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Altered Immune Cells Help Girl Beat Leukemia
An anonymous reader writes "For decades, one of cancer's most powerful weapons has been to corrupt the human immune system. Finally, researchers in Philadelphia have developed a way to turn that weapon against certain cancers, and potentially open the door to a whole new generation of therapies for all manner of cancers. From the article: 'It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma, then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options. Desperate to save her, her parents sought an experimental treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one that had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.'"
Really; it sounds wonderful, but if Murphy and Pandora had a child, his/her favorite toy would be using lethal viruses to help us combat lethal cancers.
Using nuclear weapons to plug oil gushers, using attack polar bears to guard your bunny farm, using a scalpel to pick your nose... these ideas will go right some of the time too.
A link with more detail:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9508895/A-virus-that-kills-cancer-the-cure-thats-waiting-in-the-coldc.html
http://xkcd.com/938/
Pharmaceutical companies make too much money from cancer for there to be a cure for cancer on the market.
If it turns out that the AIDS virus took 50 years off of the timeline to finding a cure for cancer, I wonder if the AIDS epidemic was worth it.
While I understand your concerns, every medical breakthrough has involved risk.
The polio vaccine could have backfired, but it didn't. You and I have grown up without the fear of a disease that plagued every generation up to our parents.
Jared: "I lost weight because I got aids, and I want to give everyone Aids too!"
But seriously its extremely cool to see the sci-fi like ideas that you watch and just think "yea right" come to life. One could almost argue that the vision of art helps drive the dream of science. Maybe what the US Government needs to invest in rather than a huge boondoggle bill is a new Star Trek trilogy!
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Will Smith thinks this is a bad idea.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Is it a cure for the disease, for the individual, or a fix that makes us able to fight multiple types of cancer? Does the cure spread like AIDs? Can I take some of her blood and infect 50 people with cancer? And then infect more with those? Cheapest medication ever?
Cars are dangerous, but it's extremely difficult to run somebody over with a car that has no axles. Just as axles are required to move a car under its own power parts of HIV have been removed so that it cannot replicate (and then cause and transmit AIDS) on its own.
Wow there are a lot of people freaking out they are using HIV for this.
Um, relax, they didn't give the girl HIV, they re-engineered the virus into something new. The virus doesn't replicate in the to host. T-cells removed from the host are exposed to the engineered HIV. The engineered HIV then changes the DNA in the T-cells to allow it to attack cancerous B-cells. The T-cells are then re-injected and do their work. The T-cells continue to replicate, but the engineered HIV is not actually introduced into the body.
My mother was diagnosed with acute myelodysplastic syndrome in 2006, and the doctors she spoke with talked about this type of treatment. At the time it was not ready for use in humans, however. We did talk for awhile with the doctors about the nature of cancer and this type of treatment.
Many people are aware that cancer is present in almost all people at several times in their lives. The vast majority of cancers are from genetic defects that the body detects as an alien, and it will attack and destroy the mutated cells just as foreign bacteria or a transplanted organ are. Now, the types of cancer that we talk about and that result in terminal illness is from a mutation that is different enough to be deadly and parasitic to the human body, but not different enough to be detected as different.
All cells contain markers that act as identification badges. Last I was aware, there were 10 known genetic markers for humans that determine this identity (only six were known in the 1990's, so this is pretty new stuff). Its these markers that are used to find organ and tissue donors. However, even a perfect 10 out of 10 match is not enough to guarantee that foreign tissue will be detected as alien, so we know that our known list of 10 markers is incomplete. This is why perfect matches still face rejection risks.
The problem then, from a leukemia perspective, is that donor bone marrow will produce white blood cells that see the recipient body as alien, and attack it. That's kind of what you want, since the idea is to kill the cancerous bone marrow, but it's not exactly discriminate about what it will attack. So for leukemia treatment, you don't even want a perfect 10 out of 10 match since that would be counterproductive. Perfect donor bone marrow wouldn't identify the cancer either, and the cancer would relapse.
What this treatment does is gives doctors a way to tell your body that certain cells are aliens by forcefully altering their DNA. Then the body can just fix itself. That's really what medicine does best: allows the body time to fix itself.
"How can this possibly work?" you think. "Aren't all cancers different?" Well, it turns out the answer is "sort of". We categorize cancers based on the kind of tissue that is affected, but that's really not accurate. We should categorize it based on exactly what genetic sequence mutated and in exactly what way. Cancer, then, is literally a family of thousands of diseases with very similar symptoms. Many cancer types are, in fact, mutations of the same segment in the same way. However, now that we are able to sequence the DNA of a human, we ought to be able to accurately categorize each person's individual cancer by sequencing healthy and cancerous cells. We can then design a DNA segment which will only work in the DNA sequence of cancerous cells and that will identify the cells as alien to the body. The body will then attack the cancer, and destroy it. We will, literally, paint a target on the cancer cells for the human body to destroy. The mechanism for delivery of this kind of genetic manipulation is already supplied to us by nature in the form of a retrovirus. In this girl's case, the retrovirus that seeks out her cancerous cell type is HIV, which attacks white blood cells.
This, then, is the most promising path to the cure for cancer. It will not be cured with a single treatment like polio or smallpox, but the method can be applied over and over against every type of cancer.
My mother was given more traditional treatment with a bone marrow transplant. The best match that could be identified was an 8 out of 10 match. Even so she successfully underwent the transplant and survived a year longer than she was given when diagnosed. She then relapsed, and was beginning her second treatment when she died from a massive stroke caused by all the medications required to treat the disease and the anti-rejection drugs and the side effects of the medications. If she had had this kind of option where doctors could reprogram her immune system to seek and destroy the cancerous bone marrow like it's supposed to instead of having to rely on grafted bone marrow that would attack her healthy tissue as well, she might still be alive today.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
If you really care about your bunnies invest in the best.
Pharmaceutical companies make too much money from cancer for there to be a cure for cancer on the market.
The "cure for cancer" implies a level of competence so high that every product you bring to market will show the benefits. You just might learn enough along the way to begin treating aging itself as a chronic disease.
In case you're thinking "yeah, cancer, big deal. People die every day" I welcome you to watch Anthony Griffith on The Moth describe his personal experience with leukemia.
WARNING: NSFW -- both for (IIRC) some rather strong language and the uncontrollable weeping that will consume you for the rest of the day.
Lost my brother to Leukemia when he was 7, to think that maybe soon no other family goes through that is amazing. Thank you science.
of Zombie kids....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
But when we're all huddled into a dark building hoping Dr. Carl "Legend" June doesn't drag us off for use in bizarre medical experiments to cure the plague he ended up accidentally creating, will you still think this is a good idea?
Just sayin'
Science: Turning AIDS into medicine.
"used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS"
LOL. Are they incapable of writing 'HIV'?
HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and 99% of Slashdotters don't even know what 'AIDS' is.
As opposed to all the cures they didn't invest in before?
Oh right, fixing your limp dick was top priority.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/21/steve-jobs-refused-cancer-treatment-biography
So how many decades ago did cancers acquire this capability? Must have been quite a few.
Extending the patent life of drugs will discourage investment?