Would it be the height of irony if the medical scourge of the late twentieth century helps cure cancer in the twenty-first century?
In what is certainly in contention for first place in my Top 12 science stories of 2012 - please see this column in the December 26 and January 2 editions of Yorkton This Week - researchers in Pennsylvania successfully treated a six-year-old leukemia victim with the help of a disabled form of the HIV/AIDS virus.
Of course, the scientists are nowhere near using the C-word (cure), but the results in this case are tremendously promising.
On December 9, the New York Times reported that now-seven-year-old Emma Whitehead of Philipsburg, PA "has been bounding around the house lately, practicing somersaults and rugby-style tumbles that make her parents wince."
Remarkable, considering just eight months ago she was near death having twice relapsed following chemotherapy.
Desperate to save Emma and out of options, her parents, Kari and Tom, sought the experimental treatment at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. It was the first time it had been tried on a child or in anyone who had the type of leukemia Emma suffered from.
Doctors removed millions of Emma's T-cells - a type of white blood cell - and inserted new genes using a disabled form of HIV. The AIDS virus is very good at transferring genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, which are a normal part of the immune system, but turn malignant with leukemia.
The medical team then returned Emma's T-cells to her blood intravenously.
It almost killed her.
Unfortunately, kick-starting the immune system like this, if it works, makes patients extremely ill with raging fever and chills that oncologists call "shake and bake" according to Dr. Carl June lead researcher with the University of Pennsylvania team that developed the treatment. The technical name is cytokine-release syndrome, which refers to the chemicals released by the cells as they are activated.
Doctors sometimes use steroids to ease the reaction, but they didn't work in Emma. She developed a temperature of 105, was put on a ventilator and remained unconscious and swollen almost beyond recognition.
Her friends and family came to say goodbye.
But June wasn't done. Blood tests revealed the level of one of Emma's cytokines (IL-6) had spiked horrifically. Doctors treated her with a drug designed to lower the level of IL-6 and within hours she had stabilized. She woke up on May 2, her seventh birthday.
Today, she is completely cancer-free.
And this is not the only success for this treatment. Three adult leukemia victims also treated by June's team are also in complete remission. Two more have been well for more than two years and four improved, but did not have full remissions.
Other centres, including the National Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, are also experimenting with similar approaches.
Giving a patient's own immune system the lasting ability to fight cancer has been a long-term goal of cancer research. There is a long way to go before this could be considered a cure even for leukemia. And there is no guarantee that if it does work for leukemia that similar approaches could be developed for other types of cancer.
There are drawbacks, as well. The altered T-cells do not distinguish between cancerous B-cells and healthy ones, meaning Emma has to be treated with immune globulins to prevent infections.
Nevertheless, June hopes the treatment will eventually replace bone marrow transplants-which are even more arduous, risky and expensive-as the last resort for leukemia patients.
It is a very exciting time for cancer research.
Science or nonsense?
Is raw food really better for you than cooked?
Raw foodies can be pretty obnoxious about their lifestyle choice. And we've all heard the old adage that cooking vegetables removes all "the good stuff" from them.
There is plenty of research, though, that indicates cooking actually enhances most of the vitamins in vegetables. The big exception is Vitamin C, which is water soluble. Nevertheless, cooking food helps us digest it meaning our bodies can extract more of "the good stuff."
In fact, a new study suggests we are what we are because we developed cooking. The research correlates the advent of cooked food with the development of our brains. Human brains are disproportionately large for our body size compared to the other great apes. It takes them much more energy to digest their raw diet.
Cooking also makes a lot of foods more palatable. If you are healthy, you are probably getting everything you need.
All of this remains quite controversial. Some dissenters suggest evolutionary adaptation to an entirely new diet, would take much longer than the time we have been cooking.
Personally, though, I am going with what has worked for our species for the last 250,0000 years.
