Training an Immune System To Kill Cancer

NotSanguine sends in a story about William Ludwig, a 65-year-old leukemia patient who underwent a new, experimental treatment that draws upon two decades of advances in molecular biology. Quoting: "Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins. At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst. A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia. ... In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person's own immune system to kill cancer cells."

Comments

very cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

The study was only 10 people. I REALLY hope that they continue this. Note that the guy was refused funding by major cancer research groups previously. I hope this changes this.

( DNRTFA... couldn't get passed the paywall )

Re:very cool but

[justforgetme]

I think major cancer research groups (and HIV research groups) are all Pharmaceutical driven so that's why he wouldn't get any acceptance from them.

Oh and in the parentheses you obviously meant past right? Right???

Re:very cool but

[Jarik C-Bol]

this was on the news weeks ago. hell, there's an XKCD about it. http://xkcd.com/938/ it was on SLASHDOT weeks before THAT. repost much?

Interesting

[Jimmyisikura]

While I think this is awesome, isn't this how I Am Legend happened?

Re:Interesting

[Dyinobal]

umm I Am Legend was a fictional work by Richard Matheson, in case you weren't aware.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably...

of course if we don't die from cancer then we still have to deal with aliens coming down to conquer us like independence day.

At least we know we can infect their technology with a wi-fi laptop running mac-os. Thanks will smith!

Re:Interesting

[Culture20]

No, for one, I Am Legand never happened. Two: the disease in I Am Legend was a bacillus stirred up into the air by dust storms, not some human experiment.

Re:Interesting

[Jimmyisikura]

I was referring to the story startup, I didn't think it was an actual event haha.

Re:Interesting

[kylemonger]

Nope. It was bacteria in the awful novel, a gengineered virus in the Will Smith movie.

These T-cells shouldn't be a threat to you unless you, in a fit of stupidity, injected yourself with them. Or through a medical error the doctor somehow injected you with someone else's T-cells. Oops.

Re:Interesting

[Dyinobal]

ah well I wasn't sure from the wording and I've seen people believe stranger things were fact as opposed to fiction.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Even that wouldn't be too much of a threat. You would get a moderate fever, maybe some chills (a mild version of what happened in the story, except with a lot less foreign cells to kill), then you'd be fine. Might need a few-day hospital stay for monitoring, but likely nothing more.

Re:Interesting

[Surt]

The evidence for I am Legend is better than for the American Revolution, after all, they have actual video for I am Legend, but not for the American Revolution. So really, believe what you want, but I prefer things I can see.

Re:Interesting

[Columcille]

No, but Resident Evil uses the t-virus.

Re:Interesting

[perpenso]

The evidence for I am Legend is better than for the American Revolution, after all, they have actual video for I am Legend, but not for the American Revolution. So really, believe what you want, but I prefer things I can see.

Well there are paintings, drawings, engravings, etc of revolutionary events. You can see those too. :-)

Re:Interesting

[PPH]

I Am Legend is complete fiction.

Slashdotters would never come out into the sunlight, no matter what.

Re:Interesting

[garaged]

Or stop generalizing, for that matters

Re:Interesting

[bronney]

*flashes you my double D* doesn't mean they're real ^_^.

Re:Interesting

[tinkerton]

It was fiction? And the Hulk then, what about the Hulk?

Re:Interesting

[Robert Zenz]

Actually, thanks goes to Jeff Goldblum for that.

Re:Interesting

[Culture20]

Even that wouldn't be too much of a threat. You would get a moderate fever, maybe some chills (a mild version of what happened in the story, except with a lot less foreign cells to kill), then you'd be fine. Might need a few-day hospital stay for monitoring, but likely nothing more.

As long as they aren't Reginald Barclay's T cells. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Barclay's_Protomorphosis_Syndrome

Re:Interesting

[GeorgeMonroy]

I can draw and paint unicorns giving it to you. I guess that makes that event real as well.

Re:Interesting

[Pieroxy]

When I went to see this movie, there was a standing O in the end. It was a very entertaining experience. For the first 8-10 minutes, the place was silent (save for the movie). Then people started laughing realising it was a comedy intended for laughter. The rest of the movie was hysterical as people laughed harder and harder.

A well deserved standing ovation, in which I participated wholeheartedly.

Re:Interesting

[daid303]

There are already loads and loads of invisible pink unicorn paintings everywhere, what more proof do you need?

Re:Interesting

[jamiesan]

Duh! Jeft Goldblum was the one with the lap top. Will Smith just piloted the alien space ship.

Re:Interesting

[GeorgeMonroy]

Right! =)

Re:Interesting

[2names]

You're a *GIRL*??!?!??!?!?!

Re:Interesting

[Just Some Guy]

On Slashdot, you don't have to be a girl to have large breasts.

Re:Interesting

[2names]

That's just wrong. Funny, but oh, so wrong.

Re:Interesting

[bronney]

teehee :D

Re:Interesting

[lazlo]

A subtle distinction between this and the whatever-it-was in the I Am Legend movie is that the drug in the movie was a preventative measure, while this is a curative measure. It's important because preventative measures need to be applied to everyone who might ever get cancer (which would be everyone, unless it's possible to predict cancer, which would be its own major breakthrough), while curative measures are applied to those who already have cancer.

From a societal standpoint, if everyone who has cancer suddenly turns into brains-craving zombies, that's a relatively small fraction of the population and it's a threat that can be dealt with. If, on the other hand, everyone who doesn't want to get cancer turns into a zombie, that's pretty much it for the human race.

From a personal standpoint, a 1E-9% chance of turning into a zombie and being detonated by a crack government anti-zombie squad is fairly easily offset by an alternative of near-certain death by cancer. It's at least a little bit harder to swallow if, like most of the US, your chances of getting cancer and dying of it are more like 25%.

Re:Interesting

[interkin3tic]

The matrix AND terminator TRILOGIES involved computers going evil: what the hell are you doing USING ONE?!?

Re:Interesting

[Big Smirk]

Yeah, and?

Re:Interesting

[indeterminator]

From a societal standpoint, if everyone who has cancer suddenly turns into brains-craving zombies, that's a relatively small fraction of the population and it's a threat that can be dealt with.

That is what one would think. However, most zombie infestations only start out from just a handful of zombies, and they still get out of hand very quickly. All it takes is an evil bio-engineering company to try to turn it into a weapon.

Re:Interesting

[lazlo]

Assuming that the cure/infestation could spread, then sure, it's a serious threat, and I wouldn't want to take it lightly. Even a single zombie should be taken seriously (/wave Clairvius). But if you take the worst case scenario that a few million cancer patients suddenly become infectious zombies, then yes, it's a serious threat, a huge disaster, and the premise for an interesting sci-fi story.

On the other hand, if you take the best case scenario of a non-transferable zombification resulting as a side effect from a preventative measure, then you're likely to have a handful of the world's poor, remote, and those with a religious or cultural bias against modern medicine all engulfed in a sea of billions of the walking dead. That's converting your story/movie from a sci-fi horror disaster movie into a post-apocalyptic survival movie.

Re:Interesting

[Belial6]

Predicting who will get cancer wouldn't be a breakthrough. It's been done with very high accuracy already. If they live long enough, it will be close to 100% of the population.

You can be that if this treatment worked, there would be heavy work in making it a vaccine. Why get paid for the slow stream of patients when you can just tell parents that they must have the treatment administered to their children before they can be enrolled in Kindergarten?

Of course, if we are worried about destroying the human race by performing poorly tested inoculations, we are already there. The flu vaccines that are administered at drug stores around the country are new formulas each year, and don't even attempt to do what they imply to the public that they do. The chicken pox vaccine is another vaccine that has been tested in the field through mass inoculation of 95% of the population as they reach the age of 3. Both of these have been done to combat diseases with very low mortality rates.

Re:Interesting

[Belial6]

You are making a very big assumption that any of the rest of us are human, and that you are not posting to a site generated by a sentient supercomputer bent on destroying the human race or using them as biological generators.

Re:Interesting

[theswade]

"If I can see something ... ya know ... it kinda helps the credibility along" -George Carlin

Re:Interesting

[perpenso]

I can draw and paint unicorns giving it to you. I guess that makes that event real as well.

As real as the unicorns in the movies and as real as the biology in I am Legend. A fun movie by the way.

Re:Interesting

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Don't worry, the Hulk is real. :)

Re:Interesting

[tinkerton]

Good. That got me worried for a moment.

Now this is what I'd call

[RogueWarrior65]

WICKED COOL!!!

Re:Now this is what I'd call

[linatux]

apart from a few weeks of fevers!!!

Re:Now this is what I'd call

[g6mrfixit]

Better a few weeks of fevers than a forever of dead.

Re:Now this is what I'd call

[Anonymous Coward]

You misunderstand. You still get the forever of dead.

Re:Now this is what I'd call

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry that will happen in time.

Re:Now this is what I'd call

[andot]

Normal leukemia treatment gives fever anyway.

Re:Now this is what I'd call

[Anonymous Coward]

My sentiments exactly.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like a proper crazy immune response. Even if he had died, I'd be surprised if his cancer didn't go down at least.

Go go science.

Is there a drug?

[mrquagmire]

Is there a drug that requires a prescription or some sort of long term "treatment" that goes along with this procedure? If not, then it probably won't catch on in our wonderful privatized health care system, sadly.

Re:Is there a drug?

[sandytaru]

Not yet, but if it's possible to reprogram white blood cells via retroviruses, then perhaps someday it will be as simple as doing a plasma collection and then a few days later having the cells re-infused.

Re:Is there a drug?

[ColdWetDog]

Is there a drug that requires a prescription or some sort of long term "treatment" that goes along with this procedure? If not, then it probably won't catch on in our wonderful privatized health care system, sadly.

Really? Why? If you had a single dose, effective treatment for a fatal cancer, just how high do you think you could jack up the cost? People are already paying 100,000 a year for drugs that only prolong life by months. A 'cure' could be worth a million, easy. In the cold hearted world of the Medical Industrial Complex, you can bet your spreadsheet that they've already figured out exactly how much they would charge and how much they could make.

No, it's not going to be cheap - these sorts of treatments are custom builds and there is a lot of fiddly tech involved, even after they streamline the process. It probably would not be used on rarer cancers because you would have to do all that work without the possibility of a really big payoff. But all of this talk is rather premature. This is a proof of concept experiment. This lab is the first one to actually get all the pieces together and they admit they're not sure why it works when other similar attempts failed. So there is a lot of work to be done before you can get your doc to write a script for it.

By the time these treatments come out of the lab, we will either be using a different model for health care payments or most of us will be running around the woods looking for willow bark while the 500 billionaires get entire body replacements. Chiba City, anyone?

Re:Is there a drug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually insurance companies (and you know how they love money....) will decide its merits as an intervention. What is more expensive, spending months or years in and out of the hospital with expensive chemo (which is going through shortages at the moment), or doing this one procedure and a couple weeks in the hospital? If this works, insurance companies may cover it and refuse to pay for chemo if the patient is a candidate for this treatment.

Re:Is there a drug?

[wierd_w]

A killer T cell is an end product cell type. It does not divide. As such introduction of the cells shouldn't cause lasting immunological issues, unless the synthetically activated cells initiate a cascade autoimmune reaction.

(T cells destroy pathogens, but they also pass antigen information on to B cells, which "remember" previous infectious agents, and mass replicate antibodies in the hystamine cycle. This mechanism is how vaccination works. Deactivated virus is introduced, white cells engage, destroy, and then present the debris to B cells, which produce antibodies. When the real virus comes along, the immine system reacts with a flood of antibody production, which greatly inhibits proliferation of the pathogen. In this case, researchers would have to be VERY careful what cellular membrane cues they program their new mutant superhero T cells to go after, or else the body may become sensitized against its own cellular membranes, resulting in runaway autoimmune reactions.)

Assuming that everything goes well, then the modified T cell culture will natually self-terminate like normal T cells do, and then all traces of the manipulation would be gone from the host.

This means that there shouldn't be a need for long term antirejection meds, like with a bone marrow transplant.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Anonymous Coward]

"they will need periodic infusions of a substance called intravenous immune globulin to protect them."

Re:Is there a drug?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Not yet, but if it's possible to reprogram white blood cells via retroviruses, then perhaps someday it will be as simple as doing a plasma collection and then a few days later having the cells re-infused.

I am currently a candidate for an experimental treatment that does just that - plasma collection at start, then they convince the white blood cells to reproduce like mad, then put them back into me at weekly intervals.

Hopefully, my turn to play guinea pig for this one will come up this next month.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Khyber]

I wish you luck. There are so many possibilities for this, but also risks.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Imrik]

It's not the privatized health care that would be the problem (in this case) but rather the privatized medical research companies. Health care companies would prefer a cure, that way they get to keep the money that you keep paying them rather than give it to someone else. Plus they could probably find a reason to treat you as having a higher risk for other kinds of cancer or other conditions afterwards.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Guppy]

A killer T cell is an end product cell type. It does not divide.

T-cells are differentiated cells, but they most certainly do undergo clonal expansion.

(T cells destroy pathogens, but they also pass antigen information on to B cells, which "remember" previous infectious agents, and mass replicate antibodies in the hystamine cycle. This mechanism is how vaccination works.

Huh? "Histamine Cycle"?

Deactivated virus is introduced, white cells engage, destroy, and then present the debris to B cells, which produce antibodies. When the real virus comes along, the immine system reacts with a flood of antibody production, which greatly inhibits proliferation of the pathogen

This description relates to the humoral branch of the adaptive immune system, but is irrelevant here. The treatment in question primarily operates via a cell-mediated mechanism.

In this case, researchers would have to be VERY careful what cellular membrane cues they program their new mutant superhero T cells to go after, or else the body may become sensitized against its own cellular membranes, resulting in runaway autoimmune reactions.)

Target cue was CD19, a B-cell specific receptor (but not cancer-specific receptor). Hence the patient's ensuing state of hypo-gammaglobulinemia, due to indiscriminant destruction of antibody-producing cells.

Moderators, please refrain from moderation when not sufficiently versed in a field to accurately gauge the value of a post.

Re:Is there a drug?

[wierd_w]

Hey, I thought I was doing good dredging up information I was exposed to more than 20 years ago. (And at midnight, no less.) :)

I did not know T cells underwent mitosis. I thought they were produced as needed by their progenitor cells in the bone marrow, similarly to red cells.

Admittedly, I did not read tfa, (paywall, LONG out of university.) so I did knot read that it directly targets B cells. The issue of runaway autoimmune reactions is still relavent. Indescriminate destruction of B cells is a very bad thing and would make the patient extremely immune suppressed following the initial "thermonuclear" immune response, as the patient's immune system would effectively be given a lobotomy and would forget every pathogen it had encountered, and would remain that way until new B cells are produced.

This treatment could be adapted for other types of cancer besides this flavor of leukemia, just as long as there is a reasonably reliable target for the t cells to go after.

When b cells are not THE target, then their implication in the immune response would be more in line with what I had said earlier.

Sorry about the histamine bit. A quick google refresher points out that it is used to help white cells navigate capillaries. For some reason I erroneously recalled that it triggered b cell activation.

I am not a cellular biologist, and I don't work with this stuff every day, so naturally I will defer to somebody that is/does.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Guppy]

I am currently a candidate for an experimental treatment that does just that - plasma collection at start, then they convince the white blood cells to reproduce like mad, then put them back into me at weekly intervals.

I've heard of some trials of autologous immune therapies that were going on -- Dendreon (Prostate), Genesis/Lonza (Melanoma), and Sloan-Kettering Memorial (Ovarian & Leukemia) were supposedly doing some. Any chance you're in one of these?

Re:Is there a drug?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Only in those cases(which I imagine do come up) where a company's research raises the risk of cannibalizing their current products:

If I don't make chemo drugs, say, I get 0% of Mr. Cancer Patient's medical spending. If I can develop a cure for his particular flavor of cancer, suddenly I capture a substantially greater than zero slice of the pie. Even if the absolute size of the pie shrinks(because my hypothetical single treatment is cheaper than his previous slow demise), my slice is larger. Assuming I can cover my costs, it makes perfect sense for me to go ahead and nuke the other guys' profits in exchange for some of my own. The issues arise if there is excessive consolidation of researching entities...

Re:Is there a drug?

[Guppy]

I did not know T cells underwent mitosis. I thought they were produced as needed by their progenitor cells in the bone marrow, similarly to red cells.

Yes, that's correct, there are T-cell progenitors in the bone marrow that generate new T-cells. However, experienced T-cells are maintained in a population of circulating "memory" cells that persist long-term, and undergo rapid expansion upon encountering their triggering antigen.

Indescriminate destruction of B cells is a very bad thing and would make the patient extremely immune suppressed following the initial "thermonuclear" immune response, as the patient's immune system would effectively be given a lobotomy and would forget every pathogen it had encountered, and would remain that way until new B cells are produced.

Yes, these patients are currently on IVIG (Intravenous Immunoglobulin - antibodies collected and pooled from donors), and will be for a long time, possibly for the rest of their lives. Very expensive.

This treatment could be adapted for other types of cancer besides this flavor of leukemia, just as long as there is a reasonably reliable target for the t cells to go after.

Yes, I believe one of the next targets they are going after with this technique will be mesothelin-expressing tumors (found in certain ovarian/mesothelioma/pancreatic tumors). Will probably be messy, as it is expressed in certain populations of normal mesothelial cells.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that only works if companies are researching treatments for conditions that they don't already treat. I would guess that companies are more likely to work on treatments for problems similar to those they already treat, if only to make better use of existing expertise.

Re:Is there a drug?

[0123456]

It's not the privatized health care that would be the problem (in this case) but rather the privatized medical research companies.

No, it's the regulations that massively increase the cost of drugs.

Health care companies would prefer a cure, that way they get to keep the money that you keep paying them rather than give it to someone else.

As I understand it, the health insurance companies like big payouts, because it increases their income and hence their profits. For example, if they were collecting $100 and spending $50 then they'd face a backlash from the government, but by collecting $1000 and spending $950 they get the same amount of profit but can claim their margins are very tight. Or, when the stock market is actually going up, they can invest that $1000 until they have to pay it out and make ten times as much as they would investing $100.

Re:Is there a drug?

[shutdown -p now]

Selfish as I may sound, it would be great to hear your tale once the experiment is over - say, as a Slashdot story *wink wink*.

Re:Is there a drug?

[wierd_w]

You learn something new everyday. :)

However, if the artificially sensitized T cells programmed to eliminate B cells stick around, the patient would not be able to properly recover. Any freshly produced B cells would be marked for elimination immediately after production.

Perhaps the population could be coaxed into premature senesence (sp? I am tired...) by carefully regulated injections of refined trigger protein? The idea is to get the memory population to spike and exhaust the longevity of the population.

After that the patient could begin to recover.

Re:Is there a drug?

[RightSaidFred99]

I get it, you're cool cynical guy.

Let me guess, the evil car companies (and oil companies, natch) are holding back zero point energy and highly efficient batter technology!

Fruitcake.

Re:Is there a drug?

[TheRaven64]

Exactly what I was going to post. I'd much rather hear from someone who has undergone the treatment and talked to the doctors than read a press release. Please submit a Slashdot story!

Re:Is there a drug?

[TheRaven64]

True, but they are still in competition. If you come up with a cure for a disease that you also treat and don't market it, then you risk your competitors coming up with a cure and then destroying your market for the treatment or the cure. Given the FDA approval lead time, if you can get your cure to market as soon as you develop it, then you probably have a good three years when you're selling the cure and your competitor isn't selling the treatment (because it's obsolete) or their cure (because it isn't ready to market). In this time, you're raking in the money and your competitor is having to fund their research from their reserves, while you're funding yours from your income.

Hiding cures makes for good conspiracy theories, but not for very good economics.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably would not be used on rarer cancers because you would have to do all that work without the possibility of a really big payoff.

I'm of the understanding that doctor's bill by the procedure, not by the outcome. Consequently their willingness to use a new technique on an edge case is bounded only by your insurer's willingness to pay out and their inclination to attempt expensive unproven procedures on you.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Guppy]

Perhaps the population could be coaxed into premature senesence (sp? I am tired...) by carefully regulated injections of refined trigger protein? The idea is to get the memory population to spike and exhaust the longevity of the population.

Well, nobody knows yet if the leukemia has been permanently eliminated, or is instead being continually suppressed by the constant T-cell response.

However, I believe the researchers involved have stated they would like to include a kill-switch (as a long-term goal), both to be able to turn off the attack when therapy is concluded (assuming it can ever be concluded). and as a safeguard against T-cell leukemia that might possibly be induced by the therapy.

Re:Is there a drug?

[sandytaru]

Yup. Leukemia costs an insurance company at least a million bucks per patient, for all 3-4 rounds of chemo that is the standard treatment. As long as this treatment is as effective and cheaper, insurance companies will push for it, against the will of Big Pharma.

Re:Is there a drug?

[c6gunner]

No, it's not going to be cheap - these sorts of treatments are custom builds and there is a lot of fiddly tech involved, even after they streamline the process. It probably would not be used on rarer cancers because you would have to do all that work without the possibility of a really big payoff.

Naw, see, a lot of people get this stuff wrong. Earlier you talked about drugs which cost "100,000" a year. The reason they cost so damn much is exactly because they treat extremely rare conditions. From what I remember reading, the most expensive drug on the market treats a disease that affects less than 100 people per year in the US. So yes, you probably would see this used on "rarer cancers", but you'd end up paying a lot less if you have a common cancer vs. a rare one.

Re:Is there a drug?

[marnues]

Hence a reason to let this enter the public domain allowing the markets to find a better price. Allow medicaid to pay and jack up State's responsibility to collect money for this. Cancer hurts our economy and I'm willing to pay a few dollars to improve this place.

Re:Is there a drug?

[Belial6]

That sounds a lot like why companies always use their patents to wipe out their competitors instead of stockpiling them as a war chest.

Re:Is there a drug?

[CtownNighrider]

On the other hand a patient you save is bound to a be a patient again later, a patient that's dead won't pay again.

old

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, but not news - I think we've had news of the development posted here already. If not, we're way behind the news curve.

Re:old

[olsmeister]

Yeah, it's a dupe - but still a good story and encouraging for anyone that has had their lives affected by cancer. Here is the original post.

Duplicate

[natex84]

Duplicate of this: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV

Re:Duplicate

[j-beda]

Yeah, but that one had a very poor title, implying that the HIV did the curing, whereas it was really only used to do the reprogramming.

Re:Duplicate

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how you use the word "only". It's like saying walking on the moon is so great, but Saturn V only did the lifting. Or how great it is to be able to fly across large distances in a plane, whereas plane builders only do the design and building of these machines...

Genetically modified HIV was *the key* method to modify the immune cells as it is the only virus that does so. Without HIV, modifying immune cells would be significantly more difficult, if outright impossible for our technology. HIV was the enabler that allowed this therapy vector.

The therapy to use genetically modified HIV to modify immune cells to recognize a given protein was ingenious. If this leads to cure of majority of cancers out there, these people deserve a Noble Prize. Same as the peptic ulcer and H. Pelori discovery by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori

They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[zoffdino]

It almost killed him, but he would inevitably die with cancer anyway. I think most patients will accept the risk. Now that he has 1 billions modified T-cells, possibly double that now, how do they plan on getting them out, or make the body accept them? Surviving cancer just to die from your own T-cells doesn't sound cool.

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[sandytaru]

The body already accepts them - they were his cells, after all. Just like any immune reaction, once the cells "detect" that the threat is no longer present, they'll calm down and go back to the proverbial barracks (lymph nodes) until they're needed again.

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[Anonymous Coward]

thats what i wanna know too

or are they just going to leave them in?

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[Anonymous Coward]

His body wasn't attacking the T-cells. The "reaction" was his body's immune system being activated in order to attack the cancer cells, having been signaled by the now-reprogrammed T-cells. It wasn't rejection of those cells. The cells would still be recognized as "self" and as such, could just be left alone.

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[ralphdaugherty]

Now that he has 1 billions modified T-cells, possibly double that now, how do they plan on getting them out, or make the body accept them?

They gradually diminished on their own as the targets disappeared.

This is a great article in explaining what happened. Something on this was posted a couple of weeks ago and most responses were jokes about getting AIDS to kill cancer. In any event I never did see what the explanation was until now.

On a further note, so I don't have to start a new post and get a rejection that I didn't wait several minutes before posting again, there were several references in TFA about dangers to life from contents of killed cancer cells. I am wondering whether the technique used to filter T-cells from the blood could be used to filter or chemically reduce those toxins in the blood after the injection of modified T-cells until the danger passes.

I see now that this works by identifying a protein on the cell types that became cancerous, in this case B type immune cells, and also difficulty or impossibility of identifying a unique protein for other types of cells. As great as this is, it may only work for this type of cancer because of the unique protein on those type of immune cells.

Hopefullly they can find something prevalent in cancer cells to target with this.

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[billcopc]

The sensation of "feeling sick" is (in layman's terms) your body shunting all resources to the immune system. You get sick to get better. This is partly why people who claim to never get sick have a tendency to suddenly drop dead. Their body is still full of garbage, they just never noticed because the fight was subtle. The more responsive your immune system, the more it beats the crap out of you. I'm dumbing it down to extremes here, so don't go and write this in your Med school entry exam :P

It can, and does, happen that said "shunting" gets so extreme that you die anyway, but that's what the ICU is for. If these researchers can coax the body into waging a full-scare biowar on cancer, and keep you alive through it, that's HUGE!

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[Anonymous Coward]

This is partly why people who claim to never get sick have a tendency to suddenly drop dead. Their body is still full of garbage, they just never noticed because the fight was subtle.

Yeah, or maybe their immune system is actually doing a good job getting rid of the "garbage"?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you're not a doctor?

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes chemo can get the T-Cells back out, which after they can infuse clones of the original T-Cells back in. I doubt they will do either, because of extra cost, after all there cured why spend more. I think the patient should be quarantined for about 2 weeks while being cured of cancer, then eliminating GE T-Cells and restoring the patients orig biological ecosystem. I host a training program for those docs, have to watch a lot of medical conferences and generally find the immune system a work of art that should be studied in computer science.

Re:They do have a plan for the T-cells after

[sjames]

They're still his T-cells, they just got some direct reprogramming. Other than cells bearing the target protean (his cancerous B cells), nothing in his body will have any problem with them. The actual T-cells will die off now that the cancer is gone, but memory cells will now be primed to mount a new response if it's ever needed.

The fact that his new immune response is permanent is a good thing. If the cancer tries to come back, it'll get nipped in the bud before he even knows it happened.

Xkcd on the topic

[Sparx139]

http://xkcd.com/938/

Re:Xkcd on the topic

[a_hanso]

Modified T cells that kill leukemia and then grow out of control? I think I know this corporation.

Re:Xkcd on the topic

[Andtalath]

That was actually one of the times where I've grown annoyed with XKCD.

This is the beginning of using a different types of retrovirus to cure deadly diseases.

That is the biggest breakthrough since penicillin.

Which, if you would like to be reminded, is putting mold into your body which is quite deadly and thus killing loads of germs, indiscriminatory.
Which happen to save lives.

Re:Xkcd on the topic

[cp.tar]

Indeed. Five gods forbid someone actually made a joke about it all.

Duplicate?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Didn't we get this a couple weeks back?

Use HIV to reprogram his white blood cells to attack cancer?

Re:Duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that was different, this is using re-mapped white t-cells to fight off the disease.

That was using cancer to fight off aids or vice versa to kill the disease if i recall correctly. This is different i believe.

Re:Duplicate?

[j-beda]

yeah, right here: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV

but at least this story title is a bit more accurate.

Re:Duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty sure they are different, that study was conducted in germany. This one at the university of Pennsylvania

similar tech using proteins instead of genes

[mauthbaux]

There's a company called Argos therapeutics http://www.argostherapeutics.com/ which uses proteins harvested from cancer biopsies to do the same thing. Last I checked, they were in phase 2 clinicals (efficacy testing). This is as close to personalized medicine as anyone is really able to do right now. Disclaimer: the only tie to the company that I have is that I interviewed there a couple years ago (didn't get the job unfortunately).

Re:similar tech using proteins instead of genes

[witherstaff]

Dubai is allowing a treatment in their country that does that. http://www.arabianbusiness.com/new-ovarian-cancer-treatment-approved-in-dubai-403287.html My mother has been fighting ovarian for 3 years and if it didn't cost a few hundred thousand for this treatment they'd have another client.

Sort of old news

[Brian_Ellenberger]

From a few weeks back. XKCD even did a comic on it.
http://www.xkcd.com/938/

Re:Sort of old news

[Anonymous Coward]

No this is different i believe.

woah! so jealous.

[Narcocide]

Does this mean he's practically immune to cancer now? Like, he could smoke, drink, bqq and huff glue all he wants and not get cancer again... just like, maybe flu symptoms? I'm kinda jealous... I wonder what other super powers this might come with. (Reduced aging anyone?)

Re:woah! so jealous.

[currently_awake]

T cells focus on a single invader DNA, there are many different cancer DNA- Meaning no, this won't give full immunity.

Re:woah! so jealous.

[terrox]

the article answers that.

Re:woah! so jealous.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unfortunately for us, "Cancer" is a very plural mass noun(both because it is a catch-all category for a large number of conditions caused by one's own cells dividing in excess, and because cells that have jumped the tracks and defeated the various safeguards in place against uncontrolled replication are in an excellent position to evolve rapidly).

If he's lucky, this particular flavor of cancer won't be back to finish him off. Even then, though, there are a zillion others just waiting in the wings...

Re:woah! so jealous.

[sjames]

He is immune to that particular cancer now. Unfortunately, he remains just as vulnerable as any of us to the others.

Re:woah! so jealous.

[autophile]

Correction, I think: T cells focus on protein markers. This is why one of the patients died: the protein marker associated with the cancerous cells also turned out to be present on healthy lung tissue.

immunopheresis

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.immunologyfoundation.org/ has been doing immune therapy work for cancer for years with pretty high success rates in europe.

Autoimune side effects?

[BlueParrot]

Whenever I see a suggestion about using the immune system in some new and novel way I cannot help but get worried about autoimune side effects.

I guess it is a bit irrational since vaccinations are basically stimulating the immune system to hit specific pathogens, and most of them are very safe as compared to other drugs, but I can't help but feel a bit uneasy about training the body to attack its own cells.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[dr2chase]

I think there's much more to worry about here than with a vaccination, seeing as how the cancer is a lot more like us than some random bacteria or virus. However, don't forget "compared to what". People were willing to do some scary shit to avoid Smallpox ("here, I'll infect you from this pus-filled sore on a cow"). Someone who's already got bad cancer is in an even worse place than that.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at it this way.

The guy mentioned in the article had undergone chemotherapy. It didn't work. He was basically a dead man walking; they either tried something radical, or he was going to die.

Or, put another way - he had nothing to lose. If it causes significant problems for him down the road, well, hey - he's had six months (or a year, or two years, or ...) that he otherwise wouldn't have had, and those will have been good times, not days spent lying in a bed wishing he was dead.

So yeah. Long term effects - possibly a concern. But given that the alternative was death in very short order, I think the tradeoff was worth it.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that depends on the indivudual's particular immune system. Outside of those folks who already have autoimmune issues, I don't know if this approach can cause permanent damage in that respect. Could perhaps trigger it if they were otherwise succepticble, but that's a small population.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[sjames]

Actually, autoimmune reactions are a serious risk with this sort of treatment. One woman died of an autoimmune attack on her lungs when a similar technique was tried to cure her colon cancer. It's particularly tricky since the target is actually cells from the patient's own body that just have damage to a few critical genes.

The patient's recovery is BECAUSE of an autoimmune reaction to his own B cells. ALL of his B cells, cancerous or not. In his case, they weren't working well anyway (the few healthy ones were swamped by the cancer) and in any event he was terminal without the treatment, so nearly anything was better than nothing.

He will require periodic infusions of immune globulin for the rest of his life to help compensate for the loss of his B cells, but that seems to be an excellent trade-off.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have acute leukemia, then autoimmune side effects is last problem to worry of.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, the side effect is that they no longer have any B-Cells, since they trained to T-Cells to attack cells with a protein found on both healthy and cancerous B-Cells. The article also mentions a woman who died after a similar treatment because the protein they were targeted was also present on cells in her lungs. So yeah, stuff like that is definitely possible.

Re:Autoimune side effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

The T-cells were trained to destroy all the healthy and cancerous B-cells. You're right to be uneasy about it, since it's not so much a cancer cure as a more precise alternative to constant chemotherapy, which the patient's cancer had become resistant to.

Honestly, I've always been amazed chemotherapy can work. Chemically attacking parts of the body sounds like, something more likely to cause cancer than treat it.

Plus, they're all extreme medical procedures by most standards. In my mind at least, deliberately changing that behavior of the immune system this way is akin to gadget modding or car repair with explosives. Got a flat tire? Blow the !@#$'er back up. Laptop overheating? Add vents to the case with a claymore! Car seats giving you a pain in the back? Fluff 'em as good as new with C4!

Where's DrBob?

[Farmer Tim]

I can't gauge the validity of this research without a mention of subluxations as a calibration reference for my stupidity detector.

Re:Where's DrBob?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll see if I can help.

HIV causes severe vertebral subluxations, if these Frankenstein blood-cells ever escaped from the lab they could...

nope sorry, I can't keep the crazy up long enough.

They will stop this

[Anonymous Coward]

American Cancer Society (cancer.org) and others similar institutions receive millions in donations from dying patients and their families, they live-off cancer donation and it is their primary business, they give away only about 1% to the research, while 99% goes to compensations, wages, and salaries. Lets see what they think about it.

Read the scandals and criticism section here for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Cancer_Society

Re:They will stop this

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Are they going to deploy their reserve army of carcinogen ninjas or something?

Do organizations often have a structural problem with dependence on what they are supposed to fight? That they do, and a fair few succumb. However, there is a nontrivial additional burden of proof when you go from saying that an organization is merely bloated, feckless, and profiteering, to saying that the organization is willing and capable of halting progress in order to preserve its reason for existence.

It can, and does, happen; but it takes an additional step, additional power, and additional ruthlessness and/or blindness on the part of those involved...

Re:They will stop this

[RightSaidFred99]

Depends. If I hire 500 scientists to consult on cancer and research cancer, is that on "compensation, wages, salaries"?

3rd story in 2 weeks about this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the 3rd story I've heard about this kind of thing in the last 3 weeks. The first story was here, which is a very interesting way to do this kind of thing. The next story I heard was here which sounds very similar (but different), and now this. Will cancer be eradicated within 10 years? No one knows for sure, but things are very promising. Maybe some of this research will save my life, maybe it will save you life (and I don't have cancer, and you may not have cancer now either, but 10 years older is 10 years older).

Re:3rd story in 2 weeks about this

[ledow]

There are animals that are completely immune to the effects of cancer and "live forever" (try and age most lobster-species - you can't because they literally "regrow" their cells all the time). There are human groups that are vastly more immune to certain types of cancer (and some vastly more susceptible) - and yet they would probably die if you gave them the flu.

Cancer is merely the result of a cell going haywire and instead of dying it reproduces like mad and keeps going. It's a DNA mutation caused by the presence of a chance of something going wrong every time a cell splits or reproduces. It's not some mystical, magical disease - we can pinpoint the cause virtually all of the time. The problem is that this makes it inherently more difficult to "attack" - it's not foreign, so to speak, it's just a normal part of us spinning out of control

At the moment, cancer is an inevitable thing caused by sheer statistics - if you live long enough, and have enough cells, one of them will "go rogue" and start a chain reaction that gives you cancerous tumours, etc. Thousands of years ago we rarely suffered from cancer because people just weren't living long enough to hit those sorts of probabilities (of course they happened, in the same way that babies can get cancer today, and they happened more if you were exposed to carcinogens, but it rarely had time for symptoms to affect your life so drastically as to kill you).

The problem is that, currently, treatment consists of obliterating obviously-cancerous cells plus a sufficient margin around them (to catch any we can't see) by a variety of pretty crude means (amputation, irradiation, chemical death, etc.). It's hardly "high-tech". In fact, our treatment of cancer is something that belongs in the era where we didn't suffer from it at all.

The problem with cancer is not "where's the magic pill", like it can be with actual diseases, viruses, etc. It's "how do we change your entire genetic makeup so this doesn't have a chance of happening". Hence what this article shows - you have to basically change the immune system cells artificially and then re-insert them into the patient.

You're basically changing their blood and immune system for one that their own genetics could *never* have produced (unlike, say, diseases that you can immunise against). In effect, you're genetically engineering parts for a human that attack the cancers they would normally be susceptible to.

10 years is optimistic, because of the sheer variety of cancers and the sheer magnitude of changes that can happen when ANY part of a DNA strand is "corrupted" when it's copied. And this is all cutting-edge stuff that has huge ramifications on your body (and just wait until people start equating "genetically modified" with things being inserted into human tissue!) and is pretty unique to each person / cell type / mutation. It can take 20 years to get something through clinical trials even if there are no adverse effects on tests.

Cancer will be with us for a LONG time. We may be able to control it "soon", i.e. years to decades, but to stop people dying of it is going to take a lot longer. It's the most heavily funded medical research there's ever been, and been running for almost all of modern medicine's existence - and STILL the most effective treatment is chemicals that kill parts of you, radiation that kills parts of you and a lot of hope and guesswork.

Computer analogy: If cells are like NULL-terminated strings stored on a hard drive, cancer is what happens when they lose the NULL. Eventually the drive will (inevitably) corrupt a single byte and if that loses the NULL terminator, everything can go tits-up. Our treatment at the moment consists of zeroing the drive areas around the string. It can work but there's nothing guaranteed about the rest of the data on the disk. This treatment is kinda like a RAID checksum algorithm running over the disk - a byte wrong here or there can be detected or fixed. The cure, though, is to make a drive that doesn't corr

Re:3rd story in 2 weeks about this

[omnichad]

try and age most lobster-species - you can't because they literally "regrow" their cells all the time

I know this is off-topic, but is that why lobster tastes so good? It's like the veal of the sea?

Virus treating cancer isn't new..

[Anonymous Coward]

..although this is a novel methodology that has a lot of promise.

Closer to approval is the Reovirus from Oncolytics Biotech, http://www.oncolyticsbiotech.com which is natural(not engineered), has been in trials for 10 years and currently in a Phase III trial with the FDA under SPA(Special Protocol Assessment) which means that if the mathematical endpoints agreed to prior to the trial are met then likelihood of approval is high.

Repost

[poity]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV
Incredibly interesting nonetheless.

Re:Repost

[Anonymous Coward]

If only CmdrTaco was here, this dupe never would have happened!

Fringe

[caspy7]

Awesome.
Sounds like something that would happen on Fringe - except on Fringe it would happen in under an hour.

Re:Fringe

[sjames]

And the doctor would have dropped acid first.

Re:Fringe

[tsotha]

As long as it happens before I get cancer.

Seems more comparable to inoculations

[perpenso]

While I think this is awesome, isn't this how I Am Legend happened?

Whatever happened in the movie was fanciful hand waving. This seems more comparable to inoculations. Fluids are introduced to the body, the body learns how to defend itself. Of course this high level perspective is about where the similarity ends.

House

[PPH]

He'd nearly kill the patient 3 times while making remarks about Cuddy's ass. And after the successful cure, he'd admit that the procedure had not yet been approved for use on rats, let alone people.

If it was Fringe, they'd be using alien DNA.

Okay, what about prevention?

[MyLongNickName]

Any chance of using this technique in a preventative way? I mean, could you give an inoculation to train your body to fight off the cancer when it first starts? Not an MD by any stretch.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[RatPh!nk]

You could, but you would need to know which errant protein would be on the cell surface to attack.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[Chas]

That probably wouldn't be a good idea.

The way the treatment works is by killing off most of your healthy T-cells. Then replacing them with the altered ones.

This leaves you open to infection pretty much forevermore.

Right now the treatment is kind of a russian roulette game. Things like kidney failure (due to being clogged with the byproducts of killed cancer) is no joke.

What they've got to do after they verify the results with further trials is find a way to control the reaction a bit more. Maybe lower dosages of altered T-Cell so the effect is more gradual.

A cure, or at least a VERY efficacious treatment for cancer doesn't do you much good if it kills you while trying to cure you.

Still, damned impressive. If this can be duplicated and controlled a bit better, these researchers should go up for a Nobel. And a few tens or hundreds of million in additional funding.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[MyLongNickName]

Maybe I am oversimplifying as I am not trained in this area... but I got that most of the side effects were due to how much cancer had taken over the body... two pounds of waste in one article I read. If you used a variant of this technique earlier, I was thinking that it might not be such a traumatic experience.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Already in effect.

Multicellular organisms generally, humans not excepted, have a whole bunch of mechanisms to terminate abberant cells. Some are internal to the cell, conditions that trigger cellular suicide, and some involve the immune system coming in for the kill.

What we call "cancer" are the abberant cells that manage to overcome the internal defenses and multiply their way to clinical significance.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[Chas]

Yes. But if you look at the article again. Part of the treatment is an intensive round of chemo to kill off most of the existing T-cells in the body. This way they don't attack the modified ones.

The problem is, after that, your immune system is more or less permanently compromised. You have enough to basically continue to try and fight off the cancer. But you're more susceptible to infections and the like. This is why the patients require regular infusions of immune globulin. To help bolster their immune systems.

If you try treatment earlier, before the cancer has progressed as much, yes, you run less risk of overloading the body's waste elimination mechanisms and there's a possibility that the negative side effects experienced would be less. But you're still going to have the compromised immune system.

But hell, if it was a choice between regular immune globulin infusions for the rest of my life and a bout of feeling sick enough to want to die or ACTUAL death by cancer? Give me the damn treatment and just keep me from flopping over dead while my body's killing the cancer!

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[Lazareth]

I have no expert knowledge in the field, but what would prevent the body from regenerating its own natural T-cells after the treatment? If the new, modified T-cells are the issue, can't you do the same thing as the first time around, having stored a batch of his old T-cells and kill off all the modified ones before pumping them back in again?

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[mosb1000]

Your body will often do this on it's own if you are healthy. When it doesn't, that's when you get cancer. I'd think, since it's actually a cure, it would be better to use it only on people that have cancer (especially since it could have a lot of nasty side effects). Perhaps using it preventatively might cause resistant forms of cancer to become more prevalent as well (I know that sounds crazy).

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[AmonTheMetalhead]

It's the bone marrow who creates T-cells and I do believe they kill of that bone marrow in the proces. I assume it's not possible to store bone marrow outside of the body. Or I could be completely wrong.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[Walkingshark]

It's the bone marrow who creates T-cells and I do believe they kill of that bone marrow in the proces. I assume it's not possible to store bone marrow outside of the body. Or I could be completely wrong.

You are. But hopefully Sam Wright will show up and save us with a car analogy to clear it all up. :)

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[Jarik C-Bol]

ok, the way I understand this procedure to work is this:
1. they take some of the patients T cells
2. they modify the cells, making them psycho cancer hunters, able to replicate like rabbits (paraphrasing)
3. the irradiate the patient, to murder the remaining T cells, so the fancy modified ones can work.
4. insert modified cells into patient, allow them to eat cancer.

now, i cant get past the pay-wall, but as a logical human being, i would assume that the next steps would be:

5. irradiate the patient, to kill the modified T cells.
6. Reintroduce the patients original unmodified (abet non cancerous) t cells. (which you saved from the batch you took to make the fancy cancer eating cells)
7. ?
8. Profit!

At least, it seems like that is what I would do. That is of course, assuming that the modified cells are not simply programed to go after only aberrant B cells in the marrow, leaving healthy marrow alone.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[wwphx]

Funny story about being on immune globin infusions for the rest of my life. When I was in the process of initial diagnosis for hypogammaglobulinemia, or common variable immune deficiency, one potential cause of my immune problem was cancer of my spleen. I'd just had pneumonia four times in five months and my lymphatic system was working overtime to clean itself, thus I had an enlarged spleen. Had I had that form of cancer, assuming it hadn't spread, removing my spleen might have resolved my CVID and I wouldn't need IgG infusions.

It's kind of odd hoping for cancer. 4 needles in your abdomen for about 2 hours twice a week isn't a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, I'll be infusing later tonight, I'm coming up on my 200th infusion. Which is not to say that having advanced stage cancer is a lot of fun, both of my in-laws died of cancer and I've lost several friends and relatives from it.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[ethergear]

The lysis of two pounds of tissue is definitely a cause of negative side effects, but consider that the cancer in question (leukemia) is a cancer of the immune system, specifically cancerous B cells. The treatment does not distinguish between healthy and cancerous B cells, so you just never have B cells ever again.

Re:Okay, what about prevention?

[Kilrah_il]

Actually, there is no problem in taking some person's bone marrow (or rather, bone marrow progenitor cells), save them and return it to him after the treatment is over; this is the basis for bone marrow transplantation. The problem is choosing between transplanting the person's own bone marrow or another person's. In the former case, you run the risk of having cancer cells hiding in the bone marrow and having a recurrence of the disease; in the later, you have to deal with using immuncompromising medications for the rest of the life. Either way, it's a hard treatment with large mortality and is reserved for severe cases of Leukemia.

THIS IS NOT A MOTHA FUKIN DUPLICATE !

[Anonymous Coward]

People, please read the MOTHER FFFFFFFFFFFFF u ckin article!

The previous article that was similar to this is NOT this. That study was conducted in germany. This was done at the University of Pennsylvania.

Im sick of people not actually READING the articles.

Re:Duplicate? - wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, that study was in germany this was at UPE

Good Progress but NOT a WIN... (yet)

[SirAstral]

If you read the article the treatment destroys ALL B-Cells good and bad while the new T-cells are present. With this I can certainly understand why the doctors are still reluctant to party. But it is definitely good to still have in the arsenal.

We can consider treatment a win when the disease is eliminated, the modified cells are gone, and normal biological operation is restored. But in the case of this treatment, if the special t-cells all die, then the reproduction of bad B-Cells may resume.

The really scary part of this all is the usage of HIV virus. Yes it's gutted but the wonderful thing about viruses is that they have the nasty habit of adapting to survive and if the theory on evolution is true, then eventually it's going to happen. The source of change may come from one of the cells being modified behaving in a way that is unexpected because it has damaged DNA and voila, that damaged DNA combines with the RNA to create something else. Heck, the RNA in the vector could become damaged and start another fun experiment to stop the new threat or it could just become wasted and die out.

For now I would just classify this stuff as interesting but definitely a little scary.

Re:Good Progress but NOT a WIN... (yet)

[Anonymous Coward]

Please for god sakes STOP mixing up two different stories !

The previous article written 2 months ago was conducted in germany!!!!

Re:Good Progress but NOT a WIN... (yet)

[SirAstral]

I am only referring to the article linked in this story, additionally all of my comments are regarding the information on Mr. Ludwig.

Additionally the article in the link has no references to anything in Germany that I could find. Maybe you need to point out where the discrepancies are rather than just saying they exist.

Isn't cancer eventually inevitable?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all cancer is cell division gone bad because the instructions have degraded from analog copying? Eventually every cell will have degraded instructions, it is inevitable. Live long enough, you WILL get cancer.

Re:Isn't cancer eventually inevitable?

[omnichad]

Yes, that's mostly true. I wouldn't quite call it analog, since there's a checksum algorithm and all that (which still fails). But we have quite a number of redundancy in our non-cancerous cells to "restore from backup," so to speak.

NO DAMN YOU

[Anonymous Coward]

NOPE this is NOT a re-post.

That study was done in germany, this study was at UPE

What could possibly go wrong?

[thisisauniqueid]

The chance of causing an autoimmune disease with this sort of treatment protocol seems enormous... Do you really think that nothing could possibly go wrong in training the body to kill its own cells of a specific narrow type?

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a worthless idiot, this isn't the virgin mary, this is a 65 year old on deaths door... do you really think his primary concern is getting graves disease or lupis after his life was saved? Better refuse the treatment and die from leukemia just to be on the safe side you twat.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean besides dying? You're one of those IT guys that says no to everything aren't you? I'll take the "chance" some other cells get killed...thanks.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to dying of terminal cancer?

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[mldi]

The chance of causing an autoimmune disease with this sort of treatment protocol seems enormous... Do you really think that nothing could possibly go wrong in training the body to kill its own cells of a specific narrow type?

I'd still take that possibility over a terrible death sentence any day. Well, depending on the traffic on the way to the clinic. Then I may just take the death sentence.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, something could go wrong. It might not work and the person would die of Leukemia..

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have leukemia, when chemotherapy becomes useless, and when you cannot be accepted for a bone marrow transplant, a chance that you will survive via any method easily outweight the risks. Basically in these conditions, a lot of things have already gone wrong in the body, and nothing else than a dangerous procedure is going to save you unfortunately ... After all, as mentionned in the article POUNDS of cancer cells can be killed thanks to this treatment.

This is one of the better ways to eliminate cancer IMH non-doctor opinion. Targetting is done not manually on a zone by a human (when it's possible, as for solid tumors), nor via the the very aggressive chemotherapy (that also attacks other normal cells) but thanks to the body's own immune system. That way has the potential to allow not missing any cancerous zone of a particular cancer, or not to only kill half the cells and just weaken the other half, damaing the rest of the sane cells in the process.
Maybe in the future it could be possible to test with scan markers that bind to the same kind of proteins if this treatment might also target some sane cells, and then try to bind to another more characteristic protein in the cancer cell in this case, but this is already very promising ...

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[zwarte piet]

yeah, besided the body already knows how to kill cancercells. There's just something out of balance about that ability in cancer patiens that could use some stimulation.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you're right, there might be a risk of some kind of autoimmune response.

But given the choice, what would you opt for? A cancer that's going to kill you painfully and imminently, or a chance of an autoimmune disease that could probably be treated with immunosuppresants?

All medical treatments have risks and tradeoffs. The question is, are those negatives worse than the illness they treat? In the case of an aggressive and inoperable cancer that has shrugged off other treatments, I'd say "almost certainly not".

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is dangerous and like many cancer treatments it might actually kill the patient even if it kills the cancer. Aggressive chemo therapy can do this. But it is really only risking a couple of weeks or months against being cured which could allow you to live for 10-60yrs or more. So even if treatment has a fair chance of causing an incurable autoimmune disease it is a worth while gamble for many people. Yes, it would suck to be sick and then be "cured" only to die from the cure.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good point, but the team who did this knows about it. They explain in the article that they're perfectly aware of the risks and the fact that previous trials have occasionally led to deaths. It's risky to you and me, but to the patients, the risk was apparently relatively small:

Mr. Ludwig said that when entered the trial, he had no options left. Indeed, Dr. June said that Mr. Ludwig was “almost dead” from the leukemia, and the effort to treat him was a “Hail Mary.”....Mr. Ludwig thought that if the trial could buy him six months or a year, it would be worth the gamble. But even if the study did not help him, he felt it would still be worthwhile if he could help the study.

When you get to the point of thinking "at best I'll die after 12 months, at worst I'll die during the treatment: may as well make myself useful" you're probably willing to accept the risk of an autoimmune disease.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this why it was a trial to see if it is safe? As with all new drugs, they do human trials to see if they're "safe" (people don't drop dead immediately, but chronic health issues are ok).

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall reading Popular Science years ago with an anti-arthritis treatment using protiens welded to bacteria, where you convince the immune system to attack itself, killing off the IFF immune cells. Didn't hear anything more about it afterwards, like all the other future tech, of course.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

When your own cells are killing you, taking the chance that some of the cells who are supposed to save you might kill you, sounds like the easy choice.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Yes things can go wrong, and TFA talks about that as well. The 3 patients who underwent this treatment are at higher risk of infection because the reprogrammed T-Cells suppress part of the immune system and will forever have to receive infusions of immune globulin. TFA also mentions a woman who received similar treatment to fight colon cancer and the reprogrammed T-cells attacked her lung tissue and killed her. Another trial to reprogram T-cells to kill leukemia may have contributed to a patient's death from sepsis. Not to mention, the treatment itself can kill a patient as their body is stressed by it's efforts to kill the cancer. It's all in TFA.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to die a certain death from leukemia than to risk the possibility of death from autoimmune disease; is that right?

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

= Zombies?

Supprise ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the doctors failed to predict that after you tell the body that cancer is a decease... the body would start acting like it's sick ? (Fever etc. especially given the large biomass the body had to deal with ...)

"His temperature shot up"

[iMadeGhostzilla]

I remember reading about a decades old cancer treatment technique that included fevers with very high temperatures. The physicians of the time claimed it was the body heat that killed the tumors.

Don't know how valid that is, but I know that a doctor told me once when I have fever not to take an aspirin just to lower the body temperature (unless it's dangerously high) because fever creates conditions for the body to fight the germs.

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Normal range" fevers do trigger an immune reaction, so your doctor's advice was correct. Hyperthermia is a recognized therapy that can attack cancer cells directly, but it's necessary to get the temperature beyond the normal range, to approximately 42 degrees C or even higher. Not sure what the effect of fever is on germs or viral infections, but I assume it varies.

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[kyriosdelis]

It is possible that he got some sort of tumor lysis syndrome as a result of the mass destruction of the cancer cells.

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[smellsofbikes]

I remember reading about a decades old cancer treatment technique that included fevers with very high temperatures. The physicians of the time claimed it was the body heat that killed the tumors.

Don't know how valid that is, but I know that a doctor told me once when I have fever not to take an aspirin just to lower the body temperature (unless it's dangerously high) because fever creates conditions for the body to fight the germs.

I dunno about fighting cancer that way (it might work: I just don't know) but the germ thing is valid. Bacteria and viruses are optimized to reproduce as quickly as possible at body temperature. Their proteins are less efficient as temperature varies either way from that optimum. So when you run a temperature, you slow down their reproduction rate, which gives your immune system more time to form a response and go fight them. (Bacteria can reproduce in about half an hour, which means they can increase by nearly 1,000,000,000,000:1 in one day, where our cells take many hours to reproduce once, so when you're forming an immune response, which involves a cell chewing up one of the invading bacteria and producing antibodies against it, and then that cell reproducing repeatedly to form a whole population of cells making antibodies, it takes several days. Anything that slows down the bacteria helps.)

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[BigDogCH]

Excellent response. So I often wonder then why parents are so eager to freak out when their kid runs a slight fever. Get the drugs, we need to get that fever down! WTF? Where does that come from?

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[sloth jr]

Well ... in the case of my daughter, moderate fever (102, 103 - nothing really extreme) was several times accompanied by febrile seizures. They're not that uncommon in children under 5.

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[Mex]

I too have read that fevers are a way for the body to get rid of some extraneous bodies like harmful bacteria and viruses, basically "boiling" them alive inside your flesh (someone else might explain this much better, but that's the basic concept).

But since tumors are just masses of flesh created by a disfunction in the immune system, would fevers help at all?

You'd have to treat the reason that the immune system malfunctioned, no?

Just wondering, perhaps the fevers were not caused by his body "killing the cancer", but a side effect, a reaction to foreign bodies invading the system.

Re:"His temperature shot up"

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Thanks for the explanation, it really makes sense. As for fever and cancer, just found this article from Sep 2010:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1313773/Can-fever-cure-cancer-Jordan-baffled-doctors-leukaemia-vanished-new-evidence-suggests-remarkable-explanation-.html

"Now, scientists believe they understand how this might work. There are two theories: the first is that an infection serious enough to provoke a fever response can push the body's immune system into a high-powered, hypersensitive state.

This helps the patient's immune system detect the fact that cancer cells are subtly different from normal healthy cells. It then attacks the tumour cells as though they are infectious invaders.

In everyday life, our immune systems may wipe out many cancer cells unobtrusively, so we never know we were at risk. But, too often, such tumour cells can be sufficiently similar to normal ones that they sneak under the radar of a normally-running immune system and develop into serious cancers.

The other theory is that the high temperature itself attacks and destroys the cancer. "

Aperture's been doing this for years!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they gave him his additional $60 for letting them take him apart, put some science stuff in him, and put him back together.

Re:No, this is Homeopathic in application.

[kheldan]

Wow.
Here's a tip for you: I hear the dollar stores have great deals on off-brand aluminum foil. So, you know, you can never run out of tinfoil hats, to keep the gov'ment mind-control lasers from getting you.

Better question: What could possibly go right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your terminal cancer might go into remission.

For now this is only for patients with virtually no hope of a cure. As the treatment is refined and the risks become more quantifiable, the treatment will be opened up to more and more types of cases.

You would know.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how you conspiracy theorists all think alike, and the first one that breaks from the group is the one that tries to tell everyone they aren't a conspiracy theorist.

So, how much aluminum have you bought already? Any of it cross your blood-brain barrier yet or do did you forget the question already? Got any recommendations to improve my Time Cube that I haven't already done by wearing 4 quartz-crystal watches set to differing time zones? I wear a wind-up mechanical pocket-watch around my kneck just for the rap-factor of knowing that I can walk through parallel dimensions that don't effect the time of my neck-peice while the 4 electric wristwatches all respond to my entrance of electro-magnetic rifts when I cross into another dimension.

I'm willing to bet your dimensions are more basement-level, neckbeard, unemployed, mother's child. Good one.

Re:You would know.

[kheldan]

Gee, that all stings so bad coming from someone who posts as an AC, while I at least have the balls to take my pot-shots out in the open. Go back to /b/ on 4chan and lurk more.

Why do I have to read it here?

[m.alessandrini]

I mean, they found a therapy for cancer, even if it worked for a single case and it's still experimental, so why do I have to read it on Slashdot and not on all the main news? This should be "breaking news" on every tv channel, instead of the bullshit of the politician of the day.

Re:Why do I have to read it here?

[rhsanborn]

The German trial got some of this press in mainstream news (although, arguably, not enough), and it was just a few weeks ago. So, this one probably won't get much press.

Re:Why do I have to read it here?

[masman]

I read it on CNN.com two weeks ago. And the NY Times yesterday. AP sent it out on Sunday. So it is out there. Can't speak for TV news, though, as I don't watch TV news. For the reason you cited.

Important gotcha

[Anonymous Coward]

The treatment wiped out all of the patients’ B-cells, both healthy ones and leukemic ones, and will continue to do for as long as the new T-cells persist in the body, which could be forever (and ideally should be, to keep the leukemia at bay). The lack of B-cells means that the patients may be left vulnerable to infection, and they will need periodic infusions of a substance called intravenous immune globulin to protect them.

It's not a perfect solution, as it does wipe out part of the immune system, apparently forever. But it's progress, for sure.

damn you freakin people

[Anonymous Coward]

this is NOT a duplicate, this is a completely different story.

If any of you even bothered to READ the stories you would have read right off the bat that the HIV/cancer study was conducted in germany.

This was conducted at UPEN!

Smart Blood (tm)

[Dark Lord of Ohio]

Well, science is not far from fiction. In Old man's war, Scalzi writes about human clones with altered blood (it's called SmartBlood). This SmartBlood fight infections, keeps oxygen longer... and burns mosquitos :) I think it is the way we go, to become genetically altered humans. But, really, HUMANS? Or something else? Hell with it. I don't care, just make it work for cancer.

All i have to say.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stock up for the zombie apocalypse...... NOW !

Although it sounds extreme

[hesaigo999ca]

It sounds like it is right out of a sci-fi movie, where the cure has a kick to it,
looks like you might not make it after taking it, and yet after the storm passes, WOW, the results are amazing.

I hope they get to test this a few more times just to make sure, as well as follow said patient 10 years after,
as it is important to see if the cells will be ok 10 years later and not morph or mutate....I just hope they do not let
him walk away without keeping tabs on him.

You could die ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but, gee, you're going to die anyway.

It a way of coping

[juancn]

His fiancee has stage three breast cancer. I see it only as a way of coping with the pain and uncertainty that situation brings.

Re:It a way of coping

[Anonymous Coward]

plus http://xkcd.com/931/

Re:It a way of coping

[David Gould]

And don't forget: http://xkcd.com/933/

Re:It a way of coping

[Anonymous Coward]

wife

Want another test subject?

[GameboyRMH]

I have a relative in Ontario dying of cancer right now who might be willing to give it a shot.

Anyone in the field know if these guys can test on willing terminal patients? She's been given a year to live max.

Did I miss a memo?

[ady1]

Cancer itself is caused by immune system.

10 days later...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were surprised at what happened 10 days later, just wait until you see what happens 28 days later...

amusing anaecdote. . .

[jafac]

A friend of mine has this condition, and had this treatment.
He has had white hair all his life. After the treatment, he lost his hair, but it grew back black. They do not know if he's "cured", but he's doing better. His condition brought with it, many secondary tumors, and those have stopped.

Re:amusing anaecdote. . .

[Geminii]

I'm waiting for the creating company to stop putting billions into the cancer cure, and start marketing it as the latest in hair dye tech. "Regain your natural hair color! No dye, no chemicals, no surgery! (Also cures cancer.)"

Abstracts to the scientific papers

[Joe Torres]

T cells with chimeric antigen receptors have potent antitumor effects and can establish memory in patients with advanced leukemia. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832238 Chimeric antigen receptor-modified T cells in chronic lymphoid leukemia. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21830940

www.symtompsofcancer.com

[Anonymous Coward]

that is very important, maybe this site can help you, www.symtompsofcancer.com