BREAKTHROUGH!!!!

 

            A breakthrough!! As of 6 days ago, scientists from the Stanford University of Medicine have reported finding a possible cure for cancer…our world has waited for this for so long! Researchers have found that a SINGLE drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice. The treatment involves an antibody that blocks a signal that typically prevents your cells from attacking a tumor cell and furthermore, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.

            Ten years ago, biologist Irving Weissman of Stanford University School of Medicine discovered that leukemia cells produced higher levels of a protein called CD47 than do healthy cells. CD47 is a marker that blocks your immune system from destroying healthy blood cells as they circulate throughout your body. Cancer cells use CD47 to their advantage, using CD47 to trick your immune system into ignoring them as they slowly attack your body. In the past few years, Weissman has showed that blocking CD47 with an antibody cured some cases of lymphomas and leukemias in mice by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as invaders. Now, Weissman and his colleagues have shown that this CD47-blocking antibody may possibly have a far wider impact than just blood cancers.

“What we’ve shown is that CD47 isn’t just important on leukemias and lymphomas,” says Weissman. “It’s on every single human primary tumor that we tested.” Moreover, Weissman’s lab found that cancer cells always had higher levels of CD47 than did healthy cells. How much CD47 a tumor made could predict the survival odds of a patient.

According to ScienceNOW, this was Weissman’s procedure:

To determine whether blocking CD47 was beneficial, the scientists exposed tumor cells to macrophages, a type of immune cell, and anti-CD47 molecules in petri dishes. Without the drug, the macrophages ignored the cancerous cells. But when the anti-CD47 was present, the macrophages engulfed and destroyed cancer cells from all tumor types.

Next, the team transplanted human tumors into the feet of mice, where tumors can be easily monitored. When they treated the rodents with anti-CD47, the tumors shrank and did not spread to the rest of the body. In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment—colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped.

“We showed that even after the tumor has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumor or slow its growth and prevent metastasis,” says Weissman.

Although macrophages also attacked blood cells expressing CD47 when mice were given the antibody, the researchers found that the decrease in blood cells was short-lived; the animals turned up production of new blood cells to replace those they lost from the treatment, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cancer researcher Tyler Jacks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge says that although the new study is promising, more research is needed to see whether the results hold true in humans. “The microenvironment of a real tumor is quite a bit more complicated than the microenvironment of a transplanted tumor,” he notes, “and it’s possible that a real tumor has additional immune suppressing effects.”

Another important question, Jacks says, is how CD47 antibodies would complement existing treatments. “In what ways might they work together and in what ways might they be antagonistic?” Using anti-CD47 in addition to chemotherapy, for example, could be counterproductive if the stress from chemotherapy causes normal cells to produce more CD47 than usual.

Weissman’s team has received a $20 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to move the findings from mouse studies to human safety tests. “We have enough data already,” says Weissman, “that I can say I’m confident that this will move to phase I human trials.”

YAY!!!!!!!

 

Sources: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/27/scientists-find-treatment-to-kill-every-kind-cancer-tumor/

 

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/one-drug-to-shrink-all-tumors.html?ref=hp

 

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4 Responses to BREAKTHROUGH!!!!

  1. Emily Pearlman says:

    Wow! This is a huge advancement! If this drug proves to work in humans, think of all the lives that will be saved! Unfortunately, I bet it will take a long time before this drug will be able to be used on humans, with all the FDA drug restrictions and requirements. But this is good progress! We are finally headed in the right direction to curing cancer!

  2. Madison Miller says:

    That’s simply AMAZING! I can’t even believe how far medicine and research has come in fighting problems that used to be so deadly. It was investing to me to learn that the microenvironment of the lab is a lot different than actual human trials and that scientists need to determine what happens when the treatment is paired with other treatments. I hope that this treatment will help the millions of people with cancer and their families to finally find a solution.

  3. Alyssa Ardolino says:

    This is incredible. What a huge advancement for us! It’s so amazing to see how far we’ve come and all the lives that have been saved. We’re definitely on the right track, and hopefully someday cancer will be a thing of the past. Awesome post!

  4. Sam Lebold says:

    This is amazing. I’m really shocked though that I didn’t hear about this before reading your blog post. You would think that this would be national and global breaking news. While I understand that it’s not a cure, it seems to be a huge step that holds a lot of promise. Can you imagine what the world would be like if cancer was no longer such a deadly, horrible thing? It would be so neat to give people hope rather than despair when they were diagnosed with cancer.
    I wonder if in the future, it would be possible to not only treat cancer, but prevent it as well. How cool would that be?!

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