9 ms·
Killing cancer like the common cold
- antirez 13y agoGreat news but bad title as there are no treatments for the common cold.
- cromulent 13y agoYour own immune system kills the common cold. That's the point :)
- ttflee 13y agoYeah, there is no cure for the common cold, except immune system, so far.
- ThomPete 13y agoWell there is. Your immune system kills it. Thats what they are referring to here.
- dekhn 13y agoYour own immune system already kills cancer, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunology Your body is constantly surveilling for cancer cells and eliminating them; in doing so, it selects for cells that can evade the immune system. By the time you have large tumors, the cells are already quite good and evading the immune system, at which point your adaptive immunity system can't help you. These scientists are trying to do first-order engineering on the immune cells to make them more effective. We've seen this before in science, with antibiotics. A few major, early wins followed by the long silence of failure, due to second-order adaptation by cells.
- lsc 13y ago>We've seen this before in science, with antibiotics. A few major, early wins followed by the long silence of failure, due to second-order adaptation by cells. I would hardly call antibiotics a "long silence of failure" - they are still pretty goddamn effective, even if they aren't quite as effective as they once were.
- dekhn 13y agoThere are also very few new ones, and nearly all the ones we have remaining are becoming less effective. I'm not denying we got some easy wins with penicillin back in the day, or that people can't be treated with antibiotics. But I've been in the medical industry long enough to maintain a very high level of skepticism when it comes to cancer treatment.
- gmt2027 13y agoAre you saying that antibiotics were a failure? While anti-retroviral therapy for HIV/AID does not cure the disease, it has transformed a diagnosis that would otherwise have been a death sentence into a manageable illness. If a "first order" treatment for cancer only extends lives by a few years or even decades, how is that not progress?
- dekhn 13y agoFirst order treatments typically get you about 6 months, not years or decades.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago"We've seen this before in science, with antibiotics. A few major, early wins followed by the long silence of failure, due to second-order adaptation by cells." But the key difference is that cancer does not pass from person to person, unlike bacteria. All cancer cells die before or with the patient, they don't stick around to "remember" how to defeat the hack. If we do get some major, early wins, they are likely to be very reproducible, indefinitely.
- viame 13y agoTitle Police. :D
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- girvo 13y agoI've read about this before. I'm excited and cautiously optimistic about it moving forward. One hopes that it can save other people in the future. Even some is better than 0. Personalised immunotherapy is cool :)
- gerhardi 13y agoIf/when the cure makes it through the final tests to the market, the sad thing is that they are probably going to rip off everyone who needs it, no matter what are the real costs. But anyway, a life is worth everything(?)
- salient 13y agoYou mean like this? http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/6/5184168/fda-approves-new-1000-a-day-hepatitis-c-pills http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/6/5184168/fda-approves-new-1...
- ceejayoz 13y agoThat article indicates a 90% cure rate. $84k for a 90% cure to Hep-C is peanuts when compared to the alternative of liver transplant and chronic hospitalizations.
- aquadrop 13y agoYes, but that's still sky high price for most of the world. And if they put price order of magnitude less, won't it bring around order of magnitude more people who can afford it and they money outcome will be pretty much the same? Look at pharma companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_compani... They are very profitable, maybe we should make them less profitable and more effective widespread-wise?
- dnautics 13y agoyou mean by abolishing drugs patents? check out the healthcare sector margins (notice major manufacturers, vs. generics manufacturers): http://biz.yahoo.com/p/5qpmd.html http://biz.yahoo.com/p/5qpmd.html You know those "greedy insurance companies" that the US is struggling to wrangle with complicated legislation and broken website markets? They only make 3% margin.
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- nroose 13y agoDoes anyone know if this can be applied to other cancers too? I think they only mentioned leukemia, but they seemed to imply that it would be applicable to other cancers. But would the therapy have to be for each cancer or broadly for all cancers? And I am guessing they would have to choose between this and chemo, since I think chemo hurts your immune system. And that would be a difficult choice, no?
- JunkDNA 13y agoThe reason this works is that there happens to be a protein on the outside of leukemias that allows you to uniquely target only the cancerous cells, leaving everything else alone. Provided a similar molecular signature could be found in other cancers, it might be possible to do this elsewhere.
- troymc 13y agoHere's the Penn webpage about their T-Cell Immunotherapy for Leukemia: http://www.penncancer.org/tcelltherapy/ http://www.penncancer.org/tcelltherapy/
- fbarriga 13y agohttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically-engineered-immune-cells-found-to-rapidly-clear-leukemia-tumors http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically... Old news ?
- fraXis 13y agoThere will never be a cure for cancer. My wife was diagnosed in September with stage 1 breast cancer. She has triple negative breast cancer which is the most aggressive kind to get. She is on week 6 of a 16 week Chemotherapy regimen. Then she has 8 weeks of radiation. Insurance has already spent over 100k on her lumpectomy and chemo drugs and doctor appointments since September. Every week when we go to her oncologist office, the waiting room is always full with patients we have never seen before. More than half of them are new patients filling out their new patient paperwork. And they are getting younger and younger in age. We have seen teenagers in his office with breast cancer. There is just too much money (doctors, surgery, drugs) to be made from treating this disease. What are all of these trained oncologist surgeons/doctors going to do if cancer gets cured? What are the drug companies that make these expensive chemo drugs going to do if cancer gets cured? There is no way they are going to cure this horrible disease. There is no money to be made in the cure.
- Retric 13y agoUnlike infectious diseases there will always be new cancer patents so you really can make a lot of money from a cure.
- fraXis 13y agoI don't feel that way. I see all the money that is being made from the ongoing treatment of Cancer. Drugs, surgery, scans, follow up appointments, radiation, and then the cycle repeats when the cancer returns or comes out of remission.
- derleth 13y agoThen why was smallpox eradicated? Why can't anyone make money off of smallpox patients anymore?
- dkrich 13y agoI think people who make these arguments drastically underestimate the challenges faced in coming up with a single cure-all for cancer. That said, I am very sorry to hear about your wife's condition and I hope that she comes out of it fine. That must be an extremely difficult situation and I'm not sure if I were in your situation I wouldn't have a similar opinion.
- JunkDNA 13y agoI've commented on this around here before. You read lots of junk about cancer "cures" in the popular press. They are almost always in mice or something and I or someone else with a similar background always feels compelled to weigh in and remind folks that it's a long way from curing lab rats to curing people. This however, is the real deal. It's quite remarkable and there's likely more stories like this for other diseases on the way. I went to a gene therapy session this fall at the American Society of Human Genetics conference in Boston and was blown away by some of the success people are having. I quipped to colleagues that I felt like I was in a science fiction movie. The most remarkable one was where they used an approach similar to the one here to cure a fatal metabolic disorder (relaying this from memory, so some of my recollection may be off). Kids with the disorder have a busted enzyme that causes slow degeneration of neurons. They don't live past 6 or 7 if I recall. The team showed how modifying a certain kind of stem cell found in the body normally to have the correct copy of the enzyme cured several patients. The corrected cells naturally move to the brain where they differentiate into glial cells and produce the correct copy of the enzyme. It turns out that because the neurons in the brain are starved for this enzyme, they express receptors that allow them to take it up from the environment. So the repaired glial cells supply enzyme to the entire brain (i.e. it's not necessary to modify every neuron in the brain to have a correct copy of the enzyme). They can completely cure kids with this approach. All of their muscular and neurological tests are 100% normal. They had videos of these kids running around and playing just as if nothing was wrong. In one case, a younger brother lived but his older sister (who was too old when the therapy came out) had died. It was hard not to get choked up looking at their smiling, happy faces as they ran around, thinking that if this therapy hadn't existed, they would be in a nearly vegetative state. Gene therapy had a rough start with the early setbacks, but I'm getting the sense that the tide is rapidly turing.
- lmg643 13y agoI'm not an expert, just an interested layperson, but from what I read, I am starting to wonder whether cancer cures might be more basic than we realize, we're just not looking at the right things. The example that keeps coming to mind is HPV - it can cause cervical cancer etc. And, since there is an immunization for HPV, the disease is preventable, and to the extent it is the "only" cause of certain cancers, would also prevent those cancers. So is HPV the "only" virus which causes cancer? Seems unlikely. I just don't know how much research is focused on bacterial or viral origins. Maybe it is not glamorous or mysterious enough to justify funding. The 2005 nobel in physiology went to Barry Marshal for discovering that stomach ulcers, long a mystery, were caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria. And in fairness to history, he wasn't even the first person to discover it, just the most recent person in western society. http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/low-hanging-fruit/ http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/low-hanging-fruit/
- msie 13y agoI hope that all these promising therapies somehow make it out of their trials and more people can benefit from them.
- guelo 13y agoThe sad part of this story is how this publicly funded research is being licensed to Novartis.
- lsh 13y ago... or how the published research will only be available from behind pay walls - if at all.
- refurb 13y agoWhy is that bad? If I had a promising new drug, I'd want someone with years of experience in getting a drug approved helping me out and the billions in capital to get it done wouldn't hurt either (which of course is available because Novartis sold a number of profitable drugs). The professor who came up with this science is going to get a cut of that, as will the university.
- jroseattle 13y agoMy mom had cancer surgery at Sloane Kettering in NYC. After surgery, which removed most of the cancer, she was put on a treatment regimen that involves a certain type of medicine (which she'll be on for the rest of her life.) Because she matched a gene, she's able to take a medicine called Tarceva. In essence, this medicine makes her lung cancer a chronic illness -- it's present, but doesn't spread or metastasize. It's a similar strategy to the one now employed with people who are HIV positive. Mom is still kicking, so this stuff is working.
- boyaka 13y agoHere's how you deal with cancer: http://m.vice.com/weediquette-show/stoned-kids http://m.vice.com/weediquette-show/stoned-kids
- j2d3 13y agoThis approach seems roughly similar to what Sangamo Genetics has been trying for HIV - with some recent success - http://www.aidsmeds.com/articles/Sangamo_genetics_1667_24579.shtml http://www.aidsmeds.com/articles/Sangamo_genetics_1667_24579...
- j2d3 13y agoUm, actually, on the other hand - re: Sangamo Genetics: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1705622-sangamo-a-fiery-biotech-with-a-product-poised-to-go-down-in-flames http://seekingalpha.com/article/1705622-sangamo-a-fiery-biot... Yikes!
- dekhn 13y agoZinc finger nucleases are effectively obsolete; CRISPR systems do the same thing, but you don't have to develop custom proteins- just supply the approprately synthesized complementary DNA.
- caycep 13y agoI vaguely recall this being posted before a few months back, but in a long-form journalism writeup in a local Philly paper...I can't recall exactly where but I remember it was well written.