Cancer should be treated as immune system related.

Goddamned war on drugs...we could have had an all natural cure years ago.
Yes, CURE

Every study coming out (years late for dead people) shows that weed stops and actually reverses
the growth of cancer cells.
I bet you didn't even read about it, did you?
Why do you want to defend a policy that has allowed
a lot of folks to suffer?
Sure you are in the right site?

Untested pseudoscience such as hemp oil may or may not have some validity, but anecdotal evidence is not scientific method. A cure all for such a diverse group of entities is suspect, since any knowledge of the current state of heme/onc treatment modalities shows that chemotherapeutic regimens vary with each type of cancer, and is EVIDENCE BASED. People who like to bitch and moan about big pharma and greed in the medical profession fail to grasp that people like your hemp oil guy have gotten rich off of untested non-evidence based pseudo-panaceas that plays on people's ignorance and magical thinking wishes.

Big pharma is damn proud of your laziness and ignorance, it makes them richer every day.

For fuck sake Marijuana shrinks cancerous tumors too, and we've known this since 1974. It's people like you who have no faith in what really works because of what it is. Marijuana=quack medicine. Bullshit. St.Judes is quack medicine.

They've known about it for ages, but the cancer industry has been unwilling to fund the research. Now with breakthroughs like this, maybe we can advance cancer treatment beyond a 100 year-old model. Great news.

I don't think my ass is talking.

Last edited Mon Jun 1, 2015, 01:14 PM - Edit history (1)

be discovered first. It is a very complex problem, and the unlocking of the human genome along with other breakthroughs have helped.

What complicates things is that there appears not to be one treatment protocol.

For example, herceptin, which was one of the first breakthroughs at the molecular level for breast cancer, will only be effective for those that are HER2 positive. Same goes for Estrogen and Progesterone suppression therapy, it is helpful only for those that have the genetic makeup where the tumor is Estrogen and Progesterone sensitive.

This is not an easy process, even in this thread, it was the combination therapy that proved effective in the clinical trial.

There was a PBS special that gave an historical perspective of the issues affecting research and why it is so difficult. I highly recommend if you haven't seen it, "The Emperor of All Maladies", by Ken Burns is well worth the time to understand the challenges that make it so difficult.

Like any scientific endeavor the whole process has been a learning exercise, where certain progress could not occur until a good foundation had been set.

Will check it out.

I know that once the correct treatment is found people will look on the days of cut/burn/poison as barbaric a practice as bloodletting and leeches.

ipilimumab and nivolumab are both developed and tested by a pharmaceucial company with an entire division devoted to the field of immuno-oncology.

There is plenty of research going on here and it's been going on for a long time.

Cannabis!

Didn't catch enough of the story to relate any more than that.

Here's a good clip from it.

...YAAYYY!!!!

PEACE!

using an already approved drug, Lymphoseek, to piggyback medicine directly to a tumor site.
http://www.macrophagetherapeutics.com/about-us/

....That the huge amount of money in cancer research and treatment spread across the medical establishment in this country is so vast that it is a cash cow many in the medical establishment have a vested interest in keeping around. Can you imagine if a magic bullet was found? There would be a panic in the industry and possibly a market collapse.

My niece who had cancer when she was fifteen and had her leg amputated as a result of it, her cost of treatment almost reached her one million dollar insurance cap. She's alive today in her mid thirties thankfully but that's a lot of lettuce from just one patient. Now multiply that tens of thousands of times and at today's dollars.

history has given us doctors performing abortions when it was illegal. Of course, they'd be labeled quacks and their known cured patients would be reinfected and let to die and held up as propaganda against these doctors. Cuz that's what Big Biz does when their bottom line is affected. Women still went to abortion doctors and many people would still go to undercover cancer doctors.

This could be a bestseller, if nothing else.

because cancer is not a single disease. It is hundreds of diseases with thousands of different modalities and they don't respond to the same treatment.

The reason ipi and nivo work together on this type of melanoma and not on say colon cancer is that they only work on a few of these modalities. Even knowing this, ipi and nivo work only on about 60% of the patients in the trial.

The idea that nobody in the industry is working on a magic bullet therapy isn't because there's no money in it. It's because there is no way known, yet, to target the thousands of different cancers.

Those of us working on cancer have all had family members and or friends struck with the disease. We aren't holding back because it makes money.

Dr. Soon-Shiong has some fascinating ideas but they're still in the very early stages.

Activating NK cells and getting them to do what you want them to do and nothing else is very difficult. Their use in diffuse tumors has been met with a lot of unusual toxicities in pre-clinical testing and they have yet to show any significant tumor reduction in established solid tumors.

He hasn't been able to discuss how they plan to target the NK cells to a specific antigenic cell type even if they are able to detect that cell type. The reason behind that may be due more to proprietary technology than not being willing to share ideas but it's also a major stumbling block that researchers have been tripping over for quite some time.

I think the technology of Nantworks will eventually find it's niche in the personalized medicine field where they will provide a proteomic profile of a patient that will allow physicians to best pick the therapeutic strategy for that patient. That of course depends on whether or not they can deliver the proteomic results consistently and quickly.

If they or someone else is able to find a way to actually make and activate the specific NK cells through blood banking it could mean a real shift in how we treat cancer but that's still a lot further off than the video might lead you to believe.

develop all the weapons you can to destroy this dread disease.

And the sooner the better, they are now making real progress.

I saw on girl on "Vice" - she had a brain tumor and was on death's door at 9. The doctors introduced, if I remember right, some changed polio virus, programmed to only go after the cancer cells. Se got worse before she got better but they showed her at 13 or so looking like a normal young teen girl - no cancer present at all in her.

When ever I hear of a breakthrough in cancer treatment, I think of this: