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One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

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Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#21

Post by hirenj »

frisco wrote: post #19
hirenj wrote: post #18

I'm not familiar enough with CD47 to know where else it is expressed, but I'm wondering what the "regular" use of CD47 is. Since it's over-expressed in cancers, I'm assuming the cancer is somehow mucking up the regulation pathway for CD47 and there are regular non-cancer related functions for CD47. The trick to making this work will be hoping that blocking CD47 on healthy cells isn't particularly lethal (in humans),…

Here you go: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein?db=protein&cmd=link&... GenBank for CD47: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/AAH37306.1 (Should be obvious, but this is woefully incomplete in terms of where CD47 probably actually appears. But can be a good first place to start.)

It turns out the first paragraph in the paper gives a good indication for me – it's pretty much all over the shop, which makes the lack of toxicity here pretty interesting.

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#22

Post by Jimmie »

bithive123 wrote: post #6
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #5

Here is my take on curing cancer from a programmers perspective. Extract a healthy strain of DNA from the patient, insert the healthy DNA into a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type, which will include the cancerous cells. The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA, while healthy cells get the DNA they already had. It's kinda like reformatting a hard drive. Has anyone…

If you make enough simplifying assumptions anything is trivial.

Kill the cancer. Leave the normal tissue alone. C'mon scientists how hard can that be.

/s

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#23

Post by [deleted] »

amitutk wrote: post #20

I attended Dr Weisssman present this work a few years back at Dana-Farber. The somewhat long tl;dr is that while immune cells kill foreign material, normal cells have "don't eat me" signal, CD47, a cell surface marker. Cancer cells also have CD47, the "don't eat me" signal, which helps them evade the immune system. So, blocking CD47 would cause the immune system to naturally target the cancer cells, with minimal side…

[deleted]

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#24

Post by siganakis »

frisco wrote: post #9

Wow. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but Irv Weissman and his lab are the real deal. Here's the original article (which is open access): http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/20/1121623109 Of course, this isn't the first time we've seen such promising initial results only to hit roadblocks in translation, but here's to hoping it's a real effect, even if it eventually turns out to be less than…

The trouble is that there are many, many different ways that a cancerous cell is able to be cancerous.

A malignant cancer cell has generally had upwards of 7 mutational events that directly enable it to replicate itself enough times to form a tumor and become damaging.

These mutations includes things like breaking programmed cell death (apoptosis) pathways (e.g. P53 mutations), increases in anaerobic glycolysis (due to lack of oxygen within the micro-environment of a tumor), increasing production of angiogenesis related proteins (to create new blood vessels to the tumor so that it can continue to grow).

Cancer cells even acquire mutations to the pathways that regulate DNA damage repair and replication so that further mutations happen more easily, providing more variation in the clonal colony of cancerous cells making the "cancer" more able to withstand changes in the tumors environment (e.g. the introduction of chemotherapy, hypoxia, etc). Essentially the cancer evolves over relatively short periods of time.

In other words, this is just one pathway that there is a chance we may be able to disrupt, but it may very well be a crucial one. If we can build up enough drugs to target the specific mutations that make some cancers so aggressive, then we stand a good chance at significantly reducing the mortality of cancer.

Excellent research, but we have a long way to go still.

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#26

Post by antihero »

suprgeek wrote: post #16

This is basically a neat hack - Cancerous cells use a certain Chemical marker to stop being attacked. This researcher blocks this marker from being used thus allowing the body's immune system to attack and destroy the Cancerous cells. This is very promising research indeed but while they have shown Human Tumor Cells in mice shrinking, they have yet to show Human cells in Humans shrinking. Should make for a very cool…

Isn't this marker also used by healthy cells? So what is to stop your system basically attacking itself massively?

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#27

Post by antihero »

Jimmie wrote: post #22
bithive123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make enough simplifying assumptions anything is trivial.

Kill the cancer. Leave the normal tissue alone. C'mon scientists how hard can that be. /s

Surely we could just eventually breed microscopic dogs, and, you know, train them to sniff out and destroy the cancers?

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#28

Post by Daniel_Newby »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #5

Here is my take on curing cancer from a programmers perspective. Extract a healthy strain of DNA from the patient, insert the healthy DNA into a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type, which will include the cancerous cells. The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA, while healthy cells get the DNA they already had. It's kinda like reformatting a hard drive. Has anyone…

> ... a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type ...

The trouble is that living things are basically made of fancy Jello. There is no programmable interface to say "go here".

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#29

Post by Gatsky »

wensing wrote: post #11

Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?

Cancer is a difficult biological problem. It is probably the most difficult biological problem I can think of, being both microscopic and inscrutable but also sharing features of population-scale problems. We use cancer as an analogy, but what is an analogy for cancer, apart from humanity itself?

It is easy to forget that most cancers develop through an evolutionary process that takes 15 - 20 years. During this time they are under constant selection pressure by the immune system.

It is not surprising therefore, that to turn up at the very end of the process when a patient has a civillization of heterogenous, optimised cancer growing in them that trying to eradicate the whole thing with a single approach, however elegant, is likely to fail. Cancer therapies in general provide an incremental benefit.

< 5% of therapies make it out of the lab into something a doctor can use on a patient who needs it.

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#30

Post by dagw »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #5

Here is my take on curing cancer from a programmers perspective. Extract a healthy strain of DNA from the patient, insert the healthy DNA into a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type, which will include the cancerous cells. The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA, while healthy cells get the DNA they already had. It's kinda like reformatting a hard drive. Has anyone…

As much as I hate to do this: http://xkcd.com/793/
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