Cui's work on cancer with granulocytes

Granulocytes are a particular sort of white blood cell. Read the original New Scientist article or a related article in Science Daily. See a video of granulocytes attacking cancer cells. The video above is a talk by the primary investigator, Zheng Cui. I learned about this in stumbling across the fact that Chris Heward is seeking granulocyte donors.

Zheng Cui at Wake Forest University of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, took blood samples from more than 100 people and mixed their granulocytes with cervical cancer cells. While granulocytes from one individual killed around 97 per cent of cancer cells within 24 hours, those from another healthy individual only killed around 2 per cent of cancer cells. Average cancer-killing ability appeared to be lower in adults over the age of 50 and even lower in people with cancer. It also fell when people were stressed, and at certain times of the year. "Nobody seems to have any cancer-killing ability during the winter months from November to April," says Cui.

Elsewhere, Cui wrote: "In 1999, we encountered a unique mouse that refused to succumb to repeated challenges with lethal cancer cells that uniformly killed all other laboratory mice, even at much lower doses. Further studies of this phenotype reveal that this unusual cancer resistance is inheritable and entirely mediated by the macrophages and neutrophils of the innate immunity. Transfer of leukocytes with this high level of cancer-killing activity (CKA) from these cancer-resistant mice cures the most aggressive advanced cancers in other mice without any side effect. Most surpisingly, a similar activity of killing cancer cells was discovered in the granulocytes and monocytes of some healthy people." When applied clinically, this is called LIFT, or "leukocyte infusion therapy".

Cui readily admits that he has not yet done much to explore the precise mechanisms involved. For the present, he is more interested in getting the treatment through clinical trials and into clinical practice. So he has gotten very little support from the medical community, and it's been difficult to secure funding for clinical trials.

Cell-level simulation and hobbyist participation

These are a few simulators for biological cells and processes.

• http://www.e-cell.org/ecell/
• http://www.vcell.org/
• http://synbioss.sourceforge.net/

A lot of the important things that happen in medicine are happening at the cellular level. Cell-level simulators might provide a way for large numbers of hobbyist medical researchers to construct and test hypotheses. The most promising hypotheses might be testable in real biology laboratories, and the results could be fed back to improve the accuracy of the simulators.

I'm not sure this would be an effective strategy for hastening the pace of medical progress. My intuition is biased because I've spent the last fifteen years working with open-source software (Linux, Apache, etc). I recognize that competition and profit are also powerful forces driving the rate of innovation, and that these seem to work best when people aren't sharing information so readily. The software/internet world has seen lots of progress in the last ten or twenty years, and it seems that a mixed environment with both open-source and closed-source approaches has pushed things along well.

Software is difficult but biology is much more difficult. At least it looks that way from my software engineer's point of view. The depth of expertise required for meaningful contribution to medical knowledge will likely exclude most would-be contributors. I don't know what to do about that. Perhaps cell simulators and on-line information can make that expertise more accessible.

Participation by hobbyists has become a very big part of the astronomy community. Maybe there is a legitimate place for hobbyists in the field of medical research.

First post

Here is today's nifty piece of medical progress, an advance in the fight against cancer. A couple years ago, an unfortunate woman died of acute myelogenous leukemia, leaving behind samples of her cells, some healthy and some cancerous. A team at Washington University in St. Louis was able to sequence the DNA from the cells and compare her healthy DNA to her cancerous DNA. This became possible because the price of DNA sequencing equipment has come down by a very large factor in recent years.

They identified ten point mutations that differentiated the sick cells from the healthy ones. Two of the mutations were already known from earlier research, the other eight mutations were previously unknown. The team is continuing to study differences in the non-coding DNA as well, and they are also preparing to apply the same sequencing methodology to other cancers.

Because they were using DNA samples all from the same person, there would be very few differences among the healthy cells, just the infrequent cell-to-cell mutations that might occur in an average healthy person's body. So they had a good solid statistical baseline that made the ten cancer-related mutations really clear.

It may be years before this translates into clinical practice that saves lives. But it's nevertheless an important advance. It's something that has never been done before, and it does bring to light a few new facts. It looks strongly like point mutations are the cause of at least some, possibly all, cancers. We strongly suspected that before but this almost proves it. One of the ten mutations was present in only a fraction of the cancerous cells, suggesting that the mutations typically occur in a particular sequence, with the last one finally making the cell dangerous.

I'm interested in what social and economic factors could most hasten the rate of medical progress. My reason for this interest is simple: I'm not young any more. I'm curious about whether the development model that has been so successful for open-source software could somehow be applied to quicken the pace of medical progress.