New cancer treatment reprograms immune system

A small medical study out today is generating a huge amount of excitement among cancer researchers. 

For the first time, scientists have been able to successfully target cancer cells by using cells from a patient's own immune system.

CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook reports that that the small study produced what researchers call "proof of concept." 

It's a whole new way, of treating cancer.

Researchers engineered a patient's own immune cells to treat a type of blood cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL.

CLL affects nearly 15,000 men and women a year and more than 4,000 will die from it.

For years, researchers have been trying to figure out a way to kill cancer cells using a patient's own immune system. 

On Wednesday, Dr. Carl June and his team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine claimed a victory in that effort.

"This is a form of what I would call ultimate personal therapy. 

That's a wave of the future," June says.

CLL is a type of blood cancer. 

The only known cure is a bone marrow transplant, which is risky, and only effective in about half of patients.

In this new approach, scientists used the patient's own T-cells - white blood cells that help fight infections such as bacteria. 

Scientists remove the T-cells, genetically reprogram them to attack leukemia cells, and inject them back into the patient.

Researchers treated three patients with CLL. In two, the cancer cells were completely gone six months after the immune therapy.

"The clinical doctor involved in this was astonished and so were the patients that a single infusion of the cells could have such pronounced anti-tumor effects in the patients," Dr. June says.

This new treatment does have significant side-effects. 

The most common is a very bad flu-like illness, but so far all 3 patients who had incurable leukemia and no other options are doing well about a year after treatment.

This form of treatment is like giving a scent to a bloodhound. 

These T-cells have been given the scent of the leukemia cells and go hunt them down. 

The hope is to give T-cells the scent of colon cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer and train them go out and kill all kinds of cancers.

With CellMiner, researchers prospect for cancer discoveries

Researchers have updated a web-based application that makes a wealth of genomic and pharmacologic data obtained from a panel of human cancer cell lines available to anyone with access to a computer and the Internet.

Known as CellMiner, the publicly available application lets researchers rapidly retrieve data on the expression of more than 22,000 genes and 360 microRNAs, and the growth-inhibiting activity of more than 26,000 compounds in NCI's Human Tumor Cell Line Screen, also known as the NCI-60 panel of cell lines. 

The compounds include 102 FDA approved drugs, as well as others being studied in clinical trials.

Tapping into a Wealth of Information

The NCI-60 consists of 60 human cancer cell lines (laboratory-grown cells) derived from nine different tissues. 

These cell lines were acquired by NCI's Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) to screen compounds for anticancer activity. 

In addition to testing about 100,000 compounds on these cells, NCI researchers have amassed an extensive database of genomic information for these widely used cell lines.

Working with such large data sets often means dealing with unwieldy databases that make it difficult to analyze and integrate data. 

But with CellMiner, researchers can easily compare patterns of gene expression, microRNA expression, and drug activity in the NCI-60. 

By means of a novel pattern-matching tool, users can also explore relationships between these parameters and any pattern of interest they choose to input (for example, cell lines that lack mutations in the commonly mutated tumor suppressor gene TP53), enabling them to define their own questions.

Such pattern comparisons can, for example, reveal new connections between drug activity and gene expression, pick out compounds or drugs that work through similar or complementary mechanisms, or identify genes that may predict the response of cancer cells to specific drugs, noted Dr. Yves Pommier, chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology (LMP) in NCI's Center for Cancer Research (CCR).

No Bioinformatics Expertise Needed

"Our goal is to have this database used by people who do not have bioinformatics expertise, including M.D.s and anyone else who wants to explore the database without having a bioinformatics team next to them," said Dr. Pommier, who co-authored a recent report in Cancer Research that detailed CellMiner's features and provided case examples of its use. 

The lead author and lead developer of CellMiner, William Reinhold, is a molecular biologist in LMP.

Reinhold, Dr. Pommier, and their colleagues developed CellMiner so that researchers could avoid the time-consuming data processing previously required to work with information in the NCI-60 database. The suite of web-based tools provides "a quick and easy way for people to start doing systems biology and pharmacology—which is to say, comparing big data sets of disparate types to ask scientific questions," explained Reinhold.

"Without specialized expertise, there's been a huge wall between people who want to ask these questions and the people who have access to the information," he continued. "We're trying to take that wall down."

Users of CellMiner simply input their query online and, within minutes, receive an e-mail containing the results in the form of tables and bar graphs in a single Excel spreadsheet. The application calculates the correlation between all parameters and identifies statistically significant correlations.

And, because data are provided in a spreadsheet, Dr. Pommier noted, users can archive the results and continue working on them, even without Internet access. Researchers "can use Excel tools to search and organize the data, which makes it very versatile," he added.

One-Stop Shopping

"CellMiner is a powerful tool that allows you to generate hypotheses about the ways in which different genes or patterns of gene expression can affect cell behavior [in cancer],"  said Dr. Michael Gottesman, chief of CCR's Laboratory of Cell Biology. His lab, which was not involved in developing CellMiner, is using the tool to study gene expression patterns that correlate with resistance to specific anticancer drugs.

Investigators in Dr. Susan Bates's lab, in CCR's Molecular Oncology Branch, were among the first to use CellMiner's predecessor—a computer program called COMPARE—to probe the NCI drug-screen database. Using COMPARE, they identified a drug with anticancer activity called romidepsin, which turned out to be effective against T-cell lymphoma.

Because only one-third of patients with T-cell lymphoma responded to romidepsin in clinical trials, Dr. Bates's team is using CellMiner to help find a biomarker that predicts which patients will respond favorably to the drug.

"The CellMiner program builds on compare by providing a much easier to use interface," Dr. Bates said. "

People have found it very easy to adapt to CellMiner."

Working with CellMiner "is one stop shopping, whereas, before, working with the drug screen data required multiple queries," confirmed Dr. Robert Robey, a chemist in Dr. Bates's lab who works with the tool. 

"I read the paper and within a few minutes I was pulling up drug profiles. 

The interface makes it easy to put in your own data and pull meaningful things out of it."

"Users of CellMiner need to realize that the COMPARE program on the DTP website still represents the gold standard for determining correlations using drug profiles," Dr. Bates noted. "

CellMiner provides an easy-to-use format. 

But there are limitations in terms of the results it is able to generate. 

There is a larger body of data available on the DTP website, both for compounds and for molecular characterization data."

CellMiner's Prospects

CellMiner's developers plan to continue updating and enhancing the software. 

The next version will provide access to the whole-genome sequences for all protein-coding regions, or exons, of the genome across the NCI-60, Dr. Pommier indicated. 

The team is also making the open-source software available for others to use or modify as they wish to incorporate molecular profile data on other cell lines or human tumor samples.

Cell lines from the NCI-60 panel, which are studied by cancer researchers worldwide, "have formed the basis for a lot of what scientists know about the physiology of cancer," Dr. Gottesman noted. 

But, as reported last November, research led by Dr. Jean-Pierre Gillet in Dr. Gottesman's lab has suggested that these and other cancer cell lines may have important limitations when used to identify genes associated with resistance to chemotherapy drugs in particular tumor types. 

The study showed that, in various cancer types, the expression of a specific set of genes associated with drug resistance was very different in cell lines from what it was in tumor samples representing the same cancer types.

The fact that some gene expression patterns in laboratory-grown cells such as the NCI-60 differ from those in the original tumor tissue is not surprising, researchers agree. 

However, Dr. Pommier said, "there is a vast array of genes in the NCI-60 that retain their expression pattern between the cell line and the tumor that's what is coming out of the CellMiner analyses, because now it's easy to look at those genes."

Although researchers continue to debate the extent to which cancer cell lines represent the tumors from which they originated, "there's a lot we can still learn from the NCI-60," Dr. Gottesman said, "and having a tool that allows you to gain access to the huge amount of data that's been accumulated is a very useful thing."

How cancer cells develope?

Every person has cancer cells in the body.

These cancer cells do not appear in the standard tests until they multiply in a few billion.

When doctors tell cancer patients and found no cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect these cells in detectable size.

Cancer cells occur between 6 to more than 10 times in a person's life.

When a person's immune system is strong the cancer cells will be destroyed and prevented from multiplying and forming tumors.

When a person has cancer it indicates that it has multiple nutritional deficiencies.

This may be genetic, environmental, food and lifestyle factors.

One way to overcome the multiple nutritional deficiencies, changing diet and including supplements will strengthen the immune system.

Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly growing cancer cells, but this also means that they poisoned cedllas healthy fast growing in the bone marrow, gastrointestinal tract etc., and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, etc. ...

Radiation while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs.

Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation will often reduce tumor size.

However, the prolonged use of chemotherapy and radiation results in no more tumor destruction.

When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation the immune system is compromised or destroyed, hence the person can succumb to various kinds of infections and complications.

Chemotherapy and radiation can cause cancer cells to mutate and become resistant and difficult to destroy.

Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites.

One way to battle cancer is to stop the cancer cells starve, by not feeding it with the foods it needs to multiply.

Cancer cells feed on:

Sugar is a cancer feeder.

By cutting off sugar it cuts off one important food supply to the cancer.

Sugar substitutes like NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, etc. are made with Aspartame and it is harmful.

A better natural substitute would be Manuka honey, but in a small quantity.

Table salt has a chemical added to make it white.

A better alternative is sea salt.

Milk causes the body to produce mucus, especially in the gastro-intestinal tract.

Cancer feeds mucous.

By cutting off milk and substituting with unsweetened soy milk, cancer cells begin to starve.

Cancer cells thrive in an acid environment.

A meat-based diet is high in acid, it is best to eat fish and a little chicken rather than beef or pork.

Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer.

A diet made of 80% fresh vegetables and juice, whole grains, seeds, nuts and a little fruits help put the body into an alkaline environment.

The remaining 20% ​​can be from cooked food including beans.

The Fresh vegetable juices provide live enzymes that are easily absorbed and reach down to cellular levels within 15 minutes to nourish and enhance growth of healthy cells.

To obtain live enzymes for building healthy cells try and drink fresh vegetable juice and eat some raw vegetables 2 or 3 times a day.

Enzymes are destroyed at temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius.

Avoid coffee, tea and chocolate, which have high caffeine drinks.

Green tea is a better alternative and has properties that fight against cancer.

Takes purified water, or filtered, tap water contains toxins and heavy metal.

Distilled water is acidic, avoid it.

The Meat protein is difficult to digest and requires a lot of digestive enzymes.

Undigested meat remaining in the intestines and rotting waste becoming more toxic.

The walls are covered cancer cells resistant protein.

Eating less meat it frees more enzymes to attack the protein walls of cancer cells and allows the body to produce cells that kill cancer cells.

Some supplements build up the immune system (IP6, Essiac, anti-oxidants, vitamins, minerals, EFAs, etc. ..).

Important

Cancer is a disease of the mind, body and spirit.

A positive spirit helps the cancer patient to survive.

Anger, unforgiveness and bitterness put the body into an acidic environment, and stress.

Learn to have a loving and forgiving spirit.

Learn to relax and enjoy life.

Cancer cells do not thrive in an oxygenated environment.

Exercising daily and deep breathing help carry oxygen to the cell level.

Oxygen therapy is otherwise used to target cancer cells.

John Hopkins Hospital makes the following recommendations:

Do not use plastic containers in the microwave.

Do not place water bottles in freezer.

Do not use plastic wrap on containers in the microwave.

By heating the plastic in the microwave or putting it in the freezer, dioxins are released.

Dioxin is a chemical that causes cancer, especially breast cancer.

Dioxin poisoning the cells of our body.

Recently, Dr. Edwuard Fujimoto, Wellness Program Director at Castle Hospital, was on a TV show where he explained the health risks.

He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us.

He said that we should not heat our food in the microwave using plastic containers.

This especially applies to foods that contain fat.

He said that the combination of fat, high heat and plastics releases dioxin into the food and they finally are entering our body.

He recommends using glass, such as Corning Ware, Pyrex or ceramic containers for heating food.

He also said that the same results are obtained without the dioxin.

Instant foods appearing in television or instant maruchan soups, ramen, etc.; should be removed from the plastic container and heated in glass containers.

He noted that the paper is not bad, but you do not know what is in the paper.

It is best to use tempered glass, corning ware, etc. ..

Long ago in some fast food restaurants replaced dry ice containers (foam) per share.

The reason is because of the problems of dioxin.

He also noted that plastic containers cover as Saran, is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be heated in the microwave.

High temperatures cause dangerous toxins from the plastic to melt and fall into the food.

Herecommends paper napkins instead.