Cancer Cured By HIV

bluefoxlucid writes "Apparently cancer has been cured, by injecting people with HIV. From the article: 'As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pains that one would expect when the body is fighting off an infection, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal.' Nifty. Poorly edited run-on sentence, but nifty."

Comments

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[Samantha Wright]

I was going to write an excited post about this, but further reading of the article has made me a little more sceptical. What the researchers did was create a kind of autoimmune disease, where their engineered T cells targeted and destroyed a subset of the patients' B cells. It's important to note that all of these cells were circulating in the blood, where the cancerous cells were easy to access; this technique probably would not work well against tumours, especially since it appears to wipe out the subset of non-cancerous B cells from which the cancer line had originated. If this technique were applied directly to, say, lung cancer, it would destroy all of whatever lung tissue had become cancerous. It's also left the patients with an immune deficiency.

That being said, the leukaemia they treated is extremely common amongst cancer patients, and, in this case, it would be possible to fix the immune deficiency by adding a self-destruct switch to the T cells, and reintroducing healthy B cells, so the body can be put back to normal once the cancer is definitely defeated.

Prior to this, we had no good way of treating blood leukaemia. Traditional chemotherapy relies on poisoning all fast-reproducing cells, which does huge damage to the immune system, intestinal lining, and hair follicles. Further, bone marrow transplants are often required to restore blood cell production afterwards. It looks like this technique was tried previously, but abandoned due to failures. So things are looking up—but other forms of cancer are still likely to be a part of life for a long time yet!