TECHNOLOGY TO THE RESCUE

Linda and her Mom

At our Rams Hill place, maybe 12 years ago

Multiple myeloma is cancer of the plasma cells.  It is a nasty brute, but can be held at bay and sometimes killed outright by means of bone marrow transplants. 

It transpires that a cancer researcher at UW/Fred Hutch found himself wrestling with just this ugly brute.  With the help of his wife, who is an oncologist, he seems to have conquered it.  But, I guess, this close encounter with mortality led him to think outside the box.  The result was the Center for Cancer Innovation at UW, and later a startup called All4Cure.  Some of the finances for the latter come from Crowd Sourcing (you know what that is, right?).  The whole endeavor relies to an incredible degree on technology (the cloud, next generation DNA sequencing, mathematical data-mining, that sort of thing.   (If you ever doubted the value of $150,000 spent on your kid, and that kid is into tech stuff, doubt no more.)  

  

Well, anyway, this is a happy story and I am happy that Dick Ingwall brought it to my attention.

Read both links; you will be happy you did..

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/well/live/a-cancer-resarcher-takes-cancer-personally.html

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/health-tech-podcast-researcher-taking-cancer-data-crowdsourcing/ 

AN ANTI-CANCER VACCINE?

Linda and friend

Santorini, late 1980s

Well, dammit! I am sure I have written something about this before, but I can’t find it.  (There are 561 of these little blogs so far.  Have you read them all?)  So, instead of tossing out a Comment I am forced to publish a new blog entry (#562).  But don’t worry, it will be short.  I am scheduled to play some golf in about 30 minutes.

Some people at Stanford are experimenting with what they are pleased to call a vaccine.  On mice, natch – although a human trial seem in the offing.  They inject two molecules (well, squirts containing lots of them) directly into the tumor – which promptly dies.  Better yet, this somehow stimulates the immune system to search out and destroy similar tumor cells throughout the body.

  

Wow!  Good news!  Let’s hope it pans out.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/injection-prompts-mouse-immune-system-destroy-tumors

A NEW, BUT SCARY, RESEARCH ANGLE

Beautiful Linda

Why I write all these things

Boy, this is heavy!  Scientists are examining a mutant protein that is deathly dangerous as a possible cure for cancer!  Yikes!

Okay, so in case you didn’t know (a very likely condition):  There is a condition called Huntington’s disease, or Huntington’s chorea, that is very rare, inherited, invariably fatal and, from some stuff in Wikipedia, a slow and damned unpleasant way to die.  It is caused by a mutation in a gene called Huntingtin, which is transcribed into a protein of the same name that does all sorts of important but – to me and medical science – mysterious things.  In H disease the H gene has a segment with an abnormal number of the three-nucleotide repeats, CAG (cytosine, adenine, guanine,) all in a row.  H disease attacks nerves in the brain.

Well, some researchers happened to notice that victims of H disease rarely, if ever, suffer from cancer.  To explore this observation they infected mice (poor long-suffering little devils – what would we do without them?) with human ovarian cancer, then turned the mutant H protein loose on them.  And - what do you know? - the cancer went away.  Subsequent experiments show that it is equally toxic to cancer cells in general.  Why this is so is not apparent to me, for sure, and I suspect not to the researchers either.

Well, we don’t want to save people from cancer only to turn their brains to mush.  Obviously a lot more money and time, and mice, are required.  But this is intriguing.

As a grumpy aside – why doesn’t Elon Musk spend his countless millions doing something like curing Huntington’s disease, rather than putting a damned automobile into orbit?

IMMUNOTHERAPY MARCHES ON!

LINDA AND BUTCH

                                                       The original "fraidy cat"

There is a type of OVCA known as “hypercalcemic small cell ovarian cancer” that is exceedingly rare, strikes young women, and (heretofore) had been considered incurable.  However, recently four desperate young victims “banded together”, via the internet, and demanded that their doctors try immunotherapy – despite the fact that medical science was certain that it wouldn’t work.  Well, what the heck – it DID work!  The young women are alive and prospering.  Now medical science is scrambling to understand why.  And “they” are testing some ideas.

We’ll beat the sombitch yet!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/health/ovarian-cancer-immunotherapy.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fhealth&action=click&contentCollection=health&region=rank&module=pa ckage&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

ONCOLYTIC VIRUSES: (now there's a sexy name)

LINDA AND CAROLYN IN SPLIT MOUNTAIN GORGE

Sure wish they were here now

Here is a meaty, somewhat lengthy, but quite understandable and even entertaining essay on using virus as a weapon against cancer.  Not just any old virus, obviously – specially selected or genetically modified virus called “oncolytic viruses”.  One, related to the herpes virus, is in present use against melanoma.  Another has been shown to be effective against glioblastoma (Senator McCain, take note).  Oncolytic viruses are a hot topic right now. 

It appears that an oncolytic virus (OV) introduced into a tumor cell will do the old virus trick; use the tumor DNA to manufacture millions of baby OV, eventually causing the tumor cell to burst, thus releasing more OV to attack more tumor cells.  And etc., etc., etc. 

But what about metastases? Well, it seems to transpire that  fragments of exploded tumor cell floating around in the blood stream somehow alert the immune system to the fact that something is wrong and – ideally – hunt down more such cells, and snuff them out.

Ideally.  Much work being done.  Cross your fingers.

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2018/oncolytic-viruses-to-treat-cancer?cid=eb_govdel

CHECK OUT DAD'S FAMILY TREE

 

Linda and her cousin Elsie

On a so-so Borrego flower year

 

I guess this should have been obvious, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to me.  Men as well as women, can pass on an elevated risk of ovarian cancer.  They can’t get it, of course, but they can pass it on to their daughters.  Thus, if you are female and your PATERNAL grandmother had ovarian cancer, you need to be especially careful*.  As you all certainly know, males have one X and one Y chromosome, whereas females carry two X’s.  When a zygote forms. Mom contributes one chromosome (inevitably an X), and Dad provides another – and half the time it will be an X, too.  If you get two Xs you will be a girl, and if Dad inherited a mutated X from his mom, you will have it also. Bummer!

It turns out that the mutated X also makes a male more susceptible to prostate cancer.  Another bummer! There ought to be a law against this sort of thing.

http://www.newser.com/story/255480/womens-risk-for-ovarian-cancer-may-come-from-dad.html

*Obviously, if your maternal grandmother had ovarian cancer you should be equally cautious, or even more so.

 



CANCER AND THE STOCK MARKET

 

KING AND QUEEN OF THE BEAUMONT HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR PROM

66 years later

 

  Do you hate cancer?  Do you have piles of money sitting around, waiting to be invested?  Well, if you are like me your answers will be” of course” and “get serious”.  However, if you can answer “yes” to both questions, it behooves you to read this article, from a recent Economist magazine:

https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21736176-progress-developing-treatments-makes-oncology-research-favourite

The way things seem to work nowadays is that tiny firms are created to investigate and possibly exploit new research breakthroughs.  These little fish are then swallowed tail and chin whiskers by much larger fish – collectively known as Big Pharma.  These large fish have the resources to do the requisite clinical trials, and wrestle with the FDA over the results.  And, the article implies, the FDA is uncommonly quick to render a verdict on a cancer drug because, “people are dying, and they are dying now.”

All this takes money.  Ideally the Feds would allocate enough to support a healthy research program, but they don’t.  And, there aren’t enough Jeff Bezos’s and Bill Gates’s to go around.  To some extent, it’s up to us. We can give our money directly to research organizations, as I do with Linda’s fund at Fred Hutch, or we can invest it in little-fish firms doing development work.  Then, when (and if) our little fish gets engulfed by the likes of Pfizer or Merck we can invest our profits in another little fish.  Or, if your anti-capitalist soul rebels at profit, send the filthy stuff to me.  I’ll put it to good work!

 



SOME INTERESTING BIO-STUFF

Linda in the San Juans

 

The first successful “sequencing” of the human genome was announced 16 years ago.  It had taken years, cost $400 million, and required a machine the size of a phone booth.  But science (well, technology) stumbles on.  An NIH Directors blog just announced that an even better job can now be accomplished using a device no bigger than the gadget I use to trim my beard.  Moreover, the cost now is about $23,000 and takes a matter of hours.  Hell, if you are an Alaskan (they can fix anything), with a Ph.D in physics, you can buy a kit for $1000 and build your own!

What does this have to do with ovarian cancer?  Not much, directly.  However, as genetic sequencing grows quicker and cheaper, the argument that wholesale testing of the entire female population for suspicious mutations grows progressively weaker.

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2018/02/06/sequencing-human-genome-with-pocket-sized-nanopore-device/

 



GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE

The second cutest picture ever taken

Now here is something I consider very good news; almost a “breakthrough”, in fact.

From the very beginning of this blog I have bemoaned the lack of a screening mechanism capable of detecting ovarian cancer at an early stage, when it is most curable.  The Fred Hutch team I endeavored to help was focused on that goal.  We learned some important bio-stuff and published some useful papers – but the test we sought eluded us.  Now, however, success is winking at us just over the hill.

People at Johns Hopkins have succeeded in devising a test involving blood samples that has shown some to positively great success in detecting eight kinds of solid tumors.  From my perspective the best news is that its sensitivity to OVCA is better than 90%!  And its specificity – meaning ability to avoid false positives – also is very high.

The technical details – how they do it – are left unexplained, which is fine because I doubt if I would understand them, anyway.  In brief, they scan for bits of tumor DNA, other bits of certain mutations known to be associated with cancer – as well as eight proteins that somehow are involved.  And all for less than $500, they claim.  At that rate you could do the whole damned country for less than about $150 billion.  Peanuts, these days.

So, there, Kristen, maybe your “simple blood test” is in the offing, at long last.  Of course, “more work needs to be done”, and more grant money provided.  But, I am optimistic. 

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/blood-test-detects-several-cancer-types