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New Treatment From Australia For All Cancers
New submitter FirephoxRising writes "A new, protein-based treatment from the University of NSW breaks down cancers by destroying their internal protein structures. The approach has been tried before but always resulted in too much damage to muscles and the heart. The new approach allows the new class of drug to attack tumors without damaging normal cells. Professor Peter Gunning said, 'Our drug causes the structure of the cancer cell to collapse — and it happens relatively quickly.'"
Science. It works, bitches.
Yeah, and the headline even contradicts the poorly written news article(which is already far too removed from the research to be safe). It specifically was engineered to treat one kind of cancer, they think it will effects on a similar cancer, and have a little hope for "many others". That's a far-cry from "curing all cancers".
A cure for death would wreak unbelievable chaos on the world.
Whether this new cure is a true breakthrough or not, it is really exciting to live in a time where things such as CURING CANCER are possible (even living on the verge of such a time is breathtaking).
Actually, most cancers are curable. I can cut out most tumors....the problem is getting to them early enough. Solid tumors are mostly responsive to surgery first, chemotherapy and, for some cancers, radiotherapy are best left to "mop up" residual cells be it tumor-in-situ or micrometastases or out metastatic disease, now there are a few exceptions - especially the "liquid tumors" or hematologic malignancies.
What I'd really like to see is better screening for cancers - the only universal truth about cancers is that the earlier they are caught, the better the response to treatment. Catch a cancerous growth early before is has spread locally and we can cut it out and you'll likely be cured. When it has a chance to invade locally and especially distally, I can't perform a simple operation to remove it - I have to take out more tissue and sometimes in different places or other organs...sometimes the tumor burden is so great that an operation won't make a difference. This is where chemo can also be used. But responses to chemo are almost universally poorer than surgery. And please bear in mind, most people use "cancer" like its a single entity. It is not. There are a multitude of cancerous transformations for each cell line in the body, each with its own peculiarities.
Don't get me wrong, any improvement in chemotherapy will increase survivor hood of cancer, but I doubt that this will do much to change the initial treatment of most cancers.
this has never been tried on a human being and won't be until at least 2015
many cures for cancer have worked very well in animals over the past three decades
Mostly I agree wholeheartedly. A close relative has survived colon cancer (one of the most survivable cancers today), in no small part because it was diagnosed and removed in time.
But, it seems that screening has some pretty tough limits. You have some cancers such as glioblastoma that seem to still be pretty much uniformly fatal no matter how early you find them. And breast cancer seems to be less promising for screening than it seemed at first; the aggressive type seems to be liable to have metastised almost no matter how early it is detected, while the other types are fairly unlikely to do so, even with late detection.
This seems to partly explain why breast cancer survival hasn't budged nearly as much as expected with the advent of wide-spread screening.
Screeining _is_ important. Surgery is the main means of cancer cure. And both have improved hugely over time. But for all that, cancers still collectively comprise the second most common cause of death, behind cardiovascular issues. And arguably a much more difficult and prolongued death for most sufferers. I'd say any improvement in treatment is both urgent and welcome.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
There is the tiny problem that chemotherapy damages your brain. There is, at the very least, a measurable and significant decline in IQ when tested before and after chemotherapy. Google for effect on iq from chemo to see some information.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Surprisingly, the full text is available without registering or going through a paywall. Must be a leak into a different universe or something.
Just scanned it quickly - all cells have a cytoskelaton, a framework that allows a cell to maintain a three dimensional shape. Cytoskeletons are controlled, in part, because of a class of proteins called tropomyosins. These proteins are turned over quite rapidly in cancer cells yielding the hypothesis that targeting those molecules could selectively kill cancerous cells. Unfortunately, the chemicals that have been used previously also targeted non cancer cells and caused a lot of systemic toxicity (they cured the cancer, but unfortunately, the patient died).
The new compound, TR100 (sounds like a toy truck), specifically targets a type of tropomyosin presumably found only in cancer cells. Leaves normal cells alone.
IF this remains true in testing and IF the compound doesn't have other, unintended and typically deleterious effects it MIGHT be a good drug. Grandstanding by the PR idiots notwithstanding.
The road to Big Pharma Hell is paved with effective in vitro cures for cancer.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There is reason to think that a drug like this would be broadly effective against different kinds of cancer. TR100 disrupts the actin cytoskeleton vital to all cells, and specifically disrupts its formation by targeting an isoform of the protein tropomyosin. Isoforms are different structures for the the same protein- every cell needs tropomyosin to regulate their actin filaments, but cancer cells preferentially use a certain structure of tropomyosin. Compounds with anti-actin activity have been looked at for a long time as anticancer compounds, but the known ones have been nonspecific. TR100 also has the advantage of being a relatively simple small molecule instead of a complicated biomolecule, which could make its development as a commercial drug much easier.
It is however, still (potentially) just a new chemotherapy agent, one of many out there. From what has been observed from other chemo agents, just because a compound targets a basic cellular function doesn't mean a cancer can't develop resistance. The taxanes and the Vinca alkaloids arrest mitosis (by targeting microtubules), and are excellent, widely used drugs, but are not the The Cure for Cancer. I'd imagine this compound to be along those lines- another weapon in the oncology arsenal, but not a magic bullet.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I am a cancer biologist.
There's a huge problem with the statement that Salvestrol can "reactivate" P53: P53 is irreversibly inactivated in most cancers by direct deleterious mutations.
Source data from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center:
http://www.cbioportal.org/public-portal/cross_cancer.do