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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.'"
A virus is not lethal. It is merely a vehicle, a means of reprogramming cells. Its hardware. The lethality is in the software.
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.
Not just that, but the Virus's physical form is simply a payload mechanism to inject the virus genetic code into healthy cells. The healthy cell that was infected now becomes a virus factory creating tons of new virus cells until it explodes releasing them into your system. There is a very cut and dry hardware to software paradigm here. If we consider that a virus is nothing but a genetic delivery mechanism it instantly becomes the greatest tool humanity has for this type of work. Nothing we can currently create would be even a fraction as effective.
You realize that it costs insurance companies about half a million dollars to treat a cancer patient? And most of that money goes to all kinds of different companies many of them struggling on low margins making an assortment of drugs, medical services, and other stuff. Now let's say a company comes out with a cure for cancer .. They can charge $100,000 for it as pure profit .. Insurance companies would gladly pay. 10 million people a year get cancer .. That means the profit will be an absolutely insane $1 trillion dollars a year.
Or forget that .. Steve jobs had cancer and died of it .. All a company that had the cure had to do was call him up and charge him $5 billion cash plus 50% ownership of Apple for the cure.