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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."
In the Penn experiment, the researchers removed certain types of white blood cells that the body uses to fight disease from the patients. Using a modified, harmless version of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients.
Emphasis mine. The summary almost makes it sound like the researchers just used HIV as we know it ... it's almost humorous to think that a doctor might say "The treatment was a success, you no longer have cancer ... but ..." "BUT WHAT?" "Well, we sorta had to inject you with the HIV in order to take care of it." Obviously this is not the case.
My work here is dung.
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When wintertime rolls around, the AIDS-eating gorillas simply freeze to death.
Lots of men experiment at bathhouses, Jenny! That doesn't make me gay.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How long until we never hear about this again?
Or, how long until big medicine gets their hands on it and makes it too expensive for the average cancer patient?
This sounds like an episode of House. Didn't he treat cancer by infecting a patient with Malaria on a dare, or some such thing?
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
"It is important to emphasize that there still have been only three patients. Over the past century, many attempts to harness the bodyâ(TM)s immune system to fight cancer have shown initial success and subsequent failure. So much research remains to be done to prove just how good this treatment is. But it should begin soon, with great vigor."
If what you got from that article is "cancer has been cured by injecting people with HIV", please abstain from posting any more summaries.
People often point to the existence of Cancer and HIV as proof of God's inability to be either benevolent or omnipotent. I'm sure this will shut up nonbelievers and shows us how God acts through mysterious ways to give us his holy grace. If you haven't accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior you must do so now.
Even if it did use real HIV, in many cases the life-span for HIV is around 24 years after infection in the US. This is compared to what, 6 months-5 years for some of the worst forms of cancer? I think in many cases, people would very willingly make that trade. IN many cases it would allow people to live to almost a full average lifespan anyway.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
We can wipe out overpopulation, the threat of AIDS, and cancer by just giving everyone in the world HIV? Those that are immune to HIV effects (those bearing a particular genetic anomaly passed down from Black Plague survivors) wouldn't be affected negatively, cancer would be eradicated, and those left over could get around to repopulation once they're done burning billions of corpses.
Right? Am I missing something? Oversimplifying perhaps?
This is...so incredible. The application of modified white cells and using HIV as a carrier has use beyond just cancer. It is too bad the drug companies and big cancer foundations didn't back this from the start. Hopefully the money will come pouring in now.
I'm in the hospital with my so-called doctor,
and takes his syringe and says
"This is a cure for cancer!"
And I said "Maaaaan this isn't a cancer cure, it's HIV!"
So I took it and I threw it on the ground!
Kaposi's sarcoma called, and laughed at your announcement.
FTA: Both the National Cancer Institute and several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research.
Of course they did. If you cure cancer with one shot, the cash cow of chemo drugs dries up for Big Pharma and the cash cow of donations dries up for the American Cancer Society and other 'non-profit' organization.
Sometimes, you have to send a maniac to catch a maniac. Or AIDs to catch cancer.
-www.awkwardengineer.com
Evidently, cancer can also be cured by inject people with a bullet. From the article, "As the bullet kills the patient, the cancer cells experiences death, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal."
"Both the National Cancer Institute and several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research. Neither applicants nor funders discuss the reasons an application is turned down. But good guesses are the general shortage of funds and the concept tried in this experiment was too novel and, thus, too risky for consideration."
Both the guesses as BS, considering the impact that this treatment could result in. I get the feeling that the article is hiding certain aspects of the treatment that may put it in a negative light.
specifically Will Smith's version where they used a modified virus to cure cancer, which turned everyone into zombie/vamp whatevers..
As someone who both read and comprehended the article. If I mod points I would totally mod your comment up.
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
perhaps she'll die.
Lemme guess, they need more funding to do more research and tests? Three successful subjects a cure does not make!
Herpes, the new arch nemesis of Heart Disease?
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Read I am Legend. It's true!
To get rid of the injected HIV you just do a marrow transplant from one of the people who are immune. So it's only a 50% survival rate, what's the big deal ;-)
Joking aside, is the modified HIV virus live, replicating and infectious? I don't think unleashing live viruses that have no known cure is a good idea no mater how modified they are.
Kudos to The Alliance For Cancer Gene Therapy for funding the limited trial.
No where in the article was it reported that HIV was injected into a patient. They used the retroviral nature of HIV to insert genes into white blood cells in vitro and then injected these modified cells back into the patient.
They jacked up the T-Cells to make leukemia go away. They destroyed tumors!
If there was ever a time to support government-funded science, this is the time. This technology should belong to the people. Not just a subset of the people protected by patent walls.
What do you expect from /. when troll headlines make it through the editors untouched? A much better headline would be "CLL, a type of leukemia, cured by modified HIV virus" but that's not sexy enough. This still doesn't help those unfortunate people with pancreatic adenocarcinoma or grade IV astrocytoma.
I for one welcome the zombie apocalypse that will come from the mutation of treatment once it becomes main stream.
Can we also address the CAUSES? We know certain things cause cancer. We also suspect a great many more but we have problems in getting the proof recognized which can only be described as "political and/or political reasons." We need to get over these reasons, determine the substances and then ban them from consumption by people.
I know... logical and to-the-point. It will never work because there is too much money being made in poisoning people all over the world with "whatever causes [malady]" and that happens all over the world, not just here in the U.S. Lead based paint, mercury, and a long list of other things...
Doctor: Well, you've got cancer. But don't worry, the cure is simple. Just sleep with the most disgusting whore you can find.
Run-on sentences are bad. Sentence fragments are bad, too.
But that is what gets people to read it. They are all ready and have have protest signs made up, after reading the summer then they click on the link right before the big protest so they can have a source to give to the media so they don't seem like raving nuts.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And then the doctor said, "I have some good news and some bad news..."
and so on.
I have a couple of guys in the building that seem to be attempting the cure by direct injection, nightly.
The first seems to be a link to a case study of one of the patients of the 3 person trial. The second seems to be a summary of the trials, I think. Only read the first one as most of the medical talk goes over my head.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849#t=articleTop
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/95/95ra73.abstract
The only major issue I saw from reading the first one was some kidney issues that may have been related to dehydration.
Just because he survived doesn't give him the right to kill the English language.
Actually, if you read the article, it's pretty clear that while this particular experiment was leukemia based the theory should work on nearly any cancer. Basically, they used a modified HIV virus as a carrier to modify the DNA of some of the patients white blood cells (outside of the body). The modified cells are made to specifically target the cancer in question (and replicate, a lot). If trials continue to be successful, there is no reason to think that the "signature" of any cancer couldn't be substituted for the leukemia.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/11p19/
when you think about it it is kinda funny...
The next step is to cure the HIV with Ebola.
Don't you just love how much stuff the guy got wrong in the summary?
It reminds me about a joke I hear once in a while:
In Soviet Russia, one day the radio announces "Today, the president won a car."
The next day, they say "Some facts may have been erroneous yesterday. It was not the president who won the car, but a teenager from Sankt Petersburg. And it wasn't a car but a bike. And he didn't win it, it was stolen from him."
So the summary basically said:
"Cancer cured by injecting patients with HIV".
Only it isn't normal HIV, it's modified, harmless HIV.
And it didn't actually cure cancer, but 70% of the tissue.
And it wasn't injected in the patients, but into some of their blood cells.
Some vampires were getting sick, and the cure was to infect them with HIV.
(Of course, I realize that the summary here is crap, but still, life can parallel fiction.)
>> Both the National Cancer Institute and several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research.
Its disgusting, but of course not.
The pharma companies only want to keep selling symptom suppressants instead of actual cures. They don't want to actually cure people of anything as that means diminishing their customer base.
The National Cancer Institute wont fund this because they, like any other government body, are full of bureaucratic leeches on fatcat salaries that put their own continued employment above anything else, even solving the problem they were tasked to address.
So HIV cures cancer? That's nothing- Crabs cure hunger.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Slashdot really does to often drop to the Midnight Star level of integrity these days. Really you don't think a treatment for cancer would get enough clicks without adding a flashy lie to it?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
HIV is being used here in a way similar to how lentiviruses are used to routinely introduce synthetic DNA constructs to human cell cultures. In summation it is a version of HIV where the actual viral DNA has been gutted and replaced with the chimeric construct providing these white blood cells with the ability to both rapidly divide and DETECT CANCER inside LIVING PATIENTS. The individuals citing their low patient count as "statistically insignificant" do not have a firm grasp on the field of oncology. The results published in the PRIMARY RESEARCH ARTICLE are astounding. The volume of highly specific cell death observed therein is unprecedented. Chemotherapy, radiation, and all other cancer treatments are non-specific. They kill healthy cells and tumorgenic cells alike. This is the first SUCCESSFUL application of an innate immune system targeting strategy for sustained destruction of cancer cells. It's revolutionary. It was a gutsy, bold move by the researchers. Their executed project combined some of the most advanced approaches in virology, cell biology, and biochemistry. I mean, give credit where credit is due. These guys just hit the nail on the head and you're all blabbering about nonsense.
In related news, cancer has been found to cure HIV.
1. Open Cancer Center
2. Hire cheap Hookers who are HIV Positive
3. ?????????
4. Profit
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
How long until we never hear about this again?
Or, how long until big medicine gets their hands on it and makes it too expensive for the average cancer patient?
It's ALREADY too expensive for the average cancer patient. New treatments ALWAYS are. The trick is to get "big medicine" to invest in making it CHEAP ENOUGH for the average patient.
Most of the cost is convincing the FDA to let the new treatment be used. Much of that cost is doing enough research to convince bureaucrats that you haven't discovered a new Thalidomide. (They get dinged for flipper babies but not for millions of dead UNtreated patients.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The more interesting part of this story is how they got the cells to proliferate and detect (with high specificity) cancer cells. The HIV portion of the story is just sensationalism.
you can't have cancer if you're dead!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... that HIV sounds better?
What could possibly go wrong with programming T-cells to multiply by a factor of 1000 upon reentering your body?
Didn't the female doctor in the beginning of I am Legend try this? I don't remember that ending well.
I concur. I'm dissapointed with the title of this summary. Retroviral expression of genetic therapy is novel, but not the highlight. I think a more appropriate title might have been "Novel cancer therapy gives life to two terminal leukemia patients, 1 year into remission". The data is remarkable. The tissue sample images are just amazing, never seen anything work that effectively without damaging surrounding tissue.
So cure cancer by injecting with HIV???
And never be able to have sex again for as long as you live?
I'll take the cancer, thanks.
Given a choice between dying younger and dying alone, I'd take dying young any day.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Actually, if you read the article, it's pretty clear that while this particular experiment was leukemia based the theory should work on nearly any cancer. Basically, they used a modified HIV virus as a carrier to modify the DNA of some of the patients white blood cells (outside of the body). The modified cells are made to specifically target the cancer in question (and replicate, a lot). If trials continue to be successful, there is no reason to think that the "signature" of any cancer couldn't be substituted for the leukemia.
Incorrect. It may work on a significant fraction of some cancers (especially leukemias, cancers of the blood) but it is unlikely to be a generic cure of most or all cancers. (TL;DR of the link which is annoying technical - it's a cool new twist on a general class of cancer fighting strategies that up until now have had limited success. It may well prove to be useful, but it is in the very, very early stages of research and there are some reasons why this general class of treatment would be expected not to work on many different cancers.)
And kudos to MSNBC for actually providing a link to the original literature.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How many of the powerful? You know, the ones that greenlight a product.
After all, there are people STILL working at cigarette packing plants, despite knowing that you get cancer from it.
All you need to do is look for a TREATMENT, not a CURE.
A treatment is like a WoW subscription, or a DRM'd game with DLC.
A cure is like selling your program with the source code and binaries.
Wasn't that called... leukemia... that would kill you dead too?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
One day, cancer will be cured and someone will post it to Slashdot and no one will believe it because fucking editors keep posting completely stupid and idiotic headlines and summaries.
That's no run-on sentence. It's a space station.
However, there IS incorrect comma usage in the first sentence of the summary, and the last two are fragments. Yay, pedantry!!
"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." This is not a run on sentence. Here is an example of a run on sentence: My Porsche 911 is out of gas we cannot reach town before dark. From Wikipedia: The mere fact that a sentence is long does not make it a run-on sentence; sentences are run-ons only when they contain more than one complete idea. A run-on sentence can be as short as four words—for instance: I drive she walks. In this case there are two complete ideas (independent clauses): two subjects paired with two (intransitive) verbs. So as long as clauses are punctuated appropriately, a writer can assemble multiple independent clauses in a single sentence; in fact, a properly constructed sentence can be extended indefinitely.
The following is NOT a run-on sentence:
"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."
It contains THREE dependent clauses: "As the white cells killed the cancer cells," "that one would expect," and "when the body is fighting off an infection."
However, the number of independent clauses is only TWO, which makes it NOT A RUN ON. There is no limit to the number of dependent clauses in an English sentence.
I can see it now. Big tobacco funds the entire project from here on out.
Now we just need a modified strain of cancer that can cure HIV and we'll be freaking invincible!
Check this out!
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/antiviral-0810.html
From 2005:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/02/14/1519212/The-Cure-for-Cancer-Might-be-HIV
I thought the subject of this story sounded familiar. Seems like they've made progress! Let's hope it stands up to further studies. Many, many promising treatments turn out to be fools' gold.
This could the first step to Zombification of the human race ...
In other news, the percentage of unprotected sex has skyrocketed among those suffering with cancer.
My dad died 2 years ago from the most aggressive form of brain cancer at the age of 54. We would have gladly tried this over the hell of two brain surgeries, radiation, chemo, rehab and paralysis and seizures he went through.
No one ever thinks about brain cancer, but it's right there next to pancreatic for how awful it is. It gets almost no research funding compared to other cancers and remains one of the deadliest diagnosed cancers.
Any cancer breakthrough that can be applied to brain cancer is welcome, IMO. I'd rather live with HIV (harmless or not, temporary or not) than go through what is spelled out by a Stage 4 Glioblastoma.
I always wondered why they let HIV spread uncontrollably when they could have ended it in the beginning by quarantining the contagious victims. Hundreds of millions of people (mostly Africans) will die because of this policy. Now I see that they need a pool of HIV-positive donors to cure smokers and meat-eaters of their cancers.
So if the cure is based off a modified STD. Will that mean the cure is transferred the same way? Will pharmaceutical companies finally be out of work?
Not the first by 10 years
http://www.oncolyticsbiotech.com/
and others as well. NCI has supported this research as well. Don't know why they declined the one under discussion.
I showed this to my doctor and his head exploded.
Whether or not one has some kind of religious view, that's humans at their best: fighting our common enemies instead of killing ourselves in wars.
The WebMD article went into better detail here. http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20110810/gene-therapy-cures-adult-leukemia
The OP article leaves out that the modified white blood cells may persist in the body. That means it could keep fighting any sort of remission. It also leaves out a potential downside. A bit of background, the cancer they treated is that of the B cells, a part of the immune system. The treatment targets something only B cells have. That means normal B cells STILL get destroyed. Still it's an improvement over the traditional methods which do much more collateral damage. Of course the whole persistence thing means it could be compared to permanent chemotherapy to a degree.
It reminded me of an episode of 7 Days in which a researcher develops a vaccine for cancer that mutates and kills everybody, and a future incarnation of the org makes a long jump (7+ years?) to stop her from developing the vaccine (kind of a Hitler dilemma with an innocent perpetrator). It also reminded me of I Am Legend.
I have personal knowledge on this story. The father of a very close friend was one of the first people to receive this treatment during the trials - he was diagnosed with leukemia, and was given a very short time to live. His health declined quickly, and no one really expected him to last long. However, today he is completely healthy, and has no signs of cancer in his body whatsoever. He's not in remission - he's cured. Spread the word on this research if you can, this is the real deal and can seriously save a ton of lives if it gets the funding it needs.
Inject Modified HIV, kill the cancer, then use DRACOs to clean up the virus. Easy peasy.
If we can only give HIV cancer, we will be all set.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Reminds me of the old Johnny Carson quip on Letterman's show during a rash of natural disasters in the L.A. area: Letterman: "How are things going out there in California"? Carson: "Pretty good. The mudslides are putting out the fires".
Doesn't this mean that you can immunize people against cancer?
A much better head line that that would be "Three patients in trial cured of leukemia by genetically modified T-cells".
[...] several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research. [Reasons may be] the concept tried in this experiment was too novel and, thus, too risky for consideration.
Too risky to profit margins that is.
" Patient, I have some good news.. your cured of cancer." - Doc
" What, really thats fantastic.." - Patient
" Oh I forgot to mention, you've now got AIDS " - Doc
"Damn." - Patient
So, today they cured cancer and yesterday they cured viruses. I guess bacteria is on deck for Friday.
Isn't this the premise of I Am Legend? Where was this experiment conducted again? I'll make sure to avoid that route next time I drive through...
Taco probably made a deliberate choice of framing his article that way in order to grab your attention. If you're reading this, it worked.
I wonder if Dr. Alice Krippen thought the same from the film in my subject-line... that's in regards to your statement I am quoting here:
"Absolutely no HIV DNA was transferred, and so there's absolutely no risk of HIV infection: after the viral DNA is inserted into the cell" - by Samantha Wright (1324923) on Thursday August 11, @12:49PM (#37058534) Homepage
I'm just being "facetious" &/or sarcastic with the film reference though, but the possibility is there... this, to myself @ least, DOES seem a "touch risky", but then again, I have not read the actual parent article yet, I have to say this in fairness.
NOW - From the sounds of it, this sounds like a form of "retroviral gene therapy" (i.e.-> Using viruses to deliver 'payloads' into the enemy via the cellular mountpoints that viruses attach to, & inject nuclear material from).
* Typically, that DOES introduce DNA/nuclear material into a cell though... and, your quote I used even seems to state that same pretty much.
APK
P.S.=> However - From what I have been reading here via others' commentary (which I usually do 1st, & then scan the parent/source articles afterwards)?
Yes, it seems they're actually using white cells modded by HIV infestations to combat cancer here (disclaimer - I have NOT read the article itself YET though, just got up & am having coffee this a.m. only scanning this (this is important stuff I feel is why)).
Some new NEWS/NewsFlash: I've also heard of successes vs. cancer using a compound called INOSITOL (apparently if you eat a lot of rice especially, OR vegetable material in general which is naturally produced in your intestines as a reaction by-product afterwards) completely KILLING LUNG CANCERS IN FOLKS:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22INOSITOL%22+and+%22lung+cancer%22&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=
Which like this article, seems to be good news also (& doesn't sound 1/10th as risky either).
(That's some "FYI" 4U, & IF you were NOT aware of it)...
... apk
This is an old story at least 5 years old...what's up? I am sure looking it up on /., you would find it here before...why the renewed interest???
Thanks for your comment, it perfectly reflects the real point of this finding. The delivery method and having measurable accuracy is amazing.
Talk about an counter intuitive approach is a understatement.
Whats next?
LSD used in an Alzheimer's treatment.
Ambein can cause 'Transient Awakenings' With Sleeping Pill
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2947406&page=1
MRSA Infection used to stop Antibiotic poisoning
Komodo Dragon urine dissolves kidney stones.(and Kidney)
Standard & Poor's Rates Fox news as the most accurate and responsible news agency, then HarperCollins books publishes A book about it.
JP lottery win more that 50 million stops Depression Dead in it's tracks.
PMI insurance pays off house and home owner gets to keep it free and clear. Instead of the bank. Why, because court rules premium was paid by home owner.
Thanks for helping get all this off my chest. Now where did I put my Botox?
I don't usually play videogames, but a GPL shoot-them up where you are a modified T-cell and navigate veins to infiltrate bone marrow, kill leukemic cells respecting others and reproduce would be worth trying... Action, navigation, (local organism) violence, sci-fi, and a worthy goal, wow!. it could even turn into an MMORPG (RPG?) since they say they shoot 150000 T-cells for patient kg, so that's about 7500000 - 15000000 players for a single match, around WoW's size (that would be the treatment of a 50 - 100 kg patient)...
But as usual with software I guess someone has already coded that and everyone but me knows about it .
Tylenol IS NOT TO PREVENT THE FEELING OF PAIN. YOU STILL HURT EVEN WHEN TAKING TYLENOL.
You hurt FAR less, but you still hurt. Tylenol also doesn't always work.
Again, say it with me this time TYLENOL IS NOT TO PREVENT THE FEELING OF PAIN, it isn't all that effective at it. ......
or: SEAT BELTS ARE NOT TO PREVENT DYING IN A CAR ACCIDENT
or: QUITTING SMOKING IS NOT TO PREVENT LUNG CANCER
or: CPR IS NOT FOR THE PREVENTION OF DEATH DUE TO CARDIAC ARREST
etc. ..........
If you are going to go for a proverbial Roll in the Hay anyway (and history has shown that this is usually the case), using a condom is approx. infinity more effective in preventing STDs than crossing your fingers.