Killing cancer like the common cold

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/07/health/cohen-cancer-study/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

by interconnector • 13 years ago

331 96 13 years ago

cnn.com

antirez• 13 years ago

Great news but bad title as there are no treatments for the common cold.

cromulent• 13 years ago

Your own immune system kills the common cold. That's the point :)

ttflee• 13 years ago

Yeah, there is no cure for the common cold, except immune system, so far.

ThomPete• 13 years ago

Well there is. Your immune system kills it. Thats what they are referring to here.

dekhn10• 13 years ago

Your own immune system already kills cancer, too.

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.

viame• 13 years ago

Title Police. :D

girvo• 13 years ago

I'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• 13 years ago

If/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• 13 years ago

You mean like this?

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/6/5184168/fda-approves-new-1...

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

That 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.

JunkDNA5• 13 years ago

The "real" costs of making ordinary drugs are small in terms of manufacturing. It is very inexpensive to synthesize the chemicals that make up most drugs. You're paying for the R&D of the drug as well as all the ones that failed along the way. In the days when software used to be sold in cardboard boxes and came on CD's, nobody was making the argument that someone like Microsoft should charge a few dollars since CD's and cardboard are cheap.

All that said, in this specific case, the therapy is enormously complex, time consuming, and expensive. It's not a simple chemical compound that can be manufactured in bulk. Furthermore, it has to be tailor-made in a lab under highly controlled conditions for each individual receiving the treatment. As a result, it is likely to be extremely costly when it finally makes it out of the experimental phase.

twobits• 13 years ago

"It is very inexpensive to synthesize the chemicals that make up most drugs"

Can I ask a stupid q? How exactly inexpensive is it? Thinking in line of 3d printing, how possible could it be to get the chemicals needed, and the machines needed to mix them appropriately, to make a known drug? Ie, how possible would be to "download a pill"? The recipe, and you make it yourself at home?

nroose• 13 years ago

Does 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?

JunkDNA5• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

Here's the Penn webpage about their T-Cell Immunotherapy for Leukemia:

http://www.penncancer.org/tcelltherapy/

fbarriga• 13 years ago

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically...

Old news ?

fraXis2• 13 years ago

There 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• 13 years ago

Unlike infectious diseases there will always be new cancer patents so you really can make a lot of money from a cure.

fraXis2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Then why was smallpox eradicated? Why can't anyone make money off of smallpox patients anymore?

dkrich• 13 years ago

I 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.

cLeEOGPw3• 13 years ago

You sound like you have a depression, which is completely understandable, since you can not in any way help your wife. There are good reasons why every cancer can not be completely and effectively cured in every case. But it will be cured, it's just a matter of time.

zrail• 13 years ago

I'm so sorry you and your wife are going through this. It's an awful experience, hopefully it'll be over soon and you two can move on with your lives.

Something to keep in mind is that cancer isn't just one disease, it's a huge cluster of diseases with similar presentations. I survived testicular cancer this year, which happens to be one of a group of cancers that is almost completely curable. Thirty years ago it was not the same story, with a 90% five year mortality. Now it's 95% five year survival. That said, two close family members passed away this year from other types of cancer, one kidney and another colorectal.

I guess my point is that each type of cancer potentially requires a different cure, and some are easier nuts to crack than others. Leukemia has a promising future as one of those curable cancers.

ars• 13 years ago

There is no way they are going to cure this horrible disease. There is no money to be made in the cure.

The "they" who treat cancer are not the same "they" who will cure it. It's like saying auto mechanic design cars to fail. Auto mechanics don't design cars at all, and have nothing to do with that.

refurb6• 13 years ago

That makes no sense at all. You do realize that developing a cure for a disease can be even more profitable than just trying to treat it, right?

Look at the new HCV treatments. Previously, you'd have to take two drugs for most of your life. Three different companies have developed treatments that cure HCV in 90%+ of the patients with only 12 weeks of treatment.

JunkDNA5• 13 years ago

I'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• 13 years ago

I'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/

cLeEOGPw3• 13 years ago

Prevention of cancer is not a cure, and it would not prevent all types of cancer. Cancer can appear anywhere in the body without any significant "cause". Regular safe sun radiation can be enough to alter certain DNA part during regular cell divide and immune cells might fail to spot the cell and it can start reproducing. Unlike infectious diseases, cancer is the result of evolution within body, it is fundamental to every multicell organism.

pak• 13 years ago

Viruses are only one potential cause of cancer, and there are several known tumorigenic viruses (HPV, adenovirus, EBV, polyomavirus, etc.). There are still researchers that believe that all remaining cancers are caused by yet undiscovered viruses (the "viral hypothesis"), but these researchers are becoming scarce.

It seems more likely that cancer can also be a disease of aging and degeneration. As we get older, things break. Cellular division is liable to be one of those things. There are identified mutations that dramatically predispose people to cancer, because one of the genes controlling cellular division is already broken (the "Knudson hypothesis").

Some researchers do prefer to use the viral cancers as a model for studying the others, because they luckily have a singularly identifiable cause, and therefore seem more likely to point to the causative mutations behind cancer as a general process. This is the premise for a paper that I helped author: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v487/n7408/full/nature1...

Nitpick: in the same vein, not all gastric ulcers are caused by H. pylori. Another common cause is chronic NSAID (e.g. ibuprofen) use.

emiliobumachar3• 13 years ago

http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

"Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?"

hyp0• 13 years ago

To be fair to him (and co-discoverer/recipient Robin Warren), it's one thing to notice something; another thing to prove it. And he proved it by drinking the bacteria himself. [ An interesting criticism of modern science is that by demanding proof, it rejects all truths that are not proven. ]

Cancer may be similar, though I suspect it's a syndrome i.e. not a single cause and cure; but many causes, and therefore many treatments.

JunkDNA5• 13 years ago

I used to work in anti-infectives research and if you talked to virologists long enough they would all insist that huge numbers of human ailments were caused by as yet undiscovered viruses. I admit that I'm a bit biased toward this myself. But I also have worked with people who are mitochondrial experts and they are convinced that huge amounts of disease are caused by mitochondrial defects. Lots of microbiologists think undiscovered bacteria are to blame.

The bottom line is that they are likely all correct. There is a staggeringly large amount of biology that we just don't know anything about. The complexity of it all is almost fractal. Just when we think we've got our heads around something, we peel another layer off the onion to reveal an entire landscape of which we were previously unaware. The best example of this is the recent findings in epigenetics. Before Darwin, Lamarck argued that acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring. This was widely discredited. I learned about how it was patently false in high school. Now, we are finding that DNA methylation patterns (which work sort of like commenting out blocks of your DNA code) are modified and passed on to offspring. In some studies, if a mother is stressed, her offspring have stress response genes turned on by default at birth. In another, if there is starvation, the animal has starvation survival genes enabled at birth. It's quite remarkable and it means that in addition to our DNA which is fairly static, we have this parallel inheritance pattern that can be shaped and molded by the environment and passed to our offspring. The old "nature vs nurture" debate gets a whole lot more confusing (and might even be the wrong question entirely) with that in play.

jwilliams2• 13 years ago

I think one effect is that "cancer" is actually a very broad umbrella term. Different cancers have very different causes, characteristics and prognoses.

JunkDNA5• 13 years ago

Indeed you are right. For much of the time people have thought that at least you could classify cancers by the tissues where they present themselves (e.g. colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, etc...). But more research is showing that this may actually not be so simple. At the molecular level, it's possible for two cancers from different tissues to be identical from a mechanistic standpoint. There is a lot of re-thinking going on in the oncology community about how cancers are classified and treated as a result.

msie• 13 years ago

I hope that all these promising therapies somehow make it out of their trials and more people can benefit from them.

guelo• 13 years ago

The sad part of this story is how this publicly funded research is being licensed to Novartis.

lsh• 13 years ago

... or how the published research will only be available from behind pay walls - if at all.

refurb6• 13 years ago

Why 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• 13 years ago

My 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• 13 years ago

Here's how you deal with cancer:

http://m.vice.com/weediquette-show/stoned-kids

j2d32• 13 years ago

This 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...

j2d32• 13 years ago

Um, actually, on the other hand - re: Sangamo Genetics: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1705622-sangamo-a-fiery-biot...

Yikes!

dekhn10• 13 years ago

Zinc 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• 13 years ago

I 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.

Killing cancer like the common cold

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