A bin for my favorite articles
Posts tagged cancer
Adding milk to tea alters its health benefits
Jan 1st
ISLAMABAD ( 2008-12-31 21:05:58 ) 
rinking tea reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke, but adding milk alters the effect.
Previous research has shown that drinking tea improves blood flow and the ability of arteries to relax.
Researchers from the Charite Hospital at the University of Berlin in Mitte found that adding milk to the tea eliminates the protective effect against cardiovascular disease, Health News reported.
Tea is second only to water in worldwide consumption so any benefits could have important public health implications. But until now it was not known whether adding milk had an impact.
The researchers discovered that proteins called caseins in milk decrease the amount of compounds in tea known as catechins, which increase its protection against heart disease.
The researchers compared the healthy effects of drinking boiled water and tea with and without milk on 16 healthy women. Using ultrasound, they measured the function of an artery in the forearm before and two hours after drinking tea.
It was found that black tea significantly improved blood flow as compared to drinking water but adding milk blunted the effect of the tea.
Whereas drinking tea significantly increased the ability of the artery to relax and expand to accommodate increased blood flow as compared to drinking water, the addition of milk completely prevents the biological effect.
Tests on rats produced similar results. When rodents were exposed to black tea they produced more nitric oxide, which promotes dilation of blood vessels. But adding milk blocked the effect.
The findings could explain why in countries such as Britain, where tea is regularly consumed with milk, have not shown a decreased risk of heart disease and stroke from drinking tea.
Tea has also been shown to have a protective effect against cancer so the findings could have further implications.
Since milk appears to modify the biological activities of tea ingredients, it is likely that the anti-tumour effects of tea could be affected as well.
How To Not Get Cancer-Non-Stick Frying Pans
Dec 24th
Six months ago, I moved to California from the East coast with my girlfriend to chase some opportunities out west. When we signed for the keys to our new apartment, our living space was bare and we both knew one of the first things we had to do, after unpacking, was to go to a departments store for the basic home furnishings. She had brought plates and silverware, but we needed cookware.
So we’re in the cookware aisle looking at frying pans. She goes for the cast iron frying pan, and I say something like “honey, don’t you want non-stick? Those iron frying pans are such a pain in the ass.”
“But non-stick frying pans give you cancer, honey,” she replied. At first I didn’t believe her. I had used non-stick frying pans all my life. I did however remember my mother warning me not to scrape the non-stick pan with forks or knives or anything that would scrape off the non-stick coating.
Well, as it turns out, that non-stick coating is some nasty shit that you do NOT want to put into your body. Here’s what I found out:
- Non-stick coating was developed in the 30’s by Du Pont
- It is made from a chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA
- PFOA has repeatedly shown in laboratories to cause cancer, liver damage, growth defects, immune-system damage and death to small animals.
- In 2004, Du Pont had an Erin-Brokovich type case where they were accused of poisoning the water supply with PFOAs, causing birth defects among other health hazards. DuPont paid US$300 million as an out-of-court settlement to around 50,000 residents who lived near its West Virginia plant.
- DuPont has agreed to phase-out the chemical completely by 2015, and they are classifying the chemical on par with mercury and lead, a poison that remains in your body forever.
- Trace levels of PFOAs are found in almost every American.
So what I get from this is that those bastards at DuPont made a really useful product with a really toxic chemical, tried as hard as it could to confuse and blur the studies that showed how bad it was and then signed a quiet deal to phase it out over a few decades after they had made enormous piles of cash. The Cigarette companies lied to us that cigarettes were harmful to our health, but they’re not taking cigarettes off the market like they are with non-stick.
The Equivalent of using Non-Stick frying pans…
…eating your food off a lead plate, and using mercury as dipping sauce.
The really sick thing is that if you go to a store to purchase a frying pan, there is absolutely no warning labels on the non-stick coated pans. If I had known how real the threat was with non-stick cookware, Teflon or any other name it is known by, I never would have used it. But now I have a level of PFOA in my body that is going to be there forever. I just gasp at the tragedy that people are still using non-stick cookware, who are unaware of the dangers because the whole thing has been quieted up.
So listen to me, because right now you have a responsibility. All your friends and family who probably use non-stick frying pans need to be made aware of how toxic they are to their health. Tell them to throw out all their non-stick pans and get new pans without the nonstick coating. Call them, email them, let them know that you care about them and that their health is at risk each time they continue using this toxic piece of cookware.
Large Study Finds No Link between Marijuana and Lung Cancer
Dec 24th
The smoke from burning marijuana leaves contains several known carcinogens and the tar it creates contains 50 percent more of some of the chemicals linked to lung cancer than tobacco smoke. A marijuana cigarette also deposits four times as much of that tar as an equivalent tobacco one. Scientists were therefore surprised to learn that a study of more than 2,000 people found no increase in the risk of developing lung cancer for marijuana smokers.
“We expected that we would find that a history of heavy marijuana use–more than 500 to 1,000 uses–would increase the risk of cancer from several years to decades after exposure to marijuana,” explains physician Donald Tashkin of the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead researcher on the project. But looking at residents of Los Angeles County, the scientists found that even those who smoked more than 20,000 joints in their life did not have an increased risk of lung cancer.
The researchers interviewed 611 lung cancer patients and 1,040 healthy controls as well as 601 patients with cancer in the head or neck region under the age of 60 to create the statistical analysis. They found that 80 percent of those with lung cancer and 70 percent of those with other cancers had smoked tobacco while only roughly half of both groups had smoked marijuana. The more tobacco a person smoked, the greater the risk of developing cancer, as other studies have shown.
But after controlling for tobacco, alcohol and other drug use as well as matching patients and controls by age, gender and neighborhood, marijuana did not seem to have an effect, despite its unhealthy aspects. “Marijuana is packed more loosely than tobacco, so there’s less filtration through the rod of the cigarette, so more particles will be inhaled,” Tashkin says. “And marijuana smokers typically smoke differently than tobacco smokers; they hold their breath about four times longer allowing more time for extra fine particles to deposit in the lungs.”
The study does not reveal how marijuana avoids causing cancer. Tashkin speculates that perhaps the THC chemical in marijuana smoke prompts aging cells to die before becoming cancerous. Tashkin and his colleagues presented the findings yesterday at a meeting of the American Thoracic Society in San Diego.
By: David Biello
RESOURCE/SOURCE: Scientific American on May 24, 2006
Bong Rips Cure Cancer?
Dec 24th
The Truth About Weed the Feds Don’t Want You To Know
You read that right, my sleepy-eyed stoners. Cannabis CURES cancer. Okay, that is a bit of propaganda wrapped up in overstatement. But guess what? It is our turn to spread the real propaganda of ganja. The thing that the government, religious fanatics and our parents alike will hate the most about our propaganda is that it is full of truth.
According to “The Cannabible 3,” in 1974, a study funded by the United States Federal Government found evidence demonstrating that Tetrahydrocannabinol, the most active cannabinoid in cannabis, reduces growth rates of three kinds of cancer. The assholes in the Drug Enforcement Administration office decided it might be bad for business if the public knew this. No major media outlets reported the story and research was halted in that area.
“What a pothead” you scoff. “Believing some pipe-dream a stoner threw into a book about weed.” Oh, ye of little faith. Still can’t trust your brethren to be intelligent on the most important issues facing the world?
Do you trust scientists working at Harvard to be intelligent? On April 17, 2007, www.sciencedaily.com reported on Harvard researchers delving deeper into the relationship between cannabis and cancer. “‘The beauty of this study is that we are showing that a substance of abuse, if used prudently, may offer a new road to therapy against lung cancer,’ said Anju Preet, Ph.D., a researcher in the Division of Experimental Medicine.”
Since the initial discovery in 1974, multiple international studies have confirmed that THC can halt or reverse the growth of cancer cells. In Germany: A study demonstrates the anti-cancerous effect of cannabinoids in lung and cervical cancer. At the Complutense University of Madrid Spain: One third of infected rats have their brain tumors eliminated after treatment with synthetic THC. In Italy: Cannabinol is shown to inhibit the growth of cancerous glioma cells, both in vitro and in vivo. The list goes on.
Perhaps the study most worth mentioning is a secret study financed by the U.S. government. In 1997, it was leaked to the media that the U.S. National Toxicology Program had conducted a study worth $2 million, pointing to the fact that THC protected against malignant tumors. This is the only other study funded by the government to investigate the anti-cancerous properties. As with the first study, the findings were kept away from the public eye for a few years. News of this event came only after an inside source deliberately took the report to the media.
Taking stock of this situation is sure to confuse and enrage. Let Mary Jane soothe the rage as I take care of the confusion. (Mary Jane has trouble helping with confusion. It is not her fault, she’s just too stoned to figure out how.) The situation is as follows: we are surrounded by liars. All our short stoner lives, people have been telling us that smoking marijuana will give us cancer. Scary lies like “One joint is equal to 20 cigarettes” are paraded as facts. The government, the one by the people and for the people, takes our taxes to fund studies that may lead to the cure for cancer, then hides the results from us.
The media chooses not to publicize these findings because then there would be less time to terrorize us with stories of violence and despair. Health care providers, the people supposedly fighting diseases for the benefit of others, are not interested in learning more about this issue. It is hard to blame them, though. How can that juggernaut of an industry support itself when a cure for cancer could be grown in a person’s back yard?
Health care providers have to be able to pay the scientists, do the research, discover the drug and test the pill, which has to pass the tests set up by the feds, so they can make money. This is so the public “knows” that when they have to buy health care to pay to see the doctor. How else are you going to afford those little white pills the pharmacy gives you instead of letting you know that many ailments can be cured by changes in diet, exercise or cheaper, natural, healthier substances, like weed?
So, does cannabis prevent or possibly even cure cancer? Pass me that bong and we’ll find out together.
Daily Nexus drug columnist Alex Coffman is sure a sack of weed can write his term papers and take his midterm too.
Cancer Cell ‘Bodyguard’ Turned Into Killer
Dec 22nd
ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2008) — If you’re a cancer cell, you want a protein called Bcl-2 on your side because it decides if you live or die. It’s usually a trusted bodyguard, protecting cancer cells from programmed death and allowing them to grow and form tumors. But sometimes it turns into their assassin.
Scientists knew it happened, but they didn’t know how to actually cause such a betrayal. Now they do. And it may lead to the development of new cancer-fighting drugs.
Researchers at Oregon State University and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, Calif., have developed a peptide that converts the Bcl-2 protein from a cancer cell’s friend to a foe.
“Now we can force this protein to backstab the cancer cell where it resides,” said Siva Kolluri, an assistant professor of cancer biology in the environmental and molecular toxicology department at OSU. He’s also the lead author of an article that reported the discovery in the Cancer Cell journal in October.
The key to the conversion is peptide NuBCP-9, a string of nine amino acids that bind to Bcl-2 and attack the mitochondria, the powerhouse of cells. Researchers derived it from Nur77, a nuclear receptor that can cause cells to die. To see if it worked outside the petri dish, researchers injected the peptide and its mirror-image molecule into cancer tumors in mice and found that the cancer cells died and the tumors shrank. To their surprise, they also found that a structurally mirrored-image stable peptide worked as well as the original peptide.
The findings could lead to the development of cancer-fighting drugs that target Bcl-2, Kolluri said. He explained that Bcl-2 is an attractive drug target because its levels are elevated in a majority of human cancers and it is responsible for cancer cells’ resistance to many chemotherapeutic drugs and radiation.
Michael Melner, a scientific program director at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, Ga., said the research Kolluri and his team did “will cause a lot of attention in the cancer field.”
“These investigators have done a nice job of combining findings of a basic nature as well as the preliminary studies needed to move to a preclinical evaluation. It’s unusual for one single paper to make such a large step forward,” he said.
Now one of the next steps, Melner said, is for researchers to determine what types of cancer and what stages of the disease this deadly Bcl-2 converter would combat.
Linda Wolff, a leukemia researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s Center for Cancer Research in Bethesda, Md., said the researchers’ discovery is “rare” in the world of cancer research. She added that it’s important for two reasons.
“First, it may lead to a therapy that could potentially be used against many types of cancer,” she said. “The reason for that is because it targets Bcl-2, and Bcl-2 is expressed in many types of cancers. So it could be useful in breast cancer and other carcinomas and leukemia, for example.
“The second reason it’s important is that although the peptide they studied causes cancer cells to die, its effect on normal cells seems to be quite minimal,” Wolff said. “A big problem in cancer research has been getting therapies that don’t kill normal cells.”
Dr. David Hockenbery, a member of the Clinical Research Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., said that this new way of altering a protein so it injures a cell rather than merely disables it “is very unusual.” He added that this finding would spur researchers to develop drugs or stable peptides that act on Bcl-2 at the Nur77 binding site.
“Quite conceivably, individual cancers may respond better to one type of Bcl-2 inhibitor than another,” he said. “In the future, the availability of several targeting approaches against Bcl-2 should be useful in personalized cancer therapies.”
In addition to OSU and the Burnham Institute, the other contributors to the research came from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and Xiamen University in China. Kolluri started the research project in 2003 when he worked at Burnham.
The Future of Brain Tumor Vaccine
Dec 20th
From initial success in the lab to promising results in patients, new medicines and therapies have to clear many hurdles before they can be disseminated to the general public. CDX-110, the brain tumor vaccine developed by Duke neurosurgeon John Sampson and manufactured by AVANT Immunotherapies, is well on its way to becoming part of the new treatment regimen available to oncologists..
This year, Pfizer, in conjunction with AVANT, is launching a multisite Phase II/III study to determine whether CDX-110 should become the new standard of care for patients diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) tumors. More than twenty brain tumor centers across the country are participating in the randomized study.
GBM has long been considered an “orphan disease,” a designation for conditions that affect fewer than 200,000 people. People diagnosed with orphan diseases often find that therapies to treat their conditions
are scarce, owing to the huge financial commitments that underlie research and development. But because CDX-110 targets a mutant protein found in a host of other cancers, the pharmaceutical industry has taken an interest in its development.
“To go to a Phase III trial takes hundreds of millions of dollars these days,” says Sampson. “Typically that requires having a huge venture capitalist or big pharma getting involved. In this case, big pharma is getting involved.” If the CDX-110 trials go well, he says, Pfizer Inc., one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, will conduct the final round of testing before applying for FDA approval to market the drug. In mid-April, Pfizer paid AVANT $40 million and promised a $10 million equity stake for the worldwide rights to the vaccine.
Since the vaccine is only effective in treating tumors with a particular mutation, it won’t ever be a cure-all for people diagnosed with GBM. Still, it’s more promising than anything else on the market. (Temozolomide, the most recent chemotherapy drug used to target brain tumors, only extends survival rates a couple of months, on average.) Given the slow pace of getting drugs tested and approved for use in the general population, though, the vast majority of people currently diagnosed with GBM will be dead before CDX-110 receives final market approval.
Radio Frequencies Used To Kill Inoperable Liver Tumors At Penn’s Cancer Center
Dec 20th
By transforming radio signals into a surgical laser, surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center are using high-energy radio frequency sound waves to destroy inoperable primary and metastatic liver tumors. The powerful procedure — called radio frequency ablation — is available exclusively in the Delaware Valley region at Penn’s Cancer Center… and available at only a few select hospitals across the nation.
This technology enhances a surgeon’s ability to access and successfully treat liver tumors — which are commonly deemed “inoperable” due to their anatomical position inside the organ itself. “Many patients exhibit tumors in the liver that cannot be removed safely while still preserving the remaining organ,” explains Frank Spitz, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Penn. “Or, a patient may have multiple tumors that make surgical extraction next to impossible.” To get at those formerly inaccessible tumors via radio frequency ablation, surgeons use ultrasound as a visual roadmap to guide a needle-sized probe directly into the center of the cancerous tumor. Once inside the tumor, the tip of the probe is carefully opened to permit heat- delivering wire extensions to penetrate across a larger area of the tumor. Fully extended, the wire extensions resemble an opened umbrella against the tumor. Finally, the surgeon literally chars the tumorous tissue by zapping up to 100 watts of heat through the probe tip and attached tentacle-like extensions. The heat–similar to what is generated by a microwave oven–kills the tumor. Once all the tumor cells are dead, the body absorbs this tissue over time and no resection of the tumor is needed.
In a recently approved protocol, Penn’s cancer specialists are studying the effectiveness of radio frequency ablation in destroying tumors. “We hope that the study results will indicate that the technique completely destroys tumors so that patients who, at this time, aren’t able to undergo surgical removal of their tumors will have the option of the radio frequency ablation in the near future,” notes Doug Fraker, MD, Chief of Surgical Oncology at Penn and principal investigator of the study. “This strategy to control tumors is the flipside of cryosurgery, which is a technique that has been available for over ten years, where very cold temperatures are used to freeze tumors in the liver. With radio frequency ablation, the heater probe has served advantageous over cryosurgery because a much smaller probe is used, which ultimately decreases vascular complications,” Fraker concludes.
Male Breast Cancer Types
Dec 20th
Male breast cancer is not common, but is does affect many men in the world. Male breast cancer is rare and occurs mostly in men between the ages of 60-70, but does occur in men of all ages. Most men do not understand the disease or how to detect the symptoms in their own bodies. It is important to understand the male breast cancer symptoms for an early diagnosis and to treat the disease effectively. Early diagnosis can lead to a quick and successful recovery.
There are several important terms to understand describing male breast cancer, including:
Carcinoma- this is a term that describes a cancer that begins in the lining of an organ. Most male breast cancers are carcinomas.
Adenocarcinoma- this is a type of carcinoma that starts in the glandular tissue. Glandular tissue is the tissue in the body that makes and secretes a substance. Male breast cancer in this form shows up in the ducts and lobules of the breast tissue.
Carcinoma-in-situ- this is a term that describes the early stages of male breast cancer, normally when the cancer is still in the original cells that it started to form. This type of cancer is considered by most professionals to be pre-cancerous and non-invasive.
Invasive Carcinoma-This is the most common type of male breast cancer since it describes a cancer that has moved beyond the cells that it originally started in.
Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS) This type of male breast cancer is present in approximately 1 in 10 cases. In this type of male breast cancer, the cancer cells fill the breast ducts but do not invade into the fatty tissue of the breast. This form of male breast cancer is most often curable through surgery.
Infiltrating or Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC) This type of male breast cancer invades the fatty tissue of the breast. This form of cancer will most likely metastasize into other parts of the body. This is the most common form of male breast cancer, accounting for between 80-90% of the reported cases.
Invasive Lobular Carcinoma- This type of male breast cancer only affects approximately 2% of the total reported cases. The reason for his is that most men do not have lobular tissue, tissue containing milk producing glands.
Paget Disease of the Nipple- This type of male breast cancer starts in the breast ducts but spreads to the skin around the nipple. This is the rarest form of male breast cancer and is detected through an abnormal change in the color or texture of the nipple.
If a patient experiences any of the mentioned symptoms, they should see their medical professional immediately for testing. Male breast cancer is still widely unknown about and the information about the disease and its symptoms are important pieces of information for men around the world to be aware of. If male breast cancer is detected early, the patient will have the best possible chance for a treatment plan and full recovery.
Seven Steps to Conquer Nausea in Cancer Patients
Dec 20th
A useful guide to help cancer patients and caregivers cope with nausea related to cancer. This is useful to most anyone with nausea but written with cancer patients in mind. The information provided comes from hands-on experience.
Have you got the “can”t eat’ cancer blues? Does the steak that once enticed you make you want to run to the bathroom and empty your insides? Well, not eating is not an option, sorry to have to tell you. That’s why I’ve assembled this handy little list of options that may help you keep up the appetite. These are tips and tricks I’ve learned as I stumble down the road of caring for a cancer patient. You don’t have to do what I say, but if you’re not eating, then it can’t hurt to try right?
- Forget about big traditional meals. Focus instead on small meals. Better yet, snacks. Generally, if you’re not feeling so swift in the stomach department, looking at a good hearty serving of food is not going to help you. Most likely you’ll feel nauseous just thinking about trying to eat it. Instead, keep a supply of snack food near you at all times. They make some great nutritional bars if you’re worried about the content of your snack food.
- Frozen foods are good. The may not be the best, but they cut down on prep time which limits your exposure to the scent of the food which may well be enough to put you over the edge. So frozen waffles, appetizers, hamburgers, etc – buy them.
- Don’t underestimate the value of drinks whenever you’re not eating. If you can manage to drink in between eating, you’ll find your energy will increase, and sometimes it even improves your appetite.
- Ginger, ginger, ginger – This little root thingy, or whatever it is, is brilliant for the ole tummy. Just about any form that it comes in is helpful. There’s ginger ale, crystallized ginger, ginger candy, and ginger tea. Try some out. There’s bound to be a form of ginger that you like.
- Don’t wait until you’re nauseated to take your medicine. Take it as it is prescribed. It is much easier to control the symptoms before they’ve set in than to try to stop them once they’ve started.
- Medicine isn’t working? Maybe you want to consider the alternative that is legalized in some states, but that the federal government is too thick to allow. Just a suggestion, it does work.
- Keep your pain under control. Sometimes pain is the major contributing factor to nausea. By taking your pain killers on time and as instructed you can greatly improve your chances of eating.
The important thing to remember is to take care of your self. Curing cancer is a nasty business and eating can be one of the first things to go. But you can’t fight the disease unless you master the symptoms. Master the symptoms and you may well raise those odds of being cured.
Herpesvirus Kills Cancer Cells, Spares Normal Ones
Dec 10th
NYU School of Medicine researchers report in a new study that they have isolated a new version of a herpesvirus that kills cancer cells but spares normal tissue.
The finding may eventually lead to more potent anti-cancer therapies that capitalize on the ability of viruses to reproduce in the body.
In animal studies, the new version dramatically reduced the size of human prostate cancer tumors grown in mice. Moreover, it completely eradicated the tumor mass in some of the animals, and it appears not to harm normal tissue.
“We took a crippled virus and essentially made it into a more effective killer of cancer cells,” says Ian Mohr, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Microbiology at NYU School of Medicine, who led the research and is an author of the study. “But we’ve only demonstrated this in mice. Clearly the next step is to see whether this more potent anti-tumor virus works in other animal models.”
“We think this new virus offers great promise as a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of patients with prostate cancer,” says Samir Taneja, M.D., Assistant Professor of Urology, an author of the study. “Eventually we hope to test this virus in humans but we still have many things to work out,” says Dr. Taneja, whose laboratory is focused on finding new therapeutic strategies for treating prostate cancer.
The new study appears in the July 17 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Viruses are usually associated with disease. In recent years, however, scientists have turned a bane into a potential good by taking advantage of the ability of viruses to infiltrate human cells, where they can then reproduce.
Viruses have developed this ability over the course of millions of years of evolution, and they are especially agile pirates, commandeering a cell’s own machinery to churn out more virus, and ultimately destroying the cell. The cell too has evolved its own defense against viral invasion.
Although this kind of viral research is still in its infancy — and it is far too early to say whether it will ever result in new cancer therapies — at least 10 different oncolytic (cancer-killing) viruses are, or are soon to be, in early clinical trials. Most of these viruses have been genetically engineered so that they will not cause disease, but will infect rapidly dividing cancer cells.
One of these viruses is the herpes simplex virus-1, well known as the cause of cold sores, but capable of causing a serious brain infection as well. In the early 1990s, scientists tinkered with two genes in the virus that disarmed its ability to cause the brain infection and its ability to reproduce in non-rapidly dividing cells.
The result was a weakened herpesvirus that didn’t cause disease, but reproduced in rapidly growing cancer cells. This herpesvirus, however, isn’t an ideal destroyer, says Dr. Mohr.
“Although the virus kills cancer cells, the process of weakening it often has a deleterious impact on its ability to replicate inside cells. The result is that the virus doesn’t completely destroy the tumor mass, and the surviving cancer cells can simply grow,” he says.
To get around this problem, Dr. Mohr’s group observed the effect of the genetically engineered herpesvirus on human cancer cells grown in a laboratory dish. Then they isolated the viral strain that was the most effective killer of cells and discovered that it contained an extra genetic mutation that enabled more robust reproduction of the virus.
This extra mutation switches the expression of a protein called Us11 to an earlier time in the infection cycle of the virus, which prevents the cell from mounting a response to stop viral replication.
In the new study, Drs. Mohr and Taneja and their associate Jennifer MacGregor found that the new version of the genetically engineered virus was far more effective in killing prostate cancer cells in an animal model than was the older version of the same virus.
The NYU team injected the new version of the genetically engineered herpesvirus with the added mutation directly into human prostate cancer tumors they had implanted into mice that had no immune systems.
In another group of mice, they injected the older version of the herpesvirus, and in the last group they injected an inert solution that didn’t contain virus.
Thirty-four days after the treatment, the tumors injected with two million virus particles of the new version were, on average, eight times smaller than the tumors injected with the older version of the virus.
Moreover, the tumor mass had completely disappeared in up to 40% of the animals injected with the new version of the virus.
The study was supported by a grant from the Department of Defense and an award from CapCure, the foundation for prostate cancer research established by Michael Milken.
