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.
The bad news is you have cancer. The good news is you have HIV!
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.
I think I'd go with the carrots. I dunno, maybe I'm just weird.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
The microscopic version of Alien Vs. Predator
You assume it isn't already. Remember what White Bloodcells do? Along with anti-biotics and vacines? All this is doing is adding in another weapon to the arsenal.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
"I prescribe disease-riddled hookers. Take one after every meal."
The coolest voice ever.
And the cure for HIV is Heart Disease!
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
So when this hits the market, will HIV be cheaper in Canada than the US?
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
I knew this girl in college that did amazing things with candles and vegetables, including carrots. I know for a fact she won't die of cancer. She OD'd in '86.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
Do we really want to turn our bodies into a battlefield for germ warfare?
;)
I ask myself that same question everytime I eat out... the answer is yes... yes I do... taco-hell is just too good to pass up, and the other germs I picked up from KFC and the chinese food place down the street will battle it out...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Totally offtopic, but your joke made me think of another I heard somewhere.
A guy goes to the doctor about a problem he's having. After a thorough examination, the doctor says to the patient, "I have good news and I have bad news."
"Well doc, let me hear the good news first.", says the patient.
To which the doctor responds, "Well, the good news is, we're going to name a disease after you!"
Do we really want to turn our bodies into a battlefield for germ warfare?
Yes. You better believe it.
After seeing my mother die from cancer I would give anything to make sure no one else would ever have to go through what me and my sister did.
In short, hell yeah. Bring it on.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but don't we use viruses as vectors all the time? Like in vaccines?
COMPUTER! Whatever happened to Blueberry Muffin?
Gene therapy use lentivirus-based (HIV) vectors for quite some time now; it's nothing new really; a marketing team found the 'Cure Cancer with HIV!' twist interesting I guess.
When pseudotyped with the right envelope, these virus can infect efficiently any type of cell. They can also transduce non-dividing cells, which is usefull. They lack almost every gene of HIV; they retain certain structures which allow packaging of the genome in the virus and the viral promoter, but that's about it. Viruses are packaged in special cell lines containing the viral components on plasmids most of the time, and preparations are tested for recombinants. Its the best technology out there, but its nothing new, really.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
I prefer cancer cures smoking.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
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.
Episode 238: The Mansion Family
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
chemotherapy - is just poison. it works because the cancer cells absorb the poison much quicker than normal cells.
radiation therapy - again, radiation by itself is bad.
most over the counter acne treatments - are just some form or acid that kills the bacteria on the skin
As for reengineering a virus to take on something else, while facinating, its hardly a new idea. If you are interested in this sort of thing and haven't read Orson Scott Card's Xenocide (part of the Ender Series), you might check it out.
The researchers programmed the altered virus package to attack a protein on the cancer cell surface called p-glycoprotein, which causes problems in cancer patients by shuttling cancer drugs away from the cell. In other words, p-glycoprotein causes resistance to cancer medication. Scientists could customize the system to target any protein on the surface of a cell, Chen said. He and his colleagues have seen success with about a dozen different molecules, including brain and other blood cells, he said.
Except for the last sentence, it makes it seem as though this is only a way to pave the way for more conventional treatments. The last sentence doesn't make sense to me, given the context. I can understand how the proteins on the surface of a cell could qualify as "molecules", but then the structure of the sentence makes it seem like they're calling brain and blood cells molecules:
He and his colleagues have seen success with about a dozen different molecules, including brain and other blood cells, he said.
I'm still waiting for a virus that attacks the actual cancer cells. I remember hearing something about it a while back, but then it seemed to die off. Anyone been following it?
Oh, great. If the future of medicine means that cures will be spread via sexual contact, I'm a dead man for sure!
And the cure for Heart Disease is exercise, which means that we're all doomed.
The summary of the article (and many of the comments) would have you believe this is a potential "cure for cancer".
Melanoma is a subset of the set of all cancers - specifically, it is a form of skin cancer - more specifically, it is a cancer formed from the skin cells that give skin its pigmentation.
Melanoma is NOT *all cancers* - thus even if this modified virus will kill 100% of all melanomas and have 0% harmful side-effects this does NOT make it a "cure for cancer" - merely a "cure for a type of cancer".
The will need to generalize this virus to attack ALL cancerous cells, and NOT to attack any other cells.
Now, if you can work out how a virus can tell the difference between a cancerous cell and a normal but rapidly reproducing cell, you have a Nobel prize awaiting.
www.eFax.com are spammers
80% of the virus has been completely removed and it is just now a carrier. Besides it has got a sindbis cloak that affect only insects and birds, so I believe that the person vaccinated wouldn't contract HIV. Ofcourse there are chances of mutations but when the virus is so weak, its like 0.001%.
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.
And the cure for Heart Disease is exercise, which means that we're all doomed.
Oh really? Don't geeks have Dance Dance Revolution?
Using a virus as a vector refers to inserting a payload into the viral sequence (the desired DNA or RNA), which then gets inserted into the cell's genetic sequence as the virus inserts itself.
So basically I think there's quite a confusion here. I mean, it sounds like we're using one enemy to fight another, but if we can figure out how to get HIV to fight cancer, this new HIV won't go out there and suddenly turn regular HIV into good HIV that kills cancer. In fact, I don't know if it's such a good idea to use one enemy to fight another besides the fact that it sounds ironic. I would've thought that HIV would be one of the worst candidates with its fast mutational rate and ability to attack T-cells making it extremely dangerous. Obviously though, there must be some properties of HIV that make it a good vector in this case.
Working with HIV is actually a lot less dangerous than a lot of other infectious agents. HIV is fairly hard to contract, compared to airborne or contact-transmitted diseases. For example, it dies pretty quickly when exposed to plain old air. It's only HIV's incurability and eventual fatality that makes it so hazardous.
Memory tells me that nurses dealing with high-risk patients are prescribed AZT in order to prevent infection. Can anyone confirm my memory?
That seems pretty unlikely, because AZT is pretty damn toxic. You wouldn't want to take it just as a precaution. It is true that health care workers who've been exposed (e.g. needle prick from an HIV patient) go on a short-term drug cocktail intended to weaken the virus enough for their immune systems to handle it before it gains a foothold.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
A high dose of AZT following a possible HIV infection has been shown to dramaticly decrease the risk of infection. I work with children with cancer and/or HIV on a volunteer basis and we keep a fair bit of the stuff around for just that reason.
That said, HIV isn't terribly dangerous to work with. Admittedly it's hella scary, but given that the bug isn't airborn and that we can ameliorate any infection with a huge dose of AZT those working with patients have little to fear.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Good news, we have a cure for your cancer.
Bad news, Bruno here is going to administer it.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Not exactly HIV, but some European scientists, particularly in the eastern block have been promoting the use of "phages", or general viruses for all kinds of things like killing bacteria and cancer. This idea was somewhat popular before the distillation of antibiotics in the 1930s, then retreated to the backwaters. Its been reviving as more bacteria develop resistance to all of the antibiotics.
Check your own....
Generaly the virus used is the Herpes Simplex A virus due to the ease of genetic packaging.
That said, no virus can be engineered to just attack cancer cells. Cancer cells are identical to non-cancerous cells in nearly all respects. The difference isn't in what they "look like" but what they do. Cancer cells do not (generaly) preform the task that their non-cancerous counterparts preform and instead divide rapidly.
So the way you target cancer is targeting dividing cells. Since cancer cells divide more rapidly than non-cancerous cells they die off in higher numbers. Lather, rise, repeat. Eventualy you're out of cancer cells.
The problem is that radiation and chemo make the patient very sick, and the dehydration effects tend to leave them weakened and unable to continue treatment. Chemo and Radiation thus become a balance between killing the cancer and killing the patient.
A virus could be different because unlike the injestion of poison (Chemo) or exposure to Radiation, the body does not generaly react to viral infection with vomiting and other nasty side affects.
The result is that you can get more cancer killing power per unit of patient killing power. This in turn translates to a higher cure rate for cancers.
This is why stem cells are so interesting for curing cancers. Got a brain tumor? Great.... we'll zap the shit out of it and toss in some stem cells... in a few days you'll have regenerated the brain tissue and you'll be good as new. That's science fiction today, but it's well within the realm of possibility in a few years.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
But white bloodcells and HIV have been fighting each other for so long can we really expect them to put aside their diffrences and work together for a common goal?
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Unfortunately a fellow geek has a case. Check out his weblog here.
Basically make sure you get all suspicious looking moles checked by your doctor before it's too late. Melanoma is only life threatening when it spreads beyond the initial site.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Things will be reasonably quiet until a few outcast terrorist HIV strands decide to hijack an errant blood clot and crash it into the aortic valve.
Following that, security will start "screening" the blood so finely that the backlog of blood waiting to enter the heart causes our blood pressure to skyrocket, causing us to all die early of heart attacks.
But they'll tell us it's in our best interests, and we'll go along with it anyway.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
At least, that's what the initial results of the studies show.
.
The human reovirus has shown dramatic promise in early oncolytic trials. Some great pictures can be seen here
The virus itself is non-pathogenic, lives in the bowels and lungs, and it's believed that most adult humans have been exposed to it during their lifetimes. Contrast this with HIV...
I've been watching this technology for a couple of years now it's slow going to get through clinical trials, but there's good evidence that reovirus may be able to treat 2/3 of all cancer out there , with little or no adverse side effects. Where it is not 100% effective, and radiation therapy is also prescribed, reovirus has been shown to be a good radiosensitizer.
Aside from reovirus, we're hearing more and more stories like this every year. I have a strong feeling that we'll have a cure for 90% of all cancer within the decade.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
It's not "heavy doses of radiation", it's radiotherapy. And no one takes "heavy doses of toxic chemicals"; they get chemotherapy. From now on "genetically altered HIV virii" will be known as Happy Fun Gene Therapy.
Genetically modified cells and viruses often mutate. scientists aren't certain, but they suspect that modification produces a less stable genetic code.
In the case of HIV, the virus is ALREADY extremely mutation-prone. If I remember correctly, the reverse transcriptase enzyme (the one that makes the initial-infection copy) averages more than one error per copy.
The virus compensates for this by having TWO copies of its genome - not so much for error correction as to have a significant chance of having a working version of each enzyme when it has infected a cell. (This also lets it form hybrids when two different versions infect the same cell.)
The result is that it actually evolves resistance to the antibodies the body throws at it during the course of the infection. And also that the infection is slow - but eventually overwhelms the immune system with a mob attack of divergent versions of the virus. A typical late-stage patient may have three or more viable variant populations, each capable of infecting other people.
If they ARE using pieces of the AIDS virus in their construct, I certainly hope one of the changes they made is replacing this error-prone enzyme with a more accurate one from another virus.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...is that the cure for cancer is sexually transmitted!*
Sure as hell beats chemo!
*Of coarse I didn't RTFA.
-"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.)
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.
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.
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.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Recent market research shows the phenominal popularity of words that connect with Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. Furthermore, they also show the connection with immortality or avoidance of death by characters in those phenomina.
As such, the best possible name is Darth Voldemort's Precioussss One Ring Remedy.
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)