Scientists make cancer cells vanish

[keep_it_real]

Scottish scientists have made cancer tumours vanish within 10 days by sending DNA to seek and destroy the cells.

The system, developed at Strathclyde and Glasgow universities, is being hailed as a breakthrough because it appears to eradicate tumours without causing harmful side-effects. A leading medical journal has described the results so far as remarkable, while Cancer Research UK said they were encouraging.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/health/scientists-make-cancer-cells-vanish-1.1022114

[harry_pothead]

1. K&R!

While politicians posture and religious leaders pontificate, scientists quietly work to make our lives better.

[tanyev]

11. +1

To scientists! :toast:

[Holy Moly]

38. Facts are like Farts?

Let no scientist uncreate
that which God Almighty hath created.
For on the Seventh Day,
His holy day of rest,
God created Cancer Cells
to roam the earth and plague them whom He
capriciously chooses to afflict.

And let no man deny that
Faith is the greatest virtue,
to be boastfully praised unto high heaven
and publically exposed in the politest company
for all to observe
and admire
and emulate.

But Facts?
Scientific Facts?
Let no man dare speak openly of Facts!
For Facts are like Farts,
best kept to thyself,
best kept silenced and bottled up within thyself,
never to be unleashed in polite company
lest knowledge offend even the strongest Faith.

And so I say unto y'all,
DOWN WITH SCIENTISTS
UP WITH THE INTELLIGENT DESIGNER!!
Salvation belongs only to Almighty God,
Not to false theories of faithless scientists
doing the work of the devil.
Amen

[Name removed]

43. Deleted message

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[Name removed]

46. Deleted message

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[Blue-Jay]

50. Good satire!

:D

[pundaint]

68. A poem is like a loose stool, kinda wobbly, and safer when short

[sui generis]

70. oh I thought you meant the other kind of loose stool

:think:

:blush:

Nothing a little regular fiber wouldn't help.

[Amonester]

74. ooops, you forgot to a$k for donation$

and provide a mail delivery $pot

:sarcasm: :rofl: :hi:

[and-justice-for-all]

2. K&R

[goclark]

3. This is wonderful news.....

Is it my imagination or has Medical Science taken a big leap forward since Bush left the WH?

It just feels that way to me ~ please let it be.

[laughingliberal]

34. I'm really glad Bush left the White House, too but I'm trying to figure out how that led to a

a breakthrough by Scottish scientists.

[Techn0Girl]

54. Simple....

They're drinking a lot less now after they look at the American news and thus can be more productive.

[madokie]

79. Bestest one yet

Talk to me

[goclark]

95. I just feel that the way that Bush approached Stem Cell Research

and Medical Research in general, did not encourage the Medical field to explore more.

Just my feeling.

[madokie]

77. This is wonderful news to me

and no it is not just your imagination, everything has taken a big leap forward since the dick and w left town

[lunatica]

4. The medical breakthroughs are huge right now

And a whole bunch of them will put Big Pharma out of business!

[tridim]

14. It does seem like we're just about to move into a new era of medicine

Stem cells and nano-drugs show so much promise. Thankfully stem cell research is now federally funded.

[notadmblnd]

5. I don't think the pharmacutical companies are going to like this

I mean, who would they sell all the cancer drugs to if it can be cured in 10 days? No, chemo, no radiation, no steroids.

[SPedigrees]

21. Nor will the American Cancer Society. I'd love to see both put out of business.

They've managed to quelch every other break through, from lodamin to naltrexone, from the public vision.

[KittyWampus]

26. What happened to Lodamin? It was reported in 2008 and since then nothing. They tweaked it

to escape side effects.

[SPedigrees]

30. Your guess is as good as mine, Kitty. But

I bet big pharma and Amer Cancer Society played a role in its disappearance.

[NorthCarolina]

73. The big money is in treating symptoms of disease rather than curing the disease.

AIDS is a perfect example of this.

[KittyWampus]

27. I had to look up naltrexone. Never heard of it. Sounds like a very useful drug

[greiner3]

49. Being prejudice will not score you points here;

A quick look, even at Google, brings up scholarly articles that say Lodamin is toxic to humans during trials. But sure, give it to cancer patients, they will die anyway; right?

[trotsky]

83. Drano will kill cancer cells.

I can't believe BIG PHARMA and the AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY are conspiring to keep this cure from us!!!

[laughingliberal]

35. Oh, they'll be along to start debunking in no time

Then they'll run some half assed studies and say the results couldn't be duplicated.

[rfranklin]

40. The richest doctor I know is a cancer doctor....

I found out cancer doctors make a pile of money because they are allowed to sell the drugs.

[SocialistLez]

63. Some do....some don't but most make a lot.

At the same time, they can get burned if patients don't or can't buy the drugs

[WheelWalker]

66. Expenses of the last illness is way up there as a priority expense in settling an estate...

at least in my state. When cancer isn't a death sentence, maybe we'll see a reapportionment?

[salguine]

44. Which is why it will be buried and killed. Only in this country of course.

[slutticus]

67. Yeah right

Who do you think is going to modify the transferrin and DNA so that it works in vivo? Who do you think is going to scale up the manufacture of transferrin? Who's going to manufacture the DNA? Who's going to develop the formulation for the drug product?


Fools.

[saltpoint]

6. Very encouraging. Glenn Beck will likely denounce it as witchraft.

But it seems to hold the potential to address widespread suffering. I'll hope for the best and add, "Go, scientists."

[Parker CA]

7. K&R!!

[kma3346]

8. And why isn't this on the front page of the news?

You'd think it would be a very important news story

[goclark]

10. Because Pharma $$'s own the News

[The Doctor.]

13. And the more quiet they can keep it, the less likely 'the people' are to demand it.

[tuvor]

9. Yet another breakthrough.

I'm tired of breakthroughs.

[goclark]

12. My cousin called me in Tears last night

You may be tired but I'm not.

She is 70 years old and must have her Breast removed next week.

Another relative told me that they had just found a tumor and she needed to have it removed.

The least you can do if you can't say something encouraging is give others the change to hope that this "breakthrough" will work for even one somebody.

[SPedigrees]

31. I'm sorry about your relatives, goclark. I hope they come through ok. nt

[goclark]

36. Thank you for your thoughtfulness nt

[Guilded Lilly]

15. K&R with a sad postscript

if there could be more money made from curing people than keeping them sick and on expensive medications and dangerous treatments, this country would have been able to cure many hideous diseases long ago.

Heathy citizens just aren't profitable.

[qazplm]

16. call me crazy but if we ever find a way to get rid of cancer

I think the next step will be finding ways to extend human lifespan.

Because the number one problem with living longer is cancer IMO, but if you can stop cancer, you could see people in our lifetime, even me, living to healthily be 130, 140, 150...Someone like me who is 40 could live to be say 120, and only really have health issues at say 90 or 100 (being the new 70).

Maybe not that soon, but maybe someone who is right now 30. I think in our lifetimes we are going to see old age pushed back by 20-30%.

[Xithras]

19. Curing cancer is one of the 7 steps.

A number of years ago a group identified the seven breakthroughs required to completely halt human aging and create biologically immortal humans. Curing cancer was one of the seven breakthroughs needed.

If this pans out, we'll be down to six.

[qazplm]

22. well sure but I'm not even talking immortality

just adding another 20-30 percent to life.

Once you can turn off the threat of cancer, you can start playing with things like teleromes and doing genetic tinkering and using stem cells to replace failing cells.

That probably won't give you immortality (as you said there are 6 other areas) but it will extend your quality years by decades.
I'm hopeful. Quite frankly, if told I could live forever, unlike many, I'd say yes. I realize you'd get very bored after awhile, but even so, I suspect in an infinite universe, you could come up with enough to keep you from killing yourself from boredom. :D

[Xithras]

90. Well, it wouldn't be true immortality.

Just a halt to aging and aging related disease. You could still trip and break your neck, catch a virus, or starve to death in an overpopulation induced famine. In fact, given an infinite lifespan, dying from disease or accident becomes an eventuality. A 1 in 1000 chance becomes a 100% chance if you live long enough.

Personally, I'd want to go into space. Spending an eternity flitting between the stars (ok...so it would be a slow "flit", but I've got forever), watching nebulae up close, or visiting far off worlds. Not a bad way to spend eternity.

[Jackpine Radical]

94. You raise some very interesting thoughts.

http://www.albionmonitor.com/5-27-96/agingmax.html

Could People Live to 120?

by Eric Mankin

(AR) LOS ANGELES -- Can we cross out the biblical three score and ten as the span of a human life and write in a round six score?
A life span of about 120 years is the maximum that humans can attain under current medical and environmental conditions. But 120 might become the average life expectancy if medical advances could duplicate the mechanisms at work in the only life-extension technique now known to be effective in lab rodents -- extremely low-calorie diets -- say two University of Southern California scientists.

Environment and "alpha factor" determines how long we live

In a new analysis published in the May issue of the Journal of Gerontology, USC scientists Caleb E. Finch, Ph.D., and Malcolm C. Pike, Ph.D., use updated comparative data from animals and a well-known mathematical relation to recalculate the potential human life span. Their analysis also suggests an explanation for certain discrepancies that scientists have previously found in mortality data.
The Finch-Pike study uses the Gompertz model -- named after Benjamin Gompertz, the British actuary who first described it in 1825 -- to predict maximum life expectancies for various species.

The Gompertz rule predicts that the risk of dying accelerates at a constant rate over time for all organisms, be they fruit flies or humans. After human beings reach puberty, for example, their chances of dying increase by approximately 9 percent each year -- thus doubling approximately every eight years. This steady acceleration of death risk, called the alpha factor, is particularly striking in that it seems to hold for humans (and certain other animals) living under all kinds of environmental conditions, whether harsh or benign.

A 1990 Science paper by Drs. Finch and Pike and Matthew Witten (of the University of Texas at Austin) cited the example of Australian soldiers in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II. All age groups suffered higher death rates than their counterparts back home in Australia. Indeed, both 24-year-old and 48-year-old prisoners were approximately 30 times more likely to die in a given year than their same-age counterparts in Australia. But the acceleration of death rates between the two age groups remained constant. In other words, the 24-year-olds died in the same ratio to 48-year-olds in jungle death camps as in Australian cities and towns.

"The Gompertz model," Finch explains, "allows scientists to express life expectancy as a product of two distinct factors. "One is environment, either stressful (as in the prison camps) or benign. "The other, designated by the alpha factor, is a measure of a built-in species clock, something that seems to be part of our design as animals, a burden of aging that keeps accumulating, like interest compounding on a debt. It includes spontaneous diseases of all kinds, which are largely responsible for the alpha factor."

[defendandprotect]

75. We're down to one planet -- and likely we've destroyed this one . ...

The longer humans live the more destruction of nature they bring --

we are incompatible with nature given our present thinking --

patriarchy/organized patriarchal religion/capitalism --

All based on exploitation . . . of nature, natural resources, animal-life and

even of other human beings according to various myths of inferiority.

"Manifest Destiny" and "Man's Dominion Over Nature" are suicidal concepts.


Global Warming and Ozone damage attest to that -- increasing investment in weapons/wars!

300 years of physics and men came up with the atomic bomb!

[Hassin Bin Sober]

91. Be the change you want to see in the world.

[defendandprotect]

93. Yep . . . for one, watch "Food, Inc." --

STOP aiding capitalistic exploitation of the planet -- of humans -- of animal-life!

:)

[tblue37]

23. Dementia--something like 1 in 4 people get dementia past

age 80. So just living longer isn't enough.

[qazplm]

25. well that means 75% dont get it

that's pretty good numbers.

I think many folks would prefer those odds to dying.

[defendandprotect]

76. And that's key because what we don't do is look for answers to health

among the healthy --

one of the cancer cures from way back was based on that -- just examining

the urine of healthy people and taking from that to shrink tumors.

A doctor who began doing this had to finally move to Mexico in order to

practice alternative medicine as an aid/cure for cancer.

Can't remember the name of the book on it at the moment but I'll look for it.

[bridgit]

17. I'll tell you something weird, Limbaugh was talking about this couple days ago

Of course he positioned as a clarion call for innovative capitalism that sounded to the ear like the shit he talks about Zicam and posture-pedic beds - apparently, the compound awaits its matrix of controls & clinical trial involving numbers able to send it into the hands of people. Listening, we thought this will be the $1,000,000 pill that goes to people with millions of dollars. Researchers have been looking at the 'clocks' inside cancerous cells for years now. If they finally found the switch then I say flip it

"The tumours were completely gone within 10 days. It is fantastic. When you talk about 10 days that is the time frame for curing a cold. Imagine if within 10 days you could completely make a tumour disappear." does read a bit like a market based pitch for venture/investment capital, but some things are a good investment

[tridim]

20. This sounds like something that may become a preventative measure

If it is safe and cheap, why not?

[Uncle Joe]

18. Kicked and recommended,.

Thanks for the thread, keep_it_real.:thumbsup:

[supernova]

24. All in that horrible Socialist Medicine(TM) Environment!

:sarcasm:

Congrats to the researchers!

:applause:

[Cetacea]

28. This treatment too will disappear.

[DailyGrind51]

29. I wish they had this when I was being treated for cancer in the '80s!

[indimuse]

32. knr!

this is great news! thanks for the post. :)

[glinda]

33. yup. another breakthrough we seem to never see.

[Speck Tater]

37. They cure cancer as often as they kill the leader of Al Qaida, and with as much long term effect. nt

[FourScore]

39. K&R out of hope that it will be real this time. n/t

[Duer 157099]

41. I really hope there's something to this

I'd love to read the original paper, but... my initial problem is that it's published in The Journal of Controlled Release.

When something is published in Nature, I sit up and take real notice, and I'd expect a huge breakthrough to be published there. That's just how it is in science.

That's not to say this isn't real, but it's the first red flag that many will see.

[midnight]

42. I'm glad that other countries are making progress. Madison Wisconsin

scientists, as was posted this past week here on D.U., are still having trouble with red tape ham stringing their research.

[Old Troop]

45. This is great news

I went through chemo for stage 4 lymphoma and some of the side effects were nasty and some of them appear to be permanent. As an adult I could deal with them, but I always thought of how tough it was for small children.

[SidDithers]

47. I hope that further research..

conducted by different research teams, is able to replicate these results.

Edit: and the responses "Big PHARMA is going to bury this! Big CANCER won't be able to make money if it's cured!! I'm series!!!" are fucking laughable.

Sid

[Patiod]

48. +1

I work with Big Pharma. No one there has a relative with cancer? Really? No one would blow the whistle on cures which were so mysteriously "disappeared" (as proposed by some of the posters here).

I work with people at 2 different companies that focus on diabetes - many of them HAVE diabetes, and got into their jobs because of that. You don't think they'd blow the whistle if someone tried to bury something promising? Really? Diabetics are actively burying a cure for diabetes? Really? More like they are all pill-focused or treatment-focused when things like transplants, surgery, and genetics may be the future for treatment of chronic conditions (God bless people like Lee Ioacca, who is funding research into these alternative ideas). Big Pharma isn't set up to study transplants, surgery and genetics. They are set up for pills, injections and treatments.

These conspiracy theorists make me crazy.

Who knows? Maybe Big Oil buried the electric car - Big Oil money will shield all of them from rising oil prices. But nothing will shield Big Pharma execs and their families from cancer and diabetes. Not all the money in the world. So I'm guessing they are NOT trying to repress cures that could help their Mom, Dad, Husband or child.....

[Q3JR4]

59. Not to mention the fact that if it EVER

came out that some company cured cancer but hid the research there would be a HUGE scandal.

Can you imagine the vitriol the world would direct at the CEO and board members? A company that cured cancer but hid the cure would go bankrupt the second anyone EVER got wind of it. Even ten years down the line.

A U.S. president, for those of you who don't remember, was forced to resign when the handful of people he picked to carry out an illegal operation couldn't keep it to themselves. If the most trustworthy people Nixon could find weren't trustworthy enough to keep their mouths shut do you really think "big pharma" would be able to silence every CEO, board member, researcher, distributor, and janitor on the pay roll? I think it's a fundamental rule of human nature that the probability of a group of people keeping your secret is inversely proportional to the number of people in the group.

Q3JR4.

[TheMadMonk]

65. Three people can keep a secret. If two of them are dead. nt

[donco6]

51. Wonder if it would work on me?

Where do I sign up?

[HughMoran]

52. OK, NOW I've seen everything. Somebody unrecced a cure for cancer!!

I thought that was something that was only said as a joke?

[Shining Jack]

53. K&R

That's a great news. :)

[Crunchy Frog]

55. Damn that socialized medicine!!!11!

[Yeahyeah]

56. Scots try to keep each other alive because funerals cost a lot.

Plus if you die then it's "No more haggis for you!".

[defendandprotect]

57. If it works, let's hope it isn't disappeared . . .

There's been a doctor in Mexico shrinking tumors to nothing for a long long time -- *

alternatives to "slash and burn" American medicine are few because

"slash and burn" pays well!



* I have a book on that story - I'll see if I can dig it out --

Also Germans did interesting work on this during the Nazi period!

[NorthCarolina]

58. How can this be? They have evil "Socialized Medicine" in Scottland

Anyone with half a brain knows that a medical breakthrough of this magnitude could only really be created in a country which has a for-profit system for health care. Any Fox News viewer could tell you that. This most certainly must be a fake news story. :crazy:

[Historic NY]

60. Lets hope that something comes of this.

[Q3JR4]

61. There are a couple of things we should remember.

Firstly, there are a LOT of cancers that act in different ways. One treatment might not cure them all. It would be like someone expecting that a single rhinovirus vaccination will ensure that they never get a cold again.

Second, most cancer treatments that work really well in the lab or in mice don't work as well in humans. Many treatments that were at one point hailed as magic treatments by the media either were too poisonous or wouldn't actually cure the cancer. Some of them are still used today and in conjunction with other treatment have been used to prolong human life.

Which is not to say that a panacea won't ever be found. The possibility exists that someone somewhere will find the magic bullet that will destroy every possible type of cancer there is, but to say that on the basis of the results of one study is to ignore reality.

Q3JR4.
In my armchair opinion.

[SocialistLez]

62. How long before a pharmaceutical company buys up the procedure? NT

[Liberation Angel]

64. damn

that's good news i hope

but when will it be available and how much does it cost?

[shireen]

69. that's really amazing, a wonderful breakthrough

Now, I also need them to make my body's immune system stop attacking ME.

[bertman]

71. OH GREAT!! Now we humans will be able to live forever and continue to destroy the

planet like thoughtless lemmings with technological skills and gigantic machines.

If there were evidence that we get wiser as we get older I might think this is a positive development, but when I look at the likes of Ronald Reagan, the George Bushes, and most of the teabaggers who are on Social Security and Medicare, I doubt the wiser part.

[no limit]

81. Lol, you're not serious right?

[Deep13]

72. Seems like there are dozens of things that cure cancer in rats.

I'll hold my applause until human testing is concluded.

[defendandprotect]

78. It's also important to understand that we all have cancer cells floating thru our

body at all times -- the question is damage to our immune systems which prevents

us from fighting them off.

[ejpoeta]

80. how fast will this disappear? there is no money in the cure.... money is in treatment.

[lonestarnot]

82. Damn! Excellent!

[Beetwasher]

84. Scottish Huh? First Scotch, Then Golf Now This

Is there anything they can't do?

[NewJeffCT]

85. And, this will precipitate the zombie apocalypse

like that Will Smith movie - "I Am Legend"

That started with a genetic cure for cancer, too.

[Joanne98]

86. The big drug dealers are going to hate this.

[tallahasseedem]

87. And big pharma will make it vanish...

throw in the FDA too.

[Deep13]

88. Will it vanish in Europe and Japan too? nt

[AlbertCat]

89. Great news!... but

Doncha hate the way the news presents it? "Scientists" didn't make the cancer "vanish"... they did something a little less magical... but still amazing.

Here's what really happened:

In laboratory experiments the Strathclyde research team used a plasma protein called transferrin, which carries iron through the blood, to deliver the therapeutic DNA to the right spot. Once in situ the DNA produced a protein that attacked the tumour cells.

So you see a research team got DNA to attach to a good delivery system already working in your body and then the DNA, which is merely a recipe from making amino acids which then link up into proteins, made some that attacked the cancer cells and made the tumor shrink.


Now I know one cannot get all that into a headline... but mythic magical creatures called "scientists" (as if they're not people) didn't make anything "vanish".... poof!

Smart researchers found a delivery system for natural proteins that shrink tumors.... very fast!

Still... even with the stupid way it's reported.... it all good!

[Nothing Without Hope]

92. The article has almost no information, nor is the idea new.

This study was probably done in mice, with tumors grown from injected cells, though I am guessing here because nothing is said in this very brief and cryptic newspaper report. Surely it wasn't done in human beings, since this would have been a huge and expensive study and the report would have said so. The transferrin receptor is overexpressed on many kinds of cancer cells and has long been discussed as a possible target gpt selective drug delivery. I suggested it myself years ago while I worked at a biotech company, and there was no way I was the only one with the idea. Anti-transferrin receptor antibodies light up many kinds of cancer cells, and this is well known. It is not totally specific for cancer cells by any means.

If there were a clinical study in which a particular new kind of targeted delivery to the transferrin receptor actually cured natural human cancer, I would be enormously happy and excited. But I don't think this brief report describes such a finding. I would like to see more information.