I think this site needs a new Medical News forum or some such, but here is some great news for now... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/ns/health-cancer/
Great medical news
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Sounds very promising, but we need a much much larger sample size and to then be approved by the FDA.
Rich
Rich
I would love to see a "Medical News You Can Use" kind of forum. We so many from medical profession here, I imagine the quality of what is posted will be quite high and useful to us all.
The original news is incredible. Amazing that HIV virus could be harnessed and put to good use.
The original news is incredible. Amazing that HIV virus could be harnessed and put to good use.
That is interesting but Rich is right. Hope it does pan out as had a very close audio colleague die of CLL 10 years ago
Absolutely. Those of us who are not in the medical field, but simply hungry for information about science and technology could read about it in a place where they could get immediate explanation and clarification from experts in the field. This is the very heart of the power of the online community, IMO.
Tim
One dark note in this very positive story:
Meanwhile, a couple of more branded erectile dysfunction pills were probably brought to market. We really have to find a way to do pure research in this country without looking for ROI.
Tim
Meanwhile, a couple of more branded erectile dysfunction pills were probably brought to market. We really have to find a way to do pure research in this country without looking for ROI.
Tim
With medicine turning into a business rather than an art form, research without profit potential will probably only come from a wealthy party with some personal interest in a disease. As it is, many equipment and drug purchases for hospital use are made without consulting the actual users (doctors and technicians), with pricing being the main consideration.
Lee
I'm going to sound like a socialist, but there are some broad categories of basic human need/services that are just not well-served by being driven solely by profit. This one is very high up the list.
Tim
Tim
As a physician, I'm always highly dubious when 'breakthroughs' are touted in the lay press. I know people are desperate for these type of advances, but the reality of research is that it is tedious and requires planning and patience. Most medical 'breakthroughs' are result of many years of research, testing, failure, retesting and yes, serendipity. But during the course of my professional career (and I'm not THAT old) we've revolutionized the treatment of peptic ulcer disease with H2 blockers (30 years ago if you had suggested the cause was an infection, the medical profession would have laughed at you), changed the treatment of cardiovascular disease (statins and stents), and turned HIV infection from a grisly death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease (pharmaceuticals). Barely 30 years ago, CT scans allowed us to view the internal workings of the body in vivo. A head CT required took a couple of hours; now it takes seconds and the image detail and quality are immensely better. Really amazing when you think about it!
You know, I come from Italy, where health care is provided by the State. This is one of the few things that make me proud to be an Italian of the 21st century. I wouldn't call it socialism: it's welfare state
The fact that health care is managed as a business more than as a basic need of the people, as pointed out by RBFC, is true. This notwithstanding, maybe this peculiar situation is different from what depicted. The published paper is a case report, not a clinical trial: as the injection of modified cells in the body is risky by definition, a clinical approach (which should follow tests on mouse models, when available) should start with a very limited cohort of patients. The criteria of inclusion of those patients in the mini-trial can be matter of ethical issues, but it is what it is.
Luckily, these patients seemed free from life-threatening conditions. Anyway, it occurred in the past that a case report, published again on the NEJM, referred about an "immunological storm" in healthy volunteers that underwent the infusion of an antibody to trigger immunity through the stimulation of the cell surface receptor CD28. The aim of the authors of the study was to enhance immunity for cancer prevention: they almost killed those guys. Ironically, an experimental failure resulted in a publication on the most prestigious medical journal.
In terms of issues for public and/or private funding for this research, maybe NCI and pharmaceutical companies rejected grant proposals about this treatment proposal, before it occurred. It frequently happens that good proposals are not funded: the system is hyper-competitive and institutional grants sometimes are not provided to research proposals that then turn into breakthroughs...
Well, that's not really the case...
The author of the news put a little romance about it (it's ok, they need to make the news catchy): what they did was to use a virus (a lentivirus in this case, that is a "version" of a retrovirus, the family of viruses the HIV belongs to) just as a vehicle to promote the expression of a gene (and consequently of a protein) in a cell that either doesn't express it or expresses it at a different level. It's something that in my lab is performed on daily basis. This doesn't reduce the impressive achievement of this study. Hope that the data will be confirmed on a large scale of patients
Thanks Valerio. My lay impression of it was that HIV virus was so good at what it normally does in attacking blood cells that this specific ability was used to help promote this new treatment. Is my read wrong?
Excellent question! No, the scenario is different.
The idea to use a virus that induce cell death (HIV that kills T lymphocytes), after a modification that allows the virus to recognize a specific subset of cells (such as cancer cells) would be totally cool. Anyway, this approach would be very risky.
The use of viruses we do is radically different. We employ so-called "defective" viruses. These viruses are not capable to replicate once they infect a cell (so they are "safe", as infections cannot spread) and they require special cells to be generated (cells that provide some genes to build the machinery to allow the virus to gem out from the producing cell). These viruses are derived from HIV: the reason why we use this kind of virus is that they easily integrate into the cell genome, so what you are delivering through them is stably expressed. That's the point: you want an efficient way to allow the expression of an ectopic protein, thus generating modified cells.
In that paper, they modified T lymphocytes, through the expression of a receptor for a signature molecule of the B lymphocytes that accumulate during B-CLL, a mild chronic (but formally not-treatable) leukemia. These engineered T lymphocytes so recognize and promote the killing of the leukemic cells. Brilliant. Unfortunately most of the tumors constantly change their surface profile, so the chance to extend this approach to all neoplasms is vain...
The idea to use a virus that induce cell death (HIV that kills T lymphocytes), after a modification that allows the virus to recognize a specific subset of cells (such as cancer cells) would be totally cool. Anyway, this approach would be very risky.
The use of viruses we do is radically different. We employ so-called "defective" viruses. These viruses are not capable to replicate once they infect a cell (so they are "safe", as infections cannot spread) and they require special cells to be generated (cells that provide some genes to build the machinery to allow the virus to gem out from the producing cell). These viruses are derived from HIV: the reason why we use this kind of virus is that they easily integrate into the cell genome, so what you are delivering through them is stably expressed. That's the point: you want an efficient way to allow the expression of an ectopic protein, thus generating modified cells.
In that paper, they modified T lymphocytes, through the expression of a receptor for a signature molecule of the B lymphocytes that accumulate during B-CLL, a mild chronic (but formally not-treatable) leukemia. These engineered T lymphocytes so recognize and promote the killing of the leukemic cells. Brilliant. Unfortunately most of the tumors constantly change their surface profile, so the chance to extend this approach to all neoplasms is vain...
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