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.
I guess as long as they take care of the immunodeficency part, that might not be so bad. Wouldn't want to live in a bubble now would we.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
http://www.ndtv.com/template/template.asp?template =Aids&slug=New+HIV+strain+found+in+NY&id=68437&cal lid=1
implies that HIV is becoming stronger at a time when we want to spread it by calling it a cure. I guess if you die early of the new more virulent HIV then you don't have to worry about cancer.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
I think the "slight" risk of contracting an incurable, terminal disease is worth the chance to be rid of an incurable, terminal disease. Really, what have you got to loose?
Genetically modified cells and viruses often mutate. scientists aren't certain, but they suspect that modification produces a less stable genetic code. But we are getting better at producing more robust modifications.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
At least HIV mutate a lot, As Far As I Remmember. Also the cold virus (grippe?) mutate a lot this why you have to vaccinate every year AFAIR.
mutability of influenza
some propaganda but also speaks of HIV mutability. I did not have time to search for more HIV article but google is your friend.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The Medical Indu$try in America is founded upon the idea of maintain a large pool of "sick" people.
End of story.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
At what cost to our bodies? Yes, there are germs in us all the time, having a common cold knocks you down for a few days, a stomache virus, a week, what would cancer and (modified) HIV duking it out do to us? Already some patients opt not to hace chemo and other treatments because of the toll it takes on them. They would rather live a better quality of life for 6 months than be sick from a threatment and live 12 months.
hack a day
What you're talking about is Class A Experimental Therapy. It's heavy stuff and ranks up there with "hell if I know, maybe this'll do something" as far as the wealth of medical knowledge associated with it.
As drugs and techniques prove themselves they move down the ladder until they're used to treat the general public.
Of course, patients are only give the option of highly experimental methods once the tried and true stuff has failed.
The only people exposed to this will be the ones who allready have a death sentence from their cancers.
Sometimes cancer forces people into rough decisions. A friend of mine chose to accecpt a bone marrow transplant from an HIV positive doner because it was her only chance to beat her leukemia.
She's doing fine now, but she's on AZT and all kinds of other antivirals now to stave off AIDS.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
While this may be good for curing cancer, I would fear if this tech got in the wrong hands:
"Scientists could customize the system to target any protein on the surface of a cell"
Target the protiens on a group of humans, Kurdish, Jewish, Korean, whatever. Many groups of humans have some genes that are particular to their genetic heritage. Target those geenes to make something worse, instant selective genocide.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Multi-drug-resistant HIV strain raises alarm
The coincidence that an engineered HIV against cancer comes around just when another HIV mutation appears on the wild... Where is my tinfoil hat?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
The reason that the adenoviral therapy killed Jesse Gelsinger is that they a) used a form of the virus that causes an immune response b) miscalculated the dose that they gave him and c) injected it directly into his hetatic portal vein (right into his liver).
This is a big problem with adenovectors - even in the best cases, patients will get at least a little sick from them. There are next generation forms that are less toxic, but these are still in development.
The real advance here was that they were able to combine the minimal "cell killing" aspect of HIV with another virus, Sindbis, to create a gene therapy that is relatively benign. They then modified that to target this to specifically kill a certain type of tumor. Previous attempts at HIV-based gene therapies proved to be too toxic.
Of course this was all in mice, which don't get AIDS from HIV. Whether it would in people is another story.
A bit of Googling provides multiple respectable sources stating that HIV is categorised as biohazard level 3. CDC has some information on biosafety (2.8MB - pretty slow) which includes requirements for handling of agents at different levels.
This research, while initially scary, is relatively safe due to the safeguards in place.
What you need to fear and what the general population doesn't understand is that chickens overseas are the perfect breeding ground for the next epidemic. At least one case exists where two people caught the flu bug from an infected person... who got it from a chicken.
Can you imagine what wouldve happend had that inital carrier been infected with, say, influenza? A nice, ripe virus that mutates every year and at the drop of a hat... now being fed genes that can expand it's payload a millionfold.
What do you think a flu vaccine would cost then? Assuming, of course, that the 20% mortality rate would be realistic...
Anyways- this research doesn't scare me. They aren't talking about mixing different diseases yet that have radically different vectors (think Clancy). But should they try to pull this stunt with common flu, chicken pox, small pox, HIV, bird flu, and rabies... and let them stew... then we're in trouble. Byebye world population...
-"Beneficial Effects of Nicotine" (Jarvik, British Journal of Addiction, 1991)
Not listed here is an obscure type of stroke that occurs with less frequency in smokers.
I started smoking out of sheer desperation with ulcerative colitis about ten years ago. The ulcerative colitis went away, but then I was left with a disgusting two pack per day habit for two years that probably did more damage to my health. I should have tried chewing that gross nicotine gum instead. (Crohn's disease OTOH has a high incidence among smokers so it isn't exactly a total win.)
Botox® is the commercial name for Clostridium Botulinum toxin -- a very possibly lethal one, too, if taken in appropriate doses.
Just in case the layperson didn't know what the active ingredient is, it's got a self-explaining "*TOX" in its name. Now, that doesn't sound very reassuring, right?
However, its name hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the most popular drugs in the US at the moment, with people paying outrageous money for a very simple injection - of a poison. There are even (mentally ill|desperate) people resorting to homemade products and ending up in intensive care units, if not dead. All this to be given poison and iron out a few wrinkles?
I guess this shows that when there's both a scientific (and marketing?) interest, doctors and media are more than able to convince their patients that a "poison" or dangerous substance is for their good (looks.)
there are chances of mutations but when the virus is so weak, its like 0.001%.
What does that mean? 0.001% it will mutate into a killer virus per patient? Per hour? Ever?
If it's per patient then that doesn't seem like an acceptable risk to me - we don't want any new weird strains of HIV around?
It wasn't until the mid-1990s that researchers were able to grow enough Pgp to analyze it using traditional methods, so we're really in the infancy of Pgp antagonists. This approach, if clinically successful, should radically improve the chances of many cancer patients.
I've heard this several times. Does anyone know how exactly was it determined that "too many people were afraid of the word nuclear"? Or was there one marketroid who decided "nuclear" was too scary?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
there's a 72 hour window with a ~90%+ success rate on stopping the infection. doctors/at-risk professionals have been using it for years...down side is that it's basically the same course of drugs you take for the real thing and lasts at least a month. not fun side effects either. i had a possible exposure once, odds of 1/500, declined the cocktail.
They are taking a form of the HIV virus and wrapping it inside a virus wrapper of a virus that is carried by BIRDS AND INSECTS! Imagine if they made a mistake...you could potentially have a version of the AIDS virus that could be transmitted by insects or worse yet...spreadable by birds...undercooked poultry could have a whole new problem!
Alternatively, someone with Sickle-Cell Anaemia could modify it to attack healthy bone marrow. The healthier a person was, the more deadly the attack would be to them.
The problem (or, for humanity, the good thing) is that HIV is not very stable. It would be next to impossible to make an airborne strain of it.
A far, far greater concern for humanity is that there are airborne strains of Ebola. If someone were to take an airborne Ebola and somehow merge in the targetting system in HIV, you could engineer a device capable of destruction on a scale Western civilization has no comprehension of.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why is the body good at dealing with things like colds, but can't seem to handle things like common bacterial STDs? Or, is it actually good at dealing with them, but occasionally runs into a strain it can't handle and which then causes symptoms?
HIV is the opposite extreme. It's latency period is so long that someone will be infected for years if not decades before the infection is detected. HIV is a large, complex, and fickle virus.
There is already something airborne, virilent, and with a just short enough but just long enough incubation time. It's called influenza and it kills millions per year. And it has been killing people for as long as we have been keeping track of epidemics.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Of the risks of what?
Contracting myocarditis, which they can't say how she got, where she got, and which little or nothing can be done for?
how s her example supposed to help, other than illustrate that horrible things can happen to people without warning.
I'm sorry for her, but her case is just not the norm.
The vast majority of heart disease in this country is brought on by a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet and smoking.
All three of these factors are readily curable without the intervention of a health organization, pricey pharmaceuticals or endless doctors visits.