Impressive results in cancer research
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From: Cincinnati, OH
Impressive results in cancer research
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/#.TkP8XWMWnF8
Love to hear about advances like this. 
In the research published Wednesday, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania say the treatment made the most common type of leukemia completely disappear in two of the patients and reduced it by 70 percent in the third. In each of the patients as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away in a few weeks, and a year later it is still gone.
...
It is important to emphasize that there still have been only three patients. Over the past century, many attempts to harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer have shown initial success and subsequent failure. So much research remains to be done to prove just how good this treatment is. But it should begin soon, with great vigor.
...
It is important to emphasize that there still have been only three patients. Over the past century, many attempts to harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer have shown initial success and subsequent failure. So much research remains to be done to prove just how good this treatment is. But it should begin soon, with great vigor.
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Yup. Great step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, whenever something like this happens, mainstream media picks it up and over-hypes it. It can easily give a lot of very sick people false hope.
Unfortunately, whenever something like this happens, mainstream media picks it up and over-hypes it. It can easily give a lot of very sick people false hope.
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Immunotherapy is the way to go, the lab I work in is investigating aspects of the immune system with regard to brain tumors, as the central nervous system is considered "privileged" and is under strict control. We are finding that in many cases, the immune effector cells can enter the CNS, eliminate a pathogen, and leave without creating an auto-reactive disaster (think MS). We are getting some clues from rabies which has always been considered lethal once the virus enters the brain, however it seems the pathology associated with live-attenuated strains differ from the wild-type strains as mice can clear the infection and survive. Maybe one day they will be able to give you reconstituted T cells to eliminate your brain tumor (without destroying surrounding nerve tissue), thus giving you more than the average 6 months to live.
A company called Cel-Sci is working through Phase III trials (international) for their Multikine cancer therapy (head and neck).
A company called Cel-Sci is working through Phase III trials (international) for their Multikine cancer therapy (head and neck).
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It most likely will not be perfected for some time, not to mention the long process of clinical approval. It is likely to be pretty expensive as the technology reaches the market, being that there has to be extensive background knowledge pertaining to your individual diagnosis and the varied markers which separate neoplasms from healthy tissue. In the end, it may prove more beneficial than traditional therapies both in efficacy as well as the duration of effects. Think of it as a "vaccine" against cancer, only in some cases you are skipping the step of antigen presentation and simply "winding up" the cells before setting them loose.
Unfortunately one down side I do see is this approach never reaching a plateau, in terms of controlling all types of cancer. If the engine that drives cancer is mutation, what's to stop the antigen your cells were once targeted to, from changing epitopes? Look at Staphylococcus, every year it manages to evade the cleverest of antibiotics. In another example, a vaccine may provide safety from smallpox, but what about influenza? It's a guessing game in that case, being that RNA viruses have particularly high mutation rates. The antigen literally changes every season....
Unfortunately one down side I do see is this approach never reaching a plateau, in terms of controlling all types of cancer. If the engine that drives cancer is mutation, what's to stop the antigen your cells were once targeted to, from changing epitopes? Look at Staphylococcus, every year it manages to evade the cleverest of antibiotics. In another example, a vaccine may provide safety from smallpox, but what about influenza? It's a guessing game in that case, being that RNA viruses have particularly high mutation rates. The antigen literally changes every season....
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So on Thursday and Friday of last week I was at the NIH campus outside DC for the Cancer Immunotherapy Conference. Lots of great talks with some really impressive results for a number of techniques, including genetically engineered lymphocytes and adoptive cell transfer. In fact, Dr. Carl June from UPENN (mentioned in the article in OP) was there and gave a talk on recombinant T cell therapy. An overview of the transfer method:
And some images:
The top images show a patient's liver before and after treatment. The dark gray circles that dot the liver are tumors, and you can see they've almost completely regressed in the images on the right. Similar scenario in the bottom images.
I think the future of therapy is in biologics, but a number of obstacles still remain, including the fact that these methodologies require a great deal of time and are costly as well as specific to the patient. For example, adoptive cell transfer requires you to excise tumor, scour the sample for the correct T cell lineages that recognize specific tumor antigen, grow up billions of those specific T cells, deplete the immune system in the patient, and finally reconstitute the "farmed" T cells back into the patient. Not only that but then you have to deal with the minutiae of refining the response to antigen, control competition for stimulatory factors, as well as monitor the response by regulatory T cells and central memory T cells.
Hopefully these projects receive more support
And some images:
The top images show a patient's liver before and after treatment. The dark gray circles that dot the liver are tumors, and you can see they've almost completely regressed in the images on the right. Similar scenario in the bottom images.
I think the future of therapy is in biologics, but a number of obstacles still remain, including the fact that these methodologies require a great deal of time and are costly as well as specific to the patient. For example, adoptive cell transfer requires you to excise tumor, scour the sample for the correct T cell lineages that recognize specific tumor antigen, grow up billions of those specific T cells, deplete the immune system in the patient, and finally reconstitute the "farmed" T cells back into the patient. Not only that but then you have to deal with the minutiae of refining the response to antigen, control competition for stimulatory factors, as well as monitor the response by regulatory T cells and central memory T cells.
Hopefully these projects receive more support
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