Cancer - good news of a cure at last

gctest50 wrote: »

missed this bit :

If you read it carefully, you'll see that all the patients who participated in the trials had two to five months to live.

The lead scientist, Prof Stanley Riddell from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said all other treatments had failed in these patients and they had only two-to-five months to live...

Prof Riddell told the BBC: "Essentially what this process does is, it genetically reprograms the T-cell to seek out and recognise and destroy the patient's tumour cells.
"[The patients] were really at the end of the line in terms of treatment options and yet a single dose of this therapy put more than ninety percent of these patients in complete remission where we can't detect any of these leukaemia cells."

So those that died were in a similar condition to those that the experiment helped.

gutenberg wrote: »

If you read it carefully, you'll see that all the patients who participated in the trials had two to five months to live.



So those that died were in a similar condition to those that the experiment helped.

I think what gctest was implying was that if the participants had 2-5 months to live, then a 6% chance of death from this treatment is a risk worth taking.

Anita Blow wrote: »

I think what gctest was implying was that if the participants had 2-5 months to live, then a 6% chance of death from this treatment is a risk worth taking.

If that's the case then I agree. The extreme reactions are still something to worry about & research a lot further though

Hitchens wrote: »

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35586834

This is brilliant news and hopefully it's the truth. It seems to have reached epidemic proportions here in Ireland.

We live longer than ever before and most communicable diseases are curable or treatable - of course cancer rates will rise. It's either that or cardiovascular disease.

Hitchens wrote: »

it's the rise in younger people getting it that's frightening

You hear about it more because it's better reported and more accurately diagnosed. Also the improvements in infant mortality mean more young people make it to adulthood.

We can control for behavioural and environmental risk factors (healthier living, stop smoking etc.). We can also monitor those with identified genetic risk markers (BRCA1 mutations).

However you can't control for the main risk factor, which is ageing. Better screening and a wider range of available therapies are the most effective ways to control cancer.

byhookorbycrook wrote: »

I would be wary of any "cure" interpretation. There was a Panorama programme on stem cell therapy for MS which some of the media hailed as a cure. Unfortunately it is not and can cause severe health issues but this was glossed over.

With all the research going, hopefully a cure for any of these diseases will be found sooner rather than later, but in the meantime, be media savvy.

It's not really about cure in this case. What immunotherapy does in the case of cancer, is turn a life ending disease into a manageable condition.

Hitchens wrote: »

This is brilliant news and hopefully it's the truth. It seems to have reached epidemic proportions here in Ireland.

It is great news?

cbyrd wrote: »

Billions in research and still nowhere near a cure.

You cannot cure cancer.

Cancer is an eventuality. All human beings if they live long enough will develop cancer of some form or another.

There will never be an end to it. At some point there will be some kind of treatment, nanobots or something, that are extraordinarily effective, but there will always be a small percentage of people who still die from it.

It is in effect the final disease. It develops spontaneously and unpredictably as a unintended result of the very processes that keep us alive. Even if every other pathogen, every virus, bacterium and fungus was rendered inert by medicine, cancer would continue to happen and continue to kill people.

All we can do is fight back and hope that we can shake it off long enough to live a happy life.

Raul Sour Ramrod wrote:

Could you limit this ****e to the conspiracy theory forum please.

So you're saying there's no big money in pharmaceutical companies? That's a truth not a conspiracy.
The most common 'cure' for cancer is a poison, chemotherapy. The other is a radiation which can cause cancer ...
I've lost numerous relations and my father to cancer. So having done some research, I'm not completely convinced that cancer is not a man-made complaint to generate trillions for the industry.. if by questioning something makes me bonkers then I guess I'm bonkers.. after all .
Some radical doctors think along the lines of cancer being an infection. The Gerson clinic in Germany has had success treating some cancers with massive doses of vitamin c .. along the lines of 200,000 iu's per day delivered intravenously. So much so their American clinic was outlawed by the fda and now practice our of Mexico.
Conspiracy theories abound, but there's a lot of evidence.
If you look at the fda, look at how they tried to stop aids drugs from being brought in by Ron Woodroof (dallas buyers club)
Not all cures are synthetic.
The pharmaceutical industry was started by the richest families in America. By paying and sponsoring university hospitals all over America to prescribe their drugs rather than alternative medicine/therapy they created the industry it is today.
The biggest killer in America today are drugs prescribed by gp's taken correctly but side affects kill the patient. Death from vitamin supplements is recorded at about 6 , of which had underlying conditions but yet supplements are so stringently controlled and have gotten a bad rap over the years.
I was watching the supervet yesterday, he was using active Manuka honey as an antibacterial on a dog's infected leg. No money in that though.. No prescription for antibiotics! Tea tree oil to cure fungal or viral infections.. No money spent on over the counter creams and pills.
Forgive me if I sound cynical of the medicines being peddled for ailments that have natural cures with few if no side affects.
After watching my dad rot from the cancer that was caused by type 2 diabetes, for which he was medicated for, imagine my feelings when I discovered that type 2 is reversible in 6 - 8 weeks through strict diet ... But then, that doesn't make money..

I do buy and sell biotech shares. The CAR-T immunocology companies which this article is about really exploded in value in 2014 and for a part of 2015.
I own shares in a couple of these companies, so I keep a close eye on developments.
They had a big decline in the recent sell off, but positive articles help pump the shares.
Cellectis, a French company which Pfizer bought 10% of, cured a child who received Car-T treatment after all other options had failed. The parents were told that there was no more that could be done for their child, but Cellectis got involved in the case and their treatment worked.
They had received a special dispensation to use the treatment, given it has not yet been approved for use.

There are two types of this treatment - allogeneic and autologous.
Cellectis use allogeneic cell gene therapy which is - they use an off the shelf product and not cells harvested from the patient.
The autologous companies like Juno, Bluebirdbio and Kite use the patients own cells.
It looks great for blood cancers, but it is in solid tumour cancers where they have trials that will be the most revealing.
I expect cancer to be a battle we will win in the next 20 or so, biotech have so many products on trial and the drugs are getting better and better.

The latest thing with the CAR-T therapies is to have a kill switch in the product. At least two companies have it, Cellectis and Ziop, this is where they can turn off the gene therapy and it is what will make these safer, as a few people have died in trials from a cytokine storm, which is when the body reacts to the gene therapy and you basically have a storm going on in your body...

People live longer now and the longer you're alive the more chance you'll get cancer.
A lot of illness's are treatable now so when it comes to diseases that kill people it's generally cancer, probably why people didn't think cancer was such a issue 50 years ago since the common cold could probably kill you in your 20's :pac:

KilOit wrote: »

People live longer now and the longer you're alive the more chance you'll get cancer.
A lot of illness's are treatable now so when it comes to diseases that kill people it's generally cancer, probably why people didn't think cancer was such a issue 50 years ago since the common cold could probably kill you in your 20's :pac:

It's up to about 1 out of every 2 now from ~ 1 in 3

RESULTS:

The lifetime risk of cancer increased from 38.5% for men born in 1930 to 53.5% for men born in 1960. For women it increased from 36.7 to 47.5%. Results are robust to different models for projections of cancer rates.
CONCLUSIONS:

The lifetime risk of cancer for people born since 1960 is >50%. Over half of people who are currently adults under the age of 65 years will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25647015