Thursday, June 19, 2008

Cure for Cancer?

Some good news on a black day.

There is news of a new treatment for cancer. It seems that the body always has had a cure for cancer in its immune system but the problem is that the immune system does not see cancer as quite the threat that it is.

The treatment revolves around the idea of taking a blood sample, isolating the immune cells that attack the cancer that someone has then picking the most aggressive and cloning them until you have something like 5 billion of them. Then you inject them.

This therapy has been used on advanced skin cancer but there is no reason why it could not work on all cancers.

At the moment it looks expensive because of the large amount of work and expertise involved in each case but then things that needed that combination 20 years ago are so cheap now it is ridiculous.

There is hope!

The Telegraph has this
.

2 comments:

Baht At said...

all I can say is that it will destroy the saint industry - I'm shorting the catholic church as I type.

Assuming that is this isn't the sort of shameless marketing for some american biotech company needing to raise funds.

I can see it being without fairly severe side effects, ramping up the immune system usually results in bad things. Very bad things.

jmb said...

I'm sure it won't be as simple as that although it fortunately worked for that one man. It will be years before it goes through clinical trials etc. and who knows what they will find.