Genetic Engineers Working to Reverse Cancer 121
An anonymous reader writes "Using a patient's own modified white blood cells, a team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute has reversed advanced melanoma in a study of 17 patients. The researchers tweaked the blood to recognize and attack cancer cells, and the head of the National Institutes of Health, Elias Zerhounibut, says there's big hope now that other common cancers, like breast and lung cancer, can be similarly treated. Though only 2 of the 17 patients responded successfully to the treatment, researchers are optimistic that future improvements on the technique will improve that rate of success." From the article: "In the study, Rosenberg and his colleagues took lymphocytes from the blood and inserted into them genes for a receptor capable of 'recognizing' a protein on melanoma cells called MART-1. This would allow the lymphocyte to attach to a tumor cell and kill it. The patients, all of whom had previously undergone surgery and immune-based treatments, got chemotherapy to temporarily wipe out their immune systems. The engineered cells were then reinjected, with the hope they would proliferate as the immune system recovered."
Oh noes, look out! (Score:5, Funny)
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Eat more broccoli!
This is an awesome way to treat cancer (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows Admin Tools [intelliadmin.com]
Re:This is an awesome way to treat cancer (Score:4, Informative)
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My father died of cancer a couple of years ago and I can assure you chemotheraphy is everything but not-invassive. It's incredible to see how a powerful body degrades to it's limits with it, but every hope is welcomed, even if you have to suffer with it :) I hope this research advances and we can treat it in the future, because cancer is getting worse everywhere with our 100% industrial food and environments, and that damn genetic thing says I'll probably follow my father. We need some Open Source replaceme
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Is it really getting worse due to pollution, or are we just living longer on average, and we've got to die of something now that smallpox and cholera etc have been eradicated.
-b.
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Take a look at Bone Marrow Transplants (Score:2, Informative)
Bone Marrow Transplants knock out the immune system with a combo of chemo and radiation. It's not a fun process (although it is scarily simple).
Some people feel few ill effect. Most have vomiting, nausa and their hair falling out. My wife went into grade-4 Muciousitious (sp?) and had her mouth peeling. (Others have died from merely having their immune system knocked out)
The survival rates for BMT patents was something like 50-60% iirc (5 year su
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Seriously, how often do we hear about break throughs, that never make it to people dying of cancer. Perhaps, I'm just missing it. Is there a webpage that has a timeline of various breakthroughs, when they were discovered, approved by the FDA and used on the general public, and how many lives saved. There has to be somthing if just improvements in chemotherapy.
bbc has more info (Score:5, Informative)
Always nice to see the light of science burning brighter and any treatments that can get rid of cancer that has spread to the liver are pretty amazing.
NCI has even more (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the interesting part, I thought: "The researchers also have isolated TCRs that recognize common cancers other than melanoma."
Re:bbc has more info (Score:4, Insightful)
So you fifteen unknown others... thanks for volunteering.
Re:bbc has more info (Score:4, Informative)
X.
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This article screams premature science hype.
Using the body's immune system (Score:5, Insightful)
This approch does require a lot of work (tailoring a particular patient's T-cells to a particular cancer), so it's not a cheap fix. It also requires the patient's immune system to cooperate and do it's thing, something that only happened in 2 of the 17 patients. Still, to get complete remission where there was no hope is extremely promising. My guess is that we'll see more of this.
Basically if the human race can do two things: 1) Regrow organs that have worn out and 2) cure cancer, we'll live for a very long time.
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Add to the list the banning of trans-fats in food and we need to get to the bottom of this plastic bottle thing (that leach chemicals into their contents and then you ingest them..)
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I'm only 26 and I remember when coke and pepsi came in glass bottles...I imagine there are a lot of people alive today that have never seen anything other than plastic coke and pepsi bottles. I even remember the car dealership we used to go to when I was little - it had a glass bottle vending machine. each bottle was on its side with its cap pointing out towards you. Each bottle was had spring loaded mechanical fingers around the bottl
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I also remember when canned drinks (beer) had removable tabs.
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I remember when canned drinks had NO tabs, you needed a can-opener. OMFG I'm old....
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To go back on topic: the article mentioned the 15 who died. We assume they died of cancer. I
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Re:Using the body's immune system (Score:5, Interesting)
Although only 2 of 17 patients recovered, if this was an initial human trial, then all the scientists were looking for was toxicity effects in people who were otherwise pretty much beyond any other medical treatment. i.e. people with cancer so advanced, that a treatment like this probably wouldn't make them any worse.
Hopefully when this method of treating cancer is applied to people whose tumors are not so advanced, the results will be far more effective.
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You've made me all emotional now... arse.
Re:Using the body's immune system (Score:5, Funny)
Meaninglessly, unless we can determine the mechanisms of senility and treat/prevent them. Personally, I'd love to live forever, but only if I can be guaranteed to not become a crazy old coot who thinks his toothbrush is stealing money from his wallet while he sleeps.
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Countries with ageing populations like Japan have already done a lot of research into the causes of and prevention of senility. As I recall, the upshot was that if a mind isn't used, it atrophies. They put senior citizens into education programs and get them playing computer games, seems to work well so far.
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That's the thing - will simply regrowing the brain or causing new neurons to form actually have the effect of staving off senility? If neurons in certain pathways die, will having new neurons appear in random locations, not connected to anything, will that result in any improvement? What will your mind, your consciousness be like when 50% of the neurons within it are new ones you didn't have when you were born?
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Okay, I realize that there is humor value in this, but I was actually speaking from experience. I went to go visit childhood friend's grandfather (our families are close) and at the age of 105, he really *does* think everyone and occasionally, some things, are stealing from him. It's gotten to the
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I think that is my new goal in life.
Lazy foreign toothbrushes, looking all smug in their stupid little cup. Sneaking money out of my wallet when I'm not looking I SEE YOU! A conspiracy, I tell you, CONSPIRACY!
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Sure, if we don't kill each other first.
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Huh? Trials on antiangiogenesis drugs are still continuing; it's hardly at an end state. Plus, the initial drugs tested only worked against one angiogenisis growth factor; research has revealed that there are in fact many different ones in play.
I admit that initial trials "didn't pan out as well as hoped", but that's partially due to overly high expectations; so many people were trying to imply that the cure was right around the corner and t
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It's a tightrope walk (Score:2, Insightful)
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I dunno, I listened to this story on NPR last night, and the NIH crew has been working on this for over twenty years. Their initial research showed successful results about 15% of the time, and this latest study shows successful results...11% of the time. Granted it's a small sample size, but I'm really not convinced they're making a whole lot of progress. Too bad, it's an interesting technique, I hope they can figure out how to make it scale.
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Well, the way I see, you've got nothing to lose by trying. Either way, the worst result is that you'll die. And that's guaranteed anyhow.
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Virtually all cancer treatments are dangerous.
X.
Great news. (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems odd that you would use chemotherapy described in the article as being something that wipes out your immune system, and then try to use a treatment that relies entirely on your immune system being effective. Maybe thats part of the treatment, but it seems like you would want your immune system at 100% for this process to work.
These articles always make me wonder if
Re:Great news. (Score:4, Informative)
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Overrated parent. RTFA? BS. RMFP. (Score:2)
This RTFA crap is thrown around WAY too much.
I never denied that the article said that, or that it was not correct to do it this way, I just said it seems counterintuitiv
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No, it IS part of the treatment. It won't work without it.
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Just think of it as a hard reboot for your immune system. Then the newly developed anti-badthingys can go after what has infested your system
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They need to wipe out your immune system to replace it with the modified immune system that will attack cancer.
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Abstract (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/11
I thought it was interesting how the lymphocytes stuck around for about a year. I thought they would have either died or kicked the gene out by then...
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What Rosenberg did, BTW, is to find a patient who was cured, and therefore had T cells that could kill the cancer. Then he found a patient who wsn't cured, and therefore had T cells that couldn't kill cancer. He took a receptor from the T cell that could kill cancer, and inserted the receptor into a T cell that couldn't
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Elias Zerhouni (Score:5, Funny)
My heart goes out to them. (Score:5, Insightful)
-Loyal
Yea.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to be trying to get better contact info for the people doing this research and forward it to my cousin and the family facing brain cancer.
Interferon (Score:3, Interesting)
My father had/has stage 4 Melanoma. He went into remmision from high dose interferon and dmx clinical and NIH. BTW the study found no statisical improvement over just high dose interferon.
quick wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanoma [wikipedia.org]
Treatment will get better (Score:3, Insightful)
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A patent has to be developed from it first, so that it can be restricted to only those that can pay.
We wouldn't want EVERYONE surviving cancer, that wouldn't be profitable and would destroy the market demand.
Even if the protocols used are perfected on a per cancer basis, we certainly wouldn't want to CURE a person.
What we woul
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On a related note... (Score:2)
Statistical confidence (Score:2, Interesting)
With a simple confidence interval calculation we get that with a sample size of 17 from a population of 1000 we get that with 95% confidence the results are 2+-2.6 of 17. Obviously 0 is within the error margin, so it is quite possible the results are just by chance.
I have been trying to locate some information on what the motivation was for releasing such a weak result - in case I had missed something. I have failed to find any menti
Re:Statistical confidence (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't have the information required to make this computation. Without knowing spontaneous remission rates you don't have any kind of probability distribution to start working from. There is no "simple confidence interval comp
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The simple calculation is as follows: Sample size: ss=17 Positive outcome probability: p = 2/17
Sample size = ss = Z^2(p)*(1-p)/c^2
Z = z value (e.g 1.96 for 95% confidence)
c = confidence interval for probability so
c = +- sqrt(Z^2*(p)*(1-p)/ss)
Insert values: c = +-sqrt( 1.96^2 * (2/17)*(1-2/17)/17) = +-0.153
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If you don't trust my equations, you have them here [surveysystem.com] and on the same site you can find a javascript sample size calculator [surveysystem.com] which you can test
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Since 2 of 17 people survived, that's your positive outcome probability. For sampling error the likelihood of of spontaneous recovery makes no difference at all. If we wanted to calculate a significance level, it would - but in this case it isn't nec
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As for your example, you are wrong because you are confusing mathematical logic and statistics. Claiming that something
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No. But (1) I think you need the some skill in the former before you can embark on the latter and (2) in a suitable limit, statistics needs to match mathematical logic, and a good test of your statistical methodology is to examine it's behaviour in the limit and compare it with mathematical logic.
If X has a probability 0.00001 of happening spontaneously, say, and you observe X occuring twice out of 17 times, you have very good evidence that X is not o
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Exactly, zero rate of remission is within the margin of error. By that definition the null hypothesis can't be rejected. Get it? No matter how small the spontaneous remission rates are, they will be higher than zero. I'm not sure how to explain it to you further - I've tried both with words and equations.
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Good work. Now I can start computing. n=17, p = 1/400. (Probably
It most certainly is not. If the probability of spontaneous remission were zero then it'd be impossible to get 2 out of 17 spontaneous remissions so we'd be 100% sure that the two remissions were not spontaneous.
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No you can't. You need the variance to compute significance levels, which we don't have. Either way we don't need it as we can't reject the null hypothesis anyway due to the too small number of samples.
No, I didn't say that the probability of spontaneous rem
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Mixed feelings (Score:2)
Cancer really sucks. I hope this pans out.
One question (Score:2)
Editorializing by the Poster (Score:1)
His name is Elias Zerhouni
Well well (Score:1)
This is just a technique, expect more later (Score:2, Informative)
The method mentioned is a technique - it increases the rate, and is
Great news (Score:3, Informative)
It was too late for him, but hopefully not for the thousands who die from melanoma every year.
2 out of 17 betther than now (Score:1)
If the cancer cells weren't so sneaky and/or the immune systems was doing its job right, the cancer would've been killed before it became a problem.
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It is estimated, I believe, that 90% of cancers or pre cancerous cells are wiped out by the immune system well before the person involved even notices them; those that survive have mutations which stop attack by the immune system. Unfortunately, the implication here is that the cancer will evolve to become resistant to this treatm
My father... (Score:2)
Does anyone know how you can go about 'applying' to be in this test? I'm going to send him the article, but I was hoping to have more info.
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Bigger than cancer? After you have cured cancer, anything else is just an insignificant bonus.
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It's hardly insignificant if you're the guy with something else expected to be terminal that the new technique can cure, or family or friend of that guy.
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True enough, but statistically, nearly everyone has (or will have) friends and family that battle cancer.
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Maybe, maybe not... (Score:1)
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Wait-- so you're claiming that when a child gets lukemia, it's generally the parent's fault?
That's cold, man.
brrrrr.
(At first I thought you were making a tasteless joke, but by the time I got to the end of your post, it sounds like you're actually serious.)
Re:Cancers From Identity Conflict. (Score:1)