Slashdot Mirror
The Cure for Cancer Might be: HIV
RGautier writes "Wired News has published that Scientists have successfully modified the AIDS-causing HIV in such a way that it can attack metasticized melanoma (cancer cells). The impact of genetic research on cancer research is in and of itself amazing. To mix this with the strategy of using one strong enemy against another is brilliance! Research will continue, obviously, but they are already reporting success on living creatures." Just think: between HIV and carrots we'll be all set.
If you're gotten rid of 80% of the virus, you might not want to market it as "derived from HIV". Really.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Do we really want to turn our bodies into a battlefield for germ warfare?
hack a day
I saw this on Google News this morning and wondered why Slashdot hadn't picked up on it already. As soon as I read the headline and the article, I began to wonder... How safe is this to do this research?
I'm not talking about the safety of recipients once this goes into the real-world (although that can be alarming), but about the research itself.
I'm pretty far removed from science in any practical setting, but what are the procedures for this kind of research? I've seen too many movies like 28 Days Later to not imagine some accident or oversight to cause some sort of mutant airborne HIV.
Also, does HIV even infect mice? I know there's a human/ape HIV and a feline HIV but I had not hear of mice HIV. Think of some sewer rat biting you...
That's just my mid-day alarmist self. Note I'm not against the research, just wondering about it...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Even doctors and nurses who are not focused on research but who are focused on caring for HIV patients are, in my opinion, heros. They are willing to accept the risks that others shun. There have been occasional stories of nurses who accidentally prick themselves with needles used on HIV patients. Memory tells me that nurses dealing with high-risk patients are prescribed AZT in order to prevent infection. Can anyone confirm my memory?
Maybe I'm mistaken, but don't we use viruses as vectors all the time? Like in vaccines?
COMPUTER! Whatever happened to Blueberry Muffin?
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" seems like a good fit in this instance. Then again, your mileage may vary.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
Huh? And the flu shot you take is not a virus eh?
Are you for real? You think somebody is going to invent a cure for cancer, and the FDA would dare ban it? If you thought the black market for viagra was bad, it would be nothing on this.
If you have inoperable brain cancer and given the option to die in about a month or a 1% chance at the treatment mutating into HIV...
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Wired News has published that Scientists have successfully modified the AIDS-causing HIV in such a way that it can attack metasticized melanoma (cancer cells).
So "scientists" is capitalized now?
I guess that's fair, but not everyone believes in science so it might upset some people.
Direct away from face when opening.
Jesus, dude, your spelling is *atrocious*. I don't know if I'd trust a cure from someone who can't spell.
The FDA would have to be very politicaly sensitive and short sighted to make such a call. It's not as though the FDA doesn't understand disease, after all, yogurt contains active bacterial cultures, but they are good for you, so I don't see how a virus, much less one that has to be sexualy transmitted and has had 80% of its genetic material removed (TFA), would be too big a hurdle.
As long as they arent foolish enough to market it as modified HIV.
Using one bad thing against another bad thing doesn't always work out too well.
Why not engineer different viruses to attack different cancers? This way we could deal with less variables (ie: lots of different cells being attacked while others being left unharmed) and still get good results.
I would much prefer being treated with a virus if I knew it had one function and did it well, rather than 100 different funtions that it may or may not do well.
Silly rabbit
Well, that may be true for the dozens of pharmaceutical companies that made polio-reducing drugs, but Lederle, the company which marketed the (oral) polio vaccine made KILLING by selling 3 or 4 doses to all 6 billion people on the planet!
Same thing for an HIV cure/vaccine. Dozens of companies would no longer have a source of income, but the ONE company that creates (and patents) the vaccine will guarentee to sell 50 billion units over the next 40 years (assuming, like most vaccines, that it takes a few doses and booster shots to achieve the desired effect).
Plus, as a medical student, I happen to know for a FACT that people in my school are working on HIV vaccines. "They" aren't preventing this type of research.
The popularity of quack cancer remedies is directly tied to the general public not realizing this. If a cure could be proven to work--no matter if it were some kind of wonder-herb or "drug" or hitting yourself in the head with a brick--then not only would the FDA throw open the doors, but the guy who discovered it and the company who produced it would make a lot of money. You cannot expect to ban a cancer cure and have it stay banned. If plutonium was shown to cure cancer, then you'd just have to get your therapy on a military base.
It doesn't work in reverse: because people selling fake cancer remedies are making money, that DOESN'T mean their product works. Please, please, please, do your research.
Joking aside I see this is research is being done at UCLA presumably with public funding or maybe charitable donations.
I was just wondering if anyone has an educated guess how many medical and drug breakthroughs are happening in publicly funded institutions, the NIH being another example, and how many are actually developed inside the big drug and healthcare companies using private funding.
I ask because in the face of the extraordinarily high cost of drugs in the U.S., HIV drugs in particular, the usual retort by Republicans is drug companies need those huge profits to do groundbreaking R&D on new breakthrough drugs. Drug companies have the highest profits and profit margins of ANY major industrial sector in the U.S. or at least they did before they started getting hammered when it turned out drugs they were pushing like Zoloft and Vioxx are potentially dangerous.
I'm also curious how much of the privately funded drug company research is funded by the public through tax breaks, grants etc.
To put it another way how much do drug companies profit on breakthroughs from publicly funded research.
Another question what is the current ratio between drug company spending on advertising versus R&D. The never ending saturation TV ads, designed to compel American consumers to demand drugs from their doctors they may or may not need, must be costing billions and all those advertising costs which do no one any actual good are being tacked on to the cost of drugs and making seniors in particular pay through the nose for saturation advertising campaigns instead of drugs or drug R&D.
My three step plan to drive down the cost of drugs and healthcare:
A. Outlaw drug advertising just like ads for cigarettes and hard liquor. Its totally inappropriate and disceptive to advertise drugs using slick ads, like soda pop or underarm deodorant. Confine them to advertising to doctors and then only in the form of factual dissertations on the pros and cons of the drug, audited by a 3rd party for accuracy.
B. Mandate that drugs and publicly funded health breakthroughs be provided to the public at cost or with a regulated profit margin.
C. Rather than outlawing U.S. agencies, like Medicare, from negotiating fair prices for wholesale drug purchases, make it law that those agencies MUST negotiate fair wholesale prices, like Canada and most other sane nations do.
@de_machina
Can you explain the polio vaccine? How about smallpox?
Skinner:
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa:
But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner:
No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa:
But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner:
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa:
But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner:
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/5F22
People who have cancer serious enough to require this step are going to die, soon and painfully, from their cancer. In that position I know what my attitude would be: "Cure me or kill me. It's a win-win from my point of view." (paraphrasing House, M.D.)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Some cancers have cure rates of well over 80% - we happen to have found the right mix of drugs for them. Unfortunately, that hasn't helped us much in finding the right mix of drugs for many other cancers, which still have very low survival rats.
You're absolutely right, that's how this problem has to be attacked - but it's not as simple as you make it sound. Maybe modifying a virus to attack a different cancer will be easier than modifying chemo regimens - but probably not.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Poor old woman, I think she'll die.
Didn't they basically rubberstamp a drug with an 80% success rate against leukemia a while back? They're not evil, just beurocratic.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
eh... wouldn't the average reproduction rate (or x/1000) increase?
I'm waiting for them to tell us cancer is the result of renegade stem cells. After all, stem cells "...can be used to create any other cell..." and should they get a little "goofy" or should something, whether it's environmental, ingested, genetic, or whatever else it might be, "reprogram" a stem cell (or more than one) and turn them loose - it's obviously part of the victim's body - so it's not detected as a foreign object - and it's all downhill from there.
Perhaps the same logic needs to be applied to stem cells to deal with auto-immune diseases: MS, rheumatoid arthritis, etc. Reprogram the stem cells and see if they could be less disruptive than chemo and radiation.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Ha. I knew it. Part of the definition of "good exercise" is that it has to be boring.
I guess that heart beating and sweating and stuff for easily the recommended 15-30 minutes at a time isn't enough... it overloads the easily-overloaded "fun" receptors on the heart and other muscles and cancels out all of the other benefits. The fact that I'm feeling better is also an illusion brought on by excessive fun, which can of course cause hallucinations.
If you're not slamming you feet on hard concrete and hating every minute of it, unless you let go of your sanity and use the cognitive dissonance of "Why the hell am I doing this?" to convince yourself that, logically, you must be having fun, you're not really getting exercise.
Although, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this post. Having heard of neither Heard Disease nor excercise, maybe I'm accidentally reading into what you were saying. Maybe excercise really is the cure for Heard Disease, probably helps Caner too, which I hear is really vicious. (You haven't lived until you're under attack by a Heard of Caners, either. Damn, man, now that's sickness.)
Thanks for setting me straight, Dr. SoTuA.
Hardly. We've been using one strong enemy to fight another strong enemy for years. That's what chemotherapy and radiation therapy do. You try to kill the cancer without killing the patient.
A lot of our prescription medicines are actually poisons if they were in slightly larger doses.
I'm on three antibiotics right now and they are working on the infection, but, damn, I feel as bad as I've ever felt simply from the side effects.
Tell that to my wife (a victim of heart desease for the past four years) who suffered her fate due to myocarditis brought on by a normal case of the flu... and not a poor diet or lack of excercise. Except for her failing heart (now pumping at a whopping 30%) she's the picture of perfect health. Her doctors keep wanting to use her as a poster-child to inform otherwise healthy women of their risks.
I do agree that the article is badly done, but Wired isn't really known for its rigor.
To mix this with the strategy of using one strong enemy against another is brilliance!
Ever heard of phages?
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?