

Cancer Cured? Granulocytes Treatment Worked 100 Percent In Mice - dmoney
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/cancer_cured_granulocytes_treatment_worked_100_percent_in_mice_work_but_will_it_work_in_humans

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ericb
I can't find the exact quote or attribution, but someone once said, as a
scientist, if you can't cure cancer in mice, you may as well hang up your hat.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The quip that I heard, back in my cancer research days, was "if you have
cancer, and you are a mouse, we can help you".

There was a positively awesome paper a few years back which put the problem in
perspective: According to currently accepted theory, cancer is a disease which
is caused by random mutations. The more cells with mutations, the greater the
chance that you'll get cancer. So your cancer risk is proportional to the
number of cells in your body (more candidates for mutation), to the age of
those cells (more opportunities for mutagenic factors to strike the right
genes in one cell or another -- this is why cancer incidence increases with
age), and to the number of mutation-causing factors in your life. (Do not
smoke. Seriously, quit smoking right now.)

Mice are very tiny creatures relative to humans, and they live a very short
time (a three year old mouse is an old mouse). If mice had the same anti-
cancer mechanisms as humans, a mouse with cancer would be vanishingly rare. As
it is, it's still pretty hard to find a mouse with cancer, but it does happen
-- but only because mice, who have no need for an infrastructure that will
protect their cells for 70-plus years, haven't bothered to evolve the same
anti-cancer mechanisms that humans have.

The upshot is that "cancer in mice" is a very different disease from "cancer
in humans", so while curing cancer in mice is _suggestive_ it is never
conclusive.

One way to change the nature of this problem is to transplant human cancer
cells into mice. Unfortunately, this technique only solves half the problem --
the cancer cells only make up a portion of a tumor, and their environment is
very important. Worse, the mice have to be immunodeficient to make a human-
cancer transplant take. That makes studies like the one cited here -- which
involve the cancer-fighting activity of a mouse's own immune cells --
difficult to do with human xenografts. (I actually think that such a study is
_impossible_ , but I'm not a biologist so maybe there's a loophole I can't
see.)

~~~
rw
Off Topic But Important:

Could you point me to the most medically-reputable ways to quit smoking?

~~~
menloparkbum
Read the book "the easy way to quit smoking" by Alan Carr.

The reason people don't quit (explained in the book) is that they are afraid
of what will happen when they quit. There are all sorts of imagined withdrawal
symptoms. The first thing to realize is that smoking isn't merely a bad habit,
it is a legitimate drug addiction. Smokers are addicted to nicotine. Now, even
though nicotine addiction is real, the withdrawal symptoms are ridiculously
mild when compared to other drugs. When a heroin addict quits, they get the
shakes, fevers, cold sweats, diarrhea, barf all over the place, can't eat
anything, and even get physical goose bumps. When a smoker quits, the only
thing that happens is that you want another cigarette. Nicotine actually
leaves your body completely in 3 days, so the actual physical withdrawal
symptoms (which are just craving cigarettes) only last a long weekend. After
that, you have to deal with the behavioral issues, which is easier to do if
you have some sort of cognitive framework to deal with them, which is what the
book I mentioned provides.

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ed
For those who are interested, you can sign up to be a white cell donor for
this study here:

<https://www1.wfubmc.edu/LIFT/blooddonor.htm>

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brfox
jeez... If I had a dollar for every headline which reads "cancer cured"...

