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'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer By Harnessing The Immune System Clears Key Hurdle (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: A new kind of cancer treatment that uses genetically engineered cells from a patient's immune system to attack their cancer easily cleared a crucial hurdle Wednesday. A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee unanimously recommended that the agency approve this "living drug" approach for children and young adults who are fighting a common form of leukemia. The agency doesn't have to follow the committee's recommendation but usually does. The treatment takes cells from a patient's body, modifies the genes, and then reinfuses those modified cells back into the person who has cancer. If the agency approves, it would mark the first time the FDA has approved anything considered to be a "gene therapy product." The treatment is part of one of the most important developments in cancer research in decades -- finding ways to harness the body's own immune system to fight cancer. And while it has generated much hope, there are some concerns about its safety over the long term -- and its cost.
surely they must be listened to as they know more, can't have the scientists being knowledgeable and doing good things based on facts and research :)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
there's got to be a zombie book/movie that used this plot
A friend of mine is alive today because he was part of one of the early trials.
He had been told by his doctor, just before he was accepted into the trial, that he should start putting his affairs in order.
If I recall correctly, he is 7 years cancer free now.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
GMOs entirely different. They are something that you're letting out into the environment. They aren't something you're injecting into a single person. Like all blood cells, these things have a very short lifetime. Then they die. They don't replicate themselves. They're not even designed to (like GMOs).
GMOs are like Dick Cheney deciding he owns your house because his out of control dog shat on your lawn.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They're wrong. Antibiotics are, according to the generally accepted definition, medicine. By definition, medicine is something that, when consumed, cures some illness. If you cannot consume it to kill bacteria in vivo, then it is not an antibiotic.
For example, chlorine bleach is an antibacterial agent. It is not an antibiotic. (If you drink it, you will die, but the bacteria will not.)
In fact, in the modern use of the terms, their answer is exactly backwards. Antibiotics are generally considered to be a subset of antibacterial agents. When we talk about substances that kill other microorganisms, we call them antifungals or antiparasitics, not antibiotics. We commonly say things like "antibiotics will make a yeast infection worse", which would be blatantly untrue if you included antifungals under antibiotics. I don't think I have ever (in my lifetime) heard someone call an antifungal or antiparasitic agent an antibiotic. It just isn't done. They're entirely different classes of medication that should not be confused (because doing so could be a life-threatening mistake).
And people don't typically use the word antibacterial when we talk about antibiotics because that term is too overloaded by other things that aren't medicinal. See also: bleach.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
GE did a story on it that they posted to youtube years ago.
Probably my favorite part of this story hitting the news is that the spokesperson for this treatment is the girl from the above video. She's 12 now and still completely cancer free. I'm very glad to see she's doing well.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I'm living proof these sorts of immunotherapy treatments work: five years and still cancer-free. It's wonderful that the FDA may be on the brink of approving their use outside of trials.
I sought out and was admitted into a trial at NIH in 2012 to use a similar treatment for Stage IV melanoma.
In my trial, the researchers harvested my existing white blood cells and selected those that were able to recognize and attack the mutations present in my melanoma. Those cells were expanded to 130 billion in the lab and then re-infused into my body after my own immune system was killed off. In essence, my immune system was rebooted with white blood cells that could recognize and fight the cancer cells.
In theory, my body has been effectively immunized against the some of the cancerous mutations that my melanoma exhibited. I won't need any further treatment for my previous melanoma EVER.
I know fellow melanoma patients who were in related trials at NIH in which their harvested white cells were genetically engineered to express different proteins (like, IL-12 or IL-15 or NY/ESO) with similar success.
These novel cancer-fighting approaches are working. I'm happy that the FDA may actually be slowing adapting to the changing medical technology.
The genes are patented by the drug company. The patients body making additional copies of the gene would be violating the patent and copyright of the drug maker. Who will sue you to death. If cancer does not get you, the pharma will get you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My views are correct according to the Oxford English Dictionary and many others, and are also consistent with the way that the words are commonly used, both by civilians and by doctors, at least in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere). Language changes, and old definitions become wrong. It happens.
FYI, dermatological treatment is still considered "in vivo". So no, ignoring the sloppiness of my use of the word "consumed", my definition is not wrong in any meaningful sense, nor is my example; if you put pure chlorine bleach on your skin, you'll get severe chemical burns. Chlorine bleach cannot be used in vivo in any form. Hence, it is not medicine, hence it is not an antibiotic, but it is still antibacterial.
In short, you're wrong, period. This isn't a grey area. You are objectively wrong about the commonly accepted meaning of these words.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
GMOs are like Dick Cheney deciding he owns your house because his out of control dog shat on your lawn.
Correction, the companies that own "some" GMOs are like that. GMO's in themselves are not responsible for the company that made them's reckless behavior. GMOs in of themselves are a useful tool, how a company chooses to abuse them is a totally different topic.
I figure the cost will be X in the developed world other than the US and 10X in the US because the FDA protects pharma profits (and it's own jobs) first.
That's a completely ridiculous statement. The cost is going to be astronomical because this therapy is developed on a "per person" basis. Additionally, there's not a really finely tuned way to control the altered T-cells, that's something they're still working on for the next generation of these types of drugs. So that said, these T-cells can attack cancer and healthy cells and which ones they do attack depends on what tissue they land on while in your blood stream. Long hospital stays are going to be a requirement of these kinds of treatments and a crack team of bio-engineers are going to have to be at the ready round clock for any sudden cytokine storm that might develop, since the chances of developing one is 50-50 with this drug. Again that goes back to doctor's not having a way to finely control the T-cells. There's so many variables to this treatment, you could literally pick up a 1000 page book on calculus and have nowhere near the number of variables involved in this treatment.
All of that put together is going to make these treatments costs insane. Is it worth it? Well that's not an objective question. Will it get cheaper? Of course, because we'll get better at this, but we're not going to get better at these kinds of treatments without first actually trying these kinds of treatments. Will it be cheaper in "insert some other first world nation"? Maybe, but that's less the nature of the FDA and more the nature of how crazy US healthcare is. Thinking that it's the FDA that protects profits is thinking way too small. The FDA has a part in it, but it's way smaller than you'd like to think. You want to find the people who have the most control in that, you needn't look any further than your local Congress-critter and the slew of lobbyist laws on the books. You want to be mad about prices for medicine, that's cool, but at least be mad at the right people for the right reasons. This process is an insanely brand new form of any kind of medicine that precedes it (and that's a serious understatement because this is literally a new era of medicine altogether. Literally people will look back at this as a pre/post gene therapy era) and the FDA has very little say in what ultimately is a more complex topic on price. Get mad about medicine that's been out for the last ten/fifteen years that still costs an arm and a leg because the law in the US allows them to make a monopoly on it.
They are something that you're letting out into the environment. They aren't something you're injecting into a single person.
Not to worry, things you inject into a person cannot possibly get into the environment. Nope, can't happen. Never, no way, no how.
GMOs are like Dick Cheney deciding he owns your house because his out of control dog shat on your lawn.
I think you are confusing "GMOs" and "GMO patents". It's fair to dislike GMO patents. Disliking GMOs because you dislike GMO patents is like disliking literature because you don't like copyright law.
It sounds like you're trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance between "GMOs bad" and "cancer treatment (with GMOs) good". I submit that a better solution would be to look at why you dislike GMOs and see how logical that dislike is.
yes there has been previous similar therapies that had pervasive side effects like brain swelling that resulted in death
And (according to TFA) this one sometimes does that, too. But, in the (closely watched) experimental group, they were able to catch it and treat it in the patients where it occurred.
It turned out to be transient. So nobody died, and the effect went away once the cancer cells were cleared and the immune cells settled down to just guarding against recurrence.
It was a "cytokine storm", where the signalling fallout from the modified immune cells (raising the alarm that they had found a massive "infection" of their targets) provokes immune (and other) cells elsewhere into disease-fighting modes (which also release alarm signalling chemicals, potentially creating a runaway feedback loop) damaging other tissues or even starting a persistent auto-immune syndrome.
Previous developers of such therapies might want to look into them again. If they were having the same problem, and their modified cells only attacked things, like leukemia cells, that they can easily reach and quickly clear out (rather than something that would keep them attacking long-term or that's a vital part of the body), they, too, might have viable and marketable treatments.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way