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.'"

Comments

Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another daily cure for cancer.

Re:Yay!

[i kan reed]

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".

Re:Yay!

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Exciting Times

[Somebody Is Using My]

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). The places science and technology are taking us are out of a science-fiction novel. We might not have flying cars or jetpacks (except we /do/!), but we truly are living "in the future". A thousand years ago what we take for granted would have seemed magic or even godlike. And who knows what tomorrow will hold for us - a cure for death, perhaps?

Even knowing that no such advance comes without its unforeseen darkside, it is still enough to give me a childlike glee and hope again.

Re:Exciting Times

[i kan reed]

Well, one of the dark sides is that our agrochemical food causes many of these cancers in the first place.

He said lacking any justification at all for his statement.

People die of cancer everywhere, and everywhen, it's not unique to "our" food. It's not magically caused by "chemicals". There are carcinogens present in modern society, but the primary causes of cancer aren't your damn food.

Re:Exciting Times

[quantumghost]

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.

Re:Exciting Times

[JanneM]

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.

Re:Exciting Times

[kevkingofthesea]

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.

Re:SCIENCE!

[rubycodez]

that actually was a quote of Vishnu in the Hindu scriptures Bhagavad-Gita.

What is this stuff?

[rs79]

I wonder if it's real or some really horrid chemical they can't quite get safe enough to use without dissolving your veins. That's the problem with that "discovery" in Sask. that cured cancer in rats. That's because rats can't scream as their veins dissolve.

Put on your thinking caps, why has cance shot up since 1900? What changed?

In 2007 or so, a Cytochrome B enzyme was found - CYP1B1 that only occurs in cancer cells. Fresh off the end of a successful prostate cancer drug, the first one with a new paradigm - something other than "kill ALL of the cells and pray" (See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F06%2F02%2FMNI11ORI84.DTL) that exploited CYP17, Potter then set out to make a more generalized one based on the nearly universal CYP1B1. He designed the molecule then set about to make it and while looking for precursors noticed the exact same molecule occurs in fruit, made in response to mold.

So they tried it, and it worked. Every time. It gets converted in cells with CYP1B1 to picotaneol which is fatal to cancer cells but not regular cells. If you google "Salvestrol case studies" you'll find three clinical trials where cancer was reversed in every case. It's not patentable...

So, the current hypothesis is, since we began spraying anti-fungals, there's no mold so the plant doesn't make this chemical in response to mold, so non-organic fruit contains only 10% of what unsprayed fruit has. And it's a very bitter chemical and we breed bitterness out...

Cancerous cells can be found in any animal at any time, the body takes care of them. The problem arises when it can't, and we find Gene P53 is deactivated in those people. This reactivates it; once the body has the correct raw materials it gets down to work.

It's always better to help the body do what it does naturally and has for millions of years compared to some synthetic noxious substance. If nothing else understand that with a chemical that's already in the body all the time, the body knows what to do with it. With man-made drugs there are always side effects in every case as the body has no idea what to do with the molecules it doesn't recognize and they latch on to places they shouldn't and hellooo side effects.

There are 30,000 deaths a year from these side effects.

This chemical is found in tangerines and prune plums, strawberries, asparagus and so on. Tangerines have the most. Which raises an interesting question. Do areas that grow a lot of tangerines have a lower cancer rate. That would be Morocco.

It's not on the list of per capita cancer rates WHO keeps, that's quoted in Wiki. That list ranges from South Africa as the lowest (about 250) to Denmark with the highest at 387 or something. Note also that poor countries have less, developed countries have more... poor people grow their own food and can't afford chemicals.

But, if you poke around on the Moroccan government website long enough, you find their per-capita cancer rate: 100. Less than half the lowest stat WHO has for any country. And besides having all the tangerines, they pretty much invented chain smoking there. But still: 100.

So, if these guys are using this mechanism and trying to make a patent end run, bad. If it's something else, some noxious chemical, it's equally worthless. If however they have a new agent that also uses the pro-drug paradigm Potter found, then that would be good.

But there's a reason they don't give any details on this compound and I'd really like to know what it is.