[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Sign-in]  [Mail]  [Setup]  [Help] 

Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

The death of Yu Menglong: Political scandal in China (Homo Rape & murder of Actor)

The Pacific Plate Is CRACKING: A Massive Geological Disaster Is Unfolding!

Waste Of The Day: Veterans' Hospital Equipment Is Missing

The Earth Has Been Shaken By 466,742 Earthquakes So Far In 2025

LadyX

Half of the US secret service and every gov't three letter agency wants Trump dead. Tomorrow should be a good show

1963 Chrysler Turbine

3I/ATLAS is Beginning to Reveal What it Truly Is

Deep Intel on the Damning New F-35 Report

CONFIRMED “A 757 did NOT hit the Pentagon on 9/11” says Military witnesses on the scene

NEW: Armed man detained at site of Kirk memorial: Report

$200 Silver Is "VERY ATTAINABLE In Coming Rush" Here's Why - Mike Maloney

Trump’s Project 2025 and Big Tech could put 30% of jobs at risk by 2030

Brigitte Macron is going all the way to a U.S. court to prove she’s actually a woman

China's 'Rocket Artillery 360 Mile Range 990 Pound Warhead

FED's $3.5 Billion Gold Margin Call

France Riots: Battle On Streets Of Paris Intensifies After Macron’s New Move Sparks Renewed Violence

Saudi Arabia Pakistan Defence pact agreement explained | Geopolitical Analysis

Fooling Us Badly With Psyops

The Nobel Prize That Proved Einstein Wrong

Put Castor Oil Here Before Bed – The Results After 7 Days Are Shocking

Sounds Like They're Trying to Get Ghislaine Maxwell out of Prison

Mississippi declared a public health emergency over its infant mortality rate (guess why)

Andy Ngo: ANTIFA is a terrorist organization & Trump will need a lot of help to stop them

America Is Reaching A Boiling Point

The Pandemic Of Fake Psychiatric Diagnoses

This Is How People Actually Use ChatGPT, According To New Research

Texas Man Arrested for Threatening NYC's Mamdani

Man puts down ABC's The View on air

Strong 7.8 quake hits Russia's Kamchatka


Health
See other Health Articles

Title: Billionaire Sean Parker just invested $250 million into changing the way we fight cancer
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/billion ... a-new-kind-of-cancer-treatment
Published: Apr 14, 2016
Author: LYDIA RAMSEY, BUSINESS INSIDER
Post Date: 2016-04-14 06:54:18 by Tatarewicz
Keywords: None
Views: 68
Comments: 1

ScienceAlert... Another big name has joined the research effort for a different kind of cancer treatment called immunotherapy, which uses the immune system to fight cancer cells.

Sean Parker, the internet billionaire who co-founded Napster and is a former Facebook president, gave $250 million on Wednesday to launch the Parker Institute that will help with the research and development of cancer immunotherapy treatments.

Unlike chemotherapy, which involves administering powerful drugs that kill both cancerous and healthy cells (most healthy cells can repair themselves), immunotherapies harness the power of the immune system to help it identify and knock out just the cancerous cells.

For example, using something called a PD-1 inhibitor, which goes after a type of protein called PD-1 that stops the immune system from fighting cancerous cells, the immunotherapy effectively helps the immune system take its foot off the breaks. Others, like cancer vaccines, activate the immune system in other ways, pushing the immune system to work harder against cancer cells. Cancer in the crosshairs

In the past few months, many big names have started piling on initiatives with a particular focus in accelerating research in cancer immunotherapy.

For example, Vice President Joe Biden and the Obama administration have asked for a $1 billion initiative for a 'cancer moonshot' which will in part focus on immunotherapy. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others pledged $125 million to create a new immuno-oncology focused cancer institute at Johns Hopkins.

And Patrick Soon-Shiong, the CEO of NantWorks, set up a Cancer MoonShot2020 coalition that aims to bring together all the people developing immunotherapies to bridge research gaps. Pharmaceutical companies also have many types of these treatments already in clinical trials, and investors expect many of them will generate billions in sales in the next couple of years.

Immunotherapy for cancer isn’t particularly new, so why all the recent attention and investments?

Essentially, it comes down to the fact that we’re finally getting to see the results.

The Cancer Research Institute (CRI), which has been exploring cancer immunotherapy since the 1950s, is one of the many partners that will be working with the Parker Institute.

"It’s when you see the successes and durable responses," Cancer Research Institute CEO Jill O’Donnell-Tormey told Business Insider. One clear example of this is former president Jimmy Carter, who has been cancer-free since December 2015 after having his melanoma treated in part with an immunotherapy called Keytruda.

While the results are promising, they still aren’t perfect. Some recently approved drugs, take Keytruda for example, only work about 30 percent of the time. That’s still better than the average response rate of chemotherapy treatments on their own in cases of metastatic melanoma. Still, when they do work, these treatments appear able to ward off cancer longer than other existing treatments like chemotherapy. What’s within reach?

CRI CEO O’Donnell-Tormey said that right now, cancer immunotherapy researchers need to find specific antigens, or toxins that elicit a response by the immune system, to target. This will help ensure that the immunotherapy works in every single person. And although immunotherapy has come along way in the past few years, it’s still far from having cracked the code.

"It requires a lot of money, and there are no guarantees," said O’Donnell-Tormey. "Many times we’re funding only 10 percent of the research grants that come in."

Plus, it’s hard to predict what will work and when it will work, so saying a certain amount of money will surely lead to a solution doesn’t exactly cut it. "We can’t say what the actual amount is that you really need to do it."

But in the meantime, having the momentum certainly doesn’t hurt.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

More from Business Insider:

How the science of happiness can help us shape public policy

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest

#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)

I heard that cancer was cured in 1926 but the AMA suppressed it all to keep people on worthless and destructive chemotherapy. ;)

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke

BTP Holdings  posted on  2016-04-14   7:14:51 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest


[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Sign-in]  [Mail]  [Setup]  [Help]