Tag Archives: Cancer

Medical News To Be Thankful For

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Some filibuster-reform in the Senate and the Pope expressing himself on the subject of global capitalism aren’t the only events in the news to be thankful for. For example, an editorial and an accompanying story in The New Scientist call attention to a promising development in the treatment of cancer:

Cancer is a many-headed hydra: it rapidly out-evolves treatments that target specific features of cancer cells. Even superficially identical tumours contain many different mutations, making therapy for one type useless against others.

Armed with this information, researchers are focusing on approaches that stimulate patients’ own immune systems to attack their tumour. Unlike drugs, immune systems can evolve as the cancer does, staying one step ahead of new mutations. This is how treatments based on a type of white blood cell called T-cells are curing some cancers, rather than just slowing their advance.

This new therapy involves immune cells taken from the patient and then genetically-engineered to attack the patient’s cancer cells. The modified T-cells leave healthy cells alone. Earlier this year, one patient’s “incurable” leukemia disappeared in eight days.

I have no idea whether this treatment will eventually lead to a cure for cancer (and one that is available to lots of patients), but using genetic engineering to help the body’s own immune system attack cancer sounds like an important step in the right direction.

From the New Scientist article:

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Good News Is Breaking Out All Over

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It often seems like the world is going to hell. But clearly there is good news too, like what might be happening with the chemical weapons in Syria.

Here’s another piece of good news: medical researchers are getting closer to understanding the mutations that result in people getting cancer. As the article below says, we already know that smoking causes mutations leading to lung cancer and ultraviolet light causes mutations that cause skin cancer. Now scientists are beginning to figure out which mutations lead to other kinds of cancer: 

Out of the 30 cancer types, 25 had signatures [or patterns] arising from age-related mutational processes. Another signature, caused by defects in repairing DNA due to mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1 and 2, was found in breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers.

One of the interesting findings mentioned in the article is that a certain family of enzymes is linked to more than half of the cancer types studied:

These enzymes, known as APOBECs, can be activated in response to viral infections. It may be that the resulting signatures [that cause cancer] are collateral damage on the human genome caused by the enzymes’ actions to protect cells from viruses.

When I was growing up, my mother wouldn’t say the word “cancer”. It was like “Voldemort”, a word that must not be spoken. As our knowledge grows, “cancer” should eventually become as rare as the world “polio” is today.

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2013/130814.html

In completely unrelated and less important news, the Japanese are now accepting the fact that a foreigner will break the single season home record of their great national hero, Sadaharu Oh. During his career in Japanese baseball, Oh hit 863 home runs, 149 more than Babe Ruth hit in America. As the New York Times explains:

A few foreign players in Japan’s top league have threatened to surpass Oh’s hallowed mark of home runs in a single season, 55. And each time, opposing pitchers refused to throw pitches anywhere near the strike zone in a blatant effort to protect Oh’s record.

Yesterday, Wladimir Balentien, a native of Curacao, playing for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, tied Oh’s record of 55 home runs in a season. He has 21 games left and opposing pitchers are throwing pitches he can hit.

So the people of Japan have taken another step toward welcoming the participation of foreigners in Japanese society. Good news is breaking out all over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/sports/baseball/deference-to-a-revered-record-by-sadaharu-oh-in-japan-is-going-going.html