Using HIV and Measles virus to cure Cancer

[amiriot]

I found this intersting story on Vice and I just want to share.

And here's a daiy mail article about the clinical trials on Leukemia patients:

http://anon.projectarchive.net/?htt...ted-virus-causes-AIDS-experimental-trial.html

'It's a disabled virus, but it retains the one essential feature of HIV, which is the ability to insert new genes into cells,' Dr June explained.

Of the 30 leukemia patients who received the treatment, comprised of five adults and 25 children, 23 are still alive and 19 are in remission.

It's pretty exciting!

 

[noiraud]

Exciting, yes, but it doesn't really surprise me. At the risk of telling my age, back in the late 1960s, I was working on a presentation about the then-new procedure of heart transplants for a History class. At that point, I think Dr. Christian Barnard had just performed the first one and maybe a few others had been performed around the world. Anyway, in my research, I found information about experiments whose results suggested that cancer might be either caused by viruses or a virus in its own right that we simply didn't understand. Apparently, they had discovered that the common cold virus was the only thing they had found that was capable of killling of cancer cells -- but only in a petri dish.

Ever since, I've been wondering when medical science would find the funding to try applying that knowledge by experimenting with using a virus to cure cancer. And here we are seeing that happening a mere 46 years later. Bravo to these doctors and to you, amiriot, for bringing this development to our attention! :applause:

 

[gorgik9]

Exciting, yes, but it doesn't really surprise me. At the risk of telling my age, back in the late 1960s, I was working on a presentation about the then-new procedure of heart transplants for a History class. At that point, I think Dr. Christian Barnard had just performed the first one and maybe a few others had been performed around the world. Anyway, in my research, I found information about experiments whose results suggested that cancer might be either caused by viruses or a virus in its own right that we simply didn't understand. Apparently, they had discovered that the common cold virus was the only thing they had found that was capable of killling of cancer cells -- but only in a petri dish.

Ever since, I've been wondering when medical science would find the funding to try applying that knowledge by experimenting with using a virus to cure cancer. And here we are seeing that happening a mere 46 years later. Bravo to these doctors and to you, amiriot, for bringing this development to our attention! :applause:

As far as I know there's no question about, that some types of cancer (let's say cervical cancer) in most cases are caused by some type of virus (let's say human papillomavirus, HPV).

But what seems to me a questionable presupposition is, that cancer should be ONE SINGLE disease.

 

[amiriot]

Exciting, yes, but it doesn't really surprise me. At the risk of telling my age, back in the late 1960s, I was working on a presentation about the then-new procedure of heart transplants for a History class. At that point, I think Dr. Christian Barnard had just performed the first one and maybe a few others had been performed around the world. Anyway, in my research, I found information about experiments whose results suggested that cancer might be either caused by viruses or a virus in its own right that we simply didn't understand. Apparently, they had discovered that the common cold virus was the only thing they had found that was capable of killling of cancer cells -- but only in a petri dish.

Ever since, I've been wondering when medical science would find the funding to try applying that knowledge by experimenting with using a virus to cure cancer. And here we are seeing that happening a mere 46 years later. Bravo to these doctors and to you, amiriot, for bringing this development to our attention! :applause:

That's an interesting theory. Can you tell us what happened to your research?

Btw, I think it was mentioned in the Vice video that this actually can be doented way back in the 1800s where they injected rabies virus to cancer ridden prostitutes. I might be wrong but that sounds like it was under our noses the whole time! (The cure to cancer I mean)

 

[noiraud]

@gorgik9 - Sorry, if I implied that cancer is one single disease it was due to lazy writing. It may well be many different diseases, even multiple diseases cooperating within the body. Thanks for raising the issue.

@amiriot - What happened to my research? Well, I was only in high school at the time and too young to even appreciate the implications of it back then. So, like most teenagers, I tossed the research the minute I got my grade. I think I figured that, if I had read the research, so many great scientists and researchers would have read it, too and followed up on it. Again, it was only much later that I discovered what a vast amount of the funding for medical research is actually provided by the pharmaceutical companies that make billions (or more) from selling their chemotherapy drugs, et al. Consequently, of course, the follow-up research wasn't done. The fact that SOMEONE is finally looking into it suggests that at least some of their funding is coming from third-party sources (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation comes to mind as an example) that have no financial interest in the suffering of so many people. The bottom line, as you have indicated, is that an awful lot of time has been wasted when we could have been pursuing promising avenues of viable cancer treatment.

Let's hope this leads to actual cures and/or even vaccines against the Big C!