Slashdot Mirror
Drug Turns Immune System Against All Tumor Types
sciencehabit writes, quoting an article in Science: "A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a 'do not eat' signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells."
The abstract and full paper are freely available. It seems fairly promising: "In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment — colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped."
It worked even better in mice that didn't get cancer transplants!
I kid, I kid.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What about non-tumor cells, which also display this cell determinant?
Very promising, but before we uncork the champagne, it's important to keep in mind that mice and humans are different enough that most cures don't translate 1:1 to humans.
This "The doctors are evil conspirators" crap really, really gets old...
I propose to perform the next experiment on /b/.
Then maybe we will be able to continue this thread there.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm a little over 30 now. Me getting cancer is relatively probable at some point in my life. The big question is will they cure it first?
Oh, and if cancer doesn't get me, will I have robot attendants at home when I'm old and fragile, or will they just upgrade my body? Medicine is progressing at an amazing rate, really...
.: Max Romantschuk
Or perhaps they don't want to commit to a cure for human cancers when they've just found a prelminary positive result in an animal model?
That couldn't be it, possibly?
No, must be a conspiracy. *facepalm*
I'm not sure why some people are so sure "big pharma" are disinterested in curing many diseases/conditions. After all, if you can sell a cure for cancer, you just landed in a bucket of money.
Beyond that, the need for a cure is overwhelming. Even corporate greed will often take a backseat because this issue affects us all. If it was a condition associated with a specific population, or with the poor etc then I'm sure the interest would be much less humanitarian.
Every day we get closer to a cure, every piece of research, even if it's only effective on mice takes us when step closer. I for one, appreciate every effort made in this regard.
I do not have cancer and no one close to me has it either. Perhaps just a matter of time.
It won't fly, as antibodies are cheap and not complicated to do. Seriously, do you really believe Big Pharma is going to let it happen ? A treatment simple like this would jeopardize their business, risking billions of dollar. They'll do something to stop this treatment in its tracks. They always do. Sound paranoid ? I wish. It's more like realistic. Their purpose is not really to cure cancer, but getting a maximum profit from it.
I call bullshit. First of all you don't risk anything by finding such a "simple cure". There are a lot of people and a lot of them will get cancer at one time so there is a very large customer base and no shortage thereof in the long term. For the length of the patent you could sell this stuff at almost any price. Do you really think one company would keep an invention locked up (and risk loosing it to someone else) that would bring them truckloads of money?
Not to mention all the free PR you'd get.
Also I don't really believe in conspiracies that rely on large groups of people to keep quiet, make no mistakes and act against their own private interests.
It won't fly, as antibodies are cheap and not complicated to do
What does cost to produce have to do with price, other than to set a minimum? Besides, you can get generic painkillers for 12p a box here in the UK, or you can buy the name brand stuff for £3.50; the two co-exist just fine. (Though I wonder who on earth buys the name-brand stuff...)
They'll do something to stop this treatment in its tracks. They always do.
Links or it didn't happen.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
They're not stopping the treatment. They're going to make megabucks off it.
>> Conflict of interest statement: S.J., M.P.C., R. Majeti, and I.L.W. filed U.S. Patent Application Serial No. 12/321,215 entitled “Methods for Manipulating Phagocytosis Mediated by CD47."
They've already applied for the patent for treating cancers in this way. If granted, 17 years of income for a cancer cure which they control the market on would make them a trillion dollars. Each. Although, they could just be patenting it to prevent anyone else patenting it, although naturally whomever funded the study is going to want a sizeable return on their investment and it's fair enough they get it.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
I have an M.D. from Harvard, I am board certified in cardio-thoracic medicine and trauma surgery, I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards in New England, and I am never, ever sick at sea. So I ask you; when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn't miscarry or that their daughter doesn't bleed to death or that their mother doesn't suffer acute neural trama from postoperative shock, who do you think they're praying to? Now, go ahead and read your Bible, _Dennis_, and you go to your church, and, with any luck, you might win the annual raffle, but if you're looking for God, he was in operating room number two on November 17, and he doesn't like to be second guessed. You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God. ~~ Dr. Jed Hill (Malice 1993)
What is the normal function of the "do not eat" signal? Just what normal function is going to get messed up when you turn this off?
I'm no expert in these things, but AFAIK the process goes something like this:
Each of these steps can take months. Some of it's political and administrative wrangling, some of it's just that the test itself will take some time before you can be sure of the results. A drug can fail at any one of these stages and it's back to the drawing board (or maybe the test tube).
The whole process takes years. Yet newspapers often start reporting about "miracle cure" drugs that have only just completed the first round of live animal trials. Which is why you hear about all sorts of miracle cures that never see the light of day.
What is the normal function of the "do not eat" signal? Just what normal function is going to get messed up when you turn this off?
I'm not sure which "do not eat" signal they're talking about. But one that I do know a little about is the one that prevents rejection of a placenta and multiple sclerosis.
The immune system apparently recognizes and avoids attacking its own body primarily by:
- Editing the sections of DNA coding for antibodies to produce a bunch of small clones of proto-antibody-producing cells that randomly react to all sorts of stuff.
- Shortly after birth (when most of mommy's random cellular components have been purged from baby's body) letting these clones take a grand tour of baby's body - and anybody who recognizes anything dies off.
- Then the survivors (who don't recognize any tissue in baby) turn themselves on and get ready to do a growth spurt if they recognize a target at the same time they're getting an "I'm being damaged" signal (i.e. histamine).
Result: A no-autoimmune immune system. Well, almost.
A significant problem is that there are a few tissues that aren't deployed yet when the baby is just born. One such tissue is the myelin sheaths of the nerves. Another, of course, is placental tissue from a pregnancy. (Unlike tribbles, humans aren't born pregnant.) If nothing were done about this, the immune system tissues would be a time-bomb, ready to go into attack mode if it happens to see a damage signal near a nerve or a placenta. This would result in multiple sclerosis or spontaneous abortion - both very big negative scores in the evolutionary game. So the immune system has a patch.
The main myelin protein has a short sequence that tells the immune system that this is a late-blooming tissue, so leave it alone. (I'm guessing this may be the "do not eat" signal they're talking about.) Placental tissue has the same sequence. There are lots of opportunities for failure, of course. (Defects in the signal molecules, disease organisms mimicing it, etc.) But when this patch is working right the nerves and a new baby are protected without significantly degrading the immune system's response to diseases.
This, by the way, is the reason nursing on cow's milk is a risk factor for MS. Milk has a protein related to the myelin sheath protein, but with the "do not eat" signal slightly different. As a result a baby may develop an allergy to that component of cow's milk - and thus to the common stretch of the myelin protein. Result: Autoimmune reaction to the myelin sheaths.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Expressed in other terms:
How may drug company execs will let their children, their spouses, or their friends die of cancer for better shareholder returns? Not all of them. It only takes one whistle blower, or potential whistle blower, to louse up plans like this.
One drug company supposedly had a drug for an inherited, fatal condition, but was going to can development of it, as there probably wasn't enough profit. A board member, who had a friend who's child had that condition basically said, "if you can this drug, I'm going to the press with it." Fearing the backlash, the company introduced the drug and now boasts about how good they are to bring drugs for smaller markets to market.
Probably because he's a fraud:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Burzynski
Miraculous claims require miraculous proofs. And doctors aren't just sitting on the sidelines waiting to be paid more to kill more people, despite what you might think.
Typically the first testing in humans is done in patients which have already failed multiple therapies (relapse or resistant), eliminating the ethical quandry that they would have had a better response with conventional treatment.
Ban Engadget - moderators censor comments!
Test your idea in a handful of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue. (This is going to be awkward. Ethical clearance is an important part of any medical testing; there's little chance of getting ethical clearance of using this in place of existing treatments for cancer patients because if it doesn't work, you've delayed them treatment that could have worked. You could possibly use it in conjunction with, or in patients for whom existing treatments haven't worked, but then there's the question of is the treatment more/less effective when the cancer's progressed that far? Or if it's given in conjunction with existing treatments? Sure you can devise tests to deal with these issues, but they won't be as simple as "administer drug, keep a list of who's had it and what the results were".)
There are patients who refuse chemo because they prefer death to the side effects. They would gladly volunteer for an alternative treatment with less extreme side-effects. I have seen my grandmother go through chemo, and I hope I never have to make this decision, but if I were diagnosed with non-operable cancer, I'm not sure I'd opt to be treated. I suppose it would depend on survival chances. 80% survival rate, I'd probably think it's worth a try. 50% survival rate or worse? I'd probably opt to take the time I have left to enjoy life a bit instead of spending it going through the horrors of chemo. No objections to trying a treatment that would still let me enjoy that time, even if it doesn't work.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Come on!!! Lets get this going, get some human subjects quickly, and lets end cancer as quickly as possible....stop just rehashing stories for the last 3 years about the same thing....I sometimes think that the amount of time it takes to get this out there, is enough tie for all of them to die from the disease....!
I suppose that if this treatment is as effective as advertised, we will soon see just how powerful Big Pharma's influence is.
You're assuming that a cure for cancer would not be in the interests of Big Pharma. I don't think that is necessarily true. Most current cancer treatments are expensive (also often expensive to produce, so not a huge profit margin) and are only sold for shortish treatment periods. Either the patient recovers or dies. A proper cure could easily see people living 20+ years longer. Old people tend to be a better market for pharmaceuticals (of the non-recreational kind, anyway) and so the profit from having people not die from cancer is likely to be greater than the loss from not selling them cancer treatments.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agree. Assigning evil status to big pharma is a favorite past time of many. However, reasonable people know that plenty of stock holders and insiders in the biotech industries get cancer, too. Unless you're the most sociopathic type, watching your child die to cancer generally is not a common choice people would desire.
Exactly. Imagine you ran the company that found the cure to cancer, the magic bullet that stopped all cancer dead in its tracks. Even if you didn't make a dime off of the cure itself, your new company slogan would be "We Cured Cancer!" Every commercial from then on out would say "From the people who cured cancer comes a radical new treatment for XYZ." Heck, even any regulations the government tried to saddle them with could be spun as "The government takes action against the cancer curers! OMG HORROR!" Any pharmaceutical company would kill (or save lives as the case may be) for this PR.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Lots of articles like this come and go. As far as I am concerned it is vaporware until doctors begin prescribing it. Lets hope it does turn out to be all that.
Sir David Attenborough (a famous naturalist, and someone whom I admire) basically says the same.
Whenever asked if he believes in God, the answer is vehemently not. His usual anecdote is about seeing a child in Africa with a worm that was slowly burrowing into their eye and blinding them:
"Are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball?"
It's a similar argument. If God is wonderful and created everything, he created rapists, murderers, child molestors, pain, suffering, and every disease we see. Deliberately. Knowingly. And seeing all that they would do.
And if you think you're divinely favoured, and such things (e.g. AIDS, HIV, etc.) are targeted only at "sinners" (e.g. homosexuals, drug-users, deviants, etc. and that's NOT my definition but some Christian groups!), then I suggest you go kiss their wounds and bleeding sores in the spirit of Christian easing of their suffering and see how long he favours you, too.
What will Fark do? They'll have to stop using that "... still no cure for cancer" meme. Wonder what'll take its place.