
The Man Who Would Tame Cancer - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-man-who-would-tame-cancer
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jeremy7600
I do development work for one of his companies. Great products for hospitals.
Lots of data in realtime! That goes hand in hand with his philosphies
presented here. He definitely thinks outside the box. Some monitors only
collect some info. His monitors collect everything. All data is processed in
near realtime to provide custom treatments to patients, not just cancer
patients. Every treatment can be specialized to deal with each person's
symptoms and conditions. Truly forward thinking stuff.

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reasonattlm
The best approach to cancer therapy is to focus on the commonalities shared by
all cancer. At the moment that means lengthening of telomeres. Every cancer
does it. If you can suppress telomerase and ALT (alternative lengthening of
telomeres), or if you can reliably identify the biochemistry of cells abusing
telomerase and ALT, then you can kill any cancer.

E.g. a universal cancer vaccine based on this approach:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471666/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471666/)

E.g. disable part of the mechanism by which telomerase lengthens telomeres:
[http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/cndi-
csa05111...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/cndi-
csa051115.php)

People such as the SENS folk have been advocating this approach for more than
a decade, but the research community is slow in adopting it. The vast majority
of cancer research continues to be a matter of doing very expensive things
that only work for one tiny subtype of cancer. If we're doing expensive
things, then they should be efficient expensive things.

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nonbel
>"The best approach to cancer therapy is to focus on the commonalities shared
by all cancer. At the moment that means lengthening of telomeres."

Do you have a source for this? Has someone actually measured telomere
elongation in a bunch of different tumor biopsies and reported detection in
>90%?

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JoeAltmaier
I think that's backward. Its _shortened_ teleomeres that are linked to cell
malfunction? Elongation is the supposed cure. Or is there a syndrome where
cancerous cells keep lengthening theirs?

Ah I see the article mentions this. But years ago it was understood that
cancerous cells originally happened because of damage from short teleomeres?
That end-of-life cells would divide badly and malfunction, sometimes by
reproducing endlessly.

So its a matter of timing? Young people want to keep their teleomeres long;
but if you _get_ cancerous cells then you want to clip them all. Sadly, that
means end-of-life for the rest of your body. But no more cancer.

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adenadel
The simple notion is that you want long telomeres to resist aging. Cancer
cells "want" long telomeres to maintain their "cellular immortality", their
ability to divide indefinitely. From Wikipedia:

"Telomeres are critical for maintaining genomic integrity and studies show
that telomere dysfunction or shortening is commonly acquired during the
process of tumor development. Short telomeres can lead to genomic instability,
chromosome loss and the formation of non-reciprocal translocations; and
telomeres in tumor cells and their precursor lesions are significantly shorter
than surrounding normal tissue."[0]

"Cancer cells require a mechanism to maintain their telomeric DNA in order to
continue dividing indefinitely (immortalization). A mechanism for telomere
elongation or maintenance is one of the key steps in cellular immortalization
and can be used as a diagnostic marker in the clinic. Telomerase, the enzyme
complex responsible for elongating telomeres through the addition of telomere
repeats to the ends of chromosomes, is activated in approximately 80% of
tumors."[0]

It's not as simple as long vs short.

0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Cancer)

~~~
nonbel
Interesting. Wikipedia makes that 80% claim, citing:

Aschacher; Wolf; Enzmann; Kienzl (2015). "ALINE-1 induces hTERT and ensures
telomere maintenance in tumour cell lines". Oncogene. doi:10.1038/onc.2015.65.

Aschacher et al write: "In about 80% of tumour cells, telomere maintenance is
controlled by telomerase (TA), a reverse transcriptase, which adds DNA repeats
onto chromosomal ends."12, 22, 23, 24, 25

I checked all five references and none had anything about this 80% of tumors
number. It appears to be made up.

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astazangasta
>something called transcription, which involves 200,000 rRNA (ribosomal DNA)
molecules. Then this rDNA is involved in making 10 million proteins through
10,000 different pathways.

I'm curious how this elementary error crept in here (he means mRNA, not rRNA,
and rDNA is not a thing). Poor editing? A gap in the education of the good
doctor?

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lutusp
Quote: "... an ambitious program aiming to replace a long history of blunt
trial-and-error treatment with what amounts to a training regiment [sic] for
the body’s own immune system."

Please -- it's _regimen_ , not _regiment_. One is a course of medical
treatment, the other is a military unit.

I'm beginning to see this coinage more often, alongside the ever-popular
_reign_ where the writer means _rein_ , as in _reign_ (what a monarch does to
a kingdom) instead of _rein_ (what a cowboy does to a horse).

What happened to editing? While we're on the subject, what happened to
literacy? I expect to walk into a bookstore and see a poster: "Buy 'The
Tragedy of Illiteracy', now available as an audiobook."

