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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."
Better look out, mother nature is going to take you to court for violating the DMCA when you reverse engineer her cancer.
Can all fish swim?
What is so wonderful about this type of treatment is that it is not invasive. You could have a cancer that is very difficult to reach via surgery and this method would allow your body to bring the cure to the cancer.
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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.
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These days, it seems that some of the more promising cancer treatments involve using the body's own defenses against cancer. The antiangiogenesis stuff didn't pan out as well as hoped (blocking blood vessel growth in tumors). Some of the treatments that fix a particular genetic defect in certain types of cancer are great, but extremely cancer-specific.
This approch does require a lot of work (tailoring a particular patient's T-cells to a particular cancer), so it's not a cheap fix. It also requires the patient's immune system to cooperate and do it's thing, something that only happened in 2 of the 17 patients. Still, to get complete remission where there was no hope is extremely promising. My guess is that we'll see more of this.
Basically if the human race can do two things: 1) Regrow organs that have worn out and 2) cure cancer, we'll live for a very long time.
Scientists have been working on this for years and it's exciting to see that it's finally showing some promise. However, training a patient's immune system to recognize cancer related proteins can be dangerous. The cancer related proteins are often mutated forms of proteins on normal cells and sometimes just normal proteins that are much more prevalent on cancer cells. A mistake could lead to autoimmunity.
That is promising research. It seems to be the most promising other than future use of nano technology to deliver drugs directly.
It seems odd that you would use chemotherapy described in the article as being something that wipes out your immune system, and then try to use a treatment that relies entirely on your immune system being effective. Maybe thats part of the treatment, but it seems like you would want your immune system at 100% for this process to work.
These articles always make me wonder if the researchers had access to data processed by folding projects.
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...
Elias Zerhouni may be a little miffed at being called Zerhounibut!
The description of the patients is very dry, so I wanted to say something on behalf of the people receiving this treatment. What's happened is that each one started getting symptoms, probably a growth on the skin. They went to a doctor and were told that they had the most malignant of the three forms of skin cancer. Treatment options were presented to them, and they chose to undergo surgery. Either a few days after the surgery they were told that the margins weren't clean, or immediately after the surgery they were told that portions of cancer were inoperable, or some weeks later they were told that the cancer had returned. Then they underwent immune therapy. I don't know anything about that. Finally, they were told that they were terminal patients and to get their affairs in order, but that there was a new therapy the surgeons wanted to try. The chances of success were unknown. I don't know how much chemotherapy was necessary to destroy their immune systems, but a very good friend of mine, now dead, described it as getting flu one day a week for weeks on end. I count at least six events that had to be completely emotionally devastating to the patients and their families.
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This is the interesting part, I thought: "The researchers also have isolated TCRs that recognize common cancers other than melanoma."
People > crops.
Having watched my mother die of Leukemia after a two year struggle, my cousin loose his stomach to cancer, and another relative (by marriage) currently facing a rare brain cancer with essentially no hope of survival (with a wife and two kids just a little older than mine), I'd say, let these guys play whatever cards they have.
I'm going to be trying to get better contact info for the people doing this research and forward it to my cousin and the family facing brain cancer.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
more crops == more people live longer.
What?
High dose interferon has less than a 5% chance of remmisson. So if the 2/17 ratio is realistic this more than doubles the odds of recovering from advanced melanoma. High dose interferon is the leading (read: only) non-trial treatment for advanced melanoma.
My father had/has stage 4 Melanoma. He went into remmision from high dose interferon and dmx clinical and NIH. BTW the study found no statisical improvement over just high dose interferon.
quick wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanoma
On ABC World News yesterday, they interviewed the lead scientist behind all of this. He said that since they set up the original protocol, they've found genes that are more than 100 times more effective on the cancers. Even though only a percentage of the patients will probably respond to these new anti-cancer genes, this method has enormous potential to improve greatly with more clinical trials and more research. This treatment is still cancer-specific, but it's much easier to find a gene to target a cancer than it is to come up with a new synthetic anti-cancer medication. In 10 years, I would bet that this stuff will have had amazing results.
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.
We aren't being fed GM People...well at least not yet. /cue Charlton Heston
It's hardly insignificant if you're the guy with something else expected to be terminal that the new technique can cure, or family or friend of that guy.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Check out this story over at Economist.com. For some reason they insist on calling it "synthetic biology" rather than just the more advanced forms of genetic engineering around, but the topics are amazing. One guy is putting together a set of standard genes to be inserted into anything, and with universal connectors at each end. Another group is making a "minimal bacterium" that has the absolute shortest genome possible to still survive in the lab. There are other projects mentioned too, but the potential of just those two is amazing.
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With a simple confidence interval calculation we get that with a sample size of 17 from a population of 1000 we get that with 95% confidence the results are 2+-2.6 of 17. Obviously 0 is within the error margin, so it is quite possible the results are just by chance.
I have been trying to locate some information on what the motivation was for releasing such a weak result - in case I had missed something. I have failed to find any mention at all of a confidence interval or any statistical justification. At best the results are naive, at worst dishonest. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Cancer really sucks. I hope this pans out.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
One question: will this new technique also work on other forms of cancer, like lawyers and politicians?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
(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).
There was a paper in Nature Medicine in 2004 (Lu et al.) where scientists removed dendritic cells (another type of immune system cell) and engineered them to display HIV antigens on their surface. Since T-cells and B-cells are both stimulated by dendritic cells, this kicked off a more robust immune response, resulting in pretty impressive long term viral suppression. It's not a cure, but if it can delay the use of antiretroviral drugs (with their attendant, debilitating side effects) then it's probably worth looking into more closely.
the head of the National Institutes of Health, Elias Zerhounibut
... perhaps a bit of impromptu editorializing?
His name is Elias Zerhouni
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
O great more positive PR. If only people knew whats really going on. Im not going to trust anything these drug companys, drug industry is cooking up.There is just too much conflict of intrest and reports of corruption abound,accompanied with evidence I have read that around 90% of diseases can be cured with out drugs surgery or even side effects for dollars a day. theres too much positive news on alternative medicine and nutrition.Of course u wont hear these storys on the media outlets heavily funded by big pharma (drug industry) commercials. The drug industry needs to start getting some results from all the negative pr they have been getting lately. Even the big bad FDA's own scientist are coming out and talking some.But u wont see this stuff in the evening news would u? good read: http://www.newstarget.com/019717.html
This RTFA crap is thrown around WAY too much.
I never denied that the article said that, or that it was not correct to do it this way, I just said it seems counterintuitive.
New acronym: RMFP.
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.
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It's hardly insignificant if you're the guy with something else expected to be terminal that the new technique can cure, or family or friend of that guy.
True enough, but statistically, nearly everyone has (or will have) friends and family that battle cancer.
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Wait-- so you're claiming that when a child gets lukemia, it's generally the parent's fault?
That's cold, man.
brrrrr.
(At first I thought you were making a tasteless joke, but by the time I got to the end of your post, it sounds like you're actually serious.)
I'm not one for flaming people, but you sound like a bit of a nut. To say that parents cause their kids cancers by "sucking on them", as opposed to environmental factors is ridiculous and dangerously ignorant. You sound like you come straight out of the dark ages. I bet you miss the days when you could have a good old witch burning. Sorry if my flaming burns you at the stake.
I'm the odd man out in an even number of participants
Sure beats 0 out of 17. Even when we do treat a cancer, it (almost) always comes back given sufficient time.
If the cancer cells weren't so sneaky and/or the immune systems was doing its job right, the cancer would've been killed before it became a problem.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
My father was diagnosed with Melanoma 3 weeks ago. He underwent surgery but it came back less than a week later. It's now inoperable. I don't know what his next steps are (I don't think he wants to talk to me about this).
Does anyone know how you can go about 'applying' to be in this test? I'm going to send him the article, but I was hoping to have more info.