Good one McWing. Everyone else here is already up and moving before I even hit the start button on the coffee maker or get my tea pot warmed up, and I get up early.
This is a great story to begin a Friday. Fighting fire with fire researchers in a small clinical trial were able to send 9 out of 12 leukemia patients into remission using a modified HIV virus.
Researchers at Penn had developed a technique to modify the patients’ own T-cells to turn them into what they called “serial killer” cells. These serial killer T-cells could each kill approximately 1000 tumor cells that had the CD-19 antigen on them. This antigen is found on the malignant lymphocytes in these leukemia patients.
To produce the serial killers, researchers needed to modify the patients’ own T-cells by genetically engineering them to produce an antibody-like protein that would sic them on the tumor cells. To do that, the researchers needed to get at the T-cells’ genes. They found that the best way to get this process to work was to use HIV.
First!
Hah.
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Good one McWing. Everyone else here is already up and moving before I even hit the start button on the coffee maker or get my tea pot warmed up, and I get up early.
This is a great story to begin a Friday. Fighting fire with fire researchers in a small clinical trial were able to send 9 out of 12 leukemia patients into remission using a modified HIV virus.
Researchers at Penn had developed a technique to modify the patients’ own T-cells to turn them into what they called “serial killer” cells. These serial killer T-cells could each kill approximately 1000 tumor cells that had the CD-19 antigen on them. This antigen is found on the malignant lymphocytes in these leukemia patients.
To produce the serial killers, researchers needed to modify the patients’ own T-cells by genetically engineering them to produce an antibody-like protein that would sic them on the tumor cells. To do that, the researchers needed to get at the T-cells’ genes. They found that the best way to get this process to work was to use HIV.
http://americablog.com/2013/06/hiv-being-used-to-cure-cancer-leukemia.html
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