In scarily awesome medical related news, HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) can cure cancer.
As a cancer patient the last thing you’d want to get is yet another horrifying disease, like AIDS. But research done at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that a harmless, modified version of HIV can not only melt away cancerous tissue, it can also keep it from returning – all with minimal side effects.
In the Penn experiment, the researchers removed certain types of white blood cells that the body uses to fight disease from the patients. Using a modified, harmless version of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients.
As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pains that one would expect when the body is fighting off an infection, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal.
The research is still in its very early stages, but results so far have been positive. The treatment destroyed the cancerous tumors in each of the first three patients and a year later they are still tumor-free.
Who knew you could kill one horrifying disease with another genetically modified horrifying disease? Actually, wait, scratch that. Apparently the 1927 the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to Julius Wagner-Jauregg for his revolutionary new treatment for syphilis, which involved infecting syphilis patients with malaria.
It looks like the idea of expelling evil with evil really does have some merit to it. At least in medicine, because diseases can’t form political parties (yet).
via msnbc.msn
