colostrum - diet notes - email to Symco

Why did you purchase your Sovereign Laboratories product? (Also, if you don't mind sharing your age, that would really help us out.)

Hi, I turned 47 in October.

Cognitive enhancement, joint repair, gut health, athletic and sexual performance, etc. Not ready for stem cell therapy, avoid the risks of HGH and test. replacement, go colostrum to boost my own. Let's see what happens, I'm in 5 weeks or so, I read that it takes 8 weeks to see effects. I'd love to cut cost because I'm taking a lot!

I originally learned about colostrum searching on Dr. Eric Berg's youtube channel for 'inflammation'. He has one video that talks about colostrum, saying it causes the body to produce more HGH.

I had a previous conversation with a very fit man in his 70s, I had asked if he had done testosterone replacement, and he had not, but said he'd consider HGH, although he said there is a risk of growing existing cancer cells.

Since June, I've lost 20 lbs, completely changed my diet and have been experimenting with various supplements. Daily kale and spinach now, fruit.

 I wasn't sure if my testosterone was low or if I had low thyroid (previous report), but I wanted to optimize my energy levels, my sexual health, reduce my BMI to take pressure off of my joints, and establish a sustainable diet that would control my blood sugar so I don't go up and down with carb cravings in order to stay in good health and weight as I get older. I also have been very interested in gut health since around 2013 - I've always had stomach issues and found interesting the relationship to seratonin, so I began experimenting with probiotics at that time and previously cleaned up my sugar habits and diet, lost weight, but later began lifting heavier and getting bigger again (muscular), and allowing the sugar in at times. In part, I was eating more carbs because the low calorie diet made me tired, and I felt better energy, but then the sugar came in again and that's probably what screwed me up.

I've always exercised, I've never been obese, I'm muscular and always have lifted. This last year I was bigger than before, muscular, but I felt lethargic and was getting a bloated stomach from too much sugar after a rough year and a break up. I decided to lose weight and size, and get lean, but again, really I was worried about energy levels which has been an issue over the last several years, impacting lethargy and sexual performance.

June, I carb-cycled (weekends only, protein/veg. during the week) and lost 10-15 lbs. July - mid. Sept. I did keto to try to sub fat for carbs. Mid-Sept.-Oct, I added carbs a few times per week because keto wasn't enough energy. Nov. I'm carb cycling without any fat to lean out and I added heavy colostrum - 2 tbsp 2-3x/day.

My testosterone is in the middle, so not a problem, and I am borderline at risk of hypothyroidism, but not low. My goal was to optimize my health, lose weight, lower my body fat and BMI, and I consulted an endocrinologist and G.I. doctor. I'm 6', my weight went from 250 to 230 within a couple of months, and my body fat is now around 21%, and my testosterone went up by about 70 points. All of this progress occurred BEFORE using colostrum, my results were in October.

I began taking colostrum probably 5 weeks ago. Again, originally searching for 'inflammation', then learning about the other benefits, particularly the promise of healing the gut, being the core of the immune system, and the higher dosages promising anabolic effects for performance - of course, I'm interesting in the athletic enhancement, but in particular the suggestion that more HGH will repair and reverse aging is most compelling. I just bought some for my mom who just turned 75 this month, interested to see how if affects her - she has gut issues as well, her sister had leaky gut.

flight attendant cancer risk

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/cabin-crew-cancer-risk-flight-attendant-radiation-exposure-sleep-cycle-obesity-smoking-a8416166.html

MIT gut sensor / smartphone app

Researchers have devised a new way to get a sneak peek into what's going on deep in your digestive system, creating a swallowable sensor that, with the help of engineered bacteria and a tiny electrical circuit, can detect the presence of molecules that might be signs of disease and then beam the results to a smartphone app. The device, which scientists validated in pigs, remains a prototype and needs to be refined before it could be used in people. But the researchers, who reported their work Thursday in the journal Science, combined innovations in synthetic biology and microelectronics to create a modular platform that could be adapted to identify a wide range of molecules. "We want to try to illuminate and provide understanding into areas that are not easily accessible," said Dr. Timothy Lu, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and senior author of the paper.

California cell phone warning

http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article189586129.html

BY BARBARA ANDERSON

banderson@fresnobee.com

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Put your cellphone down – and keep it away from your pillow, the California Department of Public Health is advising.

Smartphone use continues to increase in the U.S., especially among children, and the health department said some people and health professionals have concerns about the radio frequency energy emitted from cell phones. The scientific community has not reached a consensus on the risks of cell phone use, but the health department said research suggests long-term, extensive use may affect health.

“We know that simple steps, such as not keeping your phone in your pocket and moving it away from your bed at night, can help reduce exposure for both children and adults,” said Dr. Karen Smith, state public health officer. Smartphones emit radio frequency energy when they send signals to and receive them from cell towers.

About 95 percent of Americans own a cell phone, and 12 percent rely on their smartphones for everyday Internet access, the health department said. In addition, the average age when children get their first phone is now just 10, and a majority of young people keep their phones on or near them most of the day and while they sleep. “Children’s brains develop through the teenage years and may be more affected by cellphone use,” Smith said. “Parents should consider reducing the time their children use cellphones and encourage them to turn the devices off at night.”

Other tips for reducing exposure to radio frequency energy from cellphones: Keeping the phone away from the body, reducing cellphone use when the signal is weak, reducing the use of cellphones to stream audio or video or to download or upload large files, keeping the phone away from the bed at night, removing headsets when not on a call, and avoiding products that claim to block radio frequency energy because they may actually increase your exposure.

reverse aging

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/12/15/scientists-reverse-ageing-mammals-predict-human-trials-within/

•  Sarah Knapton, science editor 

15 DECEMBER 2016 • 5:00PM

An end to grey hair and crows-feet could be just 10 years away after scientists showed it is possible to reverse ageing in animals.

Using a new technique which takes adult cells back to their embryonic form, US researchers at the Salk Institute in California, showed it was possible to reverse ageing in mice, allowing the animals to not only look younger, but live for 30 per cent longer.

The technique involves stimulating four genes which are particularly active during development in the womb. It was also found to work to turn the clock back on human skin cells in the lab, making them look and behave younger.

Scientists hope to eventually create a drug which can mimic the effect of the found genes which could be taken to slow down, and even reverse the ageing process. They say it will take around 10 years to get to human trials.

Ageing is a plastic process and more amenable to therapeutic interventions than we previously thoughtDr Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, Salk Institute

"Our study shows that ageing may not have to proceed in one single direction," said Dr Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory. “With careful modulation, aging might be reversed.

"Obviously, mice are not humans and we know it will be much more complex to rejuvenate a person. But this study shows that ageing is a very dynamic and plastic process, and therefore will be more amenable to therapeutic interventions than what we previously thought."

Scientists have known for some time that the four genes, which are known collectively as the Yamanaka factors, could turn adult cells back to their stem cell state, where they can grow into any part of the body.

But it was always feared that allowing that to happen could damage organs made from the cells, and even trigger cancer.

However, it was discovered that stimulating the genes intermittently reversed ageing, without causing any damaging side effects.

In mice with a premature ageing disease, the treatment countered signs of ageing and increased their lifespan by 30 per cent. If it worked similarly in humans it could allow people to live until more than 100 years old. In healthy mice it also helped damaged organs to heal faster.

"In other studies scientists have completely reprogrammed cells all the way back to a stem-cell-like state," says co-first author Pradeep Reddy, also a Salk research associate.

"But we show, for the first time, that by expressing these factors for a short duration you can maintain the cell's identity while reversing age-associated hallmarks."

The breakthrough could also help people stay healthier for longer.  The ageing population means that the risk of developing age-related diseases, such as dementia, cancer and heart disease also rises. But if the body could be kept younger for longer then it could prevent many deadly diseases for decades.

microsoft cancer research

Microsoft Will 'Solve' Cancer Within The Next 10 Years By Treating It Like A Computer Virus, Says Company (independent.co.uk)219

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @08:05PM from the ambitious-goals dept.

Microsoft is serious about finding a cure for cancer. In June, Microsoft researchers published a paper that shows how analyzing online activities can provide clues as to a person's chances of having cancer. They were able to identify internet users who had pancreatic cancer even before they'd been diagnosed, all from analyzing web query logs. Several months later, researchers on behalf of the company now say they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. The goal is to monitor the bad cells and potentially reprogram them to be healthy again. The Independent reports:The company has built a "biological computation" unit that says its ultimate aim is to make cells into living computers. As such, they could be programmed and reprogrammed to treat any diseases, such as cancer. In the nearer term, the unit is using advanced computing research to try and set computers to work learning about drugs and diseases and suggesting new treatments to help cancer patients. The team hopes to be able to use machine learning technologies -- computers that can think and learn like humans -- to read through the huge amounts of cancer research and come to understand the disease and the drugs that treat it. At the moment, so much cancer research is published that it is impossible for any doctor to read it all. But since computers can read and understand so much more quickly, the systems will be able to read through all of the research and then put that to work on specific people's situations. It does that by bringing together biology, math and computing. Microsoft says the solution could be with us within the next five or ten years.

1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA superbug

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-32117815

Scientists recreated a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow's stomach.

They were "astonished" to find it almost completely wiped out methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA.

Their findings will be presented at a national microbiology conference.

The remedy was found in Bald's Leechbook - an old English manuscript containing instructions on various treatments held in the British Library.

Anglo-Saxon expert Dr Christina Lee, from the University of Nottingham, translated the recipe for an "eye salve", which includes garlic, onion or leeks, wine and cow bile.

Experts from the university's microbiology team recreated the remedy and then tested it on large cultures of MRSA.

Analysis

Tom Feilden, science editor Today Programme
The leechbook is one of the earliest examples of what might loosely be called a medical textbook
It seems Anglo-Saxon physicians may actually have practised something pretty close to the modern scientific method, with its emphasis on observation and experimentation.
Bald's Leechbook could hold some important lessons for our modern day battle with anti-microbial resistance.

In each case, they tested the individual ingredients against the bacteria, as well as the remedy and a control solution.

They found the remedy killed up to 90% of MRSA bacteria and believe it is the effect of the recipe rather than one single ingredient.
Dr Freya Harrison said the team thought the eye salve might show a "small amount of antibiotic activity".

"But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was," she said.

Dr Lee said there are many similar medieval books with treatments for what appear to be bacterial infections.

She said this could suggest people were carrying out detailed scientific studies centuries before bacteria were discovered.

The team's findings will be presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology, in Birmingham.

Bald's eye salve

Equal amounts of garlic and another allium (onion or leek), finely chopped and crushed in a mortar for two minutes.

Add 25ml (0.87 fl oz) of English wine - taken from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury.

Dissolve bovine salts in distilled water, add and then keep chilled for nine days at 4C.

Myth: Chocolate promotes health

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/chocolate-s-health-touters-may-have-misunderstood-local-reality-of-tribe-1.2883561

For proof of chocolate’s healthy magic, scientists often point to members of the Kuna, an indigenous tribe in Panama, famous for their consistently low blood pressure even as they age. It was an observation that sent scientists to their remote Caribbean islands more than a decade ago looking for their secret.

One group of researchers observed that the Kuna had a high intake of locally grown cocoa, drinking up to five cups a day as part of their spiritual rituals. They suggested the cocoa could be a potential source of heart-healthy compounds.

When Canadian cultural geographer Jeffrey Barnes went to Panama to investigate the cocoa drinking Kuna, he found a different story.

"I had been researching with the Kuna people for about five years. I was really looking into the different ceremonial and ritual uses of what we know as chocolate, cacao, and as it turned out people were increasingly abandoning the actual ritual uses," he said. When they did use cocoa, he said they mostly used imported powder from Colombia.

Late in his research, he said he came across that earlier study, funded by Mars Inc., the chocolate company, reporting the high daily cocoa consumption. The Kuna findings had become an important foundation for the company's research into the health effects of cocoa flavanols. And the story of the Kuna is often cited as proof of the health effects of chocolate.

"That was really an important springboard for our research program," said Catherine Kwik-Uribe, scientific director at Mars.

Working to understand cocoa

Because his observations of Kuna cocoa consumption were so starkly different, Barnes thought he had missed something and went back to Panama, to the same island where the Mars research was done, for a closer look.

"I looked into how much locally grown cacao people were actually consuming and the results were quite outstanding," Barnes said. "It would appear as though they are not consuming much at all."
"Recent studies may have misunderstood the local reality in their depictions of the Kuna people of Ailigandi as prolific consumers of locally derived cacao," he concluded in a paper published in 2013 in Human Organization, the peer reviewed journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology.
The response to his myth-busting findings? Complete silence.

"The media is always plastered with news about how healthy chocolate is for you," he said. "I was dismayed to find that no one picked it up."

Mars, meanwhile, says it has moved beyond the Kuna findings.

"While the Kuna presented an interesting hypothesis, it was important for Mars to go forward with the right studies to really understand the effects of cocoa flavanols, and that’s where we are today," said Kwik-Uribe.

Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system - 48-72 hrs.

https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regeneration-of-damaged-old-immune-system/

Protection from chemotherapy immunosuppression indicates effect could be conserved in humans

by Suzanne Wu June 5, 2014

Corresponding author Valter Longo (USC Photo/Dietmar Quistorf)

In the first evidence of a natural intervention triggering stem cell-based regeneration of an organ or system, a study in the June 5 issue of the Cell Stem Cell shows that cycles of prolonged fasting not only protect against immune system damage — a major side effect of chemotherapy — but also induce immune system regeneration, shifting stem cells from a dormant state to a state of self-renewal.

In both mice and a Phase 1 human clinical trial, long periods of not eating significantly lowered white blood cell counts. In mice, fasting cycles then “flipped a regenerative switch,” changing the signaling pathways for hematopoietic stem cells, which are responsible for the generation of blood and immune systems, the research showed.

We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system.

Valter Longo

The study has major implications for healthier aging, in which immune system decline contributes to increased susceptibility to disease as people age. By outlining how prolonged fasting cycles — periods of no food for two to four days at a time over the course of six months — kill older and damaged immune cells and generate new ones, the research also has implications for chemotherapy tolerance and for those with a wide range of immune system deficiencies, including autoimmunity disorders.

“We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system,” said corresponding author Valter Longo, Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and the Biological Sciences at the USC Davis School of Gerontology and director of the USC Longevity Institute. Longo has a joint appointment at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged,” Longo said. “What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?”

Fasting cycles

Prolonged fasting forces the body to use stores of glucose, fat and ketones, but it also breaks down a significant portion of white blood cells. Longo likens the effect to lightening a plane of excess cargo.
During each cycle of fasting, this depletion of white blood cells induces changes that trigger stem cell-based regeneration of new immune system cells. In particular, prolonged fasting reduced the enzyme PKA, an effect previously discovered by the Longo team to extend longevity in simple organisms and which has been linked in other research to the regulation of stem cell self-renewal and pluripotency — that is, the potential for one cell to develop into many different cell types. Prolonged fasting also lowered levels of IGF-1, a growth-factor hormone that Longo and others have linked to aging, tumor progression and cancer risk.

“PKA is the key gene that needs to shut down in order for these stem cells to switch into regenerative mode. It gives the OK for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system,” explained Longo, noting the potential of clinical applications that mimic the effects of prolonged fasting to rejuvenate the immune system. “And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting. Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or aging, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system.”
Prolonged fasting also protected against toxicity in a pilot clinical trial in which a small group of patients fasted for a 72-hour period prior to chemotherapy, extending Longo’s influential past research.

“While chemotherapy saves lives, it causes significant collateral damage to the immune system. The results of this study suggest that fasting may mitigate some of the harmful effects of chemotherapy,” said co-author Tanya Dorff, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital. “More clinical studies are needed, and any such dietary intervention should be undertaken only under the guidance of a physician.”
“We are investigating the possibility that these effects are applicable to many different systems and organs, not just the immune system,” said Longo, whose lab is in the process of conducting further research on controlled dietary interventions and stem cell regeneration in both animal and clinical studies.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers AG20642, AG025135, P01AG34906). The clinical trial was supported by the V Foundation and the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (P30CA014089).
Chia Wei-Cheng of USC Davis was first author of the study. Gregor Adams, Xiaoying Zhou and Ben Lam of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC; Laura Perin and Stefano Da Sacco of the Saban Research Institute at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Min Wei of USC Davis; Mario Mirisola of the University of Palermo; Dorff and David Quinn of the Keck School of Medicine of USC; and John Kopchick of Ohio University were co-authors of the study.

Solar powered toilet

From Slashdot:

"With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet challenge, [a] team has developed a toilet that uses concentrated solar power to scorch and disinfect human waste, turning feces into a useful byproduct called biochar ... a sanitary charcoal material that is good for soils and agriculture. By converting solid waste to biochar (liquid waste is diverted elsewhere, as it's easier to deal with), the toilet thus allows for sanitary waste disposal without huge infrastructure investments. The toilet itself, called the Sol-Char, is a fascinating bit of engineering. In order to sanitize waste without the help of massive treatment facilities, Linden's team instead designed the toilet to scorch waste in a chamber heated by fiber optic cables that pipe in heat from solar collectors on the toilet's roof. 'A solar concentrator has all this light focused in on one centimeter. It'd be fine if we could bring everyone's fecal waste up to that one point, like burning it with a magnifying glass,' Linden said. 'But that's not practical, so we were thinking of other ways to concentrate that light.'"

Gene therapy scores big wins against blood cancers

 http://www.sfgate.com/news/medical/article/Gene-therapy-scores-big-wins-against-blood-cancers-5044054.php#page-1

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Chief Medical Writer

In one of the biggest advances against leukemia and other blood cancers in many years, doctors are reporting unprecedented success by using gene therapy to transform patients' blood cells into soldiers that seek and destroy cancer.

A few patients with one type of leukemia were given this one-time, experimental therapy several years ago and some remain cancer-free today. Now, at least six research groups have treated more than 120 patients with many types of blood and bone marrow cancers, with stunning results.

"It's really exciting," said Dr. Janis Abkowitz, blood diseases chief at the University of Washington in Seattle and president of the American Society of Hematology. "You can take a cell that belongs to a patient and engineer it to be an attack cell."

In one study, all five adults and 19 of 22 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, had a complete remission, meaning no cancer could be found after treatment, although a few have relapsed since then.

These were gravely ill patients out of options. Some had tried multiple bone marrow transplants and up to 10 types of chemotherapy or other treatments.

Cancer was so advanced in 8-year-old Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, Pa., that doctors said her major organs would fail within days. She was the first child given the gene therapy and shows no sign of cancer today, nearly two years later.

Results on other patients with myeloma, lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, will be reported at the hematology group's conference that starts Saturday in New Orleans.
Doctors say this has the potential to become the first gene therapy approved in the United States and the first for cancer worldwide. Only one gene therapy is approved in Europe, for a rare metabolic disease.

The treatment involves filtering patients' blood to remove millions of white blood cells called T-cells, altering them in the lab to contain a gene that targets cancer, and returning them to the patient in infusions over three days.

"What we are giving essentially is a living drug" — permanently altered cells that multiply in the body into an army to fight the cancer, said Dr. David Porter, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who led one study.

Several drug and biotech companies are developing these therapies. Penn has patented its method and licensed it to Switzerland-based Novartis AG. The company is building a research center on the Penn campus in Philadelphia and plans a clinical trial next year that could lead to federal approval of the treatment as soon as 2016.

Talking with the researchers, "there is a sense of making history ... a sense of doing something very unique," said Hervé Hoppenot, president of Novartis Oncology, the division leading the work.
Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, agreed.

"From our vantage point, this looks like a major advance," he said. "We are seeing powerful responses ... and time will tell how enduring these remissions turn out to be."

The group has given $15 million to various researchers testing this approach. Nearly 49,000 new cases of leukemia, 70,000 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 22,000 cases of myeloma are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2013.

Many patients are successfully treated with chemotherapy or bone marrow or stem cell transplants, but transplants are risky and donors can't always be found. So far, gene therapy has been tried on people who were in danger of dying because other treatments failed.

The gene therapy must be made individually for each patient, and lab costs now are about $25,000, without a profit margin. That's still less than many drugs to treat these diseases and far less than a transplant.

The treatment can cause severe flu-like symptoms and other side effects, but these have been reversible and temporary, doctors say.

Penn doctors have treated the most cases so far — 59. Of the first 14 patients with CLL, four had complete remissions, four had partial ones and the rest did not respond. However, some partial responders continue to see their cancer shrink a year after treatment.

"That's very unique to this kind of therapy" and gives hope the treatment may still purge the cancer, said Porter. Another 18 CLL patients were treated and half have responded so far.

Penn doctors also treated 27 ALL patients. All five adults and 19 of the 22 children had complete remissions, an "extraordinarily high" success rate, said Dr. Stephan Grupp at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Six have since relapsed, though, and doctors are pondering a second gene therapy attempt.
At the National Cancer Institute, Dr. James Kochenderfer and others have treated 11 patients with lymphoma and four with CLL, starting roughly two years ago. Six had complete remissions, six had partial ones, one has stable disease and it's too soon to tell for the rest.

Ten other patients were given gene therapy to try to kill leukemia or lymphoma remaining after bone marrow transplants. These patients got infusions of gene-treated blood cells from their transplant donors instead of using their own blood cells. One had a complete remission and three others had significant reduction of their disease.

"They've had every treatment known to man. To get any responses is really encouraging," Kochenderfer said. The cancer institute is working with a Los Angeles biotech firm, Kite Pharma Inc., on its gene therapy approach.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center will report on 13 patients with ALL; the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will report about two-dozen patients with ALL or lymphoma, and Baylor College of Medicine will give results on 10 patients with lymphoma or myeloma.

Patients are encouraged that relatively few have relapsed.

"We're still nervous every day because they can't tell us what's going to happen tomorrow," said Tom Whitehead, 8-year-old Emily's father.

Doug Olson, 67, a scientist for a medical device maker, shows no sign of cancer since gene therapy in September 2010 for CLL he had had since 1996.

"Within one month he was in complete remission. That was just completely unexpected," said Porter, his doctor at Penn.

Olson ran his first half-marathon in January and no longer worries about how long his remission will last.

"I decided I'm cured. I'm not going to let that hang over my head anymore," he said.
___
Online:
Emily Whitehead's story: http://bit.ly/VxB0dL
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Killing Cancer By Retraining the Patient's Immune System

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/07/health/cohen-cancer-study/

By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent

(CNN) -- Nick Wilkins was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 4 years old, and when the cancer kept bouncing back, impervious to all the different treatments the doctors tried, his father sat him down for a talk.

John Wilkins explained to Nick, who was by then 14, that doctors had tried chemotherapy, radiation, even a bone marrow transplant from his sister.

"I explained to him that we're running out of options," Wilkins remembers telling his son.

There was one possible treatment they could try: an experimental therapy at the University of Pennsylvania.

He asked his son if he understood what it would mean if this treatment didn't work.

"He understood he could die," Wilkins says. "He was very stoic."

A few months later, Nick traveled from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia to become a part of the experiment.

This new therapy was decidedly different from the treatments he'd received before: Instead of attacking his cancer with poisons like chemotherapy and radiation, the Philadelphia doctors taught Nick's own immune cells to become more adept at killing the cancer.

Two months later, he emerged cancer-free. It's been six months since Nick, now 15, received the personalized cell therapy, and doctors still can find no trace of leukemia in his system.

Trusting her intuition led to two cancer diagnoses

Twenty-one other young people received the same treatment at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and 18 of them, like Nick, went into complete remission -- one of them has been disease-free for 20 months. The Penn doctors released their findings this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

"It gives us hope that this is a cure," Nick's father says. "They're really close. I think they're really onto something."

'A whole new realm of medicine '

At the conference, two other cancer centers -- Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and the National Cancer Institute -- will be announcing results with immunotherapies like the one Nick received. The results are promising, especially considering that the patients had no success with practically every other therapy.

"This is absolutely one of the more exciting advances I've seen in cancer therapy in the last 20 years," said Dr. David Porter, a hematologist and oncologist at Penn. "We've entered into a whole new realm of medicine."

In the therapy, doctors first remove the patient's T-cells, which play a crucial role in the immune system. They then reprogram the cells by transferring in new genes. Once infused back into the body, each modified cell multiplies to 10,000 cells. These "hunter" cells then track down and kill the cancer in a patient's body.

Essentially, researchers are trying to train Nick's body to fight off cancer in much the same way our bodies fight off the common cold.

Tumor Paint: Changing the way surgeons fight cancer

In addition to the pediatric patients, Penn scientists tried the therapy out in 37 adults with leukemia, and 12 went into complete remission. Eight more patients went into partial remission and saw some improvements in their disease.

The treatment does make patients have flulike symptoms for a short period of time -- Nick got so sick he ended up in the intensive care unit for a day -- but patients are spared some of the more severe and long-lasting side effects of extensive chemotherapy.

Penn will now work with other medical centers to test the therapy in more patients, and they plan to try the therapy out in other types of blood cancers and later in solid tumors.

A university press release says it has a licensing relationship with the pharmaceutical company Novartis and "received significant financial benefit" from the trial, and Porter and other inventors of the technology "have benefited financially and/or may benefit financially in the future."

Searching for one-in-a-million cancer cells 

The big question is whether Nick's leukemia will come back.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. The studies have only been going on since 2010, but so far relapse rates have been relatively low: of the 18 other pediatric patients who went into complete remission, only five have relapsed and of the 12 adults who went into complete remission, only one relapsed. Some of the adult patients have been cancer-free and without a relapse for more than three years and counting.

Relapses after this personalized cell therapy may be more promising than relapses after chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant, Porter explained.

First, doctors have been delighted to find the reengineered T-cells -- the ones that know how to hunt down and attack cancer -- are still alive in the patients' bodies after more than three years.

Stigma lingers for deadliest cancer

"The genetically modified T-cells have survived," Porter said. "They're still present and functional and have the ability to protect against recurrence."

Second, before declaring patients in remission, Penn doctors scoured especially hard for errant leukemia cells.

Traditionally, for the kind of leukemia Nick has, doctors can find one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 cancer cells. But Penn's technology could find one in 100,000 to one in a million cancer cells, and didn't find any in Nick or any of the patients who went into complete remission.

 

'It's not a fluke'

One of the best aspects of this new treatment is that it won't be terribly difficult to reproduce at other medical centers, Porter said, and one day, instead of being used only experimentally, it could be available to anyone who needed it.

"Our hope is that this can progress really quite quickly," he said. "It won't be available to everyone next year, but I don't think it would take a decade, either."

Right now patients can only get this therapy if they're in a study, but Dr. Renier Brentjens, director for cellular therapeutics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, says he thinks it could become available to all patients in just three to five years.

"When you have three centers all with a substantial number of patients seeing the same thing -- that these cells work in this disease - you know it's not a fluke," he said.

Two days ago, Brentjens became the co-founder of Juno Therapeutics, a for-profit biotech start-up company that's working on immunotherapies.

"Fifteen years ago I was in the lab looking at these cells kill tumor cells in a petri dish and then I saw them kill tumor cells in mice, and then finally in humans," Brentjens said.

He says he'll never forget the first patient he treated, who initially had an enormous amount of cancer cells in his bone marrow. Then after the therapy, Brentjens looked under the microscope and, in awe, realized he couldn't find a single cancer cell.

"I can't describe what that's like," he said. "It's fantastic."

CNN's John Bonifield contributed to this report.

Pro Life : End of Life and Eugenics

Being physicians, I understand that Ron and Rand Paul have a different perspective, but I struggled to understand why they would take a pro-life stance - it seems counter to the Libertarian values of freedom to choose, and opposition to government coercion. At first, I wondered whether Rand was embracing a pro-life stance as a way of appealing to the far right, running as a Republican, despite the damage it might do to his candidacy.

I searched for more about Rand's pro-life stance, and found a conversation in which Rand made a brief reference to end of life considerations, and I immediately wondered whether he was concerned about eugenics.

Here's Rand Paul's delivery at Liberty University, and he specifically speaks about eugenics and alludes to the film Gattaca. I've since heard more discussion of "death panels" surrounding Obamacare. The speech was followed by lots of buzz about plagiarism from wiki, which not only misses the point, but perhaps underscores the tendency for this administration to attack anyone with a threatening point of view.

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