A cure for cancer? (news)
 

http://www.latimes.com/features/heal...la-home-health

"In the new study, the team took white blood cells from the immune mice ? a combination of natural killer cells, macrophages and neutrophils ? and injected them into mice already carrying a variety of tumors, some of which were extremely aggressive. In every case, the cancers were destroyed, even if the cells were injected at a point distant from the tumor. Healthy tissues were not affected.

The mice that received the cells, furthermore, were protected from new tumors for the rest of their lives. The researchers have no idea how the immunity continues."

My thoughts: It's still too early to tell if this will work on humans but ... as a person who's lost several loved ones to cancer, this is very exciting news.

exciting and educating and hopefull...

i see the light

well thats fascinating news... but where are they going to find humans that are immune to cancer to get the cells from?

very interesting read

i hope they do get one... alot of my family was lost to cancer :(

The next step is probably finding genetic patterns and running tests on wide populations of humans that naturally don't develop cancer. Once the genes are isolated, inject cells carrying these genes on to people that have cancer.

I've read about antigen-based systems that carry chemotherapy agents to cancer cells. Those don't work too well. Hopefully, this new approach will work better.

This is very exciting news! I hope it really leads to a cure. I didn't believe there could ever be a single cure for all cancers. This makes it seem possible.

very cool hopefully it works out.

Hope it does work, somebody is gonna get rich selling that.

That is phenominal story!!! I just hope that it leads to medical break-throughs in human cures for cancer.

Cancer is a form of population control so when and if they ever discover a cure for cancer it will probably cost so much that 80% of the general population wouldn't be able to afford it.

I don't think this is a totally new idea but it's amzing that they are making it work.

There are some people that are immune to cancer.

There's even some cases of people totally imune to HIV, no matter how much contamineted blood they received they never became HIV positive.

Wow, very exciting news... I hope this will work on humans as well. It would be revolutionary discovery!

Wow, that would be awesome. Lost 3 people in my family to cancer, and I know many here have as well. It would be great if we could find a way to combat it!

unfortunately they still make way more money treating diseases than they do for curing them:( i wonder if we'll ever find a real permanent cure

hopefully this has potential but in the last 30 years there have been so many 'breakthroughs' that didn't pan out - the one i remember best is monoclonal antibodies - Time magazine cover story as the magic bullet for cancer.

if and when they cure cancer i will shed tears of joy and grief - sad that those who lost the battle missed out. i know the average age on GFY is quite young but once you get into your thirties you will inevitably begin to lose important people in your life to the beast that is cancer - no family these days remains untouched. i'm sure lots of people here under 30 have lost a parent, sibling or friend to cancer.

Good point and brings up questions. Has any industry previously, that makes so much money, ever been changed by a cure?

And what started out as a drug company attitude seems to have spread to doctors themselves. More and more seem to pay minimal attention to accurate diagnosis, but rather identify the problem area and then start prescribing drugs. If the symptoms respond, they assume correct diagnosis, otherwise they try other treatments.

One serious flaw with this approach is that sometimes their drugs do impact on the symptoms, so they assume correct diagnosis. If the effect is minor, they try other drugs in the same family or change the dose, rather than continue to investigate. That has led to one member of my family being treated for "growing pains" and a brain tumor was eventually found to be the culprit. Another had neck and back pains diagnosed as stress, when she actually had a spinal problem. In both cases it was years before the real problems were discovered, by which time of course they were much worse.

And perhaps I am looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but it seems to me that when I was younger, doctors were much more able to make diagnoses without batteries of expensive tests. Then we entered the age of test, test, test, the insurance company will pay, so perhaps diagnostic skills became less important. Now doctors are under pressure to limit the tests they do, but lack the ability of their predecessors to diagnose without them. Maybe that is another reason that drugs have become diagnostic tools.

That is right but you are not considering all the money spent in R&D. Could be even billion of dollars and usually takes thousands of falied projects to get one good dicover.

Definate a positive..hopefully one day they will find a cure

There have been cures for cancer in existence for a number of years...

Don't even believe that life is more important than money with the drug companies...

Cancer is a multi-billion dollar a year business and will not go away anytime soon...

Largely an urban myth happily promoted by the drug and medical research companies themselves.

According to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, untargeted bio-medical research (ie play around and see what you find), returns $10-$16 for ever dollar spent. Of course, those aren't nearly sexy enough figures for the big pharmaceutical companies, so up to a point, they do take bigger risks in return for the promise of bigger rewards.

About 20% of prescription costs goes on R&D, but that isn't quite the whole story. A large part of that money is spent, not on research to combat problems which do not already have a solution, but on finding ways to create drugs sufficiently different from successful drugs to be marketable alongside them. To put matters further into perspective, while the US government spent about $10 billion during the first decade it seriously tried to combat AIDS, the entire drug industry spent less than $3 billion on research. The market for AIDS drugs, despite their limited value, is now worth $17 billion a year.

Shhh some of the supporters are also against animal testing.

interesting article. thank you for sharing this good news!

You are right, I am not saying that they don't get a nice profit, but it takes time and a lot of capital.

in my opinion I say they will only bring out a cure for something once just treating the disease is no longer profitable. In this case that will be a very, very long time. Honestly, how many actual cures for deadly diseases are there out there? Slim to none. It's all about selling people a medicine that allows them to live with the disease so they can keep making money off them. Once they are cured they lose their "return customer" and lose major $.

Where did you get that information? This looks like the most nonsensical piece of text I've seen in a while, and I know what I'm talking about.

interesting :thumbsup

finding a way to kill the cancer would save so many lifes...

cancer is the worst

If this research doesn't lead to a dead end and actually makes it through phase III trials, the company that commercializes this technology would be ONE HELL OF A STOCK PICK. Anyone remember Genentech back in the 80s?

NEVER going to happen. there's WAY too much $ in it for pharms/hospitals to release an actual cure. the bling bling mentality of the planet would have to change before that ever happens

Intresting read none the less.

I don't have much trust in them.. lost everyone to cancer in my family and now have it myself :(

So you're saying that if this actually leads close to a cure, the researchers will suddenly get VERY VERY SLOW or "divert their attention" to other research areas?

I hope they find a cure

Going to print it out and read it later in the day :)

cancer is such a creepy and cunning thing that you can never say for sure - the cure is ready. You have to wait.
May be some people for the test are needed.
But still hope is what people need.

Low post count, you are not promoting anyone, so I guess your response was serious. But what "information"? Two people close to me were handled badly by a series of doctors: that was the only information in my post. The rest was conjecture stemming from an unwillingness to assume they were simply unlucky in their choice of doctors.

Here is some information (from the AARP website). "Thirty percent of Americans talk to their doctors about a specific drug they've seen advertised, and of these, 44 percent receive it". They continue: "Sales increases of the 50 most advertised drugs made up almost half of the growth in retail spending on prescription drugs... The 9,850 other drugs on the market accounted for the rest of the 12-month rise."

How likely it is that almost half the people responding to a TV advert actually needed the drug they were subsequently prescribed? How likely is it that sales pattern is a accurate reflection of patients' illnesses? So do we have doctors prescribing (often powerful) drugs they know patients do not need or is only limited care being taken with (initial) diagnoses?

cancer affected my family also

very interesting and informative article...thanks!

Hence, the advertising dollars spent on drugs like 'the little purple pill' for something that is a syndrome, not a disease and can easily be taken care of by changing the diet....same goes for other syndromes.....cut out sugar in a kid's diet and voila! - no more need for Ritalin....although I'm speaking very generally here, so no attacks, folks..:)

Drug companies will always have drugs to sell and people to buy them, as we are a nation who desires the 'magic bullet'...

But, think about this: There WAS a cure found for polio...well, not a cure, but a prevention..and small pox.....There are prevention vaccines for all kinds of diseases that plagued us..

So, the shift turns from treatment to prevention and billions will be made from that. How many people get chicken pox now? Or measles? Or diptheria? Or pertussis?

There's money to be made from both sides of the fence and believe it....drug companies and the medicos will find a way.

Someone said that years ago, doctors diagnosed without all that fancy equipment...well, yeah, they did, until America became so litigious, combined with the raping of Medicare..those WERE the golden days of medicine...when Medicare was an open artery of flowing money...when gerentology was a for-profit industry....and, let's not forget the indigent....

So, there will be cancers that are no longer worth treating...and cures or remissions will be possible...there's no money to be made in oat cell cancer of the lungs....or certain brain tumours....cystic fibrosis doesn't earn profits...look at the progress for diabetes...it's possible, in our lifetimes, there will be a transplant..the delivery systems are getting more and more sophisticated....diabetes is no longer profitable because the treatment costs are staggering, as diabetes is one of those diseases that affects every system and humans are not real compliant.

On a lighter note, there is a huge serge in genetic research, locating certain markers...I foresee vaccines...there's a lot of money to be made in vaccinations.

ok... one time for all the fucking idiots who love the conspiracies, think the government is behind it, drug companies dont want a cure... or just don't have a clue.

there are many types of cancer. many ARE already curable.

BUmp for Cure

funny - i was just reading a blog about a guy who was immune and they were studying him at some clinic. as someone also who lost many loved ones to cancer i hope this works.

That's interesting, if they could actually find a cure that will be wonderfull.

It's a business, nothing more...nothing less...it's not about conspiracies or the government keeping things from the people..

It's more about what is cost effective and profitable. These folks are not angels of mercy, ya know.

its always about business. the business is in finding a cure and effective treatments... just as they have with many cancers already.

I once bought stock in a biotech that attached chemo agents to antibodies to target cancers. IMMU -- Immunomedics This form of therapy works well in a petri dish but not so hot in reality. Hopefully, this new gene-based innovation works out differently.