Modified T Cells used successfully to fight cancer

This is pretty amazing. Doctors removed T cells from a man with severe leukemia, basically re-programmed them to go after cancer, and put them back in his body.

Nothing happened for 10 days.

Then "...hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia."

CT scans, biopsies, etc.: all negative. This was a year ago. He lost two pounds after this intense reaction ended, basically it was the mass of the cancer that had been destroyed. This is an experimental treatment, but very promising: they tried it on three people, one other had a total remission like this case, the other a partial remission.

NY Times Article: An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer

Using diamonds to fight cancer

I've been meaning to publish this for a while and am just now getting around to it. The problem is that chemotherapy is not concentrated, it flushes out of your body too quickly. This is an interesting process: they use industrial diamonds, chemically treat them so that they are sticky to the chemo drug, then they're blended, making a grayish slurry. The combo is injected directly into the tumor, and the diamonds help the chemo to persist inside the tumor, so more is delivered to the tumor and the treatment becomes more effective.

NPR diamonds article

Re-engineering drugs! Refining marijuana and ecstasy for medical applications.

Some interesting stuff. They're mapping the genome of marijuana to refine the medical aspects and reduce the narcotic effects. Personally I'd prefer to see tougher restrictions on alcohol and loosen them on marijuana.

NPR marijuana article

For ecstasy, they've found that it is extremely effective against blood cancers and lymphomas. It has to be concentrated to dosages that would be lethal, so they definitely have some work ahead of them.

BBC ecstasy article

A cure for cancer and virii?

Regarding virus:

"...researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

…In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever."

Huh. It will be very interesting to see how future testing continues to play out. It could definitely be useful to those of us with borrowed immune systems.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/08/possible-progress-in-medicine.html

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/10/1917232/New-Drug-Could-Cure-Nearly-Any-Viral-Infection


Regarding cancer:

This is a fascinating study. Researchers injected three humans who have chroniclymphocytic leukemia with a new drug. One of the subjects was told that he only had weeks to live. The results? "...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."

The side effects of the treatment were fever, aches and pains: basically the same thing that people go through when fighting any infection. The drug is "a modified, harmless version of HIV ... they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients."

The researchers weren't able to get any funding from pharmacy because it was such a strange approach, but they were able to get enough funding to try it out on three people, and hopefully the results will get them more funding for more tests.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV