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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."
but mortally susceptible to the common cold.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
will skip the line you expected here and get right to the point: INVINCIBLE MICE ARMY?!?
Will this cure cancer in rats? Because, EVERYTHING causes cancer in rats!
I'll take a carton of cigarettes and a shot of mouse blood.
See PNAS, vol. 103, no 20, p7753-7758. VERY interesting work.
"The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations"
If you cure cancer, you get laid.
"can I get a transplant donor soul?"
Yes.
--Prince of Lies.
Thinking of a "cancer gene" is misleading. Imagine a net of rubber bands all knotted togethor. Changing one gene will "stretch a rubber band" differently possibly affect all the other aspects of the organism, often unpredictably.
This cancer gene could be the one that also gives humans a soul. We can't tell with a mouse, of course, because they only speak in pips and squeaks, but scientists should know all the risks involved with creating such a possible genetic enhancement.
You're a moron, Mr. Rifkin. Seriously, though, this is the type of comment that lies outside of answering, outside of science, and beyond reason. You can't win an argument with someone like this, and it's not even worth trying. It's a religious matter. For much of human history, such thoughts set the policies of governments. Then, we discovered reason and science. But the pendulum seems to swinging back the other way again.
> The old warfrin poison trick still works, don't worry. Plus we could just breed
> an army of cancer resistant snakes to take care of the mice.
> Oh...
must... resist... can't...
cancer-resistant mongooses for the snakes
cancer-resistant gorillas to rid us of the mongooses
cancer-resistant tigers to attack the gorillas
cancer-resistant elephants to take care of the tigers
and cancer-resistant mice to scare the elephants
lather, rinse, repeat
It's all in the title of the article... The white blood cells "recognize specific patterns on the cancer cell surface", and flag/attack them as they would any other foreign body. Biology wasn't my strong-suit either, but I would venture a guess that by knowing what sort of mechanism would lead to the white blood cells identifying cancerous/precancerous cells as a risk, the response could be adapted to work similarly (if not identically) in humans. Cancer is not a by-product of evolution, it is a result of malfunctioning cells which replicate uncontrollably. This is generally not a product of 'evolution' as you and I would think of it, but by some sort of damage to the cell which caused it to malfunction. It isn't so much a "death trigger" as replicating without purpose; when you no longer need skin cells at a certain location, and some mutated cell keeps replicating malfunctioning cells, you've got cancer. If your immune system cannot recognize something as a threat, it cannot respond to it, which appears to be the current predicament with cancer in humans.
"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Your loop is leaking scared elephants.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
There are two different ways to do this.
The first is by expression profiling- looking at difference in gene expression. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_chip This will actually give you a readout of how the two cells are different in terms of how they use different genes to express their differences.
The other is positional cloning. You basically breed a resistant mouse with a non-resistant mouse to get an F1 intercross. If you are dealing with inbred mice, these are genetically identical but each chromosome is different- one from mom and one from dad. You breed this generation with eachother to get an F2 intercross and then phenotype the offspring (are they resistant to cancer?) and then genotype them (what are their genetic differences?). Genes undergo semi-random reassortment through cross-over events and all offspring in the F2 incross have a random sprinkling of genes from mom and dad. You then do linkage analysis to find out which genetic differences are most closely linked to the phenotype you are looking for.
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.