Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Cancer Agent Stops Metastasis In Its Tracks
Anomalyst writes "Mice were implanted with cancer. The control group died as tumors metastasized. The experimental group was treated with macroketone and survived a normal lifespan. While the cancer was not cured, metastasis was significantly (over 80%) inhibited. Even after metastasis had begun and additional cancers developed, macroketone inhibited subsequent metastasis. The original article is in Nature behind a paywall."
This post is a thank you for your contribution. It is heartfelt.
Cancer is bad. Implanting cancer into mice is bad for the mice. But it is good for humans.
Because we hate mice.
Since the side effects don't appear to significantly increase mortality this should obviously be given an immediate fastrack for human trials and should get to Phase III ASAP.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So does this mean there is no harm in smoking a celebratory cigar?
Thank God! Mice of the world can now sleep easy at night.
I know you need funding, but could you please not sell your research to publishing companies that have paywalls like this? There are open-access peer-reviewed journals for many fields nowadays.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
... to save my father
...it's a great day to be a mouse!
See also http://www.physorg.com/news190482866.html
... a cousin of mine just submitted and got approved for a article on leukemia research in Nature and I don't think he regrets the fact that is behind a pay wall: it's success.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Nature 464, 1062-1066 (15 April 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08978; Received 24 September 2009; Accepted 4 March 2010 Migrastatin analogues target fascin to block tumour metastasis
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
Wonder drug could save human lives left, right, and center. FDA won't approve it without decades of testing because it's "too risky" to try an experimental drug out on patients who are likely to die anyway. Film at 11.
Seriously, I've seen lectures in medical school by several researchers who ALSO have wonder drugs like this one. They can stick up a diagram showing exactly which molecular pathway it blocks in tumors. They can show Phase I results where 1 in 3 terminal patients in a hospice goes into complete remission from their cancer. Guess what...the drug still cannot be used...
I never understood this. Do the research here, test elsewhere. I'm sure there are MANY countries who would welcome some research dollars.
Enjoy your cancer, when it comes. You'll be in wracking pain, but I'm sure your morality will be worth the agony, eh Herr Idiot? Secretly you'll be praying for an Angel of Death to free you from your hypocrisy, but it would be poetic justice if you were kept alive by a Moral Majority doctor who believes in life at any cost.
Text of the article
two men in lab coats put lipstick on a rabbit, then one takes out a gun and shoots the rabbit in the kisser. "Now we know that lipstick isn't bulletproof!" "For people!"
"While the cancer was not cured"
yes lets not CURE cancer. Instead lets just treat it with a drug the person has to take over and over and over for the REST OF THERE LIFE.
Oh and of course that drug will be wicked expensive.
How much? Cuz for a whole bunch of people like me, every single medical advance means squat.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I just clicked the link in the summary and I'm reading the full article right now.
While the research paper itself may be behind a paywall at the Nature web site, the article to which the post's link takes you (on Medical News Today) is not. It looks like a fairly good description of that research for the layperson.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
Macroketone is not a compound. What they are talking about is _one_special_kind_ of macroketone.
Before you say citation needed, let me provide one:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117913741/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Sheeesh. High-school level chemistry.
The purpose of submitting one's research to a publishing company like Nature is peer review. Once a paper is submitted, Nature goes through the task of tracking down other experts in the field. These experts are use their valuable time to analyze, critique, understand, and provide educated proofing that if/when an article is published, the science is verifiable, testable, and valid. Inevitably, many of the papers submitted don't make it past the reviewing process. There's very substantial administrative costs in coordinating all this reviewing as it marches towards being publishable. It ensures every issue contains valid and worthy results that meet high standards. And there's lots of projects fighting for the same ink space.
Then there's the cost of publishing the ink and paper.
Nature can't/doesn't pay for all this cost through ad revenue. Instead, other research institutions buck up to pay a substantial subscription fee to receive the newest results and advances available. Published scientists also receive notoriety in their field, opening up their careers to new projects with more funding. If you wish to read up on the latest issue of Nature or any other science journals, you can easily find them at your nearest university library for free viewing. Universities are happy to pay the subscription fess, since they are running these research programs in an attempt to get their university name in those very same journals.
Nobody said it'll be the only cure, lemming. If all else fails, once you pinned those tumours so they don't spread all over, you can just extract them surgically when they start to grow.
But metastases are _the_ major killer in any treatment we've developped so far. Whether it's surgical, radiological, chemotherapy, you name it. You can't irradiate the patient all over, without killing him.
It doesn't help that all those are basically just based on the idea that healthy cells have better DNA repairs than cancer cells, and cells currently dividing (which includes cancerous ones) have their DNA unspooled for copying, so they're more likely to get DNA breaks. So basically they just cause a bunch of DNA breaks everywhere, and hope they got more cancerous cells than healthy ones. It's basically akin to trying to stop a plague by shooting a shotgun into the crowd and hoping that healthy people will have more chances to survive the wounds. No, seriously, that's exactly what it does to your cells. It's a very nasty treatment for anyone who's been through it, and has the side effect of also killing any other cells which are continuously dividing, like those that give you hair or fingernails or sperm.
Being able to stop metastasizing instead of that destructive treatment may actually be a more fun alternative. In the process you shaved less years off your life expectancy than normal treatments do.
But breaking DNA randomly is very carcinogenic in itself, and may cause other cancers down the line. It's very possible to just postpone the inevitable that way. A treatment that at least stops those new cancers from spreading and killing you, may well be a life saver. That's in addition to the conventional treatment, pretty much by definition.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is there an organized opposition to publically funded research being locked behind pay walls?
There should be. I want to contribute.
Can anyone point the way?
Pure text paper without the images
The images
From TFA:
This work was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
I listen to people all the time complain about how many US tax dollars go to the Defense budget for the purpose of destruction etc, yet here the DoD is funding cancer research. I wonder if there is an ulterior motive or if the purpose of the funds is truly for cancer treatment?
This is where you are wrong. You have one fact. The fact that this drugs cures 1/3 of the people taking it in the tests.
That doesn't make him wrong. He has correctly noted that we know very little about this drug and it would be highly irresponsible to wantonly permit its use until we know more about it. It also means you are looking at a single patient and he is looking at the entire population. The FDA isn't charged with saving your individual life. The FDA is charged with ensuring that drugs and medical treatments are effective, reasonably safe and have known and tested side effects. The gold standard for doing this is to conduct double blind tests. The unfortunate side effect is that some individuals are absolutely going to lose their lives so that others may live.
The FDA is acutely aware of the problem of denying treatments of unknown efficacy to terminal patients. They have expanded access rules (with more likely to come) to deal with this exact situation. They aren't blind to the problem but there are very good reasons why they are careful about creating exceptions to allow use of unproven treatments.
You do not have the fact that it kills any one. You just think it could. If we are talking about terminal cancer patients, they should be given it.
Even the safest drugs kill some people. There are complex side effects, interactions with other drugs and dosage issues. The question isn't will it kill someone, the question is how many people will it kill if it is shown to be more effective than placebo and is that number small enough to justify widespread use? There also is the question of whether a terminal cancer patient's life today is worth more than the multiple lives that might be saved by learning about a drug and how it affects the human body. These are serious, difficult questions and there is more at stake than one single life. You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
I'd agree with that in principle but there is more to the problem. I'm assuming you are relatively bright, interested in your health, and willing to accept risks. Not everyone fits that description. Many patients are not very bright and informed consent for them is a bit of wishful thinking. There is no way in hell my own mother would really understand the risks of even many basic medical treatments. She is however relatively susceptible to listening to people who sound like they know what they are talking about. The FDA isn't in the business of preventing *you* specifically from taking a drug - they are in the business of preventing snake oil salesmen. One only has to look at the "alternative medicine" industry to see that there is plenty of snake oil out there. The only tool we currently have to establish the efficacy of drugs is medical trials. If we just throw those out every time because we found a hint that a new drug might work in a mouse model, then we have ground medical science to a halt.
Yes, the FDA policies cost lives for the sake of knowledge. Snake oil salesmen if left unchecked would cost more.
We should call this agent... Agent Smith ;)
Seriously. My chances of dying are 100%. Based off my family history, it'll be cancer instead of heart disease.
So if someone offers me the privilege of continued living for only 50K a year, I'll take it. I wasn't expecting to retire anyway. And I can always decide to step off the carousel at any time by not taking the drugs.
I mean if the side effects are really as non-existant as it sounds in the article(but it probably isn't.) that makes me wonder about something. Could pretty much every healthy adult just take this medicine daily? Seriously, if there was a pill that you could take every morning and the end result of taking it was you can't get cancer and it had minimal side effects I think alot of people would take that as a preventative. (Even if the medicine was 5-10 dollars a day. I know I would if there was something like that and it had been tested thoroughly.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
You should all check out this guys work, he has uncovered it all:
http://www.thelivinlowcarbshow.com/shownotes/1346/professor-brian-peskin-tells-the-hidden-story-of-cancer-episode-316/
Also google his website. There is a wealth of valid information there.
Cheers.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
Not only will the gov continue to be doing exactly just that... Now they will be ordering treatment withheld completely from you if it is deemed that you'll cost too much to treat. And that will come after they've taken large amounts of your money you earned before you got sick, in order to pay for the healthcare expenses of people who are lazy welfare bums.
Ideally, Drug companies would love it if they can make Cancer manageable instead of curing. Look at Diabetes.... its manageable.... meaning the patient spends thousands to stay alive but never gets cured.
Where is the profit in a cure.
A joke comes to mind,
Back when trades were handed from Father to Son; A son proudly proclaims to his dad, "Dad I cured the wonman who had been coming to you for 20 years and yet you couldn't cure her". Dad replies, "You fool, she was our only faithful customer".
I am sure the insurance company will love you, we either kill him and we stop his treatment or we save him and stop his treatment.
Don't get me wrong I have seen my mother die of cancer and if it ever happens to me , well I've made my choice but in no way will I endorse such failure rate.
Hate to be a buzzkill, but I've cured cancer in mice dozens of times with experimental agents.
None of those agents have ever cured cancer in humans. Most of them have done nothing in clinical trials. Survival rates for lung cancer, for example, haven't changed since the 1960s.
The lack of new cancer drugs has gotten so bad that some drug companies want to move the goalpost. Instead of objective goals like increased survival, the increase in more subjective things like "quality of life" is touted as the benefit of the drug.
You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
My point here is that the needs of the many at this point in humanity's technological development is to advance fast into a new era of medicine where we control cancer, aging, the inmune system and metabolism. The faster we get there the more people we save.
The FDA is in the way of progress. It makes development of new therapies slow and hugely expensive and only big Pharma companies are able to navigate the bureaucracy. They are also able to bend the rules in their favor or rewrite them through lobbying. This companies are interested in keeping start ups and competing companies from entering the market. The FDA is the best tool they have. The result is that in the era of the biotechnology revolution, very few new therapies make it into the clinic.
I think it would be much better to allow people to make their own decisions. At the end of the day, they are quite interested on their own health. The market would sort the good therapies from the bad. The same way I need to learn how to deal with crooked car salesman I can learn to treat with snake oil salesman.
The advantage would be a shortening between the point we are now and the point where we have truly working therapies for the ailments we will all get eventually: cancer or diabetes or circulatory problems or why not, aging. All people that could be saved by this new therapies outweigh the few that would die because of bad decision making.
As usual, the problem with regulation is not what it achieves, but what could have been achieved and the regulation stops from happening.
Asia will soon surpass the US in developing cutting edge new therapies because of this. The US will have lost a great economic opportunity and a lot of people will have gone through pain and death needlessly.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Sorry, I'm not going to format it all, and no pdf love for you.
Migrastatin analogues target fascin to block tumour metastasis Lin Chen1,3, Shengyu Yang1,3, Jean Jakoncic2, J. Jillian Zhang1 & Xin-Yun Huang1 1. Department of Physiology, Cornell University Weill Medical College, New York, New York 10065, USA 2. Brookhaven National Laboratory, National Synchrotron Light Source, Upton, New York 11973, USA 3. These authors contributed equally to this work. Correspondence to: Xin-Yun Huang1 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to X.Y.H. (Email: xyhuang@med.cornell.edu). Top of page Abstract Tumour metastasis is the primary cause of death of cancer patients. Development of new therapeutics preventing tumour metastasis is urgently needed. Migrastatin is a natural product secreted by Streptomyces1, 2, and synthesized migrastatin analogues such as macroketone are potent inhibitors of metastatic tumour cell migration, invasion and metastasis3, 4, 5, 6. Here we show that these migrastatin analogues target the actin-bundling protein fascin to inhibit its activity. X-ray crystal structural studies reveal that migrastatin analogues bind to one of the actin-binding sites on fascin. Our data demonstrate that actin cytoskeletal proteins such as fascin can be explored as new molecular targets for cancer treatment, in a similar manner to the microtubule protein tubulin. To understand the molecular basis by which migrastatin analogues inhibit tumour cell migration and tumour metastasis, we pursued the biochemical identification of the protein target for macroketone. We took an affinity protein purification approach using synthesized biotin-labelled macroketone4 (Fig. 1a). Biotin-conjugated macroketone inhibited 4T1 breast tumour cell migration with a similar potency (50% inhibitory concentration (IC50)300nM) to that of the non-biotinylated macroketone (IC50100nM)4. 4T1 tumour cell extracts were incubated with biotin-conjugated macroketone or with free biotin. Strepavidin-conjugated agarose beads were added. After extensive washes, bound proteins were eluted and resolved by SDS–PAGE. A protein of about 58kDa was specifically detected in the sample from affinity-purified proteins with biotin-conjugated macroketone, but not in the sample with free biotin (Fig. 1b). This roughly 58-kDa protein was identified by mass spectrometry and by peptide sequence as mouse fascin1. Fascin is the primary actin crosslinker in filopodia and is required to crosslink the actin filaments maximally into straight, compact, rigid bundles7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Elevated expressions of fascin messenger RNA and protein in cancer cells have been correlated with an aggressive clinical course, poor prognosis and shorter survival13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. Figure 1: Identification of fascin as a macroketone target. Figure 1 : Identification of fascin as a macroketone target. Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg@nature.com a, Diagram of the structures of migrastatin, one of its analogues (the macroketone core) and the biotin-conjugated macroketone core. b, Coomassie blue stain of the SDS–PAGE gel after protein affinity purification. The arrow indicates the band identified as mouse fascin1. c, Direct interaction of fascin with macroketone. Neutroavidin-agarose beads with biotin-conjugated macroketone (10M) or biotin (10M) were mixed with GST–fascin or GST. WB, western blot. Data are representative of three experiments with similar results. d, Assay of the actin-bundling activity with a low-speed co-sedimentation assay. Polymerized F-actin (1M) was incubated with 0.125M or 0.25M purified fascin in the presence or absence of macroketone (10M). Supernatants (S) or pellets (P) were analysed by SDS–PAGE followed by Coomassie blue staining. The result shown is representative of five experimen
Yes, it’s good that we can save people. (Whether everyone deserves saving, or got cancer because he did not care for his health, is another question.)
But again, I can’t help but think that this smells like the typical pharma industry scheme: Sell something that makes the symptoms go away, but never ever the actual cause. That way your clients will be hooked for life, as their survival or health depends on you. For additional point, make it highly addictive. (Example: Prozac: Its only use is to help you run away from your problem instead of facing it. Which is essentially the same thing as strengthening your disease. Which usually would make your life even more horrible to you. But thanks to Prozac, you’re now as happy as a dog... living a zombie life. Unless you stop taking it... when you fall back into reality and have to face an even worse mountain to climb, as if nature would punish you for running away. I’ve seen in when people get on that slippery slope because of an idiot physician/psychiatrist. And usually, if you can’t get them off fast, you can as well declare them dead. Because there won’t be much left called “life” in that person, after some time. :((()
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Very true.
Here's an authoritative in depth article on how mice hatred has been critical to human development:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/worlds-scientists-admit-they-just-dont-like-mice,1256/
If you are a doctor, you should put the well being of your patient before your ability to get clean data.
My wife is a doctor and she would say your ideals are commendable but naive and damaging. Clinical trials are incredibly important and with most clinical trials you are necessarily putting "clean data" ahead of the well being of any individual patient. Without doing these studies it is impossible for medicine to progress. It's not enough to know that a drug works, we need to know how it works or we are condemning future patients to suffer needlessly.
To use another example, how do you think doctors get trained? There are no substitutes for learning to to procedures on actual humans. Every time you go into a hospital you are being used as a learning tool. Young doctors don't get to be experienced doctors without working on a lot of humans and making many mistakes on the way. Ideally we'd all like to be worked on by the most experienced surgeon in the world but that's not possible or realistic or even desirable. We have to train the next generation and the only way to train them is on us. It's an uncomfortable truth but there is no other way to learn medicine. We have to put learning ahead of individual patient needs from time to time.
This is just the treatment the pharma industry has been looking for. It stops cancer but doesn't cure it, so you need to keep paying for expensive treatments for as long as you want to keep living.
> There are very valid reasons to the FDAs laws governing drugs.
For the FDA, i.e. you. If the FDA approves a drug and problems turn up it causes a sh*tstorm and people (your peeps) can get sacked. However if the FDA drags its feet for a few years being extra safe the people who WILL die are voiceless so nobody gets sacked. All of the incentives are thus to delay and delay we get. Simple really, if a newly approved drug saves X lives per year all you have to do is multiply X by the number of years the drug took to move through the overly constipated FDA pipeline to calculate the FDA base death toll. Harder is to calculate the lives saved by avoiding the couple of total fiascos that do get avoided by the extra delay, but considering how many drugs still end up being recalled after going through the decade plus of paperwork the number is almost certain to be smaller than the base deaths by government so the FDA is a net cause of death.
The FDA still might could justify its existence if submission to it's so called exaustive testing provided legal immunity to the drug makers when a drug ends up having bad effects in general use but it doesn't. The trial lawyers fixed that. So it really serves no positive purpose and should be reformed or abolished. Besides, the FDA isn't constitutional; don't even try that Commerce Clause bullshit on me.
Democrat delenda est
http://dancirucci.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-cancer-breakthrough-macroketone.html
Much more information on this free page (just google the drug name).