Fight Aging!

Barring poor luck, it seems unlikely that I will die from cancer. I may be greatly inconvenienced by cancer, financially at the very least, but not killed. I take the same view of Alzheimer's - the scientists and researchers tackling these age-related conditions are well established, well funded and making progress. We may not be anywhere near as close as we'd like to a cure for cancer, but the institutions of cancer research are in place and ready to benefit from falling costs and increasing capacities in biotechnology. I feel confident that these diseases will indeed be reduced to the status of obscure threat or minor chronic condition within the next twenty years - the momentum is there. As an example of the sort of basic research that encourages optimism, here we have a recent advance in immunotherapies for cancer:

Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) of the Universite de Montreal, has succeeded in developing a new approach to eradicate malignant melanoma tumours in mice. The findings of Dr. Perreault and his research team are reported in an article just published in the online edition of Nature Medicine, and soon to be published in the print edition of the publication.

In brief, the method developed by Perreault consists of administering T-lymphocytes - cells whose function it is to recognize and destroy abnormal cells - from a healthy mouse donor to mice with cancer. These lymphocytes are pre-immunized against a specific antigen (H7a) present in host mouse cancer cells. Although the target antigen is found in some of the host's healthy cells, the treatment does not cause any side effects because the anti-H7a lymphocytes cluster almost exclusively around the tumour site where they are attracted to the molecule VCAM-1 present on the blood vessels that irrigate the tumour. The T-lymphocytes produce interferon gamma and perforine/granzyme to eradicate cancerous cells.

"We are very pleased with the insights yielded to date from this research project which our team initiated in 2003, explains Dr. Perreault. Thanks to another five-year grant from the Canadian Cancer Society, we have moved on directly to explore the cancer-curing potential of this immunotherapeutic method in the treatment of human melanoma. We may be only a few years away from testing the application on human beings. The prospect of this work leading to the development of an effective, nontoxic and non-invasive therapy against certain types of cancer for broad clinical use is exciting for every basic research students, scientist and doctors working on this project."

Barely a month goes by without an equally promising advance from cancer researchers; this state of affairs is the end result of a long history of hard work by patient advocates, scientists and activists. It makes you wonder just what we would be seeing from biomedical gerontology in terms of progress towards working healthy life extension therapies if the field were funded and supported to the degree it deserves.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, cancer