient. You've been handed a death sentence from your doctor, effectively. Might be a few weeks, might be a few years, who knows. Now, once you get over the shock, and start living with the disease (and some people do for quite a long time), what are you going to do with yourself?
1. Wait to die, knowing there will never be a cure, because all of modern science has yet to mention even the possiblity of one.
2. Have some hope, because at least it's *possible* something might happen. It could be very unlikely, but hey, there are a hell of a lot of smart people working on it, so why not give it a shot?
I'm as against snake oil as anyone. Nothing sickens me more than people who stop taking known, working treatments because some quack claims he can "cure" you. But hope? For someone expecting to die in the near future there really isn't anything better.
Actually, I'd say that things like this do more for cancer patients than almost anything else. Certainly more for them than whiny posts to Slashdot.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No - it is reality. At that point it was off the radar screen so a venture capitalist probably figured it was worth breaking into.
The patent in this case will ensure the virus gets developed. Who's going to spend a couple hundred million dollars on clinical trials if they can only sell the final product for $1.95?
Well-done research is never "wasted", because you always learn something. It may not be what you wanted to know, and it may not be immediately applicable, but it adds to people's knowledge, which makes it useful.