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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 ....
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 :)
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The nanoparticles have a component that attaches to the transferrin receptor on the surface of a cancer cell. Transferrin receptors are highly abundant on cancer cells because iron (what transferrin carries) is needed for cell division processes. Coincidentally, this is a fact I learned the first time this story was posted a few days ago.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
How about Nature?
1. Start smoking, paying $$$ for cigs
2. Get cancer
3. Pay $$$ for an operation to remove cancer cells
4. ???
5. Profit ?!?
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).
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.
How else would you define targeting in this context other than to mean only binding to cancerous cells? It seems you are implying that targeting can only refer to conscious 'aiming', but that is only a subset of things that can be considered targeted.
Targeted can mean 'select as an object of attention or attack'. That is what they are doing when the design a drug.. selecting cancer cells for attack, and then designing the drug so it will only effect those cells. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_design
Targeted drugs DO mean something specific in pharmacology.
Of course they do: ENHANCE!
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Great post. But please, can we stop using effect as a verb?
No. We only need to effect such a change such that people stop using the verb "to effect" incorrectly.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.