That’s right, two terminal cancer patients out of seventeen end-stage melanoma (pretty much the worst kind of cancer that spreads) cases are cured. This is after all other treatments have failed, and it was time to say goodbye – two guys decided they weren’t ready to leave quite yet.
This procedure basically entails harvesting some white blood cells from a cancer patient, customizing them to attack tumor cells (that’s the gene therapy part), culturing these custom-fitted cells to make millions of copies, and then re-introducing them into the patient, where hopefully, the cells will go to town kicking the cancer’s sorry ass back to last year.
The fact that this worked at all, and on a cancer that was all over the body and not confined to just a single tumor, is proof of concept and then some. The article says not to get ahead of ourselves here, because there is still a lot more research to do to iron out stuff, but I know what a monumental first success this is.
It is actually very impressive and the second poster is right, it could smack the drug companies in many ways … it will be interesting to see where these developments lead over the next 20 years.
So if we eventually have an available cure for cancer, the conspiracy nuts will stop bothering us with “the government wants us to be sick” and “the drug companies will never allow a cure, treating cancer is too profitable?”
Where can I send my check to fund that research? Curing an horrible disease and shutting up loonies at the same time?!?! What an occasion!
[quote]hockechamp14 wrote:
SWR-1240 wrote:
I just hope the drug companies don’t get wind of this. There’s not a lot of money in the cure.
What do you mean? The cure to cancer besides gene therapy? Or what was discussed through the link?
This is a huge step and hopefully more funding will go into gene therapy now.[/quote]
I meant that drug companies could lose a lot of “business” if there was a cure through gene therapy, or any other method.
I think it’s a great leap forward. I see many pharmaceutical research facilities in my line of work, and they seem to be spinning their wheels a lot (not all of them, and not all the time of course).
I think about what they do day in and day out that it takes decades to advance only slightly, save for the occasional big leap.
By the article it looks like the few T-lymphocytes that they find fighting the cancer has to be made by the patient’s body, then grow more from them, as opposed to finding them in any one person’s body and reproducing them for other people.
I guess our bodies would see them as foreign and attack and kill them.
[quote]Magarhe wrote:
It is actually very impressive and the second poster is right, it could smack the drug companies in many ways … it will be interesting to see where these developments lead over the next 20 years.
[/quote]
It wouldn’t hurt drug companies at all. The longer people live the more drugs they take.