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News of a form of immune therapy to transfer cancer resistance between mice has spawned a good conversation, presently taking place over in the Immortality Institute forums:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0602382103v1
I first read about the cancer resistant mouse in 2003 and I am very surprised that it has taken this research team 3 years to merely establish a simple fact (that a transplant of a component of its immune cells will mediate complete cancer recovery in a non mutant-mouse). The mutant mice should be distributed in research centres all around the world and millions of dollars of government funding be available to rapidly investigate the mechanism by which this effect is mediated and how it can be reproduced in humans. Since the mechanism remains to be discovered, pharma companies can also participate.
These mice are the most valuable experimental animals in the world.
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To dampen your optimism a little bit, bear in mind that there are considerable differences between mouse and human tumors. The most important ones of them derive from the fact that human tumors have more time and more cells, so they have greater potential to evolve against any type of treatment.
For example, a major histological difference between tumors in resistant mice and normal mice is that in resistant mice tumors were fraught with immune cells that killed them, while in normal mice there were litte immune cells in the tumor. Now in humans, it's actually normal to have tumors fraught with immune cells, but they are doing nothing, because the tumor has figured out some way to defuse them with various signaling molecules.
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Still, I think immune therapy is the most promising anti-cancer approach we have.
You'll find more links and commentary by reading the whole thread. Modern medical researchers are bringing in more data than the research infrastructure can process these days - hence promising advances or discoveries like this, or regenerating MRL mice, take a while to rise to general notice on their merits. You can be sure there are, a present, a hundred other equally important discoveries already made and languishing for the right attention, the right connections to other research.
Technorati tags: cancer research
Posted by Reason at May 9, 2006 10:43 PM
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