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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)."
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.
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.
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.
> Smoking takes about 50 years to give you cancer
On average, maybe, but the standard deviation is rather high, which makes the probabilities you discuss difficult to calculate with (any meaningful precision and) much accuracy.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.