As a not unimportant aside, in the The New Yorker magazine this week, there is an article on marshaling one's body's own immune cells to fight specific cancers. This theory--so logical--was disproved erroneously given some unsuccessful experiments of 30 years ago (or so). T cells, killers of invaders of the body, apparently do not recognize cancer cells as invaders. Simply stimulating the T cells at that time was insufficient and the scientific world went away from this approach for quite some time.
Now, however, what appear to be successes are appearing. I won't attempt the specific biology, but suffice to say bits of the T cells (enzymes? proteins?) have to be inhibited (not stimulated!) and then the T cells will go to work on cancers. First, the successes were with localized cancers (carcinomas, prostate) but now apparently there are some successes with systemic cancers (e.g., leukemias). Some of these procedures are quite toxic and have been applied as a last resort. Scheduled trials have been stopped in the middle, in one case because after 6 weeks there were no improvements in the experimental group--tumors continued growing. While the drug-company sponsor boogied at that time, the docs kept recording, only to find that sometime later, the cancers stopped growing, then shrank out of existence.
There is no magic bullet, so the drug companies cannot make a million dollar compound (the first one) where they can do so thereafter for a dollar. Therapies of this nature will have to be individually tailored, it is currently thought. So they will be expensive. However, one takes heart that another, promising avenue toward an eventual general (?) cure may be opening up.
In SLC this weekend doing spring cleaning on Midvale II. Whoopie do.
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