Cancer, organ transplants, Parkinson's and HIV make headlines
7. Cancer vaccines offer hope
What if a vaccine could help cancer patients survive longer? That was the question that had oncologists excited at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, when not one, but three such vaccines were presented.
The first targeted melanoma and prolonged the lives of people with skin cancer by about five months; the second targeted those stricken with neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer that attacks the nervous system, increasing by 20 per cent the likelihood of being alive or not having a recurrence after two years; and the third delayed relapse of follicular lymphoma by 14 months.
A fourth vaccine, the Human Papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil, was approved for females 9 to 26 years of age and was shown to reduce the risk of cervical cancer in women from ages 25 to 45.
6. Deadline for organ transplants extended
Doctors may soon ditch the coolers to transport living organs for transplant. Under testing in the United States and already approved in Europe, the Warm Organ Perfusion Device is like a mini heart/lung machine that allows the heart, for example, to keep beating as warm blood from the donor pumps through it.
The device gives doctors up to 12 hours to transplant the organ, three times longer than with the cold ice and cooler method.
5. Exercise battles Parkinson’s disease
The body may indeed be able to heal itself. When Dr. Jay Alberts went for a tandem bike ride with a friend who has Parkinson’s disease, he noticed something odd: the friend’s hand tremors disappeared. He brought the mystery into the lab and set up a study to see whether forced exercise – working harder than one would normally do on one’s own, in this case 90 RPMs rather than 50-60 RPMS on a tandem bicycle – would improve motor function in other PD patients. It did.
Not only was there a 35 per cent improvement in motor function and bimanual dexterity, but the effect lasted four weeks after the exercise session. The findings suggest that forced exercise may trigger an increased release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter which is deficient in PD patients and which plays a part in controlling movement.
4. First HIV vaccine, sort of
On Sept. 24, partial results from a controversial clinical trial in Thailand revealed that two older vaccines -- when given together -- cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by 31 per cent. But on Oct. 20, when the full findings by U.S. and Thai researchers were presented at an AIDS vaccine conference in Paris, the numbers didn’t add up – in fact they became statistically insignificant.
Further, the vaccine didn’t protect against those at highest risk for HIV and the effects only lasted about a year. Although disappointing, there was some effect and researchers say that may hold the key to designing new vaccine candidates.
