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

Still no cure for cancer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Still no cure for can...er, never mind. Well, the people over at FARK must be really disappointed. They'll have to come up with a new tagline!

Re:Still no cure for cancer...

[Aqua OS X]

Dude, what are you talking about. According to Slashdot, cancer and AIDs are cured every other month.

Re:Still no cure for cancer...

[Anonymous Coward]

A cure for AIDs has existed for quite some time, it's called abstinence (probably not a difficult thing for most of the geeks here).

AIDs can spread through shared needles and blood transfusions, but predominately it is contracted from unsafe sex. Rather than worrying about a cure, stop the infection to start.

Re:Still no cure for cancer...

[Ced_Ex]

Abstinence... the boring cure for AIDS.

I, for one would welcome the return of free love of the 60s and 70s with the vaccine.

Re:Still no cure for cancer...

[FirstTimeCaller]

According to Slashdot, cancer and AIDs are cured every other month.

And probably again tomorrow when this story gets dup'ed.

Vindicated!

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

Australian scientists have discovered pineapple molecules can act as powerful anti-cancer agents and said the research could lead to a new class of cancer-fighting drugs.
Scientists at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) said their work centred on two molecules from bromelaine, an extract derived from crushed pineapple stems that is used to tenderise meat, clarify beers and tan hides.

HA! I told my guidance counselor that all that beer drinkin' would pay off eventually... ^_^

Re:Vindicated!

[RapmasterT]

dammit! I only drink cloudy beers.

I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.

Re:Vindicated!

[jeblucas]

dammit! I only drink cloudy beers. I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.

VWOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

...that's what I heard when your comment went over my head.

Re:Vindicated!

[RapmasterT]

Actually pinapple has another effect, that of making your bodily secretions smell/taste better. That is an old date trick....

Considering at what point of the evening this "date trick" would become relevant, I've never understood why I should give a rat.

My reaction to the statement "eewweee it tasts yucky" is usually "why are you still here"?

Re:Vindicated!

[LordKazan]

circumcision makes you more likely to contract STDs - contrary to urban mythology which was created by individuals whom falsified studies. The prepuce contains special immune system cells which secret an antimicrobial not to mention the prepuce contains 60% of the nerve cells, provides proper mechanical function (80% of incidents of 'painful coitus' for the woman is because of her partner being circumcised) I could go on.

Re:Vindicated!

[MajorDick]

It also fixes ruptured disks,

Years ago I had a screwed up disk , oddly in between my shoulder blades , I dont remeber the number, It was the result or rotating with a 50 lb wrench in my hand around a ladder to catch myself from falling

Sugery was the only option, then a doctor at Cleveland Clinic said they were doing trials with an enzyme extracted from papaya, the idea was they would "tenderize" the disk and manipulate it back in to shape and 48 hrs later the softeing effects would wear off and the disk would become firm over the next several weeks

Better than surgery and it worked 100%, the worst part , (other than the BIG scarry needle with "Aldofs" Meat tenderizer as the doctor joked was being put in "traction" for some 48 hrs after so it could firm up agian

Enzyme-rich bromelaine crush?

[Ossifer]

Never tried it, but I do like Orange Crush...

Pineapple!

[Evil W1zard]

Time to go buy some stock in Dole!

Oh I can see it now... Healthy, Tasty Pineapple Flavored Cigarettes that have no Surgeon General's Warning.

Re:Pineapple!

[mrchaotica]

Nah, even if you eliminated the cancer, cigarettes still have a whole bunch of other bad side effects.

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.

[team99parody]

"You really think drug companies care about your health?"

Would it even be legal for them to do so if they wanted to?

Wouldn't that violate their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders? It'd be like microsoft killing off their upgrade revenue by releasing a secure OS.

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:Cures and money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Because none of the researchers for those drug companies have family members, friends or acquiantances that might be ill -- they're all in it for the money, even if it kills their parents.

Re:Cures and money.

[DownTownMT]

Cures for a lot of diseases probably already exist but there is no money in curering people, just treating their symptoms.

As much as I wish that wasn't true I'm afraid it is. I'm dating an immunologist right now, and even she has told me that the pharmaceutical companies aren't interested in cures, only lifestyle drugs such as giving an 80 year old a woody, or helping people loose weight. Basically there's no profit in cures, only the drugs you have to keep taking.

I just find it sickening that thousands die each year from HIV, cancer, and the sorts, but hey, old people are having sex!

Re:Cures and money.

[TripMaster Monkey]

I was wondering when someone would work in the obligatory Slashdot M$ slam...well done!

Re:Cures and money.

[Ingolfke]

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.

Exactly... here's you cure for AIDS and your free trial sample of Viagra... go get em champ.

Re:Cures and money.

[OrionoirO]

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?

While drug companies are probably most concerned with profit, there is quite a bit of money to be made in curing people. Imagine company A has a treatment, and company B has a cure. People will buy company B's cure.

Also, the HIV drug described in TFA, even if it worked perfectly, would probably require someone who was infected to use it for the rest of their lives to prevent cells that were already infected with the virus from becoming active and spreading it. This would make anyone who produced the drug quite a bit of money.

Re:Cures and money.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the cures "exist", it's just that the economic forces, the invisible hands, guide them toward looking for treatments rather than cures. It's just the nature of the business. They don't conciously go to work in the morning thinking "I better not find a cheap cure for cancer today".

Kinda sad really. There is NO solution to this problem other than "try to stay healthy".. I.e. there is no incentive structure that would maximize the cures on the market.

However reducing the strength of medical patents might be a way to allow smaller, more "morally guided" companies to get in the game. I dunno.

Re:Cures and money.

[Necromancyr]

Well, you'd better tell your immunologist friend to go work at a few of the companies, talk to some of the project managers, or hell - attend the BIO http://www.bio.com/ conference.

It's disconcerting to me that an immunologist doesn't realize that treating symptoms are easy, and a HELL of a lot easier to get past the FDA, then something that causes issues in a persons system but cures them.

Seriously, it's the biggest problem right now that has companies redefining what to make. People can't deal with a 1 in 20,000 chance they may have a higher chance of a heart attack if they take drug X, even though without drug X they are in constant pain every day all day.

The american public refuses to accept any danger/risk at all from there medications - and because of this it takes a HELL of a lot longer to develop anything then it did before.

The first vaccines available got people sick left and right - but people took them anyway, even with the 1 in 10000 or 1 in 1000 risk because once you actually got the disease, you had a MUCH lower chance of surviving.

Moral of the story? Get educated before you make comments - even if someone who's an 'expert' tells you something.

Re:Cures and money.

[Rei]

Yeah. Because shareholders in drug companies vote their shares in a manner designed to help the employees families, as opposed to in a manner designed to maximize their profits. And because shareholders hand onto shares of stock of drug companies that aren't profitable because they're working for common benefit as opposed to profit (instead of dumping those shares and buying up shares of a profitable drug company).

Sometimes, the interests of "profit" and "common good" overlap. But when they don't, in a market economy, who do you think wins?

Re:Cures and money.

[porcupine8]

This was the whole issue with the recent case of the little girl whose parents refused to give her radiation therapy and her cancer came back... The radiation treatment doubles your chance of getting leukemia (though the chance is still like less than 1%), slightly raises your odds of breast cancer when you're 50+, and can cause heart damage equal to having one other risk factor (such as family history or high cholesterol).

However, without radiation, the odds of the cancer coming back are 25-40%. (Well, in certain cases - I don't know all the details of her stage etc, but I had the same cancer as her so I know some generalizations.) But since she was "just fine," her parents refused to take the risks above and instead took the much worse risk, and lost. The risk of recurrence should have been scarier, but people feel better about the risk of doing nothing than the risk of taking a treatment.

Re:Cures and money.

[LurkerXXX]

Another tinfoil hat conspiracy guy eh? Here's some news for you. Much/most of the biology research done in the U.S. is paid for by the National Institutes of Health. That's the government, not drug companies. To the tune of $28 billion or so last year alone. That's your tax dollars at work.

Most done by labs at Universities like mine. If I find a cure for a disease, I'd get famous in my field. Not only that, but it would pretty much ensure that I will have all the future funding for my research that I could want.

Even besides all that, there are plenty of folks in my lab, in my department, and collegues at other Universities I collaborate with who know what I'm working on and how things are going. Hiding something major like a cure for a major disease just isn't going to happen. There is zero in it for me to hide my research, even if it were possible.

Now the drug companies would be the ones to actually produce the drug for sale. They might charge you an arm and a leg for the pill, but it wouldn't be hidden from you.

That is all. We now return you to your regular worries about the aliens reading your brainwaves. And look out for the black helicoptors!

Re:Cures and money.

[timster]

I've never seen any evidence that shareholders vote in their own interest or in any logical fashion at all. Rather, it seems to be the norm to let the executive team run the company. Shareholders often vote with their feet, but this doesn't directly control a company's decisions, especially since the shareholders who hold (or buy) are likely to be those that have faith in the executive team.

So individual choices might have more of an effect than you think. I remember an interview with an industry exec where he explained that his children (I think) had cystic fibrosis, and that gave him perspective that inspired him to push for new and better drugs.

I'm sure that it's marketing when an exec speaks like that, but that doesn't mean it's completely false. There are a lot of drug companies still, and it's reasonable to expect that some of them act purely in self-interest while others take a broader view. There are many successful companies in many industries where building a better world is part of the corporate strategy.

Perhaps I am merely being optimistic because I live essentially at the mercy of Wyeth-Ayerst and Fujisawa, but there you go.

Re:Cures and money.

[jejones]

The american public refuses to accept any danger/risk at all from there medications - and because of this it takes a HELL of a lot longer to develop anything then it did before.

Yup. Ironically, the litigious public provides an environment favoring quackery: for example, homeopathic "medicines," since they're all inert ingredients, are sure not to cause side-effects that would induce a lawsuit. (Never mind that they don't do any good...)

Re:Cures and money.

[BewireNomali]

i think that's his point though. not so much the quality of medicines being produced, or the manner in which the pharmaceutical evolutionary process works, in as much as the choices of drugs that seemingly are being developed by drug companies.

Your point about the FDA doesn't obviate the fact that pharmaceutical companies systematically seek to treat symptoms instead of developing promising long term therapies for successful eradication of conditions. What it means is that the system is fscked from the top/down.

The other issue about pharmaceutical companies is their steadfast refusal to look into nutraceuticals because of intellectual property issues. I'd be interested in seeing how much pharm money these researchers get to look into bromelain components. Interestingly enough, indigenous cultures have raved about the anti-inflammatory properties of bromelain forever and it has already been historically used as a medicine. In fact, there are a number of discrete compounds which exhibit medicinal effects that, because of intellectual property issues, don't get the money behind them to get detailed analysis.

This is a case of PRESERVING THE STATUS QUO (i.e. incremental revenue increases) at the expense of the future of our society. It's a preserving of an existing infrastructure at the expense of a whole new way of thinking about medicine.

We're the most medicated in the world, but we consistently get beaten in life expectancy by places like Andorra and Okinawa, Japan... places where few medications are taken.

IMO, that's what the GP was getting at.

Re:Cures and money.

[dasunt]

Yup. Ironically, the litigious public provides an environment favoring quackery: for example, homeopathic "medicines," since they're all inert ingredients, are sure not to cause side-effects that would induce a lawsuit. (Never mind that they don't do any good...)

I think you are mistaken. Quack medicine has had a long and successful history in the US. Homeopathy is nothing new.

Unfortunately, much of the population is missing critical thinking skills. Part of this may be due to evolution: We evolved in small tribes, thus we may give anecdotal evidence more credit than its worth. Part of this is probably due to the fact that medicine tends to be rather advanced technology and requires knowledge to understand and evaluate.

As a footnote, homeopathy may not be quack medicine. It may be possible that there is more than a placebo effect at work, and that water does "remember" what was contained in it, and that the memory of the non-diluted compound has a healing effect. This is judged extremely unlikely by most people (including myself) because it requires several possibilities that are almost certainly non-tree.

This brings up another issue: Modern medicine, like many fields, tends to be based upon the probability that something is true or not true. There are uncertainties at the core of medicine. We don't know how some things work and why some people get better. We tend to use research and scientific models and check if the clinical evidence supports them. Small shifts in thought happen in medince all the time: mouth germs can cause heart disease, ulcers can be caused by bacteria. In all probability, there are mainstream medical treatments being prescriped today that are either not effective or harmful to the patient (proportionally, such treatments are probably not very common). In all probability, there are probably more effective treatments out there as well. If you are ignorant of scientific method, research studies, and statistics, its rather easy to start to believe that homeopathy is effective, especially when the homeopath explains what he does in psuedoscientific jargon.

In the course of writing this comment, I found a slightly off-topic link discussing the 'myth' of the medical establishment fighting against the idea that bacteria causes stomach ulcers. The idea of a lone research fighting against the establishment makes a good story and for those unfamiliar with research, it may seem true, which is probably why such stories enter the pool of common knowledge. Unfortunately, with little else to go on, 'common knowledge' often leads to the wrong conclusion.

Re:Cures and money.

[LurkerXXX]

Sorry, my numbers are not crap.

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.

Great, one more thing for Spam to pimp.

[doublem]

Herbal Pineapple extract Spam in 5... 4... 3...

Pina Coladas

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

I just KNEW they were good for me!

old news

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:old news

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

The news isn't the breakthrough, the news is that science is being done in Australia. No more 'Gator Studies' majors there anymore I guess.

Re:old news

[carlcub]

Sure, in 1985, they knew that bromelaine would suppress tumor growth. I don't think they had identified the particular molecules that were responsible, though, which is what will lead to future viable treatments. It's not like you can inject pineapple extract into a living patient.

Hopefully...

[rwven]

I just hope these don't fade into the background as a lot of these types of things do. i think the world is ready for some cures...

I dunno...

[vykor]

Maybe I'm getting jaded these days, but it seems that every other week we have an announcement about a revolutionary breakthrough that's going to cure all these terminal conditions. And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies, in the way that antibiotics swept away most bacterial illnesses. Survival rates are up, sure, but most people are still dying and these conditions are still considered more or less terminal. Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures, or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?

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:I dunno...

[CornfedPig]

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.

Re:I dunno...

[ebuck]

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.

Re:I dunno...

[Otter]

... is there any hope?

Yes. Ruby on Rails. I hear it cures cancer, too.

Re:I dunno...

[Dread_ed]

"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.

I love "almost no side effects"...

[JargonScott]

That's such a great cover. I wonder what the "almost no" side effects are, like "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light".

Re:I love "almost no side effects"...

[xMilkmanDanx]

May cause drowsiness, stomach ache, dizziness, uncontrollable movements of the mouth, tongue, cheeks, jaw, arms, or legs; fever; muscle rigidity; sweating; irregular pulse; or fast or irregular heartbeats. Avoid exposure to sunlight or UV rays. Use caution in hot weather and during exercise. Drink plenty of fluids. Use caution when driving, operating machinery, or performing other hazardous activities. Some patients have experienced depression (including feelings of sadness, irritability, unusual tiredness, trouble concentrating, and loss of appetite) and suicidal thoughts and/or behavior during, and soon after stopping, treatment with Accutane. Notify your doctor immediately if you begin to experience signs of depression or if you begin to have thoughts about taking your own life during or shortly following treatment. Avoid letting infected areas come into contact with other people. Wash your hands frequently to prevent transmission. May cause internal bleeding, difficulty urinating and in certain rare instances, death.

Re:I love "almost no side effects"...

[ebuck]

I think "almost no side effects" in this case is about the equivalent effect of taking sugar pills.

Well, a lot of sugar pills.

About 890,450 sugar pills (appx. 80 lbs 7 oz), to be exact.

Taken rapidly, with no water.

Over the span of approximately 3 minutes 12 seconds.

It's not pretty, sort of like an explosion from within.

Pineapple molecules

[crimoid]

"pineapple molecules"

Pineapples have molecules of their own?

Re:Breakthrough?*Yawn*

[Daniel_Staal]

Maybe you should have read the paper: They've already done a small-scale clinical trial.

AIDS is not a virus

[mikeormike]

"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

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.)

Re:The Difference

[Reverend528]

My guess is the virus can still enter the bloodstream...

Yes, but as a virus, it's unable to reproduce if it cannot enter the cells.

Re:Breakthrough?*Yawn*

[secondsun]

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.

Aids Vaccination?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad news for Trojan good news for Hasboro.

Malaria!

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:Breakthrough?*Yawn*

[InternationalCow]

Again, you fail to read this properly. I do not believe for one second that a compound that has not passed beyond the letter+digit naming stage has been used in 40 patients, in the sense of systemic administration. There's no way that you can get away with this from an ethics point of view now that we have HAART. I believe it when they give actual details. Perhaps it was a phase I toxicity study. That is NOT a trial! As said in my other post, they may as well have taken material from 40 patients and tried it on that. The present message is just hype, hype, hype.

Double Benefit

[Foolomon]

Not only does it attack cancer, but by drinking pineapple juice I can taste better too!

I wonder how my imaginary girlfriend will feel about this...

Only a drug can treat an illness

[vettemph]

>if it succeeds it will seek a commercial partner to develop a drug that could be used in human clinical trials.

What they are saying is, "Unless we find a patentable and highly profitable way to secure this discovery, We won't bother."

I welcome the return of more natural remedies. These drug companies aren't happy until they turn a natural remedy into something with side effects.

Re:Skepticism is in order

[cbnewman]

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.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

[bujoojoo]

This just in: SpongeBob is celebrating quietly with Tinky Winky at his home in Bikini Bottom.

In the Petri dish, it's very simple

[paiute]

Back in the day, when one wrote a NSF grant proposal to fund the isolation, identification and synthesis of natural product, one always included prominently the fact that in vitro - in a Petri dish, the desired compound killed cancer cells. Hey presto - now it's an NIH grant proposal as well. The keywords antitumor, anticancer, etc. in the title were magic.

Of course, these never became actual medicines. One realized over time that a sledgehammer will kill cancer cells in a Petri dish. As will a stick of dynamite or a teaspoonful of sodium cyanide or just driving over it with a Buick.

Once you take into account that human biological system is slightly more complex than the Petri dish system, you will be less excited by the breathless prose of headline writers.

C'mon folks, get real

[yeastbeast]

As a biomedical researcher who has worked on cancer mechanisms in the past, I speak with some authority: these "breakthroughs" are a load of hooey. The popular press really loves it when some dinky little research group at Bumblefuck U. discovers a modest effect on cancer cells, HIV, etc. by some commonplace natural molecule. We've heard it about pineapples, green tea, broccoli, red wine, you name it. Usually these studies are conducted under extremely artificial conditions using tiny sample sizes and ambiguous assays. To be cynical, if researchers want to get a positive result, they can usually contrive some experimental condition where they'll observe said result. I read Slashdot for interesting technology items but I have been very disappointed with the caliber of the biomedical coverage. There have been a number of stunning discoveries over the last few years (two that leap to mind are microRNA-mediated viral immunity and gene regulation or epigenetic memory in plants) that never made it to Slashdot because they require more than a high school level education in biology to appreciate. Evidently, mod points don't go to people with an advanced knowledge of biology. How would you feel if all of tech stories were press releases from Microsoft?

Re:C'mon folks, get real

[Oxen]

As a fellow bio researcher, I wholeheartedly agree. The problem is that "News for Nerds" really means "News for CS Nerds". I would love a forum similar to Slashdot that was geared at the bio/med community, and I think it could really take off in the bio community. It would be so wonderful to be able to discuss current items of interest (i.e. journal publications) in a forum similar to Slashdot, but with some serious insight into the articles.

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.

Re:Oh sure

[Type-R]

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.

heh, until you run into the OTHER guys M1, then we're back to square one. :)

Re:Oh sure

[Ced_Ex]

Just an FYI, there are cases being reported that the incubation period has dropped to just several months.

Yikes!

http://www.planetout.com/news/article.html?date=20 05/02/11/2

Re:Oh sure

[Lifewish]

That sucks for those who contract it, but it's a good thing for the human race as a whole as these varieties are unlikely to survive very well - they'll kill all their hosts too quickly.

Gotta love mathematics :(

Re:Breakthrough?*Yawn*

[juanfe]

Um... no. see below:

New drug blocks HIV from entering human cells

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1423753,0 05 0.htm%5D
">Indo-Asian News Service
Tokyo, July 7, 2005

"A new drug that blocks HIV virus from entering human cells and causes almost no side effects has been developed by Japanese researchers.
The drug, code named AK602, was tried on 40 AIDS patients in the US and almost no side effect was found.

"When patients took 0.02 ounces of AK602 twice a day for 10 days the HIV dropped to an average of one per cent, according to a research team led by Hiroaki Mitsuya of Kumamoto University.

"Current AIDS medications often lose their effectiveness after a few days due to the virus' resistance, but the AK602 reacts to human cells instead of attacking the virus, said Mitsuya. [...]"

Under current HAART treatment, it takes months for HIV viral load to go down that quickly, and side effects under current meds are not negligible (high cholesterol, weird fat distribution, major depression, intense diarrhoea...)

Health supplements already available

[Colin Smith]

The supplement people advertise it as good for digestion rather than as a substance which helps fight cancer though.

It's interesting how much scientific evidence there is now for the medical effects of what are basically just food supplements. I started looking into this stuff when my finger joints began aching after 10 years worth of typing for 8 hours a day. (Sorted BTW)

e.g. The following all have scientific studies backing up the claims.

Glucosamine and chondroitin helps fight arthiritis, there's animal research showing that they may also help with sports injuries to joints.

Omega 3 oils significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks. They also help significantly with brain function; memory, concentration. They also help with joint suppleness and skin health. (Cod liver oil, fish oil, flax seed oil)

St Johns Wort contains a mood enhancing compound which has a significant effect on minor depression. As effective as stuff like Prozac, with fewer side effects.

Lycopene, from red fruit like tomatoes helps prevent prostate cancer.

There's a load more. This isn't to say that all health foods/supplement claims are valid and if you have a problem you should see your doctor, but the saying "you are what you eat" certainly appears to be true.

Re:The Difference

[Hachey]

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 !

Hello ... McFly ... Hello!

[Luscious868]

A cure for AIDs has existed for quite some time, it's called abstinence (probably not a difficult thing for most of the geeks here)

From dictionary.com:

Restoration of health; recovery from disease.

Abstinence isn't a cure, abstinence is a form of prevention. If abstinence was a cure all you would have to do if you got AIDS is not have sex for a period of time.

The only thing abstinence cures is a marriage. If neither partner has ever had sex before, especially with each other, then it's a shot in the dark as to weather or not they will have a healthy sex life once they are married. What if one loves sex and the other doesn't? What if one person thinks the other is horrible in the sack? The quickest route to divorce is a bad sex life. There's no way in hell I'd ever consider getting married before having sex with the women unless she was either rich (in which case if it didn't work, I'd get half her dough) or she was otherwise the perfect women in every way. Drop dead gorgeous, funny, smart, healthy, in good spirits almost 100% of the time, employed, energetic, willing to cook and clean if I handle the yard work, willing to be the primary caretaker if she wants children, willing to put up with all of my bullshit, willing to not complain that I spend "too much time with the guys", willing not to complain if she feels that "I never take her with me when I go out with the guys", willing to leave me along when I'm watching the game ... aka ... a women that doesn't exist.

So in closing, you enjoy your abstinence and your either failed or unhappy marriange when you realize you don't click with your wife sexually, meanwhile I'll be chasing tail and really having a good time and when I finally do settle down and get married it'll either be a long and happy one or I'll come out of it rich.

Re:Hello ... McFly ... Hello!

[Ravatar]

The quickest route to divorce is a bad sex life. The quickest route to divorce is money-related issues.

Re:Hello ... McFly ... Hello!

[cheesybagel]

The quickest route to divorce is a bad sex life.

Right. That must be why nearly noone used to get divorced at all when marriages were arranged and they only actually got to have sex *after* they were married.

No, the basic reason for having divorce is when the couple loses patience. For a marriage to work, both need to concede on some things. People today do not wish to concede on anything, so marriages fail. Money usually being the problem.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ouch

[DrKyle]

I don't know how popular those pineapple suppositories are going to be.....

Re:HOW?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you studied how biological research is done, you'd realize how easy it would be to test it. There's things called randomized clinical trials and epidemiological studies that would easily determine in a few years time whether or these things worked. But since you can't think of it, it can't be done! Whooo-hooo!

Perhaps asking for volunteers in Africa (very high AIDS rate) might work though... if a noticable decrease occurred in the test area you've got a winner...

Wow, are you in high school? Get a clue and take class on statistics or clinical trials in particular. You'll find well agreed upon methods that work!

Supplements

[OverCode@work]

I'm going to go buy some of the pineapple extract (bromelain) tonight and start taking it daily.

I have a bad case of melanoma (stage 4), and while there's still some hope in traditional treatments and clinical trials, I need every advantage I can get. If bromelain slows the growth of the tumors even a little, it's a huge help in combination with the other things I'm taking. And if it doesn't help, it probably won't do any harm. It's just natural pineapple extract, and it's been consumed for years.

I'm taking artemisinin (sweet wormwood extract) for similar reasons, though I do have to be careful with my dose of that because it's somewhat hard on the liver. I'm also waiting for an order of Vitamin B17 (amygdalin/laetrile) to arrive. The latter was somewhat hard to track down because of a stink the FDA raised about it a few years ago.

Dietary supplements alone won't cure me, but they just might help, and as such it would be ridiculous for me not to try them.

-John

Re:C'mon folks, get real (yes please!)

[Biodecoder]

As a biomedical scientist working in the field of HIV and immunology research in the past 15 years (having published over 40 papers in journals like Nature, Science) I fully and completely agree with Yeasbeast's comment. Where are the peer reviewed papers on these "major breakthroughs"?? If there was really a true breakthrough in either HIV or cancer research it would make it headline in Nature, Science or Cell, sorry to say /. headline only enhances these pure BS hype, because most don't quite understand the nature of biological research and discovery.

Re:Two women in China IMMUNE TO AIDS!

[SubconsciousSeraphim]

I know this may be sort of thick of me, but does immunity also imply that you won't carry it?

Re:Two women in China IMMUNE TO AIDS!

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.

Re:Call me a moralist but...

[Dwonis]

It's not a matter of morality, it's a matter of self preservation.

Precisely. Ever notice how some sort of marriage ceremony seems to be engrained in many otherwise distinct cultures? It leads me to suspect that what people like to call "sexual morality" is really just a survival trait that evolved as a result of natural selection. Recent research on sexual networks (example) seems to point to the same conclusion.

HIV immunity has already been documented before.

[spineboy]

THe HIV virus relies on a cell receptor molecule CCR-5 (cell chemokine receptor -5) that enables the virus entry into the white cell (CD-4 T cells to be precise). Certain people have a variant , or are defficient in that cell surface receptor, so that the HIV virus has nothing to "Grab" onto, and thus does not infect the person.

Curent HIV vaccines rely on the fact that people seem to suffer no ill effects of not having this receptor and are currently a main focus of vaccine research.