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

Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[eldavojohn]

Two fairly important adjectives that were for some reason omitted from the summary are listed in the article:

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.

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[rockclimber]

most people with pancreatic cancer would gladly make that trade!

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[Anonymous Coward]

Using a modified, harmless version of HIV

Yeah, that's probably something that should be repeated pretty heavily. Given what I've seen in some alternative therapy books over the years, people don't need to be *more* confused by HIV.

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[characterZer0]

Furthermore, they did not inject the HIV, they injected previously removed white blood cells modified by HIV.

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[TheRaven64]

I'm expecting now that if I actually read TFA, I will discover that it was using a modified form of the common cold to treat headaches. In mice.

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[Samantha Wright]

I am an expert on this. The HIV was used as a transport mechanism to modify the DNA of the white blood cells. It's identical to using a computer virus to deliver a kernel patch instead of self-replicating code. Retroviral engineering is extremely common in biology. The critical point is that the virus has had all of its self-replicating machinery removed in advance. No HIV genes were transferred into the white blood cells; only a payload designed by the researchers.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell all your friends. Especially if you're friends with Taco. The amount of ignorance on Slashdot about biological concepts that are directly analogous to computer concepts is staggering.

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[ekgringo]

It's not really that simple. There are many strains of HIV and it is generally advisable to avoid exposure to other strains if you are already HIV+. Treating one strain may be manageable, but when you have multiple strains, there are fewer treatment options and the ones that exist are less effective.

Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used

[Samantha Wright]

That's actually a misrepresentation in the MSNBC article. I've pored over the original paper a little bit more now, and actually the researchers didn't add anything specific to trigger multiplication. Also, they weren't macrophages, which is what most people think of when they hear 'white blood cells'—they were T cells. T cells target one specific molecule, and if they find that molecule, then the body tells that T cell to reproduce. The thousand-fold growth was actually the body's way of saying "hey, I found an infection!" and dealing with it normally. The levels subsided on their own after the cancer was gone, as with any manageable disease.

T cell receptors (the things that stick out of T cells which allow them to detect their prey) are incredible biologically because the body makes them up at semi-random when generating new T cells; it does the same for antibodies. However, we only have so many building blocks to choose from when making them, and the receptors we need to target leukaemia aren't possible. It's conceivable that a random mutation could allow someone to develop a resistance to cancer naturally, but that could potentially come at the cost of effective protection against many other diseases.

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!

Could the title and summary be more exaggerated?

[Anonymous Coward]

If what you got from that article is "cancer has been cured by injecting people with HIV", please abstain from posting any more summaries.

Still a better prognosis?

[Nidi62]

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.

Experiments performed only on 3 test subjects

[kvvbassboy]

And for one of them, it only removed 70% of the cancerous tissues. This is hardly a significant number to confirm the efficacy of the treatment. Also from TFA:

"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.

Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials

[BKX]

This argument is bullshit. Pure bullshit. If any "Big Pharma" company invented a cure for cancer tomorrow, you can bet your ass that they'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Why? Because, then that company would forever be known as the company that cured cancer. Every new product they make would be a pot of gold. Every ad they put out would be "Muhdikard, a new treatment for erectile dysfunction, from Drugco. We cured cancer.". Every drug company on the face of the planet would kill for that kind of marketing, not to mention the money from selling the cancer cure.

Now, of course, "cure for cancer" is a worthless phrase as well, since cancer is a type of disease, and not a single disease, and therefore, it's extremely unlikely that one cure will work for more than one cancer let alone all of them.