Vice Special Report: Killing Cancer

[deluca67]

Has anyone else seen this show on HBO? If freaking amazing and I can't believe it's not the #1 story worldwide. Doctors at the Philadelphia Children's Hospital are curing Leukemia. 90% of 39 pediatric patients treated are in full remission. Some as early as four weeks. It's an amazing story. Doctor's are using a modified version on the HIV virus to attack and kill cancer cells.

 

This has to be the biggest medical breakthrough in my lifetime. If you have a chance to catch it, I suggest it.

[K-9]

Our jaws dropped while watching this documentary. To think that the measles, common cold, and HIV viruses can be re-engineered to target and kill bone, brain, and blood cancer cells is beyond amazing. Talk about germ warfare! 2016 can't get here soon enough for the thousands of patients currently suffering from these cancers. 

[Claude_Verret]

^{Interesting, I'll have to check that out.  There has been a lot of breakthroughs in recent years with cancer therapies using vectors that deliver their therapeutic payload in a targeted fashion to just the cancerous cells.} 

 

^{I worked on a project a few years back around Herceptin, this was one of the first targeted therapies for a specific type of breast cancer.}

[WildCard]

That does sound amazing, is it available anywhere other than HBO?

[deluca67]

That does sound amazing, is it available anywhere other than HBO?

I doubt it, Vice is a Series on HBO.

[beerme1]

Thanks for the heads up Deluca. I will certainly go look for it. Funny but as amazing as modern medicine is, like K-9 says about some common stuff, it's equally amazing what modern medicine can't do.

[qwksndmonster]

Wow.  That's something.  I'll try to get my hands on the report.

[LTS]

Love this.  I also loved them using stem cell therapy on Howe and seeing his incredible recovery speed from stroke.

 

Lots out there.. this kind of stuff is awesome.

[MattPie]

NPR was talking about gene therapy last night. I didn't really catch all of it due to the crappy driving, but from the sounds of it gene therapy may turn some things on their heads. The main issue they were talking about was how to charge for them. They're really expensive right now but cheap to make. There was talk of a subscription model where you pay a fixed price as long as the treatment keeps working. Interesting angle is it "pays" for the drug company to do a good job, since you'll be paying more the longer it works.

[dEnnis the Menace]

This is amazing

[Claude_Verret]

For anyone interested in getting into a bit more of the nitty gritty of this technology, without getting bogged down too much in the alphabet soup of molecular immunology jargon,  this is a good resource that I found.

 

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/research-updates/2013/CAR-T-Cells