S48 Ep35 Very briefly (me) but the segment was more than half of the show. By having the first trial with Glioblastoma stricken patients who, until now, carried an automatic death sentence that saw a maximum of 10 months to live from initial prognosis, they chose to take on the most aggressive and severe form of cancer that exists. Glio manifests itself as a growing cancerous brain tumor. My own father died of this about 5 years ago. It was thoroughly devastating to him, and he only lasted for about 5 months after prognosis. The promises seen of this new cancer therapy have so far extended surviving to 15 months after prognosis in 15 of the patients. Three patients have actually been able to completely remove all of their tumor. One of these three individuals has gone a full 3 years since the tumor has been gone and still shows no sign of cancer. It uses Polio therapy. In some manner, the introduction of anti-Polio vaccine, into the patient, helps teach immune system T-cells to recognize cancer as undesirable and act to remove it. So far, they are trying to figure out how long T-cells remember their 'lesson' and keep removing cancer cells. They also use chemo therapy in conjunction with the entire treatment with better results than before. They estimated that it looks so promising that there might be an actual cure for cancer in 4-5 years. They also spoke of being able to prevent cancer altogether. They were very happy about such progress in only the first trial. One neurosurgeon, working directly with Glio patients for 50 years, said, "For the first time in my entire career, I see enough coming together to be optimistic."
To be pedantic: a cure for this particular type of cancer. 'Cancer' isn't a disease, it's more a very broad type of disease.
Amazing stuff, from memory a T helper cells would need reminding say along the line of vaccine does like Tetnus for example you get boosters through your life. Once the T cells have the correct protein key to bind with the cell the body treats it like any other unwanted infection. Interested to know how Chemo helps with that, my understanding was the Chemo reduces the bodies immune response.
I believe Chemo is used to attempt to kill the tumor to stop or slow its growth. In my father's case, they even took the trouble to operate on a large cyst that was on the tumor.
That would make more sense use targeted Chemo to stop the growth of the tumour an then activate the T Cells to remove it. In your fathers case it may have been a case of remove the Cyst to either reduce pressure around the area or a semi explorative op, go in with the view to remove the Cyst an see if they can remove the tumour at the same time.
I really do hope that more of these sorts of treatments get to see the light of day quicker. I know of a number of other products in different pharmaceutical fields that didn't end up taking off as they should thanks to a combination of ineptitude and dodgy dealing. Of course there's always the other side to things in that often "miracle" cures don't end up being quite as effective as originally envisioned. For this reason I'm holding off excitement until such a procedure is actually commonplace.
And sometimes it is down to some random element (unlucky for these people, lucky for science) : http://arstechnica.com/science/2016...g-people-but-kickstarted-parkinsons-research/
