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Cancer breakthroughs clear way for drugs that block tumor growth

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B

Bombadil

Banned
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/17/cancer-breakthroughs-clear-way-for-drugs-that-block-tumor-growth/

Researchers at the University College London announced Sunday in a study published by the journal Nature Cell Biology that they’ve observed for the first time ever how cancer spreads throughout the body and metastasizes, which causes about 90 percent of all cancer deaths.

Scientists said they discovered that cancerous cells tend to follow healthy cells through the bloodstream, calling it the “chase and run effect.” The cancer cells instinctively know to chase down healthy cells through a process called chemotaxis, which essentially lets the infected cell sniff out healthy cells by sensing the chemical makeup of its environment.

To study how this interaction leads to unpredictable behaviors, scientists told The Daily Telegraph they tweaked two different types of embryonic cells from frogs and zebrafish to act out this “chase-and-run” game in front of their microscopes, watching the interaction carefully.

The discovery means that drugs which disrupt this interaction would essentially prevent metastastasis, but it’s still going to be several years before scientists have a handle on such a therapy.

Meanwhile, another major breakthrough in recent days should give hope to breast cancer patients. Scientists at the Duke Cancer Institute announced on Saturday that a drug already on the market in Europe, approved to treat osteoporosis, has the added benefit of stopping late-stage breast cancer growth in its tracks.

“We found bazedoxifene binds to the estrogen receptor and interferes with its activity, but the surprising thing we then found was that it also degrades the receptor; it gets rid of it,” study author Dr. Donald McDonnell explained in an advisory.

His research showed that not only does the drug affect cancerous cells dependent on estrogen, it also affects cells that have developed a resistance to the most frequently-used drugs designed to treat breast cancer, meaning it could prove a valuable tool for treating sufferers of late-stage breast tumors.

Of course, it’s not just breast cancer that scientists are hard at work deconstructing. Researchers at the University of California San Diego announced in a study published Saturday in the journal Cancer Research that they have identified a protein called ROR1 that, when expressed in high levels, appears to encourage and even regulate the growth of tumors.

When disrupted by targeting a certain gene and silencing it, cancerous cells observed in a lab setting stopped growing. They concluded that custom-designed antibodies which target the protein “can inhibit cancer progression and metastasis,” leading to much more effective treatments and greater success rates for terminally ill patients. A drug which does just that is already in development, but it’s not clear when it will be ready for human trials.

Similar efforts are underway to develop viruses that actually attack cancer cells and make them “sick,” according to a study published Friday in the journal Nature Communications. While that effort has shown some stunning success, treatments there are also still years away.

“Unfortunately, cancer is a very complicated and diverse disease, and some viruses work well in some circumstances and not well in others,” the University of Ottawa’s Dr. John Bell said in an advisory. “As a result, there has been a lot of effort in trying to modify the viruses to make them safe, so they don’t target healthy tissue and yet are more efficient in eliminating cancer cells.”
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The scientific article this website references is this.
 
M

Marleyman

Banned
Fuck yeah; if there is one more thing I want to see happen in my lifetime it would be for cancer to be stopped in it's tracks.
 
B

Bombadil

Banned
Marleyman said:
Fuck yeah; if there is one more thing I want to see happen in my lifetime it would be for cancer to be stopped in it's tracks.
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Me, too.

There is another exciting new treatment option which seems to work. Researchers are experimenting with different kinds of frequencies and fields that seem to only affect cancer cells but not healthy tissues. They've discovered that they can damage cancer cells further and put them into remission by simply aiming those waves at the patient. Essentially, it could mean a one-size fits all approach to cancer, which is very exciting. Since cancer is a set of hundreds of diseases, focusing on the common denominator as a way of stopping it could basically be the fastest route to a real cure.
 
J

Josh7289

Member
So, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but if you can stop the spread then you can focus on removing the existing tumor(s) without worrying about new ones showing up? That sounds like it would help treatments a lot.
 
M

Matugi

Member
Josh7289 said:
So, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but if you can stop the spread then you can focus on removing the existing tumor(s) without worrying about new ones showing up? That sounds like it would help treatments a lot.
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More or less. The uncontrolled growth itself is not what is deadly; benign tumors, which are uncontrolled growth still, can be removed and the problem is essentially solved. Malignant tumors, which are metastatic, are what cause all the complications from cancer because they infect the more sensitive parts of the body (brain and lung being the most significant and deadly). If you can stop metastasis and render every tumor benign then you can essentially eradicate cancers that would otherwise wreak havoc on the body, such as melanoma.

From what I've read of this it sounds like they're manufacturing something along the lines of a biological immunosupressant that only targets the cancer cells. It's certainly an interesting way to target it. That being said, there are obviously some risky side effects that could come with it that would probably look similar to side effects you would get from HIV treatment. I was actually planning on doing undergraduate research that involved a combination of immunosuppressants and biological major histocompatibility complexes to "retype" certain cells in the body so that the killer T cells infected by HIV do not attack regular somatic cells.
 
R

Rayis

Member
Can't wait till cancer is basically treated as a cold, a disease that can be easily controlled and cured, cancer is a horrible disease.
 
B

Bombadil

Banned
Bomber Bob said:
let's pray for reserch
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You can contribute to cancer research by downloading an application called Folding@Home.

Neogaf has a Folding@Home team. Our team number is 51353.

Folding@Home is a distributed computing projected started by Stanford University. By combining the unused processing power of more than a million computers, Stanford researchers are able to perform hundreds of years of processing work in a very short space of time.

Understanding how proteins fold and interact in the presence of chaperones allows researchers to better understand how diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's start, and will help design better drugs that treat these diseases.

This has been a shameless a promotion.
 
J

John Harker

Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
Marleyman said:
Fuck yeah; if there is one more thing I want to see happen in my lifetime it would be for cancer to be stopped in it's tracks.
Click to expand...

Me too. More than anything I'd want to see in my lifetime, actually.

My younger brother died two years ago from cancer. He was 25.
 
Hale-XF11

Hale-XF11

Member
I'll get excited if this means that anyone can afford it and have access to it, but I doubt that will be the case for some time, if ever.
 
B

Bombadil

Banned
Ahasverus said:
WHo much until a big pharmaceutic blocks it?
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If it was ever found out that any company tried to do that, every boardmember and executive involved in the decision would be drawn and quartered, and pissed on afterward without any legal repercussions.

Isn't this like the 20th time the we have cured Cancer in some form? (According to the internet)
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Rat/mouse studies don't translate well to human studies.

By now, I'd say we can cure just about every common type of cancer in rodents.

Human bodies are more complex.

Researchers are working on creating accurate human body simulations for drug studies.

When this happens, I think we'll hit a major breakthrough in not only cancer research, but all disease research.
 
K

Kastrioti

Persecution Complex
My mom has been battling ovarian cancer for one year now so I'd give everything in the world for some sort of new medicine to battle ovarian, and all types of cancers. Fuck cancer.
 
K

Kastrioti

Persecution Complex
Bombadil said:
I am very sorry to hear that. I hope everything works out.
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Thanks man, appreciate it. I always heard about it affecting other people, but didn't really pay attention to it until it hit my mom (and best friend). Nowadays I want to go to Beat Cancer Marathons and donate money to research. Science will prevail in the end, hopefully soon.
 
B

Bowling Pin

Member
iLTfr5H.png
 
M

Matugi

Member
Rayis said:
Can't wait till cancer is basically treated as a cold, a disease that can be easily controlled and cured, cancer is a horrible disease.
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I don't know if that will ever be the case. Cancer is not an infection so there's no "true" source, and each person's cancer is different because it's entirely genetic in nature. The best solutions for treating cancer will always lie in isolating the cancerous cells then destroying them. That's why prevent metastasis is so important.
 
A

Air

Banned
I want to be hyped for this, but I've read so many articles claiming the same thing I can't help but be a little jaded. Hopefully something really comes from this though.
 
Trickster

Trickster

Member
I feel like we often hear about a new breaktrough agains't cancer. Yet nothing really changes. It's still get the tumor(s) operated out, and get chemotherapy.

xtrasauce said:
The price for an "anti-cancer" pill would be brutal.
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I think you're never gonna get such a pill in a capitalist world.
 
S

StudioTan

Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
Trickster said:
I feel like we often hear about a new breaktrough agains't cancer. Yet nothing really changes. It's still get the tumor(s) operated out, and get chemotherapy.
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That's not exactly true. My mother is dealing with a type of cancer that would have meant she had a few short years to live a couple of decades ago but now people with the same cancer can live 20 years or longer, although it's never "cured". Advances are being made all the time. Luckily we live in Canada where healthcare covers the costs of the medication which would otherwise be thousands of dollars a month.
 
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