re: Healthcare vs Health

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'I have definitely hit the jackpot.' Advanced breast cancer disappears after new immunotherapy

Melissa Healy
By MELISSA HEALY
JUN 04, 2018 | 4:10 PM

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In the all-hands effort to harness the powers of the immune system to fight cancer, scientists have reported a new approach that eliminated all evidence of advanced-stage breast cancer in a 49-year-old woman who had run out of treatment options.

The patient’s “complete durable cancer regression” followed a single infusion of her own immune cells, which were painstakingly chosen for their ability to recognize and fight her tumors — then expanded into an army of 82 billion identical cells.

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Over the course of five months, they broke down and carried off the two large tumors growing on her chest wall, along with four tennis-ball-sized tumors lodged in her liver.

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In the fast-moving world of cancer research, the new report is being hailed as a development that could open a broad new front in cancer immunotherapy.
Existing immunotherapy drugs have shown little or no effectiveness against the kinds of solid tumors that account for 90% of cancer deaths, including those of the breast, prostate and colon. This new approach could change that, experts said.

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Indeed, Perkins’ response to the immunotherapy treatment is “unprecedented,” Laszlo G. Radvanyi of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research wrote in a commentary that accompanies the study. “We are now at the cusp of a major revolution.”

The success with Perkins’ breast cancer follows reports of similar responses in patients who had advanced-stage cancers of the bile duct, colon and cervix. All are examples of common cancers that don’t typically respond to other immunotherapies.

“This approach, while in its infancy, is capable of treating a wide variety of cancer types,” said Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, an immunotherapy pioneer at the National Cancer Institute who led the team that treated Perkins.

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Groundbreaking breast cancer treatment saves woman's life
2,522 views



CBS Evening News
Published on Jun 4, 2018

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Judy Perkins battled cancer for years before she found Dr. Steven Rosenberg, a pioneer in harnessing the immune system to fight cancer. His approach helped to save her life, even keeping her cancer free more than two years later. CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook explains.

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'Bernard avait raison. Le germe n'est rien, c'est le terrain qui est tout.'

('Bernard was right. The microbe is nothing, the soil is everything.')

Louis Pasteur to Claude Bernard...

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NEWS 17 SEPTEMBER 2018
UPDATE 17 SEPTEMBER 2018 CORRECTION 19 SEPTEMBER 2018

Mass resignation guts board of prestigious Cochrane Collaboration

Governing board of the evidence-based medicine group may now be dissolved entirely.

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The board of the Cochrane Collaboration, a prestigious group that reviews health evidence, has been reduced from 13 to 6 members, following a controversial vote to expel a member for the first time in its 25-year existence.

On 14 September, Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Cochrane’s Nordic centre and a member of its governing board, posted a statement on the centre’s website announcing that he had been expelled as a member of the Cochrane Collaboration, after a vote by 6 of 13 of the board’s members.

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Gøtzsche says that no justification was given for the expulsion but that he was accused by the board of bringing the organization into “disrepute”. The organization — which carries out systematic reviews of health-care interventions — told Nature it had received “numerous complaints” about Gøtzsche after the publication earlier this year of a critique he co-authored, entitled ‘The Cochrane HPV vaccine review was incomplete and ignored important evidence of bias’ and published in the BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

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Gøtzsche’s statement says that there is a “growing top-down authoritarian culture and an increasingly commercial business model” taking root at Cochrane that “threaten the scientific, moral and social objectives of the organization”?. He has also been an outspoken critic of Cochrane’s relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. (Cochrane’s policies state that its reviews cannot be “funded or conducted by commercial sponsors or commercial sources with a real or potential vested interest in the findings of a specific review”.)

David Hammerstein Mintz, a board member who stepped down in protest, said some members thought that Gøtzsche’s critical views of Cochrane were “disloyal”. (Nature has approached the collaboration for comment on these points and is awaiting its response.) “It might have been a headache, but the harm done by expelling Peter is much greater than any inconvenience caused by scientific debate,” he says.

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RENOWNED VEGAN DOCTOR TO DEBATE PALEO DIET ON JOE ROGAN PODCAST
Cardiologist Joel Kahn, MD, anticipates debating about the paleo movement, the ketogenic diet, fasting, and the “carnivore movement” with pro-paleo author Chris Kresser and host Joe Rogan.

by NICOLE AXWORTHY
AUGUST 30, 2018

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Renowned vegan cardiologist Joel Kahn, MD, will appear on the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) podcast on September 27 for a debate with pro-paleo author Chris Kresser.

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Craig Thompson, the president and chief executive of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has been among the most outspoken proponents of this renewed focus on metabolism. In Thompson’s analogy, the Warburg effect can be thought of as a social failure: a breakdown of the nutrient-sharing agreement that single-celled organisms signed when they joined forces to become multicellular organisms. His research showed that cells need to receive instructions from other cells to eat, just as they require instructions from other cells to divide.

Thompson hypothesized that if he could identify the mutations that lead a cell to eat more glucose than it should, it would go a long way toward explaining how the Warburg effect and cancer begin. But Thompson’s search for those mutations didn’t lead to an entirely new discovery. Instead, it led him to AKT, a gene already well known to molecular biologists for its role in promoting cell division. Thompson now believes AKT plays an even more fundamental role in metabolism. The protein created by AKT is part of a chain of signaling proteins that is mutated in up to 80 percent of all cancers. Thompson says that once these proteins go into overdrive, a cell no longer worries about signals from other cells to eat; it instead stuffs itself with glucose. Thompson discovered he could induce the “full Warburg effect” simply by placing an activated AKT protein into a normal cell. When that happens, Thompson says, the cells begin to do what every single-celled organism will do in the presence of food: eat as much as it can and make as many copies of itself as possible. When Thompson presents his research to high-school students, he shows them a slide of mold spreading across a piece of bread. The slide’s heading — “Everyone’s first cancer experiment” — recalls Warburg’s observation that cancer cells will carry out fermentation at almost the same rate of wildly growing yeasts.

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Given Warburg’s own story of historical neglect, it’s fitting that what may turn out to be one of the most promising cancer metabolism drugs has been sitting in plain sight for decades. That drug, metformin, is already widely prescribed to decrease the glucose in the blood of diabetics (76.9 million metformin prescriptions were filled in the United States in 2014). In the years ahead, it’s likely to be used to treat — or at least to prevent — some cancers. Because metformin can influence a number of metabolic pathways, the precise mechanism by which it achieves its anticancer effects remains a source of debate. But the results of numerous epidemiological studies have been striking. Diabetics taking metformin seem to be significantly less likely to develop cancer than diabetics who don’t — and significantly less likely to die from the disease when they do. Near the end of his life, Warburg grew obsessed with his diet. He believed that most cancer was preventable and thought that chemicals added to food and used in agriculture could cause tumors by interfering with respiration. He stopped eating bread unless it was baked in his own home. He would drink milk only if it came from a special herd of cows, and used a centrifuge at his lab to make his cream and butter. Warburg’s personal diet is unlikely to become a path to prevention. But the Warburg revival has allowed researchers to develop a hypothesis for how the diets that are linked to our obesity and diabetes epidemics — specifically, sugar-heavy diets that can result in permanently elevated levels of the hormone insulin — may also be driving cells to the Warburg effect and cancer.

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During Warburg’s lifetime, insulin’s effects on metabolic pathways were even less well understood. But given his ego, it’s highly unlikely that he would have considered the possibility that anything other than damaged respiration could cause cancer. He died sure that he was right about the disease. Warburg framed a quote from Max Planck and hung it above his desk: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

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Warburg framed a quote from Max Planck and hung it above his desk: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

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Emphasize not being fatasses

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Plumbing, auto mechanics, electricians, appliance repair

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No one wants to read a book on here. Boil all of that down to a paragraph or two and I am sure someone will engage you; maybe even marry you.

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Researchers Explore a Cancer Paradox Healthy cells carry a surprising number of cancer-linked mutations, but they don’t turn into tumors. What’s holding them back?

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Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health
A new study on Civil War prisoners adds to the evidence suggesting that our parents’—and even grandparents’—experiences might affect our DNA.

OLGA KHAZAN
OCT 16, 2018

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Often when I complain to my therapist about how stressed out I am by a problem I’m having, she says a variation on the same thing:

“Well, like all Ashkenazi Jews, you have a lot of intergenerational trauma. You know, because of everything that’s ... happened.”


Of course you’re anxious, she seems to say; you’re Jewish! I think it’s meant to help me feel more at peace with my emotions, but I must admit I find this response deeply unsatisfying.

I am, of course, grateful that my life is easier than the lives of my relatives—Jewish and otherwise—who survived World War II. At the same time, I can’t do anything about the fact that the Holocaust happened, so I don’t want to spend time thinking about its effects on my cortisol levels. I can, however, write the perfect email to get myself out of a scrape, or find a way to stop thinking about why I didn’t get some plaudit or another.

“The Jews have nothing to do with it!” I always want to say in response, as though I’m debunking some George Soros–related conspiracy.

But a growing body of evidence suggests my therapist might be right and I’m wrong.

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The most recent chapter is a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week by researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research. They found that the sons of Union Army soldiers who endured grueling conditions as prisoners of war were more likely to die young than the sons of soldiers who were not prisoners. This is despite the fact that the sons were born after the war, so they couldn’t have experienced its horrors personally. In other words, it seemed like the stresses of war were getting passed down between generations.

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Because the study authors controlled for other factors that might have influenced the sons’ longevity, like socioeconomic status and the quality of the parents’ marriages, they believe this effect on mortality is working through epigenetics, or the process by which genes are switched on and off. These epigenetic changes are inherited by later generations, setting diseases in motion.

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Jirtle explains the epigenome as a type of software that runs on the computer-like cell. The epigenome can affect lots of different cells, just as a software program can be run on many different computers. He thinks this study might help explain why states in the southern United States—which had more severe food shortages during and after the Civil War—have worse health outcomes today.

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Epigenetic links have also been established in animal studies. For example, mice that have been taught to fear the smell of cherries when it was paired with an electric shock had children and grandchildren that also showed signs of anxiety when exposed to the odor, even though they had never “learned” the painful association.

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First is the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly. This transformation is incredibly mystical, wonderful and intensely interesting, both as an allegory and a problem-solving exercise. Scientists asked “If DNA explains the production of new species, what happens to genetic information before and after getting into that cocoon?” The answer was nothing. The genes of the caterpillar were identical to those of the butterfly. Creationists had a field day, proclaiming DNA useless, not contributing to an organism’s form. The geneticists were baffled – they knew genes contributed to an organism’s appearance.

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Epigenetics explains the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly, foetus to adult, and also shows us ways to reprogram the genetic code, pushing cells back up Waddington’s troughs. The Human Genome Project is complete but now collaborations are underway for the Human Epigenome Project – you can bet that this time you won’t be 70% similar to a banana.

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