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There was a documentary on TV regarding utilizing the patient's T cells to kill the cancer cells. It had to do with harvesting the cells in a lab and when there were upwards of a million T cells they were reintroduced into the patient.
The success rate was amazing. The problem is the exorbitant cost that insurance won't touch so they limited the treatment to a few terminal patients who had not had any success with chemo/radiation.
There's the theory about the origin of cancer cells - the microbes in healthy cells that turn malignant and what energizes them into reproducing at a rapid rate. Apparently the normal treatments of chemo/radiation was not the answer to stopping the root cause of cancer, and why it would return years later.
^^^The above link is nonsense. There are no microbes in cancer cells (or in regular cells, either). Cancer is caused by genetic mutations (some inherited, some which occur sporadically as people age) which lead to dysregulation of growth, so the cells don't respond to normal 'stop growing' signals sent by the body.
And while immune therapy shows a lot of promise, it doesn't work for all types of cancer, and it has significant side effects (up to and including death) that can be every bit as dangerous as chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
^^^The above link is nonsense. There are no microbes in cancer cells (or in regular cells, either). Cancer is caused by genetic mutations (some inherited, some which occur sporadically as people age) which lead to dysregulation of growth, so the cells don't respond to normal 'stop growing' signals sent by the body.
And while immune therapy shows a lot of promise, it doesn't work for all types of cancer, and it has significant side effects (up to and including death) that can be every bit as dangerous as chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
I agree that it seems far fetched to imagine we could have microbes that result in cancerous cells. There's so much we don't know, so much we haven't heard/read and so much we aren't being told.
I agree that it seems far fetched to imagine we could have microbes that result in cancerous cells. There's so much we don't know, so much we haven't heard/read and so much we aren't being told.
Neither of those links support the idea of cancer cells containing microbes. Rather, they discuss how microbes that are external to the body's cells interact with the the cells which are integral to our bodies (such as the cells lining our digestive tract) and influence the activity of those cells (something we've known about for quite a while, but haven't studied deeply until quite recently).
The OP's post is discussing something quite different: using drugs that act on the immune system's regulatory pathways (particularly PD-1/PD-L1 pathway) to stimulate T-cell activity in the hopes the activated T-cells will attack and kill the cancer cells. This is proving to be a a promising therapy for quite a few cancers, but it has the unfortunate (but if you think about it, predicable) side effect of causing serious autoimmune disease in some of the patients receiving the drugs. So it's an important advance, but it's in no way the cancer-specific (and harmless to all other tissues) miracle cure we all want to see.
I remember when the pediatric oncologists at CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) started doing clinical human trials in children with certain blood cancers years ago using their modified T-cells, and even the doctors had no idea if it would work, in theory it should have, but when you're dealing with something as complex as the human body, there are no guarantees.
I think the first few patients, were literal on the edge of death multiple times, before the treatment started to work. And like others have mentioned, it ain't cheap, only works against certain types of cancers and it doesn't have a 100% success rate, but if you have the money and it's your last option, might as well try it, if you're going to be dead sooner rather than later.
I remember when the pediatric oncologists at CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) started doing clinical human trials in children with certain blood cancers years ago using their modified T-cells, and even the doctors had no idea if it would work, in theory it should have, but when you're dealing with something as complex as the human body, there are no guarantees.
I think the first few patients, were literal on the edge of death multiple times, before the treatment started to work. And like others have mentioned, it ain't cheap, only works against certain types of cancers and it doesn't have a 100% success rate, but if you have the money and it's your last option, might as well try it, if you're going to be dead sooner rather than later.
This!! Excellent posting and you're spot on! Those patients were at the point that nothing else was working.
The other big problem with immunological approaches to cancer is durability of response. While the approach has done wonders for blood cancers, remissions with solid tumors typically lasts only a few months. There are good reasons why this is so. One quite surprising result from sequencing solid tumors is how genetically unstable they are. This means they can quickly mutate to resistance to a particular drug. By the time a patient finishes a third line treament, the treatments have selected for the fastest growing, most resistant cells. That's why things can be reasonably stable for a long time before going quickly down hill.
So many things in biomedicine seem to be over-hyped these days. I envision an army of PR folks, not just at companies, but at medical schools, announcing every slight discovery, speculating about the value (as any good press release would do), and misleading the public. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but nothing else explains the " boots but no cowboy"
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