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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.
Here's the absctract for the original article. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to see the whole thing.
2 9003v1
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Here's it in geek terms:
Just think of it as a hard reboot for your immune system. Then the newly developed anti-badthingys can go after what has infested your system
Cliff Claven
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Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
(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).
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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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.