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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.]"
Great idea! Lets's inject people with functional bacterial antibiotic resistance genes...
When I did Genetic engineering back in the '80s we used antibiotic resistance genes as markers to show which organisms had taken up the gene we wanted to transfer - and antibiotic resistant bacteria are becoming a bit of an "issue" these days.
Could this be in some way related?
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Two words: Lung Cancer.
That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.
There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.
If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.
BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.
" I thoroughly hope this succeeds for the good f man kind."
I don't know, I think leaving well enough alone would be best for mankind, curing cancer would only be good for individuals. The world has a touch too many people in it already...
this article reminded me of the bacteriophages mentioned in Wired a month or two ago.
it's another example of utilizing existing biology to do our dirty work for us, rather than inventing some new "super drug" from scratch. fight biology with biology, it's much more efficient. sometimes older tech works better.
Yeah but then the cheap sollution will be just everyone has a big party once one of them has caught the flu and they all catch the communicable disease. It be very easy for (unless they put safeguards into place) for this to sweep across the nation... and no more cancer. Well i guess that is an idealistic view of things.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
received the patent No. 6,627,190 for his work.
Only the sufficiently wealthy may receive access, then. In many economically deficient portions of the world, relatively benign diseases have remained impressively lethal.
Thirty years of effort, plus several decades of awaiting the availability of a less expensive implementation. What an unfortunate circumstance.
Do you like German cars?
Back in '98, Dr. Patrick Lee at the University of Calgary (http://www.med.ucalgary.ca/webs/microinfect/Lee.h tml) did this with a naturally-occuring virus. His company (http://www.oncolyticsbiotech.com) is now well on its way to having this treatment approved for general use.
Article seems to indicate that they juiced this virus so it's more effective in killing cells. We can only hope that after it's been out in the environment for a while (and that's bound to happen, they can't keep everyone who gets it isolated for weeks) that it won't start to mutate and infect healthy cells too.
so they patented this, but what's to keep someone from just getting their cancer cure by shaking hands with someone who's getting the treatment?
Two words: Off Topic.
Maybe one hyphenated word.
Seriously, though, moving nuclear waste off-planet is idiotic. The cost to get it into space is beyond prohibitive, and the chances of it being on a rocket that explodes on liftoff and spreads the waste everywhere is infinitely greater than the chances of terrestrial waste disposal causing harm.
The best nuclear waste plan is to reprocess it for nuclides helpful to industry and medicine and for nuclear fuel and then to convert it to borosilicate glass, which is very highly stable, and bury it in Yucca Mountain.
And solar anything is way to inefficient for any normal energy generation (remote locations excepted, perhaps).
But then again, the comment may be a troll, so I shall say no more.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Are also being tried.
No. They don't have to be *those* types of herpes - there are many types.
The idea is pretty simple - and pretty fascinating - cancers basically occur when the replication processes refuses to shut down in a cell (actually it usually starts up again before it should). So if a virus can be found that interferes with the replication processes - hopefully before the cancer gets to it - voila. The lesser of two evils.
Here's one of many research articles online. These papers are *all over* the journals right now.
This has been in the medical news for a while.
See here, clinical proof from phase I human study.
Not to troll or anything but with all the articles this week about how the Wright brothers weren't 'first in flight' it begs the question, is this a knockoff of the work done in Canada so people can get over US's NIH syndrome?
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Not to invoke the wrath of the anti-humanity moderators out there, but good! To hell with Darwinism. If humanity can do it better then nature, why shouldn't it? Ok, so we can no longer effectively evolve stronger and better humans through evolution. We can still evolve stronger and better humans through genetic manipulation. Granted, we are not able to effectively do this today, but some day within the near future we will be able to. Once that happens we will likely evolve much faster then any species on the face of this planet ever has. Hell, we might not even do it biologically, it might be that a few hundred years from now we have stripped away the organics and 'being human' has nothing to do with the parts you were built out of.
Now, the obvious response is that we are playing god or screwing with mother nature, but consider for a moment that perhaps this is natures grand design?
Biological evolution is just the latest of nature's trends towards greater complexity. Why can't intelligence be the next perfectly natural way to head towards greater complexity? We don't look down upon sexual reproduction because it is more complicated then single sex reproduction. No cries that it is unnatural when sexual reproduction, the next step in evolution, is given its shot. Why look down on intelligence when it contributes to the grand scheme of things? Why would intelligent human evolution brought about in a lab be worse?
Honestly, I think humans are just the next rung on the ladder on the way up. What happens when you get to the top? Who the hell knows. Are we the last step? Probably not. It doesn't bother me though that there is a new order in town. If anything, it is uplifting. Biological evolution likely is not the most reliable way for life to survive when sun dies.
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. Food does the same thing. In times of famine and wars (for that matter) very few people die of cancer.
It makes sense to fight disease with disease.
There's a whole ecosystem of single celled creatures living inside people. Some things like acidophilous are quite good for the system. IMHO, the occasional cold seems to help keep the immune system in tune.
I think it is healthier to think in terms of maintaining a good balance in the ecosystem than to try and prevent all exposure to disease. Personally, I avoid antibiotics except for extreme diseases. BTW, when people do take antibiotics, they need to take the full subscription, other wise you will turn into a fun little biology experiment where the germs resistent to the anti-biotic can work on their evolution. I read arguments by some doctors that think the government should curtail the use of antibiotics to extreme cases so that we can halt the evolution of antibiotic resistent diseases.
Actually, it's not so much "more telomerase" as "any telomerase". There are precious few cells in the body that naturally produce telomerase. Crypt cells in the stomach are one, but the other, more disturbing possibility, is germ-line cells. Women don't have much to worry about in this regard, as eggs undergo meiosis early and lie dormant until needed, but sperm production is an ongoing process, and sperm has long telomeres.
In Michael West's book, The Immortal Cell (a very good read, BTW), they detail the search for what kept cancer cells alive, and found that (p.103) 90 of their 101 tumor samples were telomerase positive, and none of the 50 somatic (normal body) cell samples were.
Blocking telomerase on its own is also thought to be a possibility for fighting cancer, because cancer cells typically express telomerase only in enough quantities to extend the telomere slightly. Normal cells don't express it at all and would be unaffected. Testis cells wouldn't be harmed as badly, as their telomeres are long, but I can imagine (if telomere shortening is a major contributor to aging) that if you had a child during treatment, you'd be knocking the number of years of treatment off the life of your child.
The cancer cells would run out their fuse and senesce (like moles). They could still pose a health hazard because there's still some growth potential up until the point where the fuse runs out, but it beats months of unchecked growth.
As a personal note, I still think it's "freakishly cool" to see how far we've come in our understanding of life, aging, cancer, genetics and evolution in the past two decades :)
P.S. You're all invited to my 200th birthday party :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
I haven't read the article yet, but I don't think this will help with finding a cure for the common cold. I'm guessing that they found a string of codons that will work with the p53 protein or MapK system and inserted this string into a cold (which I think is a virus) and use it as a vector. but this is off the top of my head and might not be 100% correct, so if someone could correct me if i'm wrong, i would appreciate it.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
My first thought as well. Or a "friendship cold": "give this letter and a big sloppy kiss to 5 of your friends...".
Unfortunately, if the virus only thrives in the tumors you probably won't be very contagious
even if you have the right type of cancer, and
not at all if you don't.
sudo ergo sum
At the risk of sounding preachy, have you ever seen a person with cancer die?
Ever been to an oncology ward? It smells like rotting death. And the patients aren't quite sure which is worse, the cancer or the treatments.
Bodies and faces deform in grotesquely humourous ways. And the pain. The most potent pain killers are used on a cancer floor. Picture a pain so severe that fentanyl (which is 100 times more powerful than morphine) isn't effective.
On top of this misery, the cost. Any clue how much it takes to half-assed treat cancer? Some people choose to die rather than leave their families destitute.
Yes sir, certainly everyone should have the right to control and profit from their work. But let's not forget the shoulders they had to stand on to get there.
The story is wonderful news, and I can only hope those persons who make the discoveries are wise enough to really understand what they have.
Schadenfreude
When you are trying to fight cancer with an adenovirus, like a particularly nasty common cold, you get a mutated adenovirus that seems to copy itself only in cells that lack a functioning copy of a gene called p53 that repairs damaged or mutated DNA. If the DNA is then too smashed up to be repaired, p53 instructs the cell to self-destruct.
Since cancer occurs when DNA becomes so badly battered that it stops regulating cell growth and behavior, it is not surprising p53 has stopped working in more than half of human tumors..
http://biotech.about.com/library/weekly/aa_penicil linpatent.htm
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, the first antibiotic, and for ethical reasons chose not to patent it. The result? No corporation saw any chance for making profit out of it, and so the drug wasn't actually manufactuered until almost 15 years later!
Sure, helping people is good--- but do you think Thomas Edison invented the light bulb because he wanted to help people? Nope- he wanted to get rich. I think both are possible. In fact, its the pursuit of personal interests that have caused the greatest advanced in society.
Proving once again that greed is good....
[FromTheMorning]
You were quite unfair to that poster.
Please, I beg you, read the posts before you respond to them. Please read carefully, and more than anything else, please avoid setting up straw men.
By restating my argument and including material that weakens it, you avoid answering my point in your diatribe.
Of course that is harder to do when you cut to essentials.
Here is the pure essence.
1. If you say people need to die to solve the overopulation problem, or, by extention, you say that cures for fatal diseases are a bad thing because of overpopulation, you are preaching but not practicing unless your assertion is read from a suicide note.
Really, it's that simple.
2. A person asserts, in essence, that *other people* should die to solve the overpopulation problem. His solution is to forego breeding--this person has given up on everything but optimizing his enjoyment of his resource-pool over the course of his own lifetime. He has so solutions, seeks none, and is not thinking of any but enjoying a resource-intensive lifestyle that will end with him.
3. A child of someone like this might think about solutions--might in fact combine awareness that solutions are necessary--'daddy said so'--with the educational/material resources needed to find and implement workable solutions.
I also mentioned that this was unlikely, but better than empty, kumbaya-singing, 'bleeding world' rhetoric limed to an ineluctible(SP) subtext that everything from Cancer, to AIDs and Ebola are not really such bad things...provided they happen only to the right people.
That is the essence of what I wrote. At no time did I say, 'be fruitful and multiply.'
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
... you have to take usage patterns into consideration. For running my watch solar is very efficient (better than producing batteries, distributing them and asking cosumers to change them when their 20$ watch dies).
... I hope crises in California and elsewhere (one is coming in Ontario Canada) will lead to some new efficiencies in *consumption*.
The problem with energy in the North is not production but extra-ordinarily high consumption. Energy is too cheap (artificially so) and everything about our enviroment reflects that: badly designed cities and buildings and major sunk investments we have to deal with for 100's of years are the result
If the Spanish moors produced wonderful energy efficient homes that needed no air-conditioning.
Yep, once you have this special cold virus, you will be legally prohibited from infecting anyone else with it... much in the same way that corn and grain farmers who use genetically engineered seed cannot save any of their crop for use as seed for next season's crop, and if any of the grain falls off the trucks alongside the roads after harvest, and begins growing on the sides of the road, the farmer still gets sued for IP infringement.
What if the virus mutates into a form that starts attacking all cells, then this virus gets loose?
Genetically engineering viruses sounds like a very dangerous task to me, especially if you make mistakes. We definitely don't need a worldwide "super-virus" epidemic that leaves half the population dead.