Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
rather than simply allow everyone to be cured, the powers that be will milk this for every penny they can, and medical bankruptcies will continue on, unabated.
TV Personality: And how many people have you treated so far?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Well, we've had ten thousand and nine clinical trials in humans so far.
TV Personality: And how many are cancer-free?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Ten thousand and nine.
TV Personality: So you have actually cured cancer.
Dr. Alice Krippin: Yes, yes... yes, we have.
[cuts to post-apocalyptic New York three years later]
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Citation needed.
Such a claim requires some serious proof.
Unless you mean our current means of food production enable people to live long enough to get these diseases.
the CDC routinely releases statistics and studies that conclude people who eat healthy and exercise regularly experience dramatically lower cancer rates. of course cancer is a terrible disease for anyone it afflicts but rarifying its manifestation should be of greater realistic priority than a panacea. if you're pining for a silver bullet you might want to give running shoes, fresh fruit and vegetables a shot. Drink a little less, and for christ sake if you're still smoking, quit.
Good people go to bed earlier.
if we have a global nuclear war, does that mean science won?
No. In all liklihood, it will mean religious fanatics in either America, some other region, or both, got their hands on nukes and decided to usher in whatever their version of post-apacalyptic "our religion now rules on Earth as it does in Heaven" millennium. By the time they realize what fools they were, we as a species have joined the other 99% of species in extinction.
Regardless, it will mean the baser side of human nature won, and happened to use a scientificly derived tool as it defeated our better natures, and our species.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yes, it only goes to prove my axiom "The only thing worse than science journalism are /. summaries."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Assuming there's been an increase in cancer incidence in recent history (not saying there's been one, I just don't feel like looking it up), I'd conjecture that it's primarily due to our greatly increased average lifespan, not any ill effects of whatever foods or chemicals we might have added to our daily diets.
THEY'RE FLUORIDATING OUR AVGAS!
dsjghsdbfgbfgngvbnbvnyjghmjghdmjhmhj
One of the hardest things for lay people to understand about screening is that false positives are a HUGE problem. If you offer somebody a painless $10 test for brain cancer which has a 1% false positive rate, they think that seems really useful and take it. Maybe a million people take your screening test. At least 10 000 get told they were positive. Virtually NONE of those people have brain cancer, but now they're scared shitless and will probably get a load more tests done, some of which are invasive or even dangerous.
Getting the false positive rate down is thus of huge importance, because if you can't do that then your screening test is worse than useless and in most countries it'll be prohibited (because it has a bad overall health outcome) and in places like the US it'll be used and drive up costs and make people's health worse because they're scared and nobody is being the grown-up and taking away the test because "We can make our own decisions" yeah right.
The specific combination will not be important to all cancers, but it's possible that the STRATEGY of targeting individual tropomyosin combinations might be broadly applicable. They used the structure of the tropomyosins in question to identify drugs that would block it specifically. That could be used in other combinations. You get a sample of the tumor, find it's using combination X and Y. Y is used by the heart and is no good for targeting, but X is, so you attack that. Another cancer, combo AB and Y might be upregulated, so you look into A or B. One would likely also use it in combination with other chemotherapy. If Y combo, is the only one the cancer is using, and again that one is needed for the heart, you might give a low dose of that with a lowered dose of taxol, which targets all dividing cells. That one-two punch will have two sets of side effects to worry about, but if you give low doses of both, you might target the cancer more effectively with reduced side effects.
I'm not a clinical doctor, so maybe that's not the idea, just that more tools are better, and the strategy is what seems to be a bigger story.
The road to Big Pharma Hell is paved with effective in vitro cures for cancer
It's also the road to better basic research tools. You can't jump from the stone age to the space age obviously. If this were the stone age, I might want to develop a better chisel. If people funding (?) research back in the stone age were the same people that are funding biomedical research today, I probably would suggest that a better chisel would be better able to cut metal for the rocket engine. I'd know in reality, it would just make it easier to carve stones to make a house, but if I don't promise big, the research money will go to some guy rubbing sticks together suggesting it was a novel source of combustion energy for reaching that big bright thing in the night sky.
I won't say it in my grant applications, but I doubt we have the technology to cure cancer at this point. That doesn't mean my research won't be essential to the eventual cure for cancer, nor does it mean that cancer research is wasted.
I'm not arguing with the articles you posted, but the argument "India/Morocco/Nepal has less cancer, so we must be doing something to cause cancer" has a significant weakness: many people in those countries die before they have the time to get cancer.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
In large part, it hasn't. What has shot up is our ability to detect it.
Apart from that, a lot of it has to do with increased overall life expectancy. You die of cancer at 80 because you didn't die of heart failure at 60.