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Cancer Therapy with Radioactive Scorpion Venom
BostonBTS writes "Researchers from TransMolecular, Inc. have used chlorotoxin -- a component of giant yellow scorpion venom -- to target radioactive treatments for the deadly brain cancer glioma. From the article: 'In the study, 18 patients first had surgery to remove malignant gliomas, a lethal kind of brain tumor. Then doctors injected their brains with a solution of radioactive iodine and TM-601, the synthetic protein. The solution bound almost exclusively to leftover tumor cells, suggesting that it could be combined with chemotherapy to fight cancer. Furthermore, two study patients were still alive nearly three years after the treatment.' Their paper is slated for publication in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology."
Researchers from TransMolecular, Inc. have used chlorotoxin -- a component of giant yellow scorpion venom -- to target radioactive treatments for the deadly brain cancer glioma.
Just so long as they remember, "With great power comes great responsibility."
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Well that sounds like a pretty cool movie. Is Bryan Singer directing?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
They almost make it sound like the patients survived the treatment.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Where do we find a vault-dweller to hunt some of those rad scorpions for us?
Sign me up for that!<servo>
Radioactive scorpions?
It's been done.
Well, the door was open...
This is just some insane publicity stunt by Stan Lee for the "Who Wants To Be A Superhero" TV show!
Injecting yourself with radioactive venom doesn't give you superpowers.
God KNOWS I've tried!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Hey folks -- take an honest listen for a moment. I don't want to come off as a new-age hippie, but honestly, the amazon rain forest has millions of poisonous bugs that we currently know nothing about. If you take a trip into the jungle and are a bug-watcher like I am, chances are you will see dozens of insects that currently aren't recognized by science.
The amazon jungle is full of life, and it's all practically poisonous plants and insects. Think about it -- the biggest predator in the jungle is man, and jaguars are a close second, coming in at about 70 pounds. All of the biomass in the jungle is bound up in plants and insects. There has been no downtime in the evolution of living things in the jungle for the past several million years. There is no winter, no dead non-metabolising topsoil -- animals and plants just eating and mating and reproducings generation after generation. The ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin says that the jungle is chemical warfare that has been going on for millions of years.
When I was on an excursion in the jungle of Ecuador, I decided to take a small hike during some downtime in the program. Foolishly I wore only sandals on my feet. Not 15 minutes down the trail, I felt dozens of ants biting my foot. Panicked, I reached down to brush them all off, but there was only three or four ants on my foot! When they bit into my skin, I didn't feel anything, but moments later, I would feel several bites in different places on my foot.
So my long-winded point is that there are millions of potential cancer cures out there, all kinds of medications and interesting chemicals. All of the chemical defenses plants and animals evolve work by interrupting or changing the normal cellular functioning of living organisms. The difference between medicine and poison is a question of dosage, as Plotkin paraphrased Paracelsus. We really need to work hard to make sure that this incredible resource stays around for future research. I don't know specifically what you and I can do, but awareness is the first step.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Side effects can include nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, and turning into a Marvel supervillian.
Patient: Doc I'm still in terrible pain, is there anything else you can do for my cancer?
Doctor (whispers): Nurse. What do we have to euthanize this patient and put him out of his misery?
Nurse (whispers): We got some radioactive scorpion venom, that should be quick.
Doctor: 100 CCs of radioactive scorpion venom, stat!
-NURSE INJECTS VENOM-
Patient: I feel better.
Doctor & Nurse in unison: Holy Sh*t!
You make an excellent point about tuning microwaves to the frequency of the venom to cook cancer cells, but there are just to many variables here for it to even be considered, not now anyway. First of all, the way a microwave oven works is to induce heat by adding electrons to fatty cells, that's why meat gets warmer faster than bread. Doctors wouldn't go for this due to the fact they could scramble brains even with only a few seconds exposure. Second of all, microwaves experience the same problems as laser beams do in atmosphere's. Nitrogen is a great scatterer of IR and EM waves thus the Northern Lights due to solar wind, also one has to take into account the varying layers of material to be penetrated and not to be fried by microwaves to reach the venom tagged cells. A design team would have to use the very lattest in computer processing power, both hardware and software, to produce a system that could calculate, tune, and react within naon seconds of a very long series of commands, 100-200 million calcs/nanosec, to even begin to be capable of developing a safe and controllable enviroment in which to treat people. Lastly, life evolves. To quote Dr. Malcom from Jurassic Park "Life will find a way.". Every few years, or even every few months, the systen would requier massive updates and overhauls to adapt to the new biological structures being used in it. These last 2 items aren't cost effective and as has been shown with the ABL, are very frustrating and time consuming. Your idea isn't flawed, its briliant. However, our current understanding of Quantum Mechanics is such that laser's and microwaves are about as far as we can develope hardware successfully. To activate the venom and not scramble the patient, you would need something akin to a remote for a TV to activate the venom. A single burst of commands to the venom instead of seconds of agitant microwaves would be far safer and much easier to use than tuning a microwave to each individuals own "frequency" so as to not kill your patient. This could lead to the Star Trek breed of nanoprobes used by the Borg, but to save life instead of take it.
The use of chemo still is that its the most effective way to treat cancer. However with treatments like this on the horizon, we could see a revoultion in the field of medicare within a few decades and definitly my lifetime. The world needs creative minds to continue to florish, so keep at it!
My world, however, will remain dark.
Remember Sue...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Jokes aside, cost might be an issue. Scorpion venom is the most expensive liquid in the world by volume.
Yet another blogger begging for an audience.
Howdy,
e r/Sontheimer.htm). Glioblastoma is hypothesized to be so deadly because of the
ability of cancer cells inside the brain to quickly migrate from the primary site to other sites within the brain, quickly invading normal
brain tissue. This makes surgery or radiation not very effective, since migrating cells may be hidden within normal brain that is not
irradiated or cut out. The migratory ability of glioblastoma cells is related to its unique ability to change size and morphology to
move in between normal brain cells.
The effectiveness of chlorotoxin in treatment of glioblastomas was discovered by a scientist here at my institution (http://www.neurobiology.uab.edu/Faculty/Sontheim
The size-changing migratory ability is related to a specific chloride ion channel that expresses highly and uniquely on certain brain cancer cells, including gliomas (PubMed ID: 8804043, 8967454). Chlorotoxin, a chloride channel inhibitor discovered in 1993 (PubMed ID: 8383429) was more interestingly found to bind to this glioma-specific chloride ion channel in mice in 1998 (PubMed ID: 9809993) and humans in 2002 (PubMed ID: 12112367). Although it was shown that chlorotoxin failed to inhibit migratory ability due to size-change, chlorotoxin was shown to inhibit migration by inhibition of another protein involved in breaking down the extracellular matrix, allowing cells to more easily migrate.
The strategy that TransMolecular uses to treat gliomas lies in the specificity of expression of the channel to which chlorotoxin binds. That channel is expressed on the vast majority of glioma tissue samples tested, and only rarely on normal tissue. If one attaches a weak or short-lasting radioactive moiety to chlorotoxin, a potential treatment can be to target glioma cells using chlorotoxin, and then kill them by short-lasting localized radiation. This strategy is already being used in Non Hodgkins Lymphoma and other diseases by attaching to tumor- targeting antibodies a radioactive iodine atom.
The important thing is to find a protein that latches on the the cancer cells and not normal cells. There are many proteins out there for the different kinds of cancer. For this brain cancer, it appears that they have found such a protein. They will probably 'tag' the protein with radioactive (beta or beta/gamma emitters, not alphas like uranium) iodine (I-131 or I-128) or yittrium (Y-90) or phosphorous (P-32) (depending on the chemistry and the dose required). They will not use heavy metals like Uranium as the half-life is too long. The radioactive package will be released wherever the protein is. If the protein sticks to the cancer cell, then the cancer cell gets most of the dosage. The brain is fairly radiation-safe, as radiation kills cells that are actively reproducing (like cancer cells). Brain cells haven't been reproduced since entering adulthood. Radiation taggin therapy is not new. The fact that they have found a protein to bind to this kind of cancer cell is very new.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands