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Scientists Find Master Gene To Switch On Immune Cells
Scientists claim to have identified a master gene which is able to transform blood stem cells into disease-fighting immune cells. The hope is that this discovery will allow for new treatments for cancer. "The researchers have 'knocked out' the gene in question, known as E4bp4, in a mouse model, creating the world's first animal model entirely lacking NK cells, but with all other blood cells and immune cells intact. This breakthrough model should help solve the mystery of the role that Natural Killer cells play in autoimmune diseases, such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Some scientists think that these diseases are caused by malfunctioning NK cells that turn on the body and attack healthy cells, causing disease instead of fighting it. Clarifying NK cells' role could lead to new ways of treating these conditions."
I doubt it. Chances are this will be used for warfare.
I recall reading somewhere that there will never be a proper 'cure" for cancer because of the nature of our cell reproduction processes.
That said, why is it everything is a "cure for cancer"? The hyperbole has gotten way old.
I suppose this just gives them more data to work with in clarifying how the system operates and how it can be tweaked to produce desired outcomes.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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The real Nature article is here : http://www.nature.com/ni/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ni.1787.html
Nature Immunology Published online: 13 September 2009 | doi:10.1038/ni.1787
The basic leucine zipper transcription factor E4BP4 is essential for natural killer cell development
NB: E4BP4 is the mouse name for Human NFIL3 ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/4783 )
From the "discussion" section ...
E4BP4 has been shown to regulate circadian gene expression and to be induced by light in the chick pineal gland, where it regulates the pineal clock gene cPer2 (ref. 24). Several studies have shown that the degree of NK cell cytotoxicity is circadian in both rodents and human38, 39. It is plausible that as E4BP4 is critical for NK development, it may also serve a central role in regulating the circadian nature of NK cell function.
From the article, its apparent that they have found a gene which is critical to the production of NK cells and its absence doesn't interfere with production of other cell types. That gives them the ability to turn NK production off, but its not a given that this is the only gene required for NK production to work. It's not even a good assumption that this doesn't have any other side effects, although obviously those side effects are not immediately lethal.
Apart from that you're exaggerating, YOU LIVE! I'm sure doctors world-wide will be very happy to give a cancer patient as many blood transfusions as he needs after this treatment, if it dramatically improves the chances he survives.
Seriously, if this has no benefits towards a cancer cure, I don't care...
Because it looks like a promising step towards helping auto-immune disorders.
Cancer either kills you, or you live...
auto-immune, you live, and suffer, and live, and suffer, and live (goddamn it).
I've known people with auto-immune disorders for over 25 years,
And it's only NOW that some of these disorders are even being recognized as a disease.
(coming in from the fringe to "real" medicine).
I have eczema.
Yeah, doesn't really sound bad does it.
Imagine having the skin on your fingers swell and split open, and your forearms be red and "popeye-ish" and they just radiate heat.
I've been lucky enough to figure out some of the triggers for it (MSG and onions, mainly), but it never quite goes away, except when I get a hard cold/flu, then it totally clears up.
Too many auto-immune disorders are still considered to be "all in the head".
Hopefully this helps bring them more mainstream attention.
Now I can get leucemia AND cytokine storm at the same time!
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"How To Make Science Popular Again?"
"Scientists Find Master Gene To Switch On Immune Cells"
Hey, that works!
Audioscrobbler
I'm sure doctors world-wide will be very happy to give a cancer patient as many blood transfusions as he needs after this treatment
Sounds like a big-pharma solution, turn the patient into a permanent revenue stream. It seems like a bone marrow transplantation would be a more appropriate and permanent solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transplantation
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
E4BP4 has been shown to regulate circadian gene expression and to be induced by light in the chick pineal gland, where it regulates the pineal clock gene cPer2 (ref. 24). Several studies have shown that the degree of NK cell cytotoxicity is circadian in both rodents and human ... . It is plausible that as E4BP4 is critical for NK development, it may also serve a central role in regulating the circadian nature of NK cell function.
And this may also lead to treatments modulating the production of NT cells by exposing the body to intense light, perhaps of some particular wavelength, or shielding it from light.
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And now I'm waiting for the "discovery" that this gene is activated by the vast amount of sugars and starchy stuff we eat...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Stop rejecting organs, stop all the Auto-Immune diseases (like say Lupus, Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus, Multiple Sclerosis, etc)
Sure Aids and cancer get all the big money, but the overly active immune systems are harder to fight because it is your own body you are fighting.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There will be many missteps, before or even if the promise is realized.
Turning on a gene to start antibody production could have the unintended consequence of starting an autoimmune attack of the patient's own body. Moreover, as others have observed Cancer is neither a single disease nor do the same or similar uncontained growths in differing individuals arise from the same cause.
Be optimistic, but expect failures and less than the full promise to appear. And quickly is even more unlikely, when we have too little experience and too little factual basis to fully predicate those hopes.
creating the world's first animal model entirely lacking NK cells
Lab Rat 2.0?
It seems like a bone marrow transplantation would be a more appropriate and permanent solution.
If it seems like that, I suggest you take a deeper look at the situation.
First, let's realize that the scneario of a patient becoming permanently medicine-dependent as a result of the type of treatment described in TFA is entirely speculation on the part of a /. poster. We don't know whether a treatment based on this protein would have side effects, and while this postulated side effect may sound intuitive to you, it sounds extremely far-fetched to me.
Then consider that, as your own link points out, the treatment you're suggesting has significant risks - so much so that it's only used in severe situations.
I'm also curious how you know, before any specific treatment has been developed and tested, that any case where such treatment would be applied is also a case that bone marrow transplantation could address, even if the risks and benefits were as you portray them.
Why on earth is every article about biotech tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"?
Diabetes (type I) and MS are caused through the adaptive immune system, i.e. antibodies, _not_ NK cells.
this sig is useless
No no no.. you UNLIVE! and get regular transfusions via fangs!
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
I get cancer, get the treatment, but now need blood transfusions because all of my blood cells have been turned into immune cells and I have no more cells to carry oxygen around my body.
Except the blood cells that are NK cells are white blood cells, they don't carry oxygen to other cells. The cells that carry oxygen are red blood cells. It's the fe, iron, in the cells that bind to oxygen which then forms ferrous oxide. And the ferrous oxide is what makes the red blood cells red. Just like corroded iron, rust, is red.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"What researchers did here was to shut off a critical component of the immune systems in a conscious species other than humans. This kind of research should only be done on human volunteers, since it is highly likely to result a miserable death in the subject if successful."
Nice troll. One, it's a mouse. Mice don't count as "conscious", unless you mean "not asleep". Two, concluding that it should be done on humans is obviously trolltastic- it doesn't even manage to be wrong, it's so confused.
Not to mention hayfever and various allergies. It would be nice to be able to turn down the sensitivity of the body to foreign bodies from time to time.
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I'm wondering if when you get the cold/flu, your adrenaline response increases and suppresses a histamine reaction to clear up the inflammation. If that's the case, you could try taking over-the-counter Claritin to see if it helps at least with the itching.
You might disagree, I expect that the majority of people would, but that doesn't make it a troll.
As for "conscious", it didn't seem to me that AC was saying that mice should have the right to vote or anything, just that they're clearly capable of feeling pain and fear, so we shouldn't do things that will basically torture them to death even if it's for some purpose we find useful.
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Just in case anyone cares to hear from someone who has hands-on experience with mouse colony care in a research environment, but the mice aren't tortured/made to feel suffering as much as animal rights activists would have you believe. Mice, in our facility at least, are usually euthanized via cervical dislocation, which is really quick, and the mouse doesn't realize it's even happening before its done. Usually they're put to sleep via gas first, so they're not even conscious when the procedure is performed. While they're being cared for they're well fed, and pain management is taken very seriously. Anesthetics before/during procedures, analgesics and other medications are prescribed and administered by licensed vets/animal techs, and any violation of rules which compromise the care/humane conditions of any animals is taken extremely seriously. Animal rights is such a touchy subject with some people, but if most people knew how much effort and money goes into making sure research animals are well-cared for they'd realize their attentions would be put to better use elsewhere, like zoos which mistreat their animals or people who leave their dogs in the car during summer...
I've been suffering for my entire life (ok only 3 or 4 months at a stretch once every 10 years), with freaking autoimmune disease (white blood cells attacking my dermis, giving me Guttate Psoriasis). The Novo-Clobetasol knocks it out, but this time its all over my hands and feet (a pain to look at, it hurts, and gives me a nice little shot of Psoriatic Arthritis). Its not the end of the world, what I have is the least life-threatening autoimmune disease, and the arthritis is the second-least life-threatening autoimmune disease. My neighbor died of Multiple Sclerosis about 2 years ago, was in a wheel chair for 5 years before that, and in a lot of pain for 5 years before that. My grandmother suffered with diabetes for years. In retrospect, I'm lucky. With this news, more so.
Turning on and off a gene does not turn on and off a single function. It deploys, or not, the set of interdependent processes whose outcome is an organism with said function.
A knockout is by definition the turning off of a gene. In fact a better metaphor is the 'removal of a switch', that in all likelihood will operate in a bunch of processes, hierarchically dependent on each other, with complex and unforeseen consequences.
The fact that the scientists can find 'statistical significance' in the correlation between the presence of a function and a gene says nothing about the process by which that function is begotten. That would be the more interesting question, as usual side stepped. An appropriate tag would be 'correlationnotcausation'.
They did not find how to make an immune cell. They found how to break the ones we have. There are probably multiple genes that will break that cell. Viruses found them, so will we. But we, being a tad smarter than viruses, had a bit of responsibility to understand our problem a little further.
The headlines of the next article in slashdot is 'how to make science popular again'. Starting out by reframing the findings, to bring back the ages when science was honest, transparent, earnest and genuinely interested in understanding.
Q: What's purple and works from home? A: A non-Abelian group. (It doesn't commute.)
This sounds like a dangerous experiment that could result in zombies roaming about and killing or infecting us all.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
No I don't. That I'm aware of I'm not allergic to anything others aren't also allergic to. Heck as a kid I had an immunity to poison ivy, I guess because I frequently contacted it.
I know 4 people know who had chronic eczema for years who eliminated gluten and their eczema went away within a few weeks.
I don't avoid food with gluten in it but I'll been seeing more and more food labeled gluten free.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?