Tuesday, December 20, 2011

New 'one-shot' leukemia treatment

Immunologist Dr. Carl Jun, a member of the Abramson Cancer Center's research team says that a treatment for leukemia, in the form of a single shot, “exceeded our wildest expectations.”
That’s right; there has been a complete breakthrough in cancer research. A new treatment option for those diagnosed with leukemia can be a single shot. Though this treatment has only been tested on three subjects, the results have been phenomenal. In two of the tested patients the leukemia completely disappeared and in the third it was reduced by nearly 75%.
In each of the patients as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away in a few weeks, and a year later the cancer is still gone.
Want another reason why this cure is so fantastic? Get this; leukemia strikes some 15,000 people in the United States and kills 4,300 every year. Chemotherapy and radiation can hold the cancer at bay for years, but until now the only real cure was a bone marrow transplant.
Why is that such a big deal? Simple, a bone marrow transplant is a tedious process that requires a perfect match, sometimes even the immediate family of a leukemia patient is unable to donate. BMT is only successful about half the time, and it often brings on severe, life-threatening, side effects such as incredible pain and infection.
This new ‘injection method’ has shown no harmful side effects aside from the aches and pain one normally feels when fighting off an infection.
The injection method is a simple and fast process as well. Doctors simply remove certain types of white blood cells from the patient. White blood cells are what the body produces naturally to fight off diseases. Doctors then inserted a series of genes from a modified version of HIV into the white blood cells.  This programs the cells to target and kill the cancer cells.  After growing a large batch of the genetically altered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients.
Similar experimental treatments for several types of cancer that re-injected white cells have been used in the past. These experiments were failures, however. The altered cells killed a few cancer cells and then basically died out. But the researchers at U Penn inserted a gene that made the white blood cells multiply by the thousands inside the body. The result is that the white blood cells became “serial killers” that were relentless in tracking down and killing the cancer cells in the patient’s blood, bone marrow and lymph tissue.
So why has this remarkable treatment been tried so far on only three patients? 
Both the National Cancer Institute and several pharmaceutical companies have declined to pay for the continuation of the treatment’s research. Neither the applicants nor funders have discussed the reasons the application was turned down. However, it is safe to guess that a general shortage of funds was a large part of it, second only to the concept of this experiment being much too incredible- therefore much too hard to imagine being true.  
And therefore, this research is too much of a risky gamble for funders.
Luckily a charity aimed to provide funding to this research has been created, and already money from the drug companies is pouring in, and not just for the testing on leukemia. Doctors have high hopes that a similar method of treatment will affect other cancers as well.
To read the full article, click the link below!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/ns/health-cancer/t/new-leukemia-treatment-exceeds-wildest-expectations

                
                 To watch video documentary of this treatment, click the link below!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/ns/health-cancer/t/new-leukemia-treatment-exceeds-wildest-expectations

8 comments:

  1. I actually read about this a few months ago. I have also seen a video on ted.com in which a gentleman was talking about how his research team is making major advancements for cancer treatments. If my memory serves me right, I believe they have cured it in other animals. They just need the pharmaceutical companies to make the medicine.

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  2. Its interesting how they use modified HIV. It sounds like that injecting HIV would be a bad thing but its interesting that there have been no harmful side effects so far. Do you know how the HIV was modified and how it changed the WBC's? Also how do the WBC's know which cells are cancerous? and Maybe its not being funded yet because they want to see effects of the treatment in a longer amount of time like 5-10 years?

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  3. I read this and thought about I Am Legend, this sounds exactly like what made the people into zombies lol

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  4. @verager I'm not sure about the complete science behind the WBC modification or how they can identify the cancerous cells, I wish I did though.

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  5. @smellslikesteph
    that was the first thing that came into my mind too,it kinda scared me

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  6. this is pretty amazing, do you think a similar technique would be possible to cure other kinds of cancers? like, genetically modifying the white blood cells to attack other kinds of cancer cells other than leukemia?

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  7. Raising funds for drugs is a constant problem for not just cancers, but any disease. More success is a wider test group and seeing result further down the line, may give other investors reason to give money to thier cause.

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  8. This sounds interesting. It could save alot of lives if it receives funding.

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