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Genetic Engineers Working to Reverse Cancer
An anonymous reader writes "Using a patient's own modified white blood cells, a team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute has reversed advanced melanoma in a study of 17 patients. The researchers tweaked the blood to recognize and attack cancer cells, and the head of the National Institutes of Health, Elias Zerhounibut, says there's big hope now that other common cancers, like breast and lung cancer, can be similarly treated. Though only 2 of the 17 patients responded successfully to the treatment, researchers are optimistic that future improvements on the technique will improve that rate of success." From the article: "In the study, Rosenberg and his colleagues took lymphocytes from the blood and inserted into them genes for a receptor capable of 'recognizing' a protein on melanoma cells called MART-1. This would allow the lymphocyte to attach to a tumor cell and kill it. The patients, all of whom had previously undergone surgery and immune-based treatments, got chemotherapy to temporarily wipe out their immune systems. The engineered cells were then reinjected, with the hope they would proliferate as the immune system recovered."
Always nice to see the light of science burning brighter and any treatments that can get rid of cancer that has spread to the liver are pretty amazing.
Warhammer forums
Here's the absctract for the original article. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to see the whole thing.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/11
I thought it was interesting how the lymphocytes stuck around for about a year. I thought they would have either died or kicked the gene out by then...
It may not be invasive, but I bet it takes a hell of a toll on you. Part of the procedure used to implement this test protocol was chemotherapy to disable the immune system--and I'm not an M.D., but I don't think that's very much fun. Now, the payoff may be worth it (well, it IS worth it if the treatment takes), but I still imagine it's nearly as trying as standard modalities, especially for cancer patients who've already had surgery or radiotherapy or the like.
RTFA. The immune system has to be completely wiped out at the beginning so that the modified cells have a chance to become prevalent in the body after being injected.
It does not look like this technique will be useful against AIDS. Though the article is sparse on details, it says the treatment targets specific antigens that appear in about half of cancer types. The problem with AIDS is that it mutates rapidly, and this means that the antigens on its surface change with time. As a result, even if we could modify one patient's cells to kill Alice's AIDS, we would need a different set of modifications to kill Bob's AIDS.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
(sidenote: my wife had a BMT....she died October 2nd, 2005)
Bone Marrow Transplants knock out the immune system with a combo of chemo and radiation. It's not a fun process (although it is scarily simple).
Some people feel few ill effect. Most have vomiting, nausa and their hair falling out. My wife went into grade-4 Muciousitious (sp?) and had her mouth peeling. (Others have died from merely having their immune system knocked out)
The survival rates for BMT patents was something like 50-60% iirc (5 year survival rates).
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
My father died of cancer a couple of years ago and I can assure you chemotheraphy is everything but not-invassive. It's incredible to see how a powerful body degrades to it's limits with it, but every hope is welcomed, even if you have to suffer with it :) I hope this research advances and we can treat it in the future, because cancer is getting worse everywhere with our 100% industrial food and environments, and that damn genetic thing says I'll probably follow my father. We need some Open Source replacement for DNA ASAP!!!
Cheers
Seriously, I was at a few seminars here at the UW by one of the Cambridge scholars who had an actual real cure for 50 percent of all cancers, which involves a literal heating of the interior of cells, triggering an apotosis chain that causes cell death in 99.99 percent of all cancer cells (of that type) while only killing less than 1 percent of normal cells. It's in trials in the UK and elsewhere and won't be available before probably 2016.
The method mentioned is a technique - it increases the rate, and is a great discovery, but is not a "cure" for "cancers". It's just better than what we have now.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The current treatments for advanced melanoma (Dartmouth protocol or Interleukin 2) are extremely difficult to take and they only have a 5-10% chance of a full recovery. Granted, this new treatment only worked for 11% of the patients but typically the people in these studies are in them as a last resort. We tried to get my Dad into one after his chemo stopped responding.
It was too late for him, but hopefully not for the thousands who die from melanoma every year.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Actually what you are describing happens, except that neurons don't appear in "random" locations but certain locations of the brain (see neurogenesis.) Neurons also naturally migrate naturally in the brain. An individual neuron in the brain really doesn't have much control over thought processes, it's the network of connections that are important, and there is a lot of redundancy built in to deal with damage and cell death. The brain is also pretty decent at routing around some types of damage, sometimes with people missing the majority of the cortex of an entire hemisphere functioning fairly normally.) Sure, some patterns can be lost (I.E. you forget facts and lose skills after time if they are not reinforced) but I sincerely believe that it is possible for Medicine to come up with treatments that A)delay or moderate brain cell death, B)increase adult neurogenesis and C)increase uptake of these new neurons into the thought pathways within the brain. I believe it's also been shown that a good proportion of senility can be prevented or at least moderated by keeping the person mentally active and stimulated. Any other part of the body will atrophy if not used in order to conserve energy. It would make sense that the brain (one of the highest energy demand organs in the body) will atrophy to some extent if not exercised.
Physical ability seems to decline far earlier than mental ability, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that physical aging leaves people in such a situation where they simply don't have the ability to do the things that allow for mental stimulation, such as diminished strength precludes sports, diminished eyesight begins to preclude reading, diminished hearing precludes conversational skills, etc etc. I don't doubt that there is a physical neurological component to senility, but I believe keeping the body healthy would allow a person to keep their brain healthier and "younger." This makes the job of finding a pill or other treatment to keep the brain healthy much less troublesome, although it would make effecacy testing far more difficult as various stages of physical sensecence and condition should also be compared in order to fully understand the effect of novel treatments.
So yes, as we get better at 1)fighting cancer and 2)replacing/repairing failing organs (including the brain) through medical advances and lifestyle changes/improvements we will be able to put off death further and further. Medical treatments to stave off senility shouldn't be viewed as strictly unnatural: the brain (along with the rest of the body) is constantly replacing dead, dying and malfunctioning cells. Even the cells that do survive for a long period of time will have their various structures repaired and replaced. I heard somewhere that in five years an average person will have none of the same atoms making up their body (Although I can't find a source for that five years "fact" so take it for what it's worth. And with a grain of salt while you're at it.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
With mathematical logic, yes, with statistics, no. With 1 out of 1000 samples being true we would with 99% certainty not be able to reject the hypothesis (that no such signatures exist). c = +-sqrt(2.58^2 * (1/1000)*(1-1/1000)/1000) = 2.6/1000. With one positive sample the confidence interval would be 1+-2.6 of 1000. This encompasses zero probability (e.g the null hypothesis) hence we can't reject it at a 99% confidence level.
Had we found 2 posts of 1000, then we would still confirm the hypothesis at a 95% level (z=1.96), but we would reject it at a 80% level (z=1.28) You have to understand that confirming or rejecting a hypothesis at a confidence level (statistics) has very little to do with confirming or rejecting a hypothesis using deductive logic.
Statistics deals with probabilities and is never absolute. You don't say that a hypothesis is true or false, but that it is true or false at a certain confidence level. And that's what's great about it as real-world science deals with real-world measurements which are always associated with various forms of errors and weird correlations that you don't want influencing your results. Sampling to obtain a probability estimate is a very convenient tool, but if you take too few samples, the margin of error will be to great, and if it encompasses zero, then it is worthless. An estimate that doesn't reject the null hypothesis means that the estimate is no better than a random guess.