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Possible Breakthroughs in Cancer and AIDS Research
FortKnox writes "Two possible medical breakthroughs have come to light in recent days. In Australia, it was discovered that pineapple extract can stimulate the body to attack cancer cells. And in Japan, Kumamoto University researchers have developed a drug that will block cells from the AIDS virus, thus making something akin to an AIDS vaccine." From the Australian news: "One of the molecules, CCZ, stimulates the body's immune system to target and kill cancer cells, the other, CCS, blocks a protein called Ras, which is defective in 30 percent of all cancers. QIMR researcher Tracey Mynott said her team had set out to find why the enzyme-rich bromelaine crush had such strong effects on biological material."
old news
1: Planta Med. 1985 Dec;(6):538-9. Related Articles, Links Inhibition of tumour growth in vitro by bromelain, an extract of the pineapple plant (Ananas comosus). Taussig SJ, Szekerczes J, Batkin S. PMID: 4095199 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
1985.
At least it's not a dupe.
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink =1564149
Read this last night.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Maybe you should have read the paper: They've already done a small-scale clinical trial.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
"AIDS virus"? AIDS is not a virus
HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus
AIDS - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS
Yes, but as a virus, it's unable to reproduce if it cannot enter the cells.
Badass Resumes
How everything will work in the actual patient...
This HIV study was a 40 patient clinical trial. Pretty damn close to actual patients if you ask me.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Malaria kills about a million Africans a year, but we hear less about it and more about HIV, despite the massive funding gap for malaria. Especially since there are cheap and effective measures against malaria which are not used because of a simple lack of funding.
Hey hippies---are you happy you got DDT banned now? All those dead Africans say thank you!
But seriously, there are some moderately effective drugs, and treated mosquito nets (covered in a bug-eating fungus, apparently) have been used to great effect.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The path from interesting research to safe, efficacious therapy is a long funnel with a verrrrrry narrow outlet. Many things that look interesting in vitro don't work in animal models (rats, dogs, etc.), much less people -- there's a lot more going on in a living body than in a petri dish, so even compounds that show promise early on can disappoint later. I was a venture investor in biotechnology companies for nearly nine years; one of our most promising portfolio companies had a drug candidate blow up in Phase III clinical trials (pretty damn close to the end of the funnel) because, despite all of the promising results in earlier stages of development, the drug simply didn't work in a statistically meaningful way in double-blind clinical trials. The FDA process can slow things down, to be sure, but the fundamental problem is that the biology of living creatures is extraordinarly complex and only imperfectly understood. No conspiracies needed -- this stuff is just very, very hard.
"It's not a bear, it's a hamster. A really, really large hamster."
yikes. having personally seen the effects of HIV infection and AIDS in people who subscribe to the AIDS Denialist school of thought, i felt compelled to reply to this posting.
bottom line:
1. CD4+ T-lymhocyte counts and HIV viral loads have been negatively and positively (respectively) correlated with survival in virtually every patient population ever studied.
2.highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has been shown to significantly reduce mortality in HIV-infected individuals.
we practice evidence-based medicine in the united states. you can try to poke holes in the virology if you want to (i'm not a virologist) but you can't argue with epidemiology.
the theory that HIV is the causative pathogen in AIDS has not been disproven in any peer-reviewed publication that i have ever seen.
we know how to treat these patients and turn AIDS into a chronic rather than a fatal illness.
here is a more complete resource on the debate.
Perhaps it's a fundamental flaw in news reporting and how it rarely interacts well with scientific researchers that explain your jaded state.
For a number of years, I worked in biological research, and twice I had the (dis)pleasure of interacting with reporters.
If you tell them there is an observed improvement in 15% of all cases, then it's a cure. If you tell them there is a statistical corelation, then it "causes". If you tell them about the science, they will latch onto the most trivial detail and make it the entire point of your research effort.
It's because most Science doesn't make good news. Good news (at least as it seems to be presented these days) gives the audience the aura of understanding without any actual understanding. In other words, good news asks the audience to learn almost nothing, but be entertained nonetheless.
To prove my point, cancer is the misbehavior of the patient's own cells, yet nearly everyone refers to it as an item that is "caught" like a transmittable disease, and "cured" like a bacterial infection. Non-scientists rarely differentiate between the reasons why our cells misbehave, instead they concentrate on where the misbehaving cells are located. Finally, people tend to totally ignore the effects of known carcinogens because they have been bombared with so much bad news that started off as:
When rats eat a diet of 80% fat, they have a 12% higher risk of contracting a cancer over a 3 year lifespan, 40% of those cases are self-arresting producing only benign tumors.
becomes:
Scientists find that diets high in fat significantly increase the risk of cancer. People who eat pizza, french-fries, and mayonnaise are at risk, and are 60% more likely to die. So it's time to stock up on those veggies.
No mention that it's rats, not people. No mention that it's a lifetime diet of 80% fat. No mention that it only affects 12% of the rat population studied. No mention that 60% of the affected die, leading to an increase of mortailty of only 8% or so.
Sometimes (just like in my example) they do it so badly that they have internal logical errors in their own reporting. 60% more likely to die (as opposed to 100% certainty that we will eventually die).
So be skeptical, but please don't be skeptical of the science, unless you are one of the few people who actually bother to read the publications without the mind-numbing news filter placed on top of it.
Just an FYI, there are cases being reported that the incubation period has dropped to just several months.
0 05/02/11/2
Yikes!
http://www.planetout.com/news/article.html?date=2
Live forever, or die trying.
It inhibits CCR5 interactions. Thats strickly macrophages - open still are CXCR4 interactions (T Helper Cells) and cell-to-cell mediation. Autoimmune reponse still cause the body to kill itself if the virus is present, and there is also the lymph system and the brain (it crosses the blood/brain barrier).
:
Plus, HIV can lie latent for many years.
It's one nasty virus. This drug does NOT make you immune to HIV.
AIDS
--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back when they were first discovered (1990s), these symptomless carriers seemed like they could have been the genesis of a separate species. Children that they had with other symptomless carriers would have HIV and only be able to have survivable offspring with other symptomless carriers. Given time we'd have separate gene pools.
Around 2000 or so, they figured out how HIV- children could be born to HIV+ mothers. So there won't be any separation of the gene pool. Due to sexual recombination, if there are no disadvantages to this adaptation (like sickle cell anemia), then the gene may quickly spread throughout the species. Quickly meaning hundreds of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies"
Many more people are being helped each year than the last. Unfortunately, new ideas are sometimes deadends that end up helping no one or having such bad effects that they are worse than the disease. Other treatments are so narrow in their aplication that you have to have certain kind of cancer for it to be expected to work. Progress is being made though, more and more each year.
Case in point:
My step-grandfather started having problems with the hiccups about three years ago. At first they went on for a few hours at a time. Later, he was even doing it while he slept, continuously for months. The constant pain and exaustion (yes, EXAUSTION from hiccups) finally overcame his reticence to see a doctor. They did some tests, then more and more tests, and finally an MRI. They found inoperable cancer on/in his spine.
A few weeks later he is at MD Anderson in Houston and they are trying an new treatment on him. They took a biopsy of some of the cancer and used it to make a vaccine. He stayed in Houston for about 6 months, had some minor chemo followups, some checkups, and then went home.
Complete remission was and still is the diagnosis. And the hiccups went away!
The problem with cancer is that cancer cells have similar reactive profiles and vulnerabilities to healthy cells. Finding the chink in the armor of the cancer that dosen't exist in the healthy cells is the big problem. Reaserchers are getting better and better at this (see the above vaccine example) but there are so many different kinds of cancer, with accompanying different vulnerabilities and minor variances from healthy cells, that it will take quite a bit of time to find and exploit them all.
In some cases even the methodology of treatment had to be fundamentally different They told my grandfather that he was lucky to have the certain kind of cancer that he had as it was one that was potentially treatable with the vaccine therapy.
I think that the basic health of the individual comes into play as well. Many people develop cancer in the twilight years of their lives. Their waning virility may make it difficult to enact a cure, regardless of the potency of the medication.
Regardless of the obstacles, had my grandfather gotten sick about 8 months before he did, there would have been no chance of stopping his cancer in time. There was no trial going then and this particular treatment was not available to humans at all. Given time to grow he would have been killed or paralyzed by his cancer. So ya, doctors are making progress, it may seem slow, but not to my grandfather. It was more like just in time, for him.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
If you want to study migratory patterns of Caribou or the depletion of the salmon population, you apply for a grant from the Department of Agriculture, or the Fish and Wildlife Service, or the Department of Commerce. You don't go to the NIH.
There are lots and lots of funding agencies that do 'biology' research other than the NIH. I've been on grants studying radiation biology from the Department of Energy. I've been supported by grants from rotory clubs. All of that has nothing to do with the $28 Billion last year that the NIH alone spent.
Apparently you don't know what the NIH is. The National Institutes of Health are:
- National Cancer Institute (NCI)
- National Eye Institute (NEI)
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)
- National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)
- National Institute on Aging (NIA)
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
- National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS)
- National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
- National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR)
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)
- National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
- National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR)
- National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Gee, what do all those things have in common? They seem to be about basic biology and human HEALTH. None of them seem directly related to Caribou. Maybe because that's not where Caribou researchers typically get their research money, but someone studying cancer might.You pointed to a 'major' pharm company spending 7 billion. There aren't that many major players, and most of their R&D money are spent on drug trials. That's an expensive part of the research process, but it's the end stage. Most of that money isn't spent discovering a cure, but making sure the possible cure doesn't kill you in other ways. That's not drug discovery, that's human drug toxicity testing. The universities around the country are where most of the real research happens.