Slashdot Mirror
New Treatment Trains Immune System To Kill Cancer
Al writes "A vaccine in clinical trials at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine triggers the human immune system to attack a faulty protein that's often abundant in colorectal cancer tissue and precancerous tissue. If it works as hoped, it could remove the need for repeated colonoscopies in patients at high risk for developing colorectal cancer. The vaccine has already proven safe in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. It works by spurring the body to manufacture antibodies against the abnormal version of a mucous protein called MUC1. While moderate amounts of the protein are found in the lining of normal intestines, high levels of a defective form of MUC1 are present in about half of advanced adenomas and the majority of colorectal cancers."
While I laud this development - we have had multiple form of immune therapy for cancer - including tumor vaccines, cancer antigen vaccines, immunostimulatory drugs, and anti-tolerance drugs for years now. There are some responders, but this field has generally been a disappointment. here's to hoping we eventually figure out how to harness this approach.
... a Scoobie snack? Who's a good immune cell? Yes you are! You are!
kicks ass!
How does one participate in the study?
Oh, wait. Never mind.
Won't this only provide selective pressure for those mutant cells to make another variant of Mucin1? That is exactly how aggressive cancers form in the first place.
Disclaimer: My wife is a therapeutic radiographer. She treats cancer patients all day long. What I've posted here is what I understand from her, which may be completely wrong because I'm not qualified to understand everything she says.
If you were to believe the press, a cure for cancer is found on average 2-4 times a year. Except it isn't, for a number of reasons:
1. The "cure" is usually in the early stages of trials. Sometimes it hasn't even been taken out of the test tube and put into any living creature. (This is one of the better articles in that respect - it seems like the initial clinical trials to test whether or not it'll do any harm in humans have been passed)
2. There's no such thing as a generic cure for cancer because there's no such thing as a generic cancer. There are dozens, if not hundreds of different types. Some tend to grow very quickly, others more slowly. Some tend to spread to other parts of the body, others don't. Some we know the main causes of, others we have no idea. Some are easy to treat and have a high success rate, others rather less so.
This is good news because by and large the cancers which are easy to detect (and therefore tend to get treated early) are the ones which are fairly easy for a lay person to spot something wrong - think skin, breast, testicle. Cancers of internal organs which are able to function for some time with little noticeable impairment (eg. liver) are far more likely to be detected too late.
Hence a more effective treatment for something like bowel cancer is definitely a Very Good Thing.
Right. A revolutionary diet therapy. Someone trying to cure cancer by non-medicinal means. So he is practising medicine without being a doctor? There is a name for that: quack. And people like you that (pretend to) believe in it and preach its blessings are instrumental for mr Gersons paycheck.
There is a very good reason alternative medicine is not accepted: it does not work. If you want it to be accepted medically; do the legwork and prove that it works in reproducible double blind tests. If you just want to make a living deceiving other people, you post references on the internets.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
So what if it's in clinical trials.... You actually think a pharmaceutical company will release a drug like this?
that could potientially "cure" cancer or be a step toward curing?
They will just buy it for millions from the Tech who made it and keep it in their vault like every other "Cure" drug they have.
The amount of money they will lose from selling 1 drug that will cure 1 disease will cripple their company. Right now for that disease I bet there are 5-10 drugs given out to 1 person which is $$$ in the bank.
and remember:
C.R.E.A.M (Cash rules everything around me)
what was the last cure that came out?
if it's in clinical trials? Maybe it won't pan out, but it is a physical product.
. We can do stuff like this, but we can't -or won't- guarantee healthcare for all. Sick. .
blog me no blogs
A little note about the "months of life" number reported for cancer treatments. It's usually small, like the three months you mentioned. But these treatments are also effective in only a fraction of patients, often on the order of one in four. So for the lucky person in whom the treatment works, that's actually a year of extra life.
If we could predict which treatments would work in which patients, rather than just trying every treatment for the cancerous body part, we would be talking about more substantial improvements and avoid wasting time and suffering subjecting non-responders to inappropriate treatments.
This article is one of the most accurate reports on cancer treatment I've seen. Even the Slashdot title and summary avoid suggesting it's a cure for all cancers. They're very clear that it's a vaccine for colon cancer to prevent progression to cancer in people already at high risk.
There are lots of immunotherapies at various stages of development and testing. I'm considering one myself for a colon cancer that escaped my colon long ago. I wouldn't have been a candidate for this Pittsburgh MUC1 trial since my cancer developed without warning or risk factors. But, as the article mentioned, there are many trials trying to treat established tumors by training the immune system to recognize abnormal proteins on the cancer cells.
The trial I'm applying for is scary as feck. They collect immune cells from your bloodstream, genetically engineer them to recognize the target protein, and culture them up to large numbers. Meanwhile they knock out your immune system with poisons so the modified cells will survive and hopefully reproduce without competition or attacks from your normal immune cells. Then, hopefully, the modified cells attack the cancer cells and your general immune function also returns before a common bug runs amok and kills you. Not fun, but probably my best remaining option if my present course of radiation therapy doesn't do the trick.
They've had some success with a similar treatment for skin cancer, but they're just starting to try it on colon cancer and have no idea how safe or effective it will be. So don't be surprised that these cures seems just around the corner, year after year. Medical science is some of the messiest, slowest, costliest, and riskiest technology known to man.
Hey wait I saw this movie with Will Smith! Isn't this how "I am Legend" starts?
I underwent the experimental treatment in 1994 at the age of 17- I had Melanoma that had metastasized to my lymph nodes. Each doctor I spoke with basically said I'd be dead.
You'll note the year- 1994- and it is now 2009. I'm celebrating my 15 year anniversary of having my 'face lift' and 7 hours of surgery to remove all of the cancer, salivary gland, neck muscles, and lymph nodes from the right half of my head. My wrestling career is over (it never got off the ground, hahaha!) but I'm alive.
Not only that, I've lived long enough to get married and have a daughter.
Was the treatment effective? Hard to say. I certainly reacted during the treatment- a couple of irradiated cancer cells and some crab blood had a MASSIVE reaction on my body- I could barely move the day after each injection. I was told that the treatment wasn't promising and that no further trials were done.
So, having been through it- I'll tell you that I believe it worked in my case. I also gained super human resistance to colds and flus afterwards for about 5 years.... unfortunately since my wife and I have had our little 'germ factory' I know now that I'm paying for that immunity with every cold I've gotten since.
(I did have one side effect- tooth pain. Excruciating, body numbing, on the floor curled up in fetal position tooth pain. Just give me the pliers already)
I'm no expert, but wouldn't prompting the immune system to attack the lining of the intestine basically be intentionally-induced inflammatory bowel disease? IBD increases the risk of colon cancer...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
There are zero blinded tests -- let alone double blind tests -- demonstrating the effectiveness of surgery.
I call bullshit. Here's one:
http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT00042081
Prevention of Autogenous Vein Graft Failure in Coronary Artery Bypass Procedures
Study Design: Prevention, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo Control, Single Group Assignment, Safety/Efficacy Study
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00042081
Try Googling randomized controlled trial surgery
The term surgeons use is not "placebo" but "sham surgery".
They use sham surgery when they can, but they can't use sham surgery that would be unreasonably harmful to the patient. It may be OK to thread a catheter into somebody's coronary arteries and squirt saline, but nobody is going to ask a patient to undergo abdominal or chest surgery, with a mortality of 1% or even 0.1%, just to satisfy somebody's idea of a perfect scientific design.
1-sentence course in medical ethics: A doctor can't do anything to a patient that wouldn't benefit the patient.
The days of using prisoners, negroes, Jews, Chinese and Puerto Ricans as experimental subjects are long gone.
There's been a lot of progress towards evidence-based medicine in the last generation of surgeons. Most surgeons put their patients' welfare first, understand science better than most people on Slashdot, and spend a lot of effort figuring out what the scientific evidence is for alternative procedures. I've seen them in some gloves-off debates at surgery conferences. Of course there are surgeons who are out first to make a buck, but that's the price of a free market.
I don't know where you get your facts from. At least go to Wikipedia.
Oh not to mention it took place in the Fall of 2009... Well I guess we better get used to zombie vampires without cancer!