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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.]"
They can cure cancer but they can't cure the common cold?!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"have genetically engineered a common cold virus"
Only a Microsoft Flu lab could make the claim that they genetically engineered a common cold virus, and all in the same sentence. It must be really hard to genetically engineer out of nothing, something... very... common.. Hmm.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I thoroughly hope this succeeds for the good f man kind. Any chance that this research will help with cold remedies ?
"have genetically engineered a common cold virus"
Only a Linux zealot would make the claim that they genetically engineered something... when it's a replication of an already known common virus. And, just like the common cold, this common virus (at 97%) is just as likely to have infected your electronic hard drives, too.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
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.
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.
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
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.
I think the biggest problem is that cancer undergoes natural selection rapidly, which is why it is so hard to fight. Since cancerous cells have a great deal of genetic mutation, populations of cancer cells can "evolve" to thwart treatments. Targetting almost any individual protein in cancer is bound to fail.
I did not RTFA, but from similar excerpts on the subject matter it is clear that they engineered the virus to only infect cancerous cells. The virus might be attracted to the increased level of telomerase that is being produced by cancer cells. Telomerase is used to replenish the expended telomeres on the end of the shoelaces-like DNA helixes. From what I know RNA attaches itself to the telomeres and starts recreating what it reads off. However, the place where it attaches itself does not get fully read, and therefore not re-created. Thus, the new molecule has a shorter telomere (the shiny end part on your shoelace). Now, when the end of the telomere is reached, the cell knows that it's time to commit senesence (suicide). Some guy called Hayflick figured that out in the 50's and that's why they call it the 'Hayflick limit', which is somewhere around 50 replications per cell (aka mitosis).
The problem is that cancer cells produce a lot more telomerase, which replenish their telomeres, so those suckers just won't die. If I would engineer a virus, I'd have it be attracted to that.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, maybe someone who really knows this stuff can elaborate on my layman explanation of this.
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?
[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.
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.
Who's got an explanation for the lay on how these could elude the body's natural immune system?
Simple.
It uses reverse tachyon transcriptase to bipolarize the antibodies. Once the body is cancer-free, the doctors must simply use a modulated graviton beam to hyperstimulate the immune system, thus ridding the body of the modified cold and restoring the immune system to normal activity levels.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Once they kill the cancer how will the deal with the cold?
I guess it's time to thaw out John Wayne...he's gonna be pretty pissed off, having been on ice all this time.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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 they do with other similar treatments is inject large quantities of the virus directly into the tumour. The cancer gets infected before the immune system has a chance to react. Then the immune system goes to full throttle, does some serious virus-slaughtering, and takes out a number of the virus-infected cancer cells while it's at it. Then the virus kills (or at least interferes with) most of the remaining infected cancer cells.
Not sure what these guys' stragtegy is, but this isn't exactly new science anymore, so they're probably doing something similar.
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.
But then we'll all get sued by the AMA, the RIAA, and SCO for copyright infringement for illegally distributing the patented cure virus to complete strangers. They'll demand royalties every time a cell undergoes mitosis!
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
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.
There's few things you have to know about viruses and cancer to understand this thing:
First: The viruses (adenoviruses to be specific) work by infecting the host (human) cell and by forcing the host to replicate the viral DNA and to produce the proteins coded in the DNA. After few days of this, a lot of new viruses form inside the host cell and the cell gets broken up (lysed) relasing a lot of new viruses to infect the nearby cells.
Second: Cancer is uncontrolled replication of cells. Actually quite many genes must be deactivated (like p53) and activated (like telomerase) to produce a bad type (neoplastic) tumor. The telomerase is needed in the cancer cells because it extends the ends of the chromosomes in the cell after each replication, thus allowing a cell to replicate more.
Prior art: Some people have taken the promoter (DNA sequence that activates a gene) from human telomerase and put it in an adenovirus (that was mutated to be non-replicating) together with cell-suicide inducing gene. By infecting a cancer cell with this virus, you can kill it nicely if the cell expresses telomerase (i.e. is replicated i.e. is a cancer cell)
The problem with the prior art is that producing non-replicating viruses is difficult and expensive and you have to infect all of the cells more or less individually.
Invention: Use the telomerase promoter to drive a gene required for the DNA replication in the virus. This way the virus will kill (by lysis) the cancer cells and infect the other cells nearby but will not lyse the healthy (telomerase-deactive) cells.
Even though this is not a major scientific breakthrough I still hope this works and think it's clearly worth a patent.
--
Binaries may die but source code lives forever
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.
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
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'
...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.
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..
But how many asses does it have?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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
... 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.
So if a buddy of mine gets cancer, is given this cold, and then spreads it to others (thus curing them for 'free') can he (or any of them) be sued for copyright infringement?
Guess that would be the ultimate for of Peer 2 Peer sharing. *rimshot*
and by rimshot I don't mean goatse you pervs
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?
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.