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Can Cancer Be Good for You?

April 9, 2015 by

Your thermoglampers are pixilated by your horples. You'll need to get undressed.
Your thermoglampers are pixilated by your horples. You’ll need to get undressed.
If you read Neil Steinberg’s fine article this morning you know that getting diagnosed with cancer is scary. As he, correctly, points out it’s no longer the OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M GONNA DIE kind of scary, but it still gives one pause. For the record I have survived it and a dear friend of mine recently did so as well. Even so, it’s not welcome news. Which is why you took one look at the title of today’s blog and said “Well no, asshole, it can’t.” And this is why I love science. Science doesn’t jump to conclusions. It assembles facts, assesses their meanings and then compares results. If the same results keep kicking up, no matter what scientists might have believed starting out, then science has discovered a truth. And truth leads to facts. And facts are simply facts. They don’t care what you believe, they simply are. And once they exist they are used to discover new facts. And so on and so on.

So what does all of that have to do with the title of today’s blog? Quite a bit actually.

Justine Alford, over at IFLScience.com, reports that someone screwed up an experiment and stumbled onto a possible cure for cancer.

Don’t you hate when that happens?

Laboratory studies do not often go as planned, and while this is usually a source of endless frustration amongst scientists, some wonderful discoveries have been made by accident in the past, such as the pacemaker and penicillin. Now, researchers may have happened upon something that could turn out to be a powerful agent against a particularly aggressive type of cancer.

After endeavoring to find ways to prevent cancerous cells from dying during experiments, scientists from Stanford have discovered that it is possible to force leukemia cells to mature into a type of immune cell that, ironically, may help the body clear up other tumor cells. The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is a rapidly-progressing cancer of the immature cells that differentiate into white blood cells, or lymphocytes. There are several different types of ALL, which are classified based on the type of lymphocyte (B cell or T cell) the cancer originates from, and how mature these cells are.

For the current study, scientists were investigating the most common type of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, known as as precursor B cell ALL, or B-ALL. As the name suggests, this cancer originates from a rogue B cell that became stuck at an early stage of maturation. These immature cells are unable to fully differentiate into normal B cells, partly because they lost some cellular molecules, known as transcription factors, which are required for their development. Transcription factors are proteins that stick to bits of DNA and then switch certain genes on or off.

B-ALL is a particularly aggressive cancer with a poor prognosis, so scientists from Stanford were keen to learn more about it with the hope of finding ways to tackle it, but they were struggling to keep cells isolated from a patient alive in the lab. “We were throwing everything at them to help them survive,” lead researcher Ravi Majeti said in a news release.

After exposing the cells to a certain transcription factor, the scientists observed that they began to change size and shape, adopting the characteristic morphology of a type of white blood cell responsible for gobbling up damaged cells or foreign material, known as a macrophage.

The team then began characterizing these cells in the lab, which revealed that they expressed similar genes to normal macrophages and were able to perform various macrophage functions, such as engulfing bacteria. Furthermore, when they added these reprogrammed cells into mice without immune systems, they did not cause cancer.

The researchers also have reason to believe that these converted cells will not only be neutralized with regards to their former identity as a cancerous cell, but they may also help the body mount an immune response against other cancerous cells lingering in the body. That’s because macrophages collect tags from abnormal cells or foreign material ready to flag down other members of the immune system for attack. Since these cells came from cancerous cells, they will possess signals that identify them as cancer.

The next stage of the project will therefore involve investigating ways to achieve this cell conversion in a clinically viable way, which has already been done for one other type of cancer.

Think of it this way, just as whiskey can turn a good woman naughty, these macrophages can turn a cancer cell good. Or, at least, kill them.

If scientists can make this work consistently this is how your world would go;

You go to the doctor, get diagnosed with cancer, give up some blood, have your mean, ugly, cancer cells treated and turned into happy, loving, macrophages, have those wonderful things injected into you and then you’d go home.

That’s it. You’re done.

Now you can go live long and prosper.

Granted, that doesn’t actually make cancer “good” for you, but it does make it a hell of a lot less scary.

She Blinded Me with Science! from DoUseeWhatEyec on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Joys of Science

March 27, 2020 by Bill McCormick

Sciencing in America.

Okay, I do have some fun, and uplifting stuff to share, but I’ve got to get the public service stuff out of the way first.

  1. Don’t drink bleach – It can kill you
  2. Don’t gargle warm water – Viruses live in your blood, not your throat. And, without a specific medical need, it can make you a human petri dish, prone to fungal infections and worse
  3. Masturbation will boost your immune system – So will regular sex. If you’re sheltering with someone, who’s willing to share their body, try and find a nice mix between the two. No matter what, however, it won’t stop the virus
  4. Ibuprofen & Advil have nothing to do with your lungs – No over the counter pain med interacts with your respiratory system. Go ahead and take what you need. I can promise they won’t kill you
  5. Ladies, there is no such thing as a Corona Virus Inspector who needs to see your breasts to confirm “positive air flow.” Quit falling for that trick
  6. Quit buying all the lupus and malaria medicines. The president was completely wrong about this. They won’t cure you, can possibly kill you if you don’t have the diseases they’re designed to treat, and you could be causing someone who truly needs them to suffer

[Read more…] about The Joys of Science

Filed Under: News Tagged With: 3d printing, corona virus, covid-19, resin

Fast Tracking For Fun and Profit

January 16, 2020 by Bill McCormick

Getting there in record time.

Last week, on The Big Wakeup Call, Ryan and I discussed a new Alzheimer’s drug that was zooming towards public use. And I mean ZOOOOOOOMING! From a preliminary, and vague, research paper released in November of 2019, to opening trials on humans in February of 2020 kind of zooming. That kind of time line is essentially unheard of in the world of medicines. I’ve written, on several occasions, about the trials and tribulations facing new treatments for Alzheimer’s. The FDA’s own rules would seem to preclude any such speed, but here we are. The company, called Green Valley, is based in Shanghai and reports to the Chinese government. In 2007 they released a “cancer cure” that was so ineffective it led to millions of dollars in lawsuits and complaints.
[Read more…] about Fast Tracking For Fun and Profit

Filed Under: News Tagged With: alzheimer's, cybernetics, fast track, implants, medicine

From Here to Eternity

November 21, 2019 by Bill McCormick

It just keeps on going on.

There are numerous long lived people in the Bible. There are others enumerated in the pantheon of religions that preceded the books of the children of Abraham. Eastern religions have their own immortals. In all cases immortality is the gift of the sacred. Even the evil possessors of this gift are considered above mere mortals. But that may be changing. Last year I noted that scientists had discovered how to work with the gene that causes aging, possibly even stopping it completely. There has been a spate of other developments as well. All the way back in the good old days of 2016 I wrote about how scientists were overcoming the limitations that prevented humans uploading their minds into cybernetic beings. [Read more…] about From Here to Eternity

Filed Under: News Tagged With: cybernetic, eternal, immortal, medicine, orbiter, overlords, slaves

Let’s Get Small

September 5, 2019 by Bill McCormick

Teeny Tiny & Terrific!

Back in the ’60s two guys named Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby wrote a story about how science could shrink people and inject them into other people to solve urgent medical issues. In the case of the story it was a soon-to-be lethal blood clot. The story was so cool that Harry Kleiner wrote a movie script about it and Richard Fleischer directed it, and they called the result FANTASTIC VOYAGE. If you click that link you’ll be subjected to 1966’s common sexism. Sorry about that. The film was made in 1966. But you’ll also see something unthought of at the time; the use of the human body as a location. Up until then all depictions of humans in sci-fi had the humans being sacred beings who did things, not some vessels that could have things done to them. The movie fascinated many, terrified some, and made stupid money for its time.
[Read more…] about Let’s Get Small

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ant-man, lasers, micro, miniature, shrinking, tiny

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