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."

Comments

Cures and money.

[HillBilly]

Cures for a lot of diseases probably already exist but there is no money in curering people, just treating their symptoms. You really think drug companies care about your health?

Re:Cures and money.

[Rei]

If you survive longer, you rack up more medical bills. Curing HIV might not be a big money-maker, but do you know how many drugs senior citizens take? Keeping them alive to continue their medications would be a gold mine.

Re:I dunno...

[Otter]

Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures...

Yeah, that's it. We're spending billions of dollars on research to find cures and not sell them. Then when patients die, we burglarize their homes during the funeral. Profit!

Look. Killing certain human cells while not killing all the rest of the cells is hard. It's a lot harder than killing a foreign pathogen without killing the human, which is already a lot harder than, say, rebooting a server or modifying a Perl script.

...or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?

Also, please note that the cancer treatment here hasn't been in human trials. (The AIDS treatment has.) It hasn't even been in animals yet. Will it fail to be as promising as the hyperventilating press release makes out? There's a 99.9999% chance that it will.

Re:AIDS is not a virus

[geon]

So, I guess the flu virus ain't a virus either, under the reasoning you exhibit above?

AIDS is not a virus, but "AIDS virus" simply means "the virus that causes AIDS", just as "flu virus" means "the virus that causes the flu". Of course, the actual _name_ of the "AIDS virus" is HIV.

The person writing the phrase "AIDS virus" knows what he means, as does everyone reading the phrase. There's not even anything misleading about it: AIDS referes to a syndrome which is caused by infection by HIV, and the phrase AIDS virus is just a reference to human immunodeficiency virus - nothing misleading about it. While I would prefer that someone refer to HIV as simply HIV, calling it the AIDS virus is not wrong.

"AIDS vaccine" is slightly misleading, for the reason you give, but it is also a case of everyone involved knowing precisely what is meant, and no actual confusion is likely to result.

+5 informative my arse. The above is not unlike complaining about the usage of who versus whom in some random sentence.

(This post brought to you by a lack of coffee and a distaste for grammar fascism and related disorders.)

Oh sure

[A nonymous Coward]

And there's a cure for ebola, measles, smallpox ... abstinence from society. Total abstinence. That'll knock 'em dead.

There's a cure for auto accidents, too, called the M1 Abrams tank. Mileage sucks, maintenance sucks, cost sucks, but by god, if we only let those people drive who could afford Abrams, why, we'd cut deaths from auto accidents down to almost zero.

Or maybe you'd prefer banning automobiles altogether. Yeh, that'd stop auto accidents. Yeh.

Get real. Expecting humans to abstain from sex except with their spouse is about as real as expecting people to stop speeding on the honor system. Especially when the number of people with AIDS in the US is around one million; one in 300. And with the incubation period being on the order of ten years, it sure isn't on people's minds all the time, especially when they get drunk or just plain feel good. Are you going to ban alcohol and feeling good too?

It's real nice to spout platitudes about morality and abstinence being the only known cure, but it isn't a known cure because it doesn't stop transfusions or needle sharing spreading AIDs, and there are far more practical methods like using condoms. Are you part of the crowd that turns your nose up at recommending condoms to stop AIDs because it encourages amoral sex outside marriage? Must be nice to not have shit that stinks.

Better to have a solution, condoms, which is widely used, even if it is only 95% effective, than some psuedo cure, alleged to be 100% effective, which is unusable in practice.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Moral twerps have their heads up their asses.