Just watched this tonight and it seems pretty incredible, especially with their staggering success rate in eliminating leukemia even at such an early stage. This is the first thing I've seen that makes me believe I might actually witness the holy grail of medicine in my lifetime
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I believe my uncle was part of that experimental treatment (at that same hospital) but it wasn't for Leukemia (different trial? it seems to be the same treatment though). I believe he was in those trials last summer, but he passed away in November.
Kind of crazy, I know people have done this kind of stuff (not necessary for cancer), use one thing to kill another thing, and we look back and say "holy fata these scientists were f'in crazy" ... makes me wonder what kind of stuff people in 50 years will look back on us and say the same thing.
Lots of things attempting on cancer, treatments at various stages. From the drug delivery to crazy stuff like this, diagnostics, early testing... a patent was filed last year to detect early stages of cancer through someones breath (similar to a dogs senses) and I guess the idea would be to put these things into cell phones, and they would monitor your health through your breath... if there are changes (I believe it was 83% accuracy, new patent topology proposes high 90%'s accuracy) in your breath, Apple's new health care kit could send you a message to go see a doctor for early testing. They got seed funding a few months ago and recently incorporated. (I'm employee #4 in this company!)
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Fantastic! I'm not much of a thoughts and prayers kind of guy, but.....man, don't even know what to say after watching that. Really looks like good news.
Haven't watched this yet, but I plan to. Didn't know they were doing a piece on oncolytic virotherapy.
There's still a lot to do. The last article I read discussed some of the current limitations and there are a few. Still, there's a lot of hope here. My worry with pieces like this is the ever constant over selling of new therapies. We've all read about "exciting new therapies" that never pan out, and it leads to further problems. That said, I haven't yet seen it so I'll say more once I have
When it comes to cancer research, detection and cures the thing the "regular" public seems to miss is that it isn't one disease with the added tag of where the cancer is located. Lung cancer is different than ovarian cancer which is different than prostate cancer etc. And it breaks down even further that you can have different prostate cancers for instance. It makes it a tricky beast to cure because in reality it is hundreds of different beasts.
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Sidebar but I follow Vice on FB and man is it ever a depressing thing to follow. Every time I open my news feed they post something new about how terrible the world is or how it's all going to crap. I'd be on suicide watch if I had to be an editor there and read all of those constantly depressing things.
Nice to see them focusing on some positives though!
Since a lot of you were interested in the concept of using viruses against cancer, I thought I'd add this link regarding a segment by 60 minutes regarding Duke's trial with polio virus vs glioblastoma:
Sidebar but I follow Vice on FB and man is it ever a depressing thing to follow. Every time I open my news feed they post something new about how terrible the world is or how it's all going to crap. I'd be on suicide watch if I had to be an editor there and read all of those constantly depressing things.
Nice to see them focusing on some positives though!
Well, thats because in reality, the world is a pretty depressing place.
I don't say this as a person who is miserable and looks on the bad side of every situation, but I, like many, have witnessed and experienced some pretty negative situations outside of the safe confines of the North America (not that there isnt horrible crap going on in our country as well, just a little more prevalent in places like the middle east and africa).
Watched this episode a few weeks ago on Showtime or whatever network broadcasts it. Fascinating stuff.
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“People get cancer and doctors don’t know why…and they don’t know how to fix it.”
We know exactly what cancer is. Cancer is a group of diseases characterized by uncontrolled cell division. Malignant cells contain mutations allowing them to multiply rapidly, form tumors and invade other organs. In the case of some cancers, we know the exact gene that is mutated. For example, we’ve learned that a translocation in the BCR gene on chromosome 22 leads to the creation of the bcr-abl fusion protein responsible for many cases of chronic myelogenous leukemia. This has led to the development of a drug called imatinib that specifically inhibits this mutated protein.
In the case of other cancers, several mutations occur in a step-wise fashion leading to malignant transformation. This was described in colorectal cancer by the ground-breaking work of Dr. Bert Vogelstein. The development of the so-called “adenoma-carcinoma sequence” has led to colorectal cancer screening programs using colonoscopy. A recent landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has shown that colonoscopy decreases colorectal cancer-related mortality.
We have a long way to go to fully understand and effectively treat the many diverse cancers that afflict our society. But your statement on the subject downplays the significant advances that have been made over the last half century and dismisses the physicians and scientists who have devoted their professional lives to treating patients afflicted with these deadly diseases.
Human beings don’t want to hear that cancer is an unfortunately unavoidable consequence of being made of cells that replicate their DNA imperfectly over the course of our entire lives. There’s an inherent hostility to any results that conclude anything other than that we can prevent most, if not all, cancers if only we understood enough about cancer and tried hard enough. Worse, in the alternative medicine world there’s a concept that we can basically prevent or cure anything through various means (particularly cancer), most recently through the manipulation of epigenetics. Unfortunately, although risk can be reduced for many cancers in which environmental influences can increase the error rate in DNA replication significantly, the risk of cancer can never be completely eliminated. Fortunately, we have actually been making progress against cancer, with cancer death rates having fallen 22% since 1991, due to combined efforts involving smoking cessation (prevention), better detection, and better treatment. Better understanding the contribution of stochastic processes and stem cell biology to carcinogenesis could potentially help us do even better.
Last edited by troutman; 04-02-2015 at 09:18 AM.
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I was delighted to learn that he had applied his exceptional skills to a topic that is very important to us on the Science-Based medicine blog, cancer. His film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. I reviewed Mukherjee’s book in 2010. He is an oncologist and cancer researcher and also a superb writer. I characterized his book as:
a unique combination of insightful history, cutting edge science reporting, and vivid stories about the individuals involved: the scientists, the activists, the doctors, and the patients. It is also the story of science itself: how the scientific method works and how it developed, how we learned to randomize, do controlled trials, get informed consent, use statistics appropriately, and how science can go wrong.
I continue to think it is the best book ever written on cancer.
The film interviews Mukherjee and many of the researchers and patients whose stories appear in the book. If you haven’t read the book, it will give you an idea what it’s about. If you have read the book, you will enjoy it even more as you meet the people you have read about. It covers the history of cancer as well as the most recent scientific developments and is very optimistic about the future.
The movie is scheduled to premiere March 30 – April 1 at 9 PM EST on PBS, in 3 parts with a total duration of 6 hours. You can watch the trailer online.
Last edited by troutman; 04-02-2015 at 09:44 AM.
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Vice Special Report: Killing Cancer
