Cancer... the tide is turning.

FTA: During the 15-year period, the cancer death rate among men dropped by 19.2 percent, mainly due to decreases in lung, prostate, and colon cancer deaths. In women, the cancer death rate fell by 11.4 percent, largely due to a drop in breast and colorectal cancer deaths.

OK, sure, a cure is still a long way off, but we've got to stop thinking about the cure for cancer as being one thing - a magic bullet - and accept that it's much more likely that we'll reduce the death rate to near zero over the course of the next couple of decades....

... or maybe we will find a magic bullet...

FTA: Scientists at Oxford University have tamed a virus so that it attacks and destroys cancer cells but does not harm healthy cells. They determined how to produce replication-competent viruses with key toxicities removed, providing a new platform for development of improved cancer treatments and better vaccines for a broad range of viral diseases.

FTA: Researchers in London have demonstrated the ability of adult stem cells from bone marrow (mesenchymal stem cells, or MSCs) to deliver a cancer-killing protein to tumors.

FTA: Therapeutic cancer vaccines received a potentially big boost this week when Seattle-based biotech company Dendreon announced that its Provenge vaccine prolonged the lives of prostate cancer patients. The success of this trial could pave the way for approval of the drug, which triggers the body's immune system to attack malignant prostate tumors.

DNA Sequencing's going to get a whole lot cheaper...

Recently DNA sequencing was going for $68k on ebay (well below market price). Now a RI based company has just received there first major piece of funding towards reaching their goal of providing people with DNA sequencing for under $100 and in less than an hour.

FTA: “All of the stuff that we are doing here is with an eye toward having a clinically relevant tool,” Bready says. “In our minds, that means something with the speed and cost to be used routinely in clinical care, but most importantly the accuracy.”

This is one giant step towards personalized medicine. Personalized medicine has its own host of issues that comes with it, but for me the juice is worth the squeeze. We'll need some privacy laws but it's tough to argue against saving people's lives by the boat load.

Smart Pills: It begins.

GTFO! Ultrasound Imaging Now Possible With Smartphone

Nothing magical here, just a combination that makes such perfect sense yet I totally did not see coming. FTA: Computer engineers at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.

Man, those pervs that try to take pictures up girls' skirts just got a new toy that's gonna take the gross to a whole new level.

Well that was quick, follow up to yesterday's WallE post.

FTA: In a genetic engineering breakthrough that could help everyone from bed-ridden patients to elite athletes, a team of American researchers—including 2007 Nobel Prize winner Mario R. Capecchi—have created a "switch" that allows mutations to be turned on in muscle stem cells to monitor muscle regeneration in a living mammal.

We're really all over this one. If there's one thing I've learned in my life it is this, if you have to have something wrong with you, try to make it be something that a lot of people in wealthy, industrialized nations have wrong with them as well.

Surgery More and More is Resembling Magic

Headline: Cancerous Kidney Removed Through The Naval

OK, so I’ve commented on similar articles before- still this is impressive.

And now for the real big one…

Headline: First Reported Case In The World: 7-Year-Old Girl Has Six Organs Removed For Tumor Surgery

FTA: A 7-year-old girl from Long Island, NY, is on her way home a little more than four weeks after receiving a historic surgery that involved the removal and partial re-implantation of six organs in order to resect an abdominal tumor that otherwise would be inoperable.
The 23-hour surgery, which began on Feb. 6, was led by Dr. Tomoaki Kato at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, and is the first reported pediatric case of its kind.

Yeah. Removed. Removed six. Removed six of her freaking organs! They took out her Large and Small intestines, her liver, her pancreas, her spleen and her stomach. They took them out. Then, after removing the tennis ball-sized tumor, put them back in.

Man, this story really makes all of the King’s horses and all of the King’s men look like asshats, huh?

the Future of Medicine

A 3D printer that creates exact replicas of bones provides surgeons with more options in transplants.

And if that's not good enough, researches are trying to determine if mollusks hold the secret to regenerating human bones. Others have already found ways to accelerate bone growth using stem cells and some nifty nanotech (at least in principal).

What's being called 'Stem cell fabrics' have the potential to give us universal tissues that will adapt to any transplant environment.

We're learning that neurons can be repurposed, allowing us to, among other things, possible restore movement to limbs suffering form certain kinds of paralysis. Meanwhile, some kinds of paralysis can be reversed using stem cells.

They're all years away, so try to take care of yourselves. Still, its comforting to know the extent of what we'll be able to do... and I purposefully didn't pick any links to Cancer or HIV research, of which there has been a lot of progress recently.

And as usually TED.com has a great video:

Remote Surgery

The first hour's the most important. Strokes, heart attacks, serious injuries- your odds of surviving any of them dramatically improve if you're able to get medical care within the first hour. With that in mind, meet the ER... 2.o.

FTA: Help could come in the form of a mobile operating theatre, according to a consortium led by non-profit lab SRI International, based in Menlo Park, California. The device, called Trauma Pod, is still in the early stages, but its developers claim it will ultimately be able to retrieve someone from the battlefield, diagnose them, and perform lifesaving procedures while transferring them to hospital.

This, or something quite a bit like it, could also be used on manned mission to Mars or in remote parts of the world where access to hospitals is spotty at best. This also fits into my general thesis about our work force- we'll be able to streamline more and more each day. Still, the days of AI doctors aren't around the corner.

Holy Florking Schnit! Cure For Cancer.... and some other stuff too.

FTA: LA JOLLA, Calif., March 4 (UPI) -- A new type of vaccination could be used to provide instantaneous protection against viruses, bacteria, cancers and virulent toxins, U.S. researchers say.

You want the nutshell version? Chemicals injected into the blood trigger an immune reaction that can be programed. Other chemicals injected into the blood can recognize cancer (or presumably other targets). These other chemicals hook up with antibodies. They then circulate until they get the kill signal from the first chemicals.

Part of the problem with cancer is that our bodies immune system doesn't recognize the cancer as being harmful- or rather, the cancer, being from us, is ignored by our immune system. You could have the second chemical floating round in your blood, hooked up with your antibodies and then, once diagnosised, inject the first chemical which tells the second chemical what its after.

Pretty damn cool stuff.

Headline: Vaccine Research Targets HIV In The Slower, Early Stage Of Infection

A vaccine's a long way off, but there is hope that its possible. Of course, we all saw how well the Fundies took to the HPV vaccine. If we get closer you can expect a similar resistance.

FTA: "HIV appears to be vulnerable when it is first introduced into mucosal surfaces in the body," said Louis Picker, M.D., associate director of the OHSU VGTI and director of the VGTI's vaccine program. "However, once HIV spreads throughout the entire body, it replicates very rapidly and becomes difficult if not impossible to control. Our approach is to attack during this early period of vulnerability. The approach is similar to that of a homeowner who sprays their house with water before sparks land on the roof. This approach can prevent the roof from catching fire and, in the case of HIV, prevent the spread of the virus."

Medical Breakthrough: Potential cure for cancer

In an episode of South Park, Cartman cured AIDs by grinding up millions upon millions of dollars and injecting the microscopic money particles into the blood. Perhaps inspired by this episode, scientists have developed a new anti-tumor drug that's ten times more effective against certain lung cancers... made of platinum.

FTA: “We are able to slow the growth of this cancer substantially in mice,” said principal investigator Ulrich Bierbach, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation Fellow and associate professor of chemistry at Wake Forest. “That is very good news, since this is such a rapidly growing, intractable type of cancer.”

Immortality!

Scientists have stopped the aging process in a whole organ for the first time! The good folks over at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University (here in New York) managed to eliminate the build up of harmful proteins inside the liver's cells. The results?

FTA: In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old, the equivalent of octogenarians in human years, cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter their age.
By contrast, the livers of normal mice in a control group began to fail.
The benefits of restoring the cleaning mechanisms found inside all cells could extend far beyond a single organ, says Cuervo.

Imagine being eighty and feeling twenty. Sign me up.

Headline: Are we about to eliminate AIDs?

No commentary, just three paragraphs FTA: WHAT if we could rid the world of AIDS? The notion might sound like fantasy: HIV infection has no cure and no vaccine, after all. Yet there is a way to completely wipe it out - at least in theory. What's more, it would take only existing medical technology to do the job.

Here's how it works. If someone who is HIV positive takes antiretroviral-drug therapy they can live a long life and almost never pass on the virus, even through unprotected sex. So if everyone with HIV were on therapy, there would be little or no transmission. Once all these people had died, of whatever cause, the virus would be gone for good.

It's a simple idea, but the obstacles to implementing it worldwide are enormous. Persuading everyone with HIV to start therapy purely for public health reasons could be ethically dubious. To identify everyone who is HIV positive would require such widespread testing that some may feel it breached their civil liberties. Then there is the question of who would fund such a massive undertaking.

Yet the idea of eliminating HIV is so appealing, and the benefit to humanity so huge, that scientists and policy-makers are seriously considering the concept, albeit on regional scales. In the next few months the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet to discuss how the idea could be tried in developing countries, and something approaching elimination might be attempted in the UK within the next decade. "You could eliminate transmission overnight," says Marcus Conant, an HIV specialist in San Francisco.

Read the rest.

Headline: An Inexhaustible Source Of Neural Cells

FTA: Research scientists in Bonn have succeeded in deriving so-called brain stem cells from human embryonic stem cells. These can not only be conserved almost indefinitely in culture, but can also serve as an inexhaustible source of diverse types of neural cell. The scientists have also shown that these neural cells are capable of synaptic integration in the brain.

And more: Transplanted into the brain of a mouse, these cells made contact with the recipient brain and were subsequently able both to send and receive signals. “This is the first direct evidence that neural cells derived from human stem cells are capable of synaptic integration in the brain”, declares Dr. Philipp Koch, the original author of the study. The scientists in Bonn are now also hoping to exploit this inexhaustible cell source to study neurodegenerative diseases and possible active agents directly in human neural cells.

This is, needless to say, incredible. We have a real chance to cure several awful diseases and to repair the natural damage caused by aging.

Counter Productive Medical Breakthrough?

If you want to try to reduce the number of diabetics in this country you should be discouraging risky behaviors... not inventing color changing tattoos!

FTA: 'The tattoo contains tiny particles of "nano ink" that change colour depending on whether they come into contact with glucose molecules.

If levels are high, the ink appears yellow. If levels of the sugar are low, it turns purple. A healthy level shows up as orange.'

Jebus Crisps, I can't wait til this tech is expanded! I want a Mario Tattoo that gets bigger when I eat mushrooms.

Kidney removed through belly button.

FTA: On Thursday, February 5, 2009, surgeons at the University of California, San Diego Medical Center removed a patient’s diseased kidney through one incision hidden in the belly button. No other incisions were used. This groundbreaking procedure is the 15th in a series of single-incision clinical trial surgeries performed by the UC San Diego Center for the Future of Surgery.

I guess the only thing to do now is wonder if it was an innie or an outtie...

Cure for the common cold, or, How Americans lost their sick days.

OK, so it's not quite ready yet... but for the first time it seems like something we maybe able to do. FTA: Scientists have begun to solve some of the mysteries of the common cold by putting together the pieces of the genetic codes for all the known strains of the human rhinovirus. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have completed the genomic sequences of the viruses and assembled them into a "family tree," which shows how the viruses are related, with their commonalities and differences.

They think once they can identify what all of the strains have in common they may be able to develop a wonder drug. Hats off to them, but be damned if I'm giving up my sick days.

Medical Breakthrough: Man remains HIV free.

A while back a man received a... well the article tells it all pretty succinctly.
FTA: A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"The patient is fine," said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. "Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication."


Now before you get too excited, this isn't a practical cure. Too few people carry the mutated gene and the transplant is both costly and serious procure with all the risks you'd expect... but its a step towards a cure for HIV.

Surgery: 1st time a Kidney's been removed through the Vagina

This one speaks for its self. Headline: Surgeons remove healthy kidney through donor's vagina.

This really is wonderful. Of course, lacking a vagina (despite what my 9th grade gym teacher may have lead you to believe) its of little benefit to me. Still, the less invasive the surgery the more remarkable it is.

Mobile Lab

Or maybe that should read Mobile Phone Lab. This is pretty amazing.
From CNN.com: "Professor Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA has taken a typical Sony Ericsson phone, and by adding a few off-the-shelf parts that cost less than $50, he can get it to produce a remarkable image that shows the thousands of cells in a small fluid sample such as human blood."