Slashdot Mirror
New Treatment Kills Metastatic Cancer Cells
robert2cane points out a promising study from Cornell University about controlling the spread of cancer. There are many treatments for an isolated tumor, but once cancer cells reach the bloodstream and start spreading through the body, it's much more difficult to control. The new research (PDF), led by Michael King, developed a compound that is able to target and eliminate cancer cells in the blood of mice.
"When attempting to develop a treatment for metastases, King faced two problems: targeting moving cancer cells and ensuring cell death could be activated once they were located. To handle both issues, he built fat-based nanoparticles that were one thousand times smaller than a human hair and attached two proteins to them. One is E-selectin, which selectively binds to white blood cells, and the other is TRAIL. He chose to stick the nanoparticles to white blood cells because it would keep the body from excreting them easily. This means the nanoparticles, made from fat molecules, remain in the blood longer and thus have a greater chance of bumping into freely moving cancer cells. There is an added advantage. Red blood cells tend to travel in the center of a blood vessel, and white blood cells stick to the edges. This is because red blood cells are lower density and can be easily deformed to slide around obstacles. Cancer cells have a similar density to white blood cells and remain close to the walls, too. As a result, these nanoparticles are more likely to bump into cancer cells and bind their TRAIL receptors."
We have cured cancer in thousands of mice, and we now realize that the mouse genome, and the human genome are vastly different. The mouse immune system is very different from that of man. They don't even have the same number of active toll-like receptors. We must start thinking much more carefully about translation from mouse to man, and ignore studies where translation is not specifically teased out...
"New treatment kills some but not all metastatic cancer cells in mice, but only while they're traversing the bloodstream and so far only when the cells are injected into the mice in the first place".
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Cancer spreads mostly through the lymphatic system, not bloodstream.
can it kill slashdot beta ?
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2012/04/21/cancer-industry-exposed-as-fraud-the-science-is-false/
"Recent news has shown that the majority of studies geared towards cancer research are inaccurate and likely fraudulent by nature. Findings published in the journal Nature show that 88% of major studies on cancer that have been published in reputable journals over the years can not be reproduced to show their accuracy. This means that the research findings published are not based on accurate results."
Still, I'm sure the resident Slashdot sociopaths will defend this 'research' to the hilt... can't have the general public waking up to the fact that the whole thing is a giant con, can we....
I repeat: "Findings published in the journal Nature show that 88% of major studies on cancer that have been published in reputable journals over the years can not be reproduced to show their accuracy."
Any comments?
Physicist Lowell Wood in a brainstorming meeting: a question for everyone. You have a tumor, and the tumor becomes metastatic, and it sheds metastatic cancer cells. How long do those circulate in the bloodstream before they land?’ And we all said, ‘We don’t know. Ten times?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘As many as a million times.’ Isn’t that amazing? If you had no time, you’d be screwed. But it turns out that these cells are in your blood for as long as a year before they land somewhere. What that says is that you’ve got a chance to intercept them.”
How did Wood come to this conclusion? He had run across a stray fact in a recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. “It was an article that talked about, at one point, the number of cancer cells per millilitre of blood,” he said. “And I looked at that figure and said, ‘Something’s wrong here. That can’t possibly be true.’ The number was incredibly high. Too high. It has to be one cell in a hundred litres, not what they were saying—one cell in a millilitre. Yet they spoke of it so confidently. I clicked through to the references. It was a commonplace. There really were that many cancer cells.”
Wood did some arithmetic. He knew that human beings have only about five litres of blood. He knew that the heart pumps close to a hundred millilitres of blood per beat, which means that all of our blood circulates through our bloodstream in a matter of minutes. The New England Journal article was about metastatic breast cancer, and it seemed to Wood that when women die of metastatic breast cancer they don’t die with thousands of tumors. The vast majority of circulating cancer cells don’t do anything.
“It turns out that some small per cent of tumor cells are actually the deadly ones,” he went on. “Tumor stem cells are what really initiate metastases. And isn’t it astonishing that they have to turn over at least ten thousand times before they can find a happy home? You naïvely think it’s once or twice or three times. Maybe five times at most. It isn’t. In other words, metastatic cancer—the brand of cancer that kills us—is an amazingly hard thing to initiate. Which strongly suggests that if you tip things just a little bit you essentially turn off the process.”
Forgot to attribute the above to the New Yorker Magazine (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?currentPage=all)
What do you say, lets start a campaign to get the standards and measures people to make human hair an actual measurement standard.
It all starts at 0
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also from Cornell, not too long ago, solving similar problems. What happened to that one?
From the article:
Ideas weren't precious. They were everywhere, which suggested that maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention-genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany - wasn't necessary at all.
And yet we have a patent system that rewards lots of obvious ideas and companies like Intellectual Ventures go about patenting tons of them.
This hoarding and monopolization of ideas, and subsequent "tax" is likely to slow down the pace of progress than increase it .
or explain why not?
Thank God. I was worried for a minute that I might have RTFA.
Would it be possible to replace or filter a patient's blood after excision of the tumor?
If this is the case, then cancer diagnostic exams should remove these cells from your blood stream, firstly.
Secondly, if you require surgery or treatment, cells in your blood stream after removal of the primary cancer should then be removed.
Which makes a lot of sense, because cancer sometimes comes back to reinfect the patient.
So this would suggest, that part of the protocols for cancer treatment would require the patient to undego some sort of immuno therapy for blood work to complete the treatment.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
This is what I love about physicists: They love sanity checks, and they do the math.
I'm in bioinformatics, and where I work we were discussing how large a value for differential gene expression could get and still be considered credible. Well, it turned out that if a single molecule of a typical RNA transcript is present in a reference sample, the value that was under consideration would require several thousand metric tons of it in the comparison sample. This was deemed to be "unphysical", as they say...
has been available to block e-selectin in people with colon cancer for 20+ years, available at Walmart etc for about 11 cents per day. E-selectin is what often makes colon cancer metastasize and recur. Funny, no advertisements on TV about it.
Don't worry, you have to read up to 10,000 slashdot articles on average before you RTFA by mistake.
I do not get it. They says the TRAIL receptor triggers apoptosis, but that cancer cells inactivate it. How can they use it, then? And how can they avoid to activate TRAIL in non-cancerous cells?
I've read that eating enough green plant matter (leaves) will remove waste from the blood. I've read in several places that people have used vegan diets to control cancer (although I think it's more about eating more leaves, and not about rejecting protein).
I've heard/read that people that live a more primative lifestyle without our grain based diets don't have cancer, presumably because they eat more leaves.
This is certainly an interesting article, but it ignores some basic cancer biology.
In order to work, the TRAIL ligand must bind to the cancer cell, and therein lies the problem.
Almost by definition, cancer cells have lost the ability to error check their DNA during cell division. This is how they became cancer cells in the first place. The end result is that unlike healthy cells, when a cancer cell divides it produces a daughter cell full of DNA replication errors. By the time you have a clinically apparent tumor, there are countless millions of mutations among the cells. The central problem with chemotherapy is that you can administer a drug that kills 99.999% of the cancer cells, but almost invariably there will be a handful of cells with mutations that make them resistant to the medication. The result is an initial strong clinical response to the chemotherapy, but with an eventual return of the cancer which is then medication resistant.
The approach outlined in this paper is subject to the same limitation. In order to work, the TRAIL ligand must bind to a cancer cell. Their method may well augment the effect of the unbound ligand, but ultimately there will be a mutation which limits the cancer/TRAIL interaction and the method will fail.
Sadly, for the vast majority of solid tumors, the best cure rate is for surgical excision of the primary tumor before it spreads to the lymph nodes or distant metastatic sites. Survival is dismal for patients with almost any type of metastatic solid tumor.
Lorraine Day cured herself of cancer by changing her diet. They body can cure itself from cancer if given the right conditions. No processed foods. Limit toxins. Give your body all the building blocks it needs - vitamins and minerals. Statistics show that you are better off not getting radiation or chemo. They lower your chance of success. Radiation causes cancer and chemo is a poison.
Harlequin is good but remedy is a better high CBD strain.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds
Fasting sometimes can help too (consult a specialist in it like Dr. Fuhrman to see what is reasonable to expect in various situations). People are always getting (pre)cancer cells and the immune system destroys them usually. Generally cancer is best prevented by diet and lifestyle (including avoiding carcinogens including browned and burned foods with acrylamides) with a healthy immune system. But once you have cancer, it is iffy if it can be gotten rid of... Dr. Fuhrman writes more on this on his site.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This tells me that either the field of oncology research and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the entire medical establishment is populated by dullards and people engrossed in their own greed, instead of people who live for the thrill of discovery and problem solving.
Why not just test everyone once a year or more ? Why not initiate a large study to find out what it is that some people are doing that prevents tumors from becoming metastatic ? The obvious answer is, the field of oncology doesn't want any real advancements to decrease the profits in constantly treating a population with increasing cancers. At some point you have to look at the obvious reality you live in and start demanding that fields of researchers that yield nothing but huge profits over the well-being of the public be dismantled and replaced with researchers that have an interest in actual progress.