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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.
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
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.
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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.
They heard you liked cancer so...
Korma: Good
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
Every time one of your cells divides there is a small risk of a (series of) horrible mutation(s) that kills you, which would include the T-cells mentioned in TFA. However untreated leukemia is guaranteed to kill you. Choose.
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.
> 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.
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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Because there is a lot to do before it even gets to the point of 'unleashing them' Also unleashing them means no controls, so it gets hard to say which worked. And then they are often target for specific cancers and so on.
You don go "Hay, this working in this one lab under these condition, lets give it to people.
You know what else kills cancer in the lag? heating it to 1000c. Maybe we should unleash that?
Science generally moves at 1 baby step at a time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Mostly.
But not necessarily. I knew a kid in high school who got lung cancer from smoking. Just depends on luck of the draw...
I've read that on average smoking a cigarette causes one cell to mutate. That cell has a very low chance of becoming cancerous. From this thread, I suppose on average it takes 50 years for you to hit a mutated cell or combination of mutated that will go cancerous. But it could happen with the first cigarette. Or none at all if you live dear a Dupont factory.
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.