I really hope this is not another one of those false cures. It's time we made some real big-news progress against this horrible collection of ailments we call cancer.<p>For those who don't want to read through the lengthy human interest story wrapping the news here, from a quick read I gathered they're basically modifying T-Cells:<p>> <i>In their natural state, T cells usually aren’t able to kill tumor cells, partly because they can’t latch on strongly enough. But June was fascinated by scientific papers showing it was possible to change this. A few researchers—first an Israeli named Zelig Eshhar in the ’80s, then other investigators around the world—had discovered that you could force a T cell to stick to a tumor cell and kill it. To pull this off, you built an “engineered T cell”—a T cell never before seen in nature. You altered the T cell’s genetic blueprint by injecting a new gene into the cell. The new gene would tell it to build a new molecular limb. The limb, called a “chimeric antigen receptor,” would sit partly inside the cell and partly outside, and it could send signals either in or out. One signal it could send was: kill. Another was: replicate.</i><p>> <i>June loved this approach. So elegant. Put the immune system on steroids. What if you could train the body to fight cancer on its own? What if, instead of replacing a patient’s immune system (as in a bone-marrow transplant) or pumping him full of poison (chemo), you could just borrow some cells, tweak them, and infuse them back into the patient? In theory, the engineered cells would stay alive in the blood, replenishing themselves, killing any tumors that recurred. It occurred to June that one infusion could last a lifetime.</i><p>It seems this research has been going on for 10+ years. How many people have died because of the glacial regulatory pace of cancer research?
I'm baffled by the HN title of this article. There is no place in the article that claims a 100% success rate for curing leukemia.<p>The title is: "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?"<p>Fighting cancer and curing it are hugely different. Yes, this is a human interest story that outlines the success of a particular patient using a particular method, it's great, but it seems disingenuous to use the title that is here.
This certainly seems like a very interesting and double-edged sword of a treatment. The engineered T-cells nuke the tumors, which is a good thing. But if I'm reading this right, the large amount of cytokine that gets released from such a rapid destruction also wreaks havoc on your kidneys and could itself be fatal. It sounds like an all-or-nothing treatment that you either sweat out or succumb to. Apparently there's a drug (tocilizumab) that essentially acts as an undo button by taming the engineered T-cells and avoiding such fatalities, but then you're back to square one. It looks like the Penn team has partnered with Novartis to study the engineered T-cells and (I'm guessing) develop a method to tailor the engineered T-cell growth rate to a magnitude the kidneys can manage.
> Human trials having 75% success rating for curing leukemia<p>Please do not use the word "cure" when talking about cancer. The article's submitter invented this headline -- the article doesn't support it in any way. In fact, it says this: "Scientists don’t talk about “curing” cancer. A cure is the hope so great, so seemingly out of reach, that it must never be invoked. They’ve built a wall around the word."<p>And well they might.
I would highly recommend "The Emperor of All Maladies" for anyone seeking a more solid understanding of cancer. I really didn't <i>know</i> much about cancer and treatments until reading this book, and now I feel like I at least have a general understanding. I read it after a family friend succumbed to cancer and I realized that I knew very little about the entire disease.<p>My take away at the end of the book was that for all of the "war on cancer" hyperbole going back to the 50s, up until the mid-90s, we just didn't know enough about cancer to really be fighting it. I feel a lot more optimistic about the next 50 years of cancer research than the previous 50.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/dp/1439170916/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/...</a> (non-affliate link)
So, somewhat darkly, when I saw this article a moment ago, it had a claimed 100% success rate. Now it's a 75% success rate.<p>Did a quarter of the patients just die?
The real headline here: "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" If a headline asks a question, the answer is virtually always "no" or "not yet," but the paper wanted to run a story anyway.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines</a>
The article's more about the patients than the science.<p>I got bored with it so I went and found this, from Carl June himself:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1sA_oz_1P5E&t=444" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1sA...</a>
Micromet was developing a set of bi-functional antibodies that pretty much accomplished this same thing. That is directing the immune system to tumors. One side of the antibody would bind the tumor, while the other bound the T-cells. They were bought out by Merck a year or two ago and I believe the therapies are in clinical trials. You can read about the antibodies here: <a href="http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/69/12/4941.full.pdf+html" rel="nofollow">http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/69/12/4941.full.pd...</a><p>The added benefit here is that the antibodies can be produced en masse and delivered as a drug rather than reprogramming the person's T-cells.
This is an interesting precursor to curing cancer. What will happen to the leukaemia industrial complex? The charities? the specialists? the drugs? Will they all just close shop and go home?
Stories like these not only show that cancer research edges us ever so slightly towards solving one of the world's biggest problems, but also shows to us the ever upward curve of human innovation. The path to an engineered humanity may seem unspiritual and mechanized to some, but to me it expositions one of the true beauties of our existence - that is, we are our own antibodies. Stories like these inspire and nurture the best in us. Keep at it Carl June - you are a true hacker.
I wonder what happened to those 3 unlucky guys for who it didn't work. Were they just too physically weakened+had too much tumors to survive the resulting cytokine storm, leaving the doctors with a grim choice between letting patient die of cancer by suppressing T-cells too much, or from cytokine storm by not suppressing them enough? Or there was simply no result from these T-cells, like they failed to multiply to work, or failed to work after multiplying?
Would a reduction of 70%, like it cites for one of the failures of the treatment, cause the patient's condition to improve a bit, or would it be effectively the same?