Cure for Cancer?

madanthonywayne

madanthonywayne

Morning in America
Registered Senior Member
This is pretty cool. A man with malignant, metastatic cancer was cured by extracting some of his immune cells, cloning them, then injecting them back into his body.

This interests me because I remember suggesting a similiar treatment for HIV to my prof back in immunology. She said my HIV cure would work, but like the cure for this guy, it would be too expensive.
A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as "immunotherapy".

Experts said that the case could mark a landmark in the treatment of cancer.

It raises hopes of a possible new way of fighting the disease, which claims 150,000 lives in Britain every year.

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it's always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used."

However, the treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness.

Genetically altered white blood cells have been used before to treat cancer patients but this is the first study to show that simply growing vast numbers of the few immune cells in the body to attack a cancer can be safe and effective.

Normally there are too few of the cells in a patient's body to effectively fight cancer.

Dr Cassian Yee, who led the team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said: "For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/18/scicanc118.xml
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Yes I know of that HIV cure hypothesis, extract immune stem cells from the bone marrow, engineered them HIV proof, reinsert, the process would be long and expensive but in theory it would prove a person with T Cell (an other immune cells) immunity to HIV infection and thus the person would never get AIDS.

As for this threatment for cancer people have been proposing it for years, and animals studies were done, now we are seeing the first human trials, My bet is that it will not work on all types of cancers but hopefully it will work for most.
 
So how exactly does this work?
Anyone got specifics of the process? Were do the cells get extracted? What tools are used? How are immune cells isolated? How do we ingineer them HIV proof exactly? And then what process is used to mass clone cells? And then were do all these cells are injected?
 
How are the cells to be extracted are found in the body and what methods are used to extract those immunity cells?
 
kmguru said:
I think nano gold particles and RF ablation, may be a cheaper solution...
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I think that has very limited applications. Their version requires that a laser beam be able to reach the malignant cells. Not very useful for an internal organ cancer or even metastased skin cancer. (If caught early melanoma is easily cured by surgical removal.)

You RF energy heating will reach deeper, but not be significantly absorbed by gold particle with diameter much smaller that the wavelength. Thermal destruction of internal cancers with focused micowaves is an old idea (more than 50 years). Very similar to using X-ray to destroy but both have been replaced with more selective methods (“magic bullets” targeting the cancer cells).

There are dozens of unique structures preferentially expressed on cancer cells in addition to the 6 different variants of VEGF. Genentech’s Avastin, is a monoclonal antibody, a first generation cancer cell targeting drug, already with more than billion dollars in sales. As cancers are rapidly growing and dividing, they need many more of the VEGF sites than healthy cells as these sites are need to cause capillaries to come and supply oxygen and sugars etc. But Avastin only stops the cancer’s growth (very useful as then the body has time to kill it)

Peregrine’s drug, still in development, bavituximab, also a monoclonal antibody, targets phosphatidylserine molecules [PS] presented on the outer side of cancer blood vessel cells. In normal, healthy vascular cells, PS is tightly segregated to the internal side of the cell. This “flipping to the outside” has been observed in lung, breast, prostate and pancreatic cancer, among others. Monoclonal antibodies that are injected into the blood stream can recognize only targets that are presented on the external side of cells. Thus healthy cells that have PS exclusively on their inner side will be unaffected, while cancer blood vessels would be targeted by the antibody exclusively. It has the potential to kill the already well vascularized cancer. I own PPHM stock and several others also working on what could be called “second generation Magic Bullets.” It is a whole new field for me to learn about and possible make some money by doing so. I love to learn (all the better if I also profit, but I do not need more money so the learning is the main motive.)

Those gold nanoparticles are if anything the 0th generation (a 50+ year old thermal killing approach with new twist and rarely applicable.) If you want to look at some exciting nanoparticle technology see: www.starpharma.com (I also own a lot of them.) It is US traded Australian ADR with symbol SPHRY (with great future, MHO, and also protection against the collapse of the dollar.)
 
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i was listening to an article this morning on this. The oncologist they were talking to said that not only did this need further testing but that it is quite possible it would only work for certain types of cancers.

For instance melanoma (the cancer this was used to treat) has a history of going into sudden remission, suggesting that its more susceptible to the natural immune system than other types of cancers
 
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Transfered from another thread....

Melanoma Treated In One Patient With Experimental Immunotherapy

A man who had advanced deadly skin cancer was completely cured with an experimental treatment. However, the case was the small study's only definite success. The treatment involved immunotherapy, which consists of exciting the immune system to kill the cancer on its own.
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I wonder we can devise an automated machine that can take ones blood and 3 days later produce a dozen vials of his T-Cells for solving many issues. Is that doable? Would there be a market for it?
 
kmguru said:
I wonder we can devise an automated machine that can take ones blood and 3 days later produce a dozen vials of his T-Cells for solving many issues. Is that doable? Would there be a market for it?
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It is doable...but who would fund so many millions of dollars into it?
 
immunotherapy_fig1.jpg
 
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