The Cure for Cancer? PLEKHA7

Maybe some day in the not too distant future one could simply walk into their local drug store and walk out with the cure for cancer…

Cancer cells programmed back to normal by US scientists
“Cancer cells have been programmed back to normal by scientists in a breakthrough which could lead to new treatments and even reverse tumour growth…”

“Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, US, said it was like applying the brakes to a speeding car…”

"Scientists discovered they could switch on cancer in cells by removing the microRNAs from cells and preventing them from producing the protein.

And, crucially they found that they could reverse the process switching the brakes back on and stopping cancer…"

"'We have now done this in very aggressive human cell lines from breast and bladder cancer,” added Dr Anastasiadis.

“These cells are already missing PLEKHA7. Restoring either PLEKHA7 levels, or the levels of microRNAs in these cells turns them back to a benign state. We are now working on better delivery options…’"

“‘There’s a long way to go before we know whether these findings, in cells grown in a laboratory, will help treat people with cancer. But it’s a significant step forward in understanding how certain cells in our body know when to grow, and when to stop. Understanding these key concepts is crucial to help continue the encouraging progress against cancer we’ve seen in recent years.’”

where’s cure for downa syndrome,diabeties,aids,hiv,ebola,laymans and asperger’s syndrome?

I’m guessing you’re more of a glass half empty kinda person eh Lucas?

They cured aids the other day, (or at least confirmed they already had) and Leukemia

they took human bone marrow /stem cells/pre immune cells that were ‘mutatated’ and then irradiated the patient, then added then cells, taking over the immune system,

they opened trials to test the cure recently

@lucas

where’s cure for downa syndrome,diabeties,aids,hiv,ebola,laymans and asperger’s syndrome?

too bad it was a fluke

It’s completely unrealistic to expect the cure for all diseases and general conditions to come at the same time, as some of them are a lot harder to understand than others and some were known far longer than others.

Be happy that we’re actually seeing this level of advancement in health. Who knows, a century from now there might be kids who don’t know what a disease is like.

…and be sad that they’ll probably find something else to complain about, people always do

This is actually good news for other diseases too. If cancer is cured all of the funds currently going to cancer research, and it’s quite a bit, will become available for other purposes such as research into aids and diabetes. Not too mention all of the man hours that will also be freed from cancer research and become available for other research.

At the same time it occurred to me that a cure for cancer would spell certain doom for a lot of businesses. Companies that manufacture radiation therapy equipment and cancer treatment centers are probably going to go out of business or at the very least downsize quite a bit. Radioactive mineral mining companies, hazardous material transportation companies… Man there’s a whole ecosystem surrounding cancer that will suddenly vaporize almost overnight.

If you have cancer or are at risk for cancer this is a sigh of relief, if cancer is your job it’s your death certificate.

I heard RFID technology might detect many death diseases much earlier before being threat of our health.

That’s the thing with the human condition sadly, these diseases even now are just one entry in a very long list.

…beri-beri,heine medina,cushing syndrome,tourret syndrome…

This right here.
It’s a very unfortunate fact that cancer is quite a massive business- one that would be utterly destroyed by such a holy grail of medical achievement.
Although, to be fair, eliminating the whole cancer thing opens up a whole new load of businesses. Mining radioactive materials might not be so dangerous, and we could send people long distances to other planets knowing that we can cure them from the immense amount of radiation they’ll be bombarded with the entire way.

Don’t industries use radioactive material for things other than just treating cancer (even in the medical industry)?

The mining companies that do that stuff wouldn’t necessarily just go out of business, meanwhile a number of other companies can just switch to new product lines (like making the actual drugs that cure it).

some business get left behind in the road of progress

Ex. blockbuster

@fdfxd Yup, it’s not necessarily bad, but unfortunately it’s one of the main reasons we haven’t been able to cure it yet. Really it’s up to these people to be able to adapt or fail. “Chase the cheese,” if you will.

@Ace: I don’t think they’ll all go out of business, depends on how deeply the business is based on cancer. The radioactive material mining industry isn’t going to go under, but they’ll probably downsize because cancer is a big chunk of their business.

Companies that manufacture radiation therapy equipment probably have other products they can rely on, but again there’s going to be lots of people that specialize in making, repairing and using that equipment whose positions will no longer be required.

Then you have to think about the doctors. People who specialize in treating and diagnosing cancer. People who’ve devoted their entire lives to cancer who will either no longer be needed at all or whose services will suddenly become a whole lot cheaper.

P.S. I was a little surprised about some of the somewhat pessimistic statements from other researchers not affiliated with this particular research at then end of the article. Then I realized those people would stand to lose their jobs if this pans out.

It shouldn’t be that surprising. When people read about advances in cancer therapy they tend to get ahead of themselves (as seen in this thread as well where people are almost deeming any further cancer research obsolete). The article is more like a proof of concept, it shows that there is potential in this method but so far they have only tested it on specific cell cultures (at least that’s how I understood it when I briefly looked at the original research article).

Working on specific cell cultures is very different from actual living organisms. I myself have made several types of molecules that have been shown to kill cancer cells (although this article is not about killing cells) and still you can’t find them in a pharmacy. It will take years of rigorous studies to find out if the method in the article is actually viable.

My point is that you shouldn’t expect too much of something that is in such an early stage.

That’s true of any research, but here we have something more promising. Even if the method turns out to be a dud researchers have discovered exactly why cancer cells don’t stop replicating. That is a massive step in understanding cancer and towards a cure. For the first time we actually know what cancer is and that is great news for a cure regardless of whether or not this particular method proves successful.

Plus it seems pretty straightforward. If a cell is missing a particular protein, PLEKHA7, it doesn’t know when to stop replicating. Replace that protein and boom the cell stops replicating.

I think for a long time scientists knew that cancer cells had mutated DNA that was missing a particular instruction, they just didn’t know what instruction. Now they do and they can replace it.

One day very soon, “conventional” therapies like radiation and chemo will be (rightly) regarded as being as barbaric as bloodletting.

altzheimer