Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
http://xkcd.com/938/
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
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?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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?)
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.
I can't gauge the validity of this research without a mention of subluxations as a calibration reference for my stupidity detector.
Blank until
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.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I Am Legend is complete fiction.
Slashdotters would never come out into the sunlight, no matter what.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
His fiancee has stage three breast cancer. I see it only as a way of coping with the pain and uncertainty that situation brings.
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.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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