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Training an Immune System To Kill Cancer: a Universal Strategy
New submitter Guppy writes "A previous story reported widely in the media, and appearing both on Slashdot and XKCD, described a novel cancer treatment, in which a patient's own T-cells were modified using an HIV-derived vector to recognize and kill leukemia cells. In a follow-up publication (PDF), a further development is described which allows for a nearly unlimited choice of target antigens, broadening the types of malignancies potentially treatable with the technique (abstract)."
it works, biatches.
So, can I start smoking again?
I'm not convinced.
What if this turns man into a race of zombies? We can't count on Will Smith always being around to save us.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Simply incredible stuff. Kudos to these scientists!! We all owe them a debt of gratitude.
Anyone that has any kind of issue with this, please pack your things and get out of the civilised world. You don't deserve to live past 30 in a heated home with running water, electrical appliances and the ability to communicate with someone more than 20 feet away.
Science, people - it's the shizzle.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I am by no means a biologist so please forgive my poor understanding, but is there any possibility that these modified cells will mutate and start attacking non-cancerous cells?
If we can commercialize the treatment AT LOW COST, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry, and it will allow millions of people to remain productive. That is the good part.
Hopefully it doesn't make the various worldwide retirement systems go bankrupt (though some will anyway because citizens allow governments to erect Ponzi schemes).
With fewer cancer deaths Pneumonia will take the lives of even more people, not that we will be able to do anything about that.
In other words, we are still guaranteed to die of something.
Does this mean we'll be able to treat HIV with HIV modified T-cells? How about a cure for the common cold? Don't get me wrong, cure cancer first. But if we can apply almost any antigen, what's stopping us from curing basically any disease? Hint: maybe my lack of knowledge in immunology.
Altering the immune system to actually cure things and fix other problems instead of treating them virtually guarantees they will lobby to stop it.
Why do you think illegal drugs are illegal? Because RX drugs are often the same thing only controlling them protects their revenue stream.
Why are phages all but outlawed for human use? They aren't drugs, can literally be made in a Russian basement so market entry is easy and they actually cure and prevent disease.
There's little profit in cures for big pharma, its all in long term treatment and the pharma lobby is powerful.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
It seems to me that for at least the last five years I have been reading about novel and allegedly very effective treatments for caner being developed in labs (gold nano particles, etc...) There have been a lot. Yet in the laboratory they stay. I realize what it takes to drag something through the FDA but why not unleash these future technologies on people facing certain death from cancer in the present? There are lots and lots after all. It would be the ultimate trial of these technologies. If I were facing certain death from some type of cancer I would insist that these new sciences be unleashed up on me.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
How much will this cost per patient? Who is going to pay?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So (study of) HIV may make curing cancer possible.
If it were to work, thanks to HIV for existing? If an incurable, but avoidable, illness is useful for curing an incurable, unpredictable, unavoidable and much more common one, wow!
42.
If somebody said: "SirWired, we can cure your otherwise-hopeless terminal cancer, but at the cost of being infected with HIV", I'd take the HIV any day of the week. Treatments for advanced cancer are often considered breakthroughs if they extend life by a few months. HIV, on the other hand, is getting very close to being a chronic long-term condition not much more serious than Type-I diabetes. (As in, if you have the treatments available and use them, you'll live a pretty normal, albeit likely shorter, life.)
If these modified HIV viruses can be changed to target different types of cancer, is there any way that athey can also be modified to be killed by some substance that isn't normally deadly to the virus but also not naturally found in the body? That way once the cancer is cured, or if the virus starts to mutate, the doctors can just introduce the kill substance? Of course, IANAB(I am not a biologist, and my last bio class was AP Bio and Genetics back in high school 7 years ago), so I could just be asking about something that isn't ven possible.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Requires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained."
Given that virulent cancer is far more dangerous than even the nastiest strains of HIV, the HIV would be pretty much always preferable. As long as they start with a strain that is easily controlled via existing drugs, I'd say we'll be fine. Heck, maybe they can dig some out of the vault that even AZT can control long-term.
Being afraid of this treatment because it starts with HIV makes little sense. Yes, more precautions need to be taken than working with, say, E.Coli, but frankly a syringe full of HIV isn't any more dangerous than some of the drugs we use as cancer treatments. (Some chemo formulations are downright scary...)
Like all tools, there will be weaknesses and downsides. Even if this is effectively a miracle cure compared to current treatments (and it sounds like it has definite possibilities). My immediate thought: misuse. How easy would it be to target, say, nerve cells? Instant leprosy symptoms? Or just a general-purpose "attack all cells with this person's DNA"? Seems like it could make a handy covert weapon.
Flip side, of course, is that it's probably easier and less traceable to use existing natural agents (unmodified HIV, polonium, $5 wrench in a back alley, etc).
The immune system kills cancer in your body every day. Free radicals cause cell mutations (cancer) all the time in the human body. The immune system identifies the mutated cell and destroys it. Cancer happens when the immune system either doesn't catch it in time or at all and the mutated cell begins to multiply. This sounds like any other type of immunization. The immune system is tricked into taking action against cancer cells by attaching cells it already combats to the cancer cells.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Dr Zheng Cui (Wake Forest University of Medicine in North Carolina) discovered that human innate immune system is very effective at killing a wide range of cancer cells. About 15-40% of human population is naturally cancer resistant. Granulocytes kill 97% of injected cancer cells within 24 hours.
The most important discovery is that such cancer resistance can be transferred via simple blood transfusion. Here are some articles:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7003019.stm
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/12/granulocyte-infusion-therapy-spreading-into-clinics-beyond-the-us.php
Few human patient clinical trials are in progress right now:
http://www.bmscti.org/cancerpatients.htm
http://liftcancertreatmenttrial.com/scientific-background/previous-studies-in-humans
http://www.novacellsinstitute.com/
And there are some exciting news about patients with 'cancer in full remission':
http://www.novacellsinstitute.com/articles/Beating%20Cancer%20-%20New%20Form%20of%20Immune%20Therapy%20is%20Working%20-%20for%20NOVA%20CELLS%20website.pdf
...XKC - oh.
The viral vectors are based on replication-deficient HIV. They are missing some of the genes necessary for their replication. They cannot (or at least should not) be able to reproduce in the cells, so they are not giving people AIDS. One of the reasons HIV is used because it is a lentivirus, which means it can integrate into the genomes of cells that are not actively dividing.
Cool, I'm sure this will save a lot of lives when this gets FDA approval in 2129.
You appear to be under the impression that T-cells are not part of the innate human immune system. This is based, at least on part, on research such as that which you reference in your links.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Penn State is working on a method of a 'natural' treatment/cure involving fish oil.
All jokes aside, it's a good story about how medical research can find sudden and unexpected results
You don't deserve to live past 30
All Capricon 15s enter the carousel. It's time for renewal.
William Coley, the father of immunology, cured fully metastasized cancers in the early 1900s. Look it up - Dr. William Bradford Coley. We had a cancer cure, and this article is about a similar potential cure. Coley mixed up highly individualized brews of dangerous disease organisms and shot them into cancer tumors, and trained the patient's immune system to recognize cancer cells as something to be destroyed. You want to know why we outlawed Coley's system and are just now rediscovering it?
Because nuke shills. That's why. Nuke shills, like the fission-obsessed irrational numptys who reauthorized Price-Anderson and are unwilling to fund LENR or clean fusion research. Science is no match for politics and propaganda - if it was, we'd have progressed past fossil fuels and corporate nuclear fission decades ago.
Honestly, if the treatment works, and we can commercialize it at ANY (finite) cost, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry. In 1980, there was no amount of money that could sequence the human genome in a year, and in 1995 there was no amount of money that could buy the technology in a modern cell phone. If a broad spectrum, effective cancer treatment can be shown to exist, the price -will- fall.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
You do know that they are not actually infecting people with HIV, right? Instead, they're extracting T-cells from a human, then reprogramming them with a modified strain of HIV, letting them replicate, and then inserting the T-cells back into the body.
Granted, there are different problems for each type of vector that is used for modifying cells...but the whole HIV thing is pretty much overblown, from what I have read.
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If I have sex with someone after treatment, can I cure them of cancer? If so there might not be as much profit in this treatment as they think. :)
So many posts are all worried about giving people HIV. It's good to see someone knows what they're talking about.
Not only is the HIV replication-deficient, but it's not even given to the people. They extract the T-cells, reprogram them outside of the human body with the modified HIV, then put the modified T-cells back into a human. This should allow them to double-check whether the modified T-cells are safe before inserting them back into a patient.
Wiki has a good article on various viral vectors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector
From what I've read, the main problem with lentivirus is that you don't know where exactly the payload will be inserted into the genome.
:(){
Correction: men who rape young girls
The hebrew in that line refers to girls from the age of infancy till adolecence. Not specifically grown women.
Christians reject the deuteronomy laws totally though: Romans 13 rules their life, the state, thusly society, thusly women is their god; not the God of Deuteronomy.
Thanks. Those are good points. I believe that integration location is a problem with a lot of viral vectors, but lentiviral vectors tend to cluster less frequently within and around growth-promoting genes. This could be due to differences in the integration mechanism or because the cell does not have to be actively dividing and therefore the growth-promoting genes may not be active. I am not sure.
Isn't T-cells a part of Adaptive immune system?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system
As far as I know T-cells are not playing any role in GIFT therapy about which I've described above.
Cancer immunotherapy seems to be a popular topic nowadays.
Another company engaged in research in this direction and worth following is Immonovative.
I realize this is cynical but...
According to the WHO ~7.6 million people die of cancer each year: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs297/en/ and according to the National Cancer Institute ~1.6 million of them are Americans: http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
That's a huge revenue stream for the drug companies to just ignore because "hey, it's cured!" I just don't think the drug companies won't start looking for ways to kill this or put it out of reach of most people. They haven't exactly proven to be altruistic and wholly forthcoming thus far; they're just for-profit companies in the same old "corrupt American capitalist" system.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I forget where, but somewhere in the Souteast US, they erected a statue of a Boll Weevil bug, honoring the unintended consequence of the weevils destroying the cotton crop, which forced them to deversify their crops, thus avoiding anymore destructive, near universal crop failures.
trouble is, it's illegal.
Hemp!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
And BTW, Mr Dawkinsfollower, last Sunday MY preacher spoke of the work our church is doing in Kenya. "I saw a lot of Catholics, and Methodists, and Baptists, and even Muslims, but I didn't see s single athiest, agnostic, or secular humanist."
You'll find plenty of atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists doing aid work in Doctors Without Borders, the Peace Corps, Amnesty International and the like. Your preacher got confused because secular charity organizations don't operate in the "name of atheism," and also apparently because he is an idiot.
No FDA approval needed for Chaumurky. Just create a vector that will train someone's T-Cells to go for antigens specific to the target ( but not you ) and you can put some in each of your drinks. Have them select which one, and you both drink up. They become deathly allergic to themselves and die. You become allergic to them, but this doesn't cause a problem since you weren't going to eat them anyway.
If poisoning is suspected, they can test all they want. There is no poison.
...
They don't carry flags saying "Baptist" or "Methodist", they simply converse.
No, but they work for organizations with names like "Lutheran World Relief" or "Baptist Global Response," and their logos invariably feature crosses or other religious insignia. And not only that, but they network together, so that all the Lutheran and Methodist and Baptist relief efforts are communicating and working together, but they don't extend nearly the same effort when interacting with secular groups, which leads to a lot of obviously Christian evangelical groups spending most of their time together. They don't make comparable efforts when working with secular groups, and will often work completely autonomously from them, sometimes with disastrous results.
The Emperor knows this firsthand, as an atheist who has helped coordinate fundraising and other efforts for Lutheran World Relief.
And from what I've seen, athiests (and especially antitheists) continually shout "there is no god!" from the rooftops.
Of course, the only atheists you "know" are the vocal ones - that's because you'd never, ever recognize a "stealth" atheist. Get off the Internet, try to meet some real atheists (you will probably fail, due to the nature of atheism), and stop spreading derogatory lies about entire groups of people. The vast majority of atheists and agnostics will not openly bring up their beliefs, perhaps not even if pressed on the subject, because non-believers are the most persecuted and unpopular group in America, largely because of the intentional ignorance spread by people like yourself and your pastor. THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE IN HIGHLY RELIGIOUS DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, WHERE ATHEISM IS EVEN LESS TOLERATED THAN IT IS HERE. Openly identifying as an atheist is not only extremely improbable behavior for an atheist in any situation, but in a country that does not have a strong tradition of liberalism, it is actually dangerous.
(We have not decided to correct you because you have offended our fellow atheists; The Emperor defends the truth and integrity of all cultural groups, including religious groups whose faith we do not share. But we will not abide libels.)
He's no idiot, not by a long shot.
That is slimly possible, but "idiot" was the polite term for someone who spreads ignorance and libel about an entire group of people. "Bigot," "monster," and "evil" may have been more appropriate, although just "ignorant" probably suffices.