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Cancer Resistant Mouse Provides Possible Cure
Evoluder writes to tell us that scientists at Wake Forest University have found a "cancer resistant mouse" and bred it to make a small army of cancer resistant mice. When transplanting blood from one of these mice to a normal non-resistant mouse they are able to provide "lifetime cancer protection". From the article: "The cancer-resistant mice all stem from a single mouse discovered in 1999. "The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations," said Cui, associate professor of pathology. It also has been bred into three additional mouse strains. About 40 percent of each generation inherits the protection from cancer."
How good is this really?
(Assuming this is true, it is a wonderful step.)
"If you cure cancer, you get laid."
If a guy was somehow determined to be "cancer-resistant", imagine how many women would want to procreate with him so that their children would be immune to cancer. The guys that could be declared "cancer-resistant" could have women lining up down the street waiting for the guys to knock them up!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Oh well, give or take another 20 years, I've got time...
I wouldn't be so sure. My sister-in-law died of cancer at the ripe-old age of 25, and I'm sure there are many other slashdotters that personally knew someone who died of cancer prior to reaching 30.
As exciting as this sounds, it's probably not going to lead to a pancea for cancer in humans. We've cured cancer in mice several times over since the 70s. The problem is that mice are a short-lived species that has very little innate resistance to cancer. After all evolution is not going to have an organism waste lots of energy repairing DNA damage and having pools of immune cells constantly checking for mutant cells if the organism is just going to get eaten by a cat in an average of a few months after birth.
By contrast, humans are a very long-lived animal species. Our bodies already have a large number of cancer-prevention mechanisms that simply aren't present in mice. Take for example telomeres. The telomere ends of chromosomes shorten with each cell replication other than gamete formation. All your cells have what is known as the 'Hayflick limit' where the telomeres get too short, the chromosomes become unstable and the cell dies. Although this mechanism is probably one of the contributors to human aging, it also does a very good job of eliminating many tumors. Most of your tumors hit the Hayflick limit and simply die off before they can present a threat to you. Virtually all human cancers either mutate so as to find a way to reactivate the telomerase that re-lengthens the telomeres or manages to find a way to preserve their telomere ends through chromosomal recombination. Mouse cells, by way of contrast, have huge telomeres which never get short enough to act as this sort of cancer-prevention mechanism.
As a result human tumors are much 'tougher' than mouse tumors. The average mouse tumor wouldn't stand a chance in a human. Any tumor that manages to thrive in a human has had to jump a host of hurdles and checkpoints that no mouse tumor does in order to simply survive.
The problem is that many of these cancer cures in mice already exist in humans naturally. Some of these cures (such as this one, most likely) are simply reactivation of vestigial anti-cancer systems in the mice that have atrophied for the above-mentioned reasons. Others are cancer treatments that attack weaknesses in mouse tumors that are simply irrelevant in human ones. I suspect that this super mouse is simply being more human with regards to cancer and that the end result is that we'll rediscover something our bodies already do.
Quite possibly. They found the original resistant mouse when they injected him with cancer and he didn't die. We can't really do the same thing to humans, a minor issue of ethics stopping us.
Although I do wonder- could you inject a cancer into a human tissue sample? Such as a small skin graft? If so, there might be a humane way to test for immunities, if you could find possible resistant families and get a volunteer. Of course the whole solution may just not work with humans making it all pointless.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
We may actually be doing the experiment and not looking at the results.
The article states that if an immune mouse gives white blood cells to a mouse with cancer the second mouse gets better.
If we assume the same mutation exists in humans, we just need to do a statistical analysis of humans who have had spontaneous permanent cancer remissions after receiving a blood donation.
A few more tests and we could cure a lot of cancer.
My theory is that it has to do with the relative life spans of humans and mice. Humans live about 40 years, as far as evolution is concerned. That means that the body needs to keep reproduction-threatening tumors from ocurring within the first twenty-five or so years of life. Everything after that gives diminishing returns on your fitness function.
Compare with mice.
So if medical science comes up with a hundred ways to cure cancer in rats, but it turns out that human tumors in vivo are already resistant to all but a very few of them... well... I'm not that surprised. Human tumors have to be made of sterner stuff to survive the host organism.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that mice might be a shitty model organism for cancer research if it weren't so hard to suggest a small, cheap, long-lived mammal.
Do you try to pronounce this PNAS as a word or always have to spell it out?
..." that you'd bother to think of.
You joke, I realize, but I'm a scientist, and for those who are seriously wondering, I routinely hear it both ways. I myself tend to say P-N-A-S, (but rather fast: "pianehess"*), but my advisor and some others tend to say "P-NAS", with a nasaly "aah" (like in "ass") -- not really close to an 'i' or a schwa ('uh') sound. Some people just say "Proceedings" and assume that there is only one "Proceedings of
* I'd use IPA, but I don't know it, and others here probably don't either.
Yeah, let's redesign biology as a microkernel.
Wait, let's go up one level: a society. Easy to isolate functions (jobs/responsibilities), easy to add/remove functionality and resources while it is running (ranging from building projects via emigration/immigration to full-scale conquest of/by other societies), pretty fault-tolerant (if some individual malfunctions, society as a whole usually continues on).
Will it turn out to be succesful? Well, we'll read all about it in the syslog^H^H^H^H^H^Hnewspapers.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!