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First Anti-Cancer Nanoparticle Trial On Humans a Success
An anonymous reader writes "Nanoparticles have been able to disable cancerous cells in living human bodies for the first time. The results are perfect so far, killing tumors with no side effects whatsoever. Mark Davis, project leader at CalTech, says that 'it sneaks in, evades the immune system, delivers the siRNA, and the disassembled components exit out.' Truly amazing."
... to start smoking ....
How do they direct them into tumor cells?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This is science, not magic.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Well, what's meaningful is that they all didn't up and die, and that a bigger round of testing is to go forward.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The point of the study is to make sure that people don't explode when the procedure is performed, or for something similarly unpleasant to happen--it's a Phase I study, not a real effectiveness trial.
From comments on TFA, "The Lab" writes: "a science editor would be more capable of pointing out what is really exciting here, which is the ability to stop cells from producing a given protein."
I think the cancer aspect is great (if it works) but this has potential for curing a whole host of diseases.
Now we just need to figure out how to change people's DNA on the fly.
Not to mention there are now at least 15 extremely happy people out there :)
...
Gizmodo? Call me when a reputable publication reports on this.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Well I can finally go to California, everything is known to cause cancer in California,
Or "its known to the State of California to cause cancer".
I could never figure it out, so I just stay away from California.
Nanotechnology, huh?
And here I had all my money on the Murai vaccine.
As long as the subjects have the same distribution as the population, this sample can be considered representative of the population. This means that they didn't pick 15 terminal patients and didn't pick 15 100%-survival-rate patients. You can achieve quite a lot when your sample is well selected.
Can we now laugh at all that silliness that smoking cigarettes leads to death? I can't wait till Camel gets in on the cancer killin' business.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
It's a phase-I trial, it only confirms safety already established in animal models and kinetics. Phase-II and phase-III trials, much larger in scale, assess efficacy and optimum dosing. That will tell us if this can be more effective than traditional chemotherapy (possible) and monoclonal chemotherapy (much more difficult to predict).
This is so much win, I can hardly stand it. And I never thought I'd see the day when they'd be able to find something to kill this cancer trash. We all live in very interesting times.
All that will accomplish is to fill the world with beautiful, bisexual nympho women who still aren't interested in you...
I cannot see anything meaningful coming from such a small sample size. It has potential but obviously much more research is needed.
You can't just jump from rats to tens of thousands of humans. That's why the sample size is 15. That's why it's a Phase I trial. There are four phases of clinical pharmaceutical testing that follow preclinical (animals, in vitro, etc.) testing. Phase I normally tests a treatment in healthy humans in order to see the negative effects of the treatment (this is not necessarily the case in cancer treatments because all cancer treatments have significant negative effects). Phase I trials are only a couple dozen people, max. Successful Phase I trials allow for Phase II trials. These usually have one or two hundred people with the disease the therapy is intended to treat. In Phase II, they are mainly gathering pharmacokinetic data (half life, metabolism, volume of distribution, etc.). Phase III is where you start to see the trials you're clamoring for. These are typically done in several thousand patients, all with the disease in question. These trials are placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind studies (the hallmark of research). Statistical analysis then allows you to determine if the therapy was effective in improving outcomes. If so, the drug goes to the FDA. 30 days later, it is officially on the market. Phase IV studies begin here, and continue perpetually. They are called post-marketing surveillance, and they study long-term effects (because previous trials are not long enough to do this), as well as very rare adverse effects (where the sample size in previous trials may have been too small to correctly detect the progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy that occurs in 0.1% of patients treated).
So don't claim the study size wasn't big enough - it wasn't supposed to be. Phase III trials are what you want. Phase I and II trials are of no interest to anyone outside of health professions, really.
Please stop pluralizing words with an apostrophe. That is not what it is there for.
Of course they do: ENHANCE!
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
You'd have to engineer particles that target a specific vital tissue (and stop thinking "brain", because the blood-brain barrier would block that), and then deliver a piece of siRNA that silences an essential gene for that tissue. You'd also have to inject enough of these into the person to have this effect. Still, it could be useful to replace the siRNA entirely with some kind of toxin (it would be nearly undetectable, because it wouldn't linger in the bloodstream).
Who cares how the particles get inside the cancer cells? Does it matter if we use microscopic needles and inject every single cancer cell or just throw a bunch of square pegs at square holes and hope for the best?
The end result is that the medicine winds up where it should be, and doesn't seem to be accumulating where it shouldn't.
BTW, in the above referenced Nature article it says this:
When the components are mixed together in water, they assemble into particles about 70 nanometres in diameter. The researchers can then administer the nanoparticles into the bloodstream of patients, where the particles circulate until they encounter 'leaky' blood vessels that supply the tumours with blood. The particles then pass through the vessels to the tumour, where they bind to the cell and are then absorbed.
So maybe that counts as targeted. Maybe not. I don't care either way - it works, regardless of semantics.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...everything is known to cause cancer in California...
Are you saying that this nano thingy will consume the whole state?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Could come in the water supply along with fluoride you already get. Maybe not in the USA, but some nation on this planet will think it's a good idea.
Politicians get special bottled water to enhance their genome however.
Life is not for the lazy.
I quit yesterday :-(
.
Abraxis has been around for, literally, years.
That's what fluoride is for, silly!
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
> everything is known to cause cancer in California... I could never figure it out, so I just stay away from California.
Everything says it causes cancer because of Proposition 65. Basically, if something in California is known to cause cancer (even only if ingested by the ton), you have to label it, or lawyers can sue you under a "private attorney general" law. In theory it might be a good idea, but it was implemented so that the defendant has the burden of showing that it's basically impossible to the nth degree that the thing could cause cancer in the quantities you're talking about.
This resulted in a lot of litigation where basically lawyers went around everywhere and said "Oh! You have flame-retardant furniture! Did you know it can cause cancer if you lick it?" "You're a dentist! You use drugs that can cause cancer if you administer them for a week and you didn't post a notice!"
This resulted in a plethora of notices to prevent lawsuits--notices which the public ignores because they're on everything. So in the cases where the warning is actually important, it gets ignored because there are so many.
IIRC, there have been some efforts by the AG (and some courts) to limit abuse.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
This is science, not magic.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke
Break out the cuban cigars and pass me a diet Pepsi... sure you can smoke 'em if you got em! Cancer, smancer.... i eat urea formaldehyde foam insulation for breakfast!
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Since currently if you have metastasis most of the time it's incurable.(If you're lucky you'll just be a chronic cancer victim.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13334
If you cannot spell Caltech properly - please turn in your nerd card.
Thanks for the overview of the clinical trials procedure. You clearly know a lot about it. One thing I wanted to point out is that while placebo-controlled designs are probably the most reliable, in many contexts (including a cancer treatment) it would be unethical to give patients a placebo (i.e. a treatment expected to do nothing) rather than a treatment that might actually help them.
Basically, if there is a treatment that is known to be at least somewhat effective, that's your control rather than a placebo. It might be that the definition of placebo has shifted to include any standard non-experimental treatment, but that would be news to me.
"Preceded by itself yields falsehood" preceded by itself yields falsehood.
"it sneaks in, evades the immune system..."
Um, this doesn't catch anyone else as potentially really scary? What else might (now or eventually) sneak in and evade the immune system along with it?
Not that it's relevant to anything, but Hollywood touched on this subject a few years ago.
Phase III trials in this situation would assess the efficacy of this treatment relative to the current standard of care. The whole point of phase III is to figure out whether the drug is at least as effective as the current standard and, as you correctly state, it would be medically unethical to administer a placebo treatment to a cancer patient.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Wonderful. Now that we can destroy cancer cells, where can I sign up to have my telemeres refreshed? I'm not getting any younger here... yet.
Hey, you really want to fight obesity, kill the corn subsidies so that we stop having high fructose corn syrup in fucking everything. That would be way more effective than unbanning ephedrine.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
And that time they spelled Caltech correctly!
Sir, the man was killed by tiny Nano particles
Hmmm, I guess...
In the end...
It is the little things that matter
There is no -1 disagree
it's got siRNA, it's what plants crave!
I didn't see any indication that the nano-particles are self-replicating, or capable of spreading from one person to another, so you'd need to inject each target individually. It's probably easier just to shoot them.
Plus, if I understand correctly, cultural conceptions of race don't map very well to genetic differences. So finding a race-specific gene to target might be harder than you'd think.
http://ingresstech.com/~bernard/instantCSI/
This is not the funny you're looking for.