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Cancer Resistance Technique Moves To Human Trials
TaeKwonDood tips us to news that a new cancer resistance treatment is going into clinical trials after being quite successful at eradicating cancer in mice. Researchers discovered that certain white blood cells called granulocytes from cancer-immune mice were able to cure cancer in other mice. Now, doctors are putting out the call for healthy granulocyte donors in order to test how well it works on humans. The article quotes lead researcher Zheng Cui saying, "In mice, we've been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors. Hopefully, we will see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans."
This strikes me as a kind of fast-track immunization, i.e. getting the relevant antibodies into a person's immune system quickly before an infection can take hold. Rather than having to spend time developing the relevant treatment, simply borrow from another human who already has the necessary lymphocytes. Nice!
I'm aware of the correlation between infection and various cancers - I had Hodgkins Lymphoma a few years ago myself.
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The new plasma. Pay $20 bucks per donation and winos everywhere will be happy to donate, so long as they have the right granulocytes.
Invenio via vel creo
Definitely glad to see this story. It's the first of a number of techniques to reach clinical trials that actually show real promise.
I don't qualify as a patient participant as I still respond to conventional therapy. Hopefully they'll still be conducting trials if that changes, or will have expanded them to include patients who are still being treated conventionally.
It'll definitely be interesting to see the results if they expand trials to include patients with aggressive tumors. The patient requirements, while not explicitly saying so, eliminate consideration of such patients. Once you no longer respond to therapy treating an aggressive cancer, the likelihood of having a > 6 month survival rating is basically nil (thus disqualifying you from the study). I can understand the rationale to not unnecessarily skew the initial trial results when they can get good data from patients with less aggressive cancers, but if/when the trials go after the fast killers it will definitely show the true potential of this particular cancer weapon.
Here's to hoping for positive results. The other nice thing about this therapy is that, since it is not drug-based, it is not locked up by one single pharmaceutical company. Hooray for open source medical therapies.
People who protest against using animals for testing new drugs or therapies would be well advised to take note of how this advance relied on years of animal research. While unnecessary cruelty to animals is to be abhorred (and yes there may be times when suffering is necessary) this shows that the rewards may be significant.
It's interesting that (much of) the scientific community and christian fundamentalists agree upon this point. It's due to the christian fundamentalists' view that God gave Man dominion over all the animals; not because of any appreciation or understanding on their part of the scientific method.
If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago, your chances were much better than ten years ago. Etc. The general public loses interest when a promising new treatment turns out not to be The! Cure! For! Cancer!, but yes, research does make its way from the lab to the bedside. Probably no new medicine or treatment technique will ever cure all cancer, but there's a good chance it will take care of a significant portion of a certain type of cancers -- which is, of course, of infinite interest to those diagnosed with that particular disease.
Supporting evidence of how far we've come:
Every single person I have personally known that has had cancer (several people), was able to take care of the issue. This amazed me because in all cases I had the 1990s based feeling that cancer = death. I am slowly coming to realize that unless a person finds out way way late, their chances are pretty good nowadays.
I've heard of others that have died from cancer, but nobody I personally knew, and definitely not as frequent as the successes that must be happening.
...but I think that cancer is likely to be triggered by some psychological conditions. Well, it might not be the *only* cause, but certainly the psychological aspect should never be underestimated when dealing with *any* illness.
Depression is certainly associated with increased mortality. There have been studies linking psychological states to subsequent cancer incidence, but their findings have been mixed.
The negative physical effects of perceived loneliness has had almost no attention in the scientific literature (as opposed to clinical depression, which gets a lot). I know this because I've recently been looking as part of my own research programme. I'm planning a study of the adverse effects of loneliness in the elderly, and I'm hoping to be able to separate the effects of loneliness and depression caused by neuronal changes, which is surprisingly hard in the clinical setting.
"If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago your chances were much better than ten years ago."
This is exactly what I told my father when he was diagnosed 2 years ago w/ stage 3 lymphoma. He's still around and doing well thanks to the hard work of these researchers.
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Recently, several people, in clinical trials, have been cured!! from metastatic (widespread) malignant melanoma - which is usually a 1-2 year death sentence after it has metastasized.
Many childhood leukemias have a 80% survival rate, whereas 30 years ago it was a 80% death rate.
Osteogenic and Ewings sarcoma (primary bone cancers) now has an 80% 5 year survival rate, 20 years ago it was a 20% 5 year survival rate. Now, 90-95% of the kids I operate on now get to keep their arms and legs with artificial bones. 30 years ago, they mostly had amputations.
Much of the advances have been from improved detection (MRI/CT/PET scans), and newer chemotherapies - ALL which have been based on animal research (F U PETA!)
Many scientists and MDs feel that immuno-therapy (using the bodies own immune system to fight/kill the cancer) will be the most fruitful research, and probably the most successful in the long run.
..........FULL STOP.
Cancer is already a big umbrella funding source for research. You're researching a gene involved in embryonic bone development? Bad news: there may or may not be a "bone development association" and even if there is they're not going to give you much money to research it. Good news: there is a very good chance the gene is involved in cancer and you'll probably be able to get some money from some cancer fund.
If people stop donating money to cancer research because it's cured, it's going to decrease funding to a lot of areas that are only tangentially involved in cancer but have huge potential for human health. Trying to get people to donate to studies involving things that can't be explained with one word will be impossible.
Not to say of course that cancer shouldn't be cured, just that it's going to slow other research.
A better title would probably be, "Scientists test to make sure that interesting cancer treatment idea doesn't kill human subjects." This appears to be a Stage I clinical trial of an interesting idea, that is at least somewhat biologically plausible. I haven't fully reviewed the pulished data, so I don't feel comfortable saying more than that. However, most of us who work in biology and medicine would agree that our understanding of the immune system is still relatively primitive, so there may be potential cures still lurking in plain site. However, Stage I trials are only the very initial trials in humans - and they evaluate safety as the primary outcome; i.e, trying to make sure we're not going to kill anyone. Stage II trials would attempt to evaluate appropriate dosing, and Stage III trials attempt to compare the new therapy to currently accepted standards. While this may be a breakthrough (and all of us in medicine are always looking for breakthroughs), there are also huge lists of ideas that worked really well in mice, moved on to Stage I, II, and III clinical trials, and failed utterly. This is extremely far from being any sort of cancer cure at this point - though perhaps 20 years from now we'll look back at this as a step towards that goal. I think it's always interesting to hear
While not exactly what you are talking about, a psychology study found no connection between a positive attitude and survival rates among a sample of patients with head and neck cancers: Article
That's not to say attitude is unimportant in general. It does affect quality of life, which is important to enjoying whatever time you have left. It just doesn't determine how much time you get.
It to me even seems to be a bit of blaming the victim for the disease.
Blaming the victim? Well let's see here... To use a much more obvious and practical example, if someone fails to take care of their teeth, and said teeth proceed to rot out of their sockets, is it the "victim's" fault? Yes! Someone sits on their ass and eats junk food for years on end and winds up morbidly obese and possibly acquires heart conditions as a result, should we "blame the victim"? Yes!
Not saying I'm convinced of GP's speculations about mental health affecting cancer onset, but yes, people's actions and behaviors drastically affect their own health and yes, in some cases, it is their own fault.
So let's suppose for the sake of argument that in time research shows a definite causal link between cancer and mental state. That would not be "blaming the victim", it'd be simple cause and effect. Obviously this would be much less obvious an effect than the more commonly known results of not taking care of one's teeth, or not getting proper exercise and eating all the wrong foods, but once the information is known, it'd be up to the individual to do something about the problem as a form of prevention.
Admittedly I do have a somewhat emotional involvement in the situation (I suppose according to the GP's logic I should worried about cancer myself now :-P), but there is evidence that the amount of pollution these companies produce can and do seriously affect the health of individuals who live around them. I provided the links as an illustration of this, so you may want to go back and follow them. I'll even provide you with another, just to drive home my point. As far as having no reason to suspect it wasn't natural, you can't seriously ask me to believe that lead levels like that are normal. Why do you think they don't use lead paint anymore? There is far, far more evidence pointing to pollution causing (some, not all) cancer than there is for any kind of traumatic psychological events that the GP is blathering about.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
One interesting theory related to this is the Grandmother Hypothesis, which states that menopause was a trait that was selected through evolution because infant humans who had post-menopausal grandmothers to look after them had higher survival rates than those whose grandmothers were still reproducing, and therefore less available to help out with their grandchildren.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Not to be rude or insensitive, but being filled full of chemicals that cause cancer is obviously an alternative method of getting cancer.
As is swimming at "Chernobyl lake".
It does not therefore follow that people "spontaneously" getting cancer may not be effected by state of mind. It does not mean that someone can be "Mr Happy" and not get cancer spontaneously also.
It all about percentages.
I am sorry your bro died so young dude. That just sucks. Doubly so if it WAS from such poisoning.
And did you know that there was absolutely NO Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research BEFORE Bush? You act as if he cut off funding that was already there! Bullshit.
He did cut funding that was already there just not up front, he did it around back. He made it a crime to share resources between programs.
So, unlike all other kinds of research, if you wanted to do embryonic stem cell research you had to draw a bright white dividing line around your facilities. In many cases this required entirely separate buildings just for stem cell research. In other words, Bush made it so that any idle resources purchased by other programs must remain idle rather than be used opportunistically by any embryonic stem cell researchers, and absolutely no pooling of money to buy and share 1 larger faster, more efficient piece of hardware over 2 smaller, cheaper and dedicated slower pieces of hardware. That is if they wanted to keep the federal funding for any of those other non-controversial programs.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"How about a retrospective study of blood transfusion recipients? Shouldn't this population, on average, have a lower incidence of cancer relative to a comparable control population?"
Not if you could get cancer from someone else along with their blood.
Which won't be surprising since if you're getting a transfusion:
1) You're probably not in good shape in the first place.
2) Your immune system isn't supposed to be going "Red Alert!" and blasting away what you just got transfused with.