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.

Comments

Re:It will never see the light of market shelves .

[OrangeTide]

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.

Re:battlefield

[SpongeBobLinuxPants]

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.

Re:It will never see the light of market shelves .

[TGK]

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.

Re:Might want to downplay the HIV thing

[networkBoy]

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

Mutating HIV here, today :(

[marcello_dl]

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?

Re:Is there any chance...

[jamesoutlaw]

This link has some interesting information about the origin of HIV... including this:

Three of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are as follows:

1. A plasma sample taken in 1959 from an adult male living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo
2. HIV found in tissue samples from an American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969.
3. HIV found in tissue samples from a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.

Analysis in 1998 of the plasma sample from 1959 was interpreted5 as suggesting that HIV-1 was introduced into humans around the 1940s or the early 1950s, which was earlier than had previously been suggested. Other scientists have suggested that it could have been even longer, perhaps around 100 years or more ago.

Re:"Ahhh that's how it always starts. Then later..

[nucal]

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.

Beneficial effects of smoking

[MillionthMonkey]

"When chronically taken, nicotine may result in:

• positive reinforcement
• negative reinforcement
• reduction of body weight
• enhancement of performance

and protection against:

• Parkinson's disease
• Tourette's disease
• Alzheimer's disease
• ulcerative colitis and
• sleep apnea.

The reliability of these effects varies greatly but justifies the search for more therapeutic applications for this interesting compound."

-"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.)

Re:Might want to downplay the HIV thing

[jd]

Hmmm. I don't think that it would be as easy to turn it into a deadly weapon that way. But there probably are ways it could be done. If you were to modify it to target the appendix, or something else that you could ensure had already been removed from those you wanted to survive...

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.

Re:Might want to downplay the HIV thing

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Well no. You don't have to mix HIV and ebola to make ebola devastating. The problem with ebola is that it is SO simple it kicks every cell it invades into overdrive to produce more ebola. It has just enough proteins to latch onto a cell and do its job. By the time you realize you have ebola, you are as good as dead.

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.