I spent over twenty years working for a company that pioneered immunological medicines, including cancer treatments. And with cancer treatments no one ever said cure. What they talk about is survival rates; % of patients surviving six months or twelve months or twenty four months.
“In 2010, Doug Olson became the second person in the world to receive CAR-T cell therapy, an experimental tactic to engineer his own immune cells to fight cancer. His doctors had tempered expectations for how well it would fight off Olson’s chronic lymphocytic leukemia, an incurable blood cancer — it was a last stab in the dark, one with no guarantees.”
…
“We can say it was a cure for Doug, because these are the most mature and oldest results available reported in scientific literature. Because they were the first treated,” June said. “Ten years on, no leukemia cells, and we still have CAR-T cells that are on patrol and surveillance from leukemia.”
The breakthrough is the presence after ten years of sustaining populations of functional immune cells.
“Over the next several months, the data suggested that the patients’ CAR-T cells were transforming from the killer CD8 T cells and into CD4 T cells, or “helper” T cells. These tend to remain in the body and help form a long-term immune memory, but typically are less involved in actively killing diseased cells.
In the years that followed, the CAR-T cell population did what our own natural T cells normally do: shift back and forth between types. By the nine-year mark, the researchers could only find CD4 cells, suggesting that the cells had stabilized into a long-term population of helper T cells.”
The article stated that, “There are now approved CAR-T therapies for six different indications including different types of leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. But nearly all other patients treated with CAR-T therapy did eventually experience a relapse of cancer, making the enduring response from these first two patients extraordinary.”
Nevertheless, this is a cancer cure. What can work once can be reverse engineered for other cancers. Hopefully the research on why this one cell therapy successfully enabled the human immune system to completely eliminate this one particular cancer can be the key to a deeper understanding of how the body defeats cancers in general.
As the Primary and General Off-Year Elections creep up on us I’m interested in getting posts from readers about their local political scene. Places like Texas, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota are represented by readers here. Even Canada and Australia have local political stories that some of our readers might want to provide. So if you are interested in sharing your perspective on your local politics, get in touch. Either leave a comment or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net. Anonymity is, of course, perfectly fine and if you prefer to discuss local cultural issues instead of or in addition to politics that also is encouraged. I’ll add this want-ad to the footer of the posts for a while to see if I can entice any readers to write.
The other side. My sister was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer around 6 years ago, which would have been a quick death sentence except for an introduction of similar drug to the above called Keytruda. At $20,000 per monthly dose, it’s only for the heavily insured. Using Keytruda, my sister bought a fairly normal extra 5 years of life but that came to an end last October as her immune system attacked and destroyed her lungs over a 5 week period.
My condolences for your sister. A very good friend of mine was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He lasted something over three years. There were so many chemotherapy agents, cell therapy procedures. And as you say the costs were astronomical. And the side effects were terrible. Our knowledge of how the immune system works is primitive. And not because the people working on it are stupid. The intricacies of the human organism and of the immune system in particular are staggering. Maybe in twenty years if we spend a trillion dollars we may understand it. I wonder if we ever will.
AI might eventually map or model living systems to some extent, but I suspect that a true understanding is quite beyond human capability. As a system becomes complicated to the border of chaos, the more likely that any given input will yield an unintended consequence.
And that goes for 20 trillion-dollar economies as much as a human body.
I agree. The idea that the genetic code was just a big tinker toy that they could decipher into some fixed number of proteins that held all the answers to life was a mirage. The complexity seems to increase the farther in we go.
As for economies, we’ve got our best man, Joe Biden, working on that. I think I’ll join the preppers.