Check out two news stories from the past week about modern medicine. Better to say, about high-class technologies that allow solving some conditions by attacking them at the cellular or genetic level. All are consequences of research at the cellular and genetic level of the human body, of the desire to understand in the smallest chemical details the processes through which it works.
The first: in a clinical trial done in New York on 14 patients with colorectal cancer, all 14 went into remission after immunotherapy treatment (link).
Immunotherapy means, in a very simplistic explanation, that the patient’s immune system is taught or directed to attack the cancer cells in the tumors of that form of cancer. It’s something we’ve seen a lot of news about in recent years, and it’s believed to be a very effective treatment against various forms of cancer.
In this trial, there were 14 patients with some form of rectal cancer. The explanation is something complicated related to the blocking of certain proteins in the cells of the immune system, which thus recognize the cancerous tumor and destroy it. All 14 patients got rid of their cancer with this treatment, probably a few injections, without radiation or chemotherapy.
And since colorectal cancer is one of the main causes of mortality in the world, including Romania, and there are also genetic predispositions for such a thing, the news is excellent.
Second: In China, several children born deaf have regained the ability to hear after genetic treatment (link).
The treatment itself uses a harmless virus. I think it’s something like CRISPR therapy, where a virus is modified to cut a cell where the doctors want and insert a new DNA code in that place. From what I understand, some viruses do this naturally, and by modification they can be told “look what the cell you want to look for in the body looks like and look what amino acids you have to connect there”.
Perhaps it was the same in China. The researchers used a virus to add missing DNA to the children’s ear cells, cells that otherwise didn’t know how to propagate sounds. Once “corrected”, children started to hear after about a month.
We live in amazing times, indeed. Almost every year there are several such news stories about revolutionary treatments whose clinical trials give hope for the future of medicine that can cure hitherto incurable diseases, that can restore organs and even organs.
The possibilities of medicine will probably be very different 20-30 years from now. I can only hope that they will be accessible to everyone and not blocked after costs of tens or hundreds of thousands of euros per treatment. Theoretically, in time any treatment becomes cheaper, once the technology becomes accessible, but we will see.
Also, maybe someday a solution will be found for this classic cold, the common cold as the Americans say, so that we don’t stay with cough, fever and runny nose for several days. Alice has had a cold since Friday, her throat also hurts and she doesn’t understand why, and we all sleep so badly at night that in the morning I wonder if I have the strength to make a coffee.
2023-11-14 08:03:45
#Medicine #future #Colorectal #cancer #cured #immunotherapy #deafness #eliminated #gene #therapy #clinical #trials
/nginx/o/2023/11/14/15718586t1hb9c6.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1)
