Pneumonochrome

This week we’ve got another cool approach to cancer: Bone marrow transplants that attack the tumor, it’s actually somewhat similar to the approach we covered last week.  Like last week, this approach uses immune cells to attack the tumors.  This time, though, doctors are taking advantage of some of what are usually considered the problems with bone marrow transplants: Graft versus Host disease.  In short, GvH is when immune cells in the bone marrow graft begin attacking the natural cells of the person receiving the graft.  The less perfect the match between the graft and the host, the more often this will occur.  Usually this means that doctors want to find as close to a perfect match as possible.

A Dr. Velardi in Italy has found that if he takes bone marrow from family members who are only a 50% match to the patient, sometimes immune cells called Natural Killer cells will attack the patient’s tumors, and they do it in a predictable way.  This is another one that’s not ready for broad usage yet, but shows potential for some really cool alternatives to the treatments we have now.

If you’re interested in the original report, it can be found here.

This week’s cool medicine isn’t really established medicine, yet.  An article in the New England Journal of Medicine details the use of a person’s own cloned immune cells in treating his cancer.  If that is a little too technical for you, BBC News reported about it, too.

Basically, this patient had very advanced skin cancer that had spread to his lungs and some lymph nodes.  The reasearchers took some blood and separated out his immune cells.  They isolated some immune cells that could identify the cancer cells by a protein they have.

These immune cells were trying to fight the cancer, but there weren’t enough of them, so the researchers caused these cells to make a lot of copies of themselves, a process called clonal expansion, and injected all of them back into the patient.

In this case, it appears to have worked, and the patient seems to be cancer free.  This technique isn’t ready for broad usage, but it is encouraging and really cool that they got it to work in this instance.  Hopefully we’ll see more progress in this area.

This week, an aspect of medicine that caught my eye was Induced Hypothermia.  The short version is that when someone has a heart attack or a stroke, part of the damage that occurs is due to that person’s cells production of chemicals that tell cells to commit suicide or do other unhealthy behaviors.  Doctors have started cooling people down, a lot, to slow down the production of those chemicals, thus reducing the damage that is caused by them.  People are studying if it helps heart attack and stroke victims, and the data we have right now seems to show us that inducing hypothermia in these patients increases survivability and reduces the severity of other damage associated with these injuries.

So, I have been working on projects for school all day today, and again haven’t had time to actually do the podcast I’m wanting to do.  So perhaps tomorrow I’ll find time and get it done.  Today I finished a nutrition project that involved keeping track of everything I ate for three days and analyzing my nutrient intake for those days.  It was quite surprising to see how deficient I am in a lot of nutrients.  I’ve managed to stay within the DRIs for fats of all types, and for cholesterol, but I’m substantially low in my intakes of many, many important vitamins and minerals.  I’m also safely under my recommended caloric limits per day on my typical day, which is good, as I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.  I could fix a lot of my nutrient deficiencies by increasing my portions, but that would decrease my calorie deficit, and I think my weight is currently a more pressing issue than undernutrition is for me, despite what the analysis says.  So I don’t foresee myself making any major changes any time soon, but it was an eye-opening experience all the same.

Blah.  I’ve got a migraine, and my tummy is getting involved.  I hate when that happens.  It’s been a long day, too.  I’ve got tons of reading I should be doing tonight, but I just don’t have the time to do it, so my 3-hour Psychiatry marathon and my Biochem tomorrow will just have to be caught up on tomorrow, because right now I can’t read anything and actually comprehend it.  sigh