Slashdot Mirror
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)."
Remaining issues are
Hasn't yet been show statistically effective to treat cancer in humans
Hasn't yet been shown safe in humans
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.
All joking aside, even if it actually worked like that... with modern AIDS treatment that might actually be preferable to cancer, especially some of the nastier varieties of leukemia.
I'd rather count on Milla Jovovich.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
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.)
"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...)
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
You're probably right. I've read the bible.
Contrary to what protestants in general, and American ones in particular, want to believe, this isn't usually enough by any means. You see, any major literary author or work, such as Shakespeare, requires a ton of research to be properly understood, so much so you have entire academic departments dedicated to properly analyzing them. Sure, you can just take a "complete works of [author name]", read it once cover to cover, and think you understood it, but it's almost certain you didn't. Now, given major religious texts are way more complicated than "simple" literary works, the complexity expands geometrically. This is the reason why older branches of those religions usually recommend you don't directly read said texts without at least some previous preparation. It's better to first read some introductory ones to get an overall idea on the techniques used to approached the major work as well as the proper contexts, and only then dwell into it.
Please note this way to deal with such works is valid independently of whether you actually believe or not on its attached religion. Academic comparative religious studies are usually as much atheistic as everything else in academy nowadays, and yet they follow proper study patterns when dealing with such works. This is so because otherwise the results at which you'll arrive will be quite random to say the least, and overly colored by your own cultural background, always a poor way to go about analyzing anything located outside it.
By the way, please also note, for whatever it's worth, that I'm not a Christian, so this isn't preaching.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I like how vocal you are, but completely bereft of an actual point except being anti-nuke.
Outlawed? I don't see that in anything you've cited. If you mean, rather, that it isn't FDA approved, I think you need to blame Coley himself.
A lack of reproducibility is FATAL to a scientific claim and any sort of study. You might as well claim you saw a unicorn in the forest.
Unless you're going to now claim the article has been surreptitiously changed by "nuke shills" to discredit him. Chances are he was on to something, but failed to appropriately document it in a way that was useful. Then, unsurprisingly, an effective solution came along and overshadowed his work.
But you didn't post this to highlight his work. You came to scream OOGA BOOGA NUKULAR.