Cell therapy shows remarkable ability to eradicate cancer in clinical study | Hacker News Reader

Cell therapy shows remarkable ability to eradicate cancer in clinical study

sciencedaily.com

104 pointssigna1112 comments

As has been said by the Carl June who did the pioneering work at UPen, this is like a targeted, safer version of a bone marrow transplant.

The problem is generalising this to every type of cancer. You need a target that is widely expressed on the cancer cell, and that isn't found on other important tissues. This is the case (sort of - it still destroys all the healthy B-cells, which as it turns out, doesn't cause TOO many problems) for CD19 which the T-cells are aimed at in this study. For solid tumours like lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer etc it will probably be much harder to find a similarly useful target. But they are trying:

http://cancerimmunolres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2013/...

After reading this, this is what came to mind: (from I am legend). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRctxZT-a1A Though, I don't think we'll be needing to worry about mutated zombies it's still an interesting comparison.

ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.

[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

Participants on Hacker News have been commenting for years that there are much better sources for stories than ScienceDaily.

Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

See also treatment with low doses of Naltrexone, opiod growth factor - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890982 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110519101242.ht... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8620464

There's a lot to be said for using the body's own immune system rather than suppressing it.

My god! Is this as good as it looks? Because it looks like my chances of living to be 100 have just gone up significantly.

Yeah, looks sensational to me, not sure why nobody comments on this. Also, I think that's the right path - improving our own immune system.

It doesn't improve your immune system per se, injected cells are programmed to target cells with specific markers and there can be collateral damage (see top comment). Also if I understand it correctly your immune system will not reproduce these programmed cells, so it's temporary.

IIRC there was a recent story abou this technique. It seems it's too effective at times, causing liver problems as too much cancerous tissue is killed at once.

This is the real deal. My friend tried to save his mother (cervical cancer) with this approach couple years ago. He found a place in Austria) and they charged a small fortune for the treatment, but it was already too late (cancer stage too advanced). I'm pretty sure this company was involved: http://www.activartis.com/en.html

I just started working on a project related to immuno-oncology and I think this field is (1) really fucking fascinating and (2) rapidly heating up. Two decades ago, the centrality of our immune systems in the prevention and/or evolution of cancers was barely appreciated. Now, immune evasion and immune editing are understood to be central aspects of 'cancerness' and cancer immune therapies are being rapidly dreamed up and evaluated. We suddenly (on the timescale of medical research) have chimeric antigen receptors (this post), immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD1, anti-CTLA4), dendritic cell vaccines, adoptive T-cell therapies, growing databases of tumor-associated antigens, and a lot of momentum around tumor sequencing (which can help make immune treatments fully personalized).

I have recently lost a good friend in her 40s to multiple myeloma. It isn't named in this article, but would this treatment work for that cancer as well? Both seem to target B cells.

CAR therapy requires identifying a broadly expressed target; it looks like there are a few candidate antigens being evaluated for MM but I don't know if any of the studies have published significant results yet.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24411699 http://www.myelomabeacon.com/resources/mtgs/ash2013/abs/14/

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