Weakness in virus gives hope for cancer cure

ScienceDaily has the news.

Serious Weakness Found In Virus Responsible For Most Cervical Cancer

The virus responsible for most cases of cervical cancer has a serious weakness which may provide hope for new treatments for the disease.

Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a virus which causes several types of cancer but is particularly associated with cervical cancer, has developed clever ways of hiding in the body, but researchers at the University of Leeds have found that its ability to trick the body's first line of defence leaves it vulnerable to attack from a second defence system.

This sounds like a promising line, and hopefully the new knowledge can lead to a treatment for this virus, before it causes cancer.

Why medical experiments matter

A couple of days ago, Orac wrote a long post about animal testing - Bad scientific arguments in the service of "animal rights" activism.

Personally, I dislike furs and am against unnecessary animal testing ("unnecessary" of course being the hard-to-define keyword). Necessary testing, such as medical testing, on the other hand, I'm all for, and Orac gives many good arguments for why I should continue endorsing it.

One of the good examples that Orac mentions Dr. Judah Folkman, who did some critical cancer research on mice.

Folkman found a mouse tumor model that mimicked this behavior and in the early 1990s did a series of pioneering experiments. In a strain Lewis lung carcinoma cells of low metastatic potential (LLC-LM), when cells are injected into C57BL/6 mice and allowed to grow subcutaneously, if the tumor is left alone, mice develop only microscopic lung metastases. These metastases do not grow and kill the mouse. If, however, the primary cancer is removed, then many large lung metastases grow rapidly. The results of the experiment above strongly implied that the primary tumor is secreting something that suppresses the growth of microscopic metastases. After this, the Folkman group did what we like to call "brute force" science, collecting mouse urine and analyzing it for tumor suppressive activity until they were able to purify a single 38 kDa peptide, which they designated angiostatin. This involved analyzing literally gallons of mouse urine. (Who said science isn't glamorous?) Once Folkman's group had a bunch of angiostatin on hand, it peformed the following experiment. Two groups of mice were injected with LLC-LM and the tumors allowed to grow to a certain size, after which they were surgically removed. One group was treated with angiostatin, and the control group with saline. The result was that the control group developed massive lung metastases and died, while the group treated with angiostatin had microsocopic lung metastases that never grew beyond a ball of cells. Dr. Folkman then demonstrated that it was the inhibition of angiogenesis by the angiostatin that kept these tumors in check. Ultimately, he used a similar method to discover endostatin, and later he demonstrated that endostatin could induced tumor dormancy in mice. I trust that the reader can see how these seminal preclinical observations about angiogenesis would have been virtually impossible without animal models, given that angiogenesis requires the interaction between tumor cells, cells in blood vessels, and the surrounding tissue stroma to occur.

Of course, after this was done, Folkman could move on to testing on humans, but the animal testing was vital.

Just to put Orac's example into perspective, the very next day the NY Times, had an article about one of the humans involved in the tests - A Daring Treatment, a Little Girl’s Survival. The treatment is still being researched, and the data is so far anecdotal, but it seems promising. This means that it looks like Folman's experiments on mice will end up saving the lives of many humans, including the small girl mentioned in the NY Times article.

I'm sorry, but if I have to choose between humans and laboratory breed mice, I'll go for the humans.

This might revolutionize cancer treatment

One of the big issues with cancer treatment is finding the cancer in time to do something about it. At ScienceDaily there is some news which might help in this regard.

New Technology For Cancer Screening Listens For The Signs Of Cancer

Cancer-sensing devices built as cheaply and efficiently as wristwatches -- using many of the same operating principles -- could change the way clinicians detect, treat and monitor cancer in patients.

A device which can be mass-produced cheaply sounds like good news indeed. This would mean that it could be widely distributed to family doctors (presuming it's easy to use), and save people hospital visits for a diagnosis.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an acoustic sensor that can report the presence of small amounts of mesothelin, a molecule associated with a number of cancers including mesothelioma, as they attach to the sensor's surface.

I am sure this will result in a number of false positives, but I'd rather have false positives, than diagnoses that come to late to do anything about it.

Of course, it's important to note that not all types of cancers would be possible to detect this way.

According to the researchers, the study is a proof of principle, demonstrating a technique that might work for the detection of nearly any biomarker -- a collective term for a molecular signal that denotes the presence of disease.

"It is one thing to be able to identify biomarkers for a disease, but it is another to be able to find them in blood quickly and easily at very low concentrations," said Anthony Dickherber, a graduate student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. "We envision that, one day, doctors can use an array of our sensors as a sort of laboratory in their office, where they could use a quick blood sample to detect or monitor the signs of cancer."

I hope that the proof of principle can be reproduced, and that this device will become available as fast as possible. If they are right, I can't see any downside to the device. However, it would require the device to be at least as reliable in detecting cancers than current methods (though more false positives would be acceptable) for it to become a reliable first step of diagnosis.

A good example of a field, engineering, bringing its expertise to another field, medicine, to help solve a problem. Hopefully it will fulfill its potential.