Concluding Blog Post

Writing a blog for a semester has been a completely new experience for me. English classes so far have consisted of three papers and a final, however this class had me constantly engaged in news articles and writing profusely. My topic “science and medical breakthroughs” was at times a very difficult topic to write about. For most of the semester I had difficulty finding a community I could fit into and or relate too. However I chose to broaden my search for a community and found that there is a large amount of material reported in the newspapers. My blogging community is small but my reporting community is quite large. An article that I was writing about—“The baby in Mississippi that was cured of HIV” made the front page of The Huffington Post as well as written about in many other newspapers.

As for anyone looking to write a scientific based blog, I can’t urge enough the importance of having numerous sources when writing a post. Reading multiple sources is always essential for finding accurate and extensive information on a topic.

I am very grateful that I have been able to be apart of this class. Maintaining a blog has been a difficult but very rewarding assignment. Writing weekly and getting feedback really did improve not only the way I wrote but also the way I read and asked questions while reading articles. It has given me new interest in the field of biology, assisting me in finding a path in psychology I would want to study. After writing and reading about brain mapping and tissue engineering; I plan to get a minor in neuroscience or biology.

I’ve realized that my blog is an “island” community, for that reason I hope to continue to cover any discoveries that make headlines and catch my attention.  Ending my semester with 300 page views and multiple views in numerous countries shows me I have opened up a potential community of readers and potential writers themselves. 

Courage Through Adversity

Cancer. It’s the most feared word that a doctor could ever utter. It is one thing most people believe will never happen to them or their families. Unfortunately, this disease does not discriminate and can affect anyone despite their age, sex, or ethnicity. For anyone that receives this heart-stopping diagnosis numerous life changes will be required for proper treatment and care.  This disease has devastating effects on more than just those who are diagnosed; loved ones are also profoundly impacted.

I was fortunate to get to speak with someone who was hard hit by this disease and has stood by her mother during her diagnosis and treatment.
Her mother worked for years as a nurse even though she had a pre-existing condition of Fibromyalgia; a disease that causes severe and debilitating pain, she still continued to sustain a job and attempted to maintain a normal life.  She began to complain of odd pains but as any woman in her late 60’s and also a person living with fibromyalgia, pain is a part of every day life. However, when she began to forget segments of her day that affected her work, she promptly resigned and made an appointment with an oncologist.

The doctor used an ultrasound to examine the site of her pain and the results came back problematic.   The doctor had noticed several dark spots as well as an infection in her lymph nodes. A further biopsy and endoscopy were administered diagnosing her with stomach cancer and started her on gastric chemotherapy. During this treatment she suffered a severe allergic reaction and the doctors were forced to stop treatment. With this close call with death and an obvious misdiagnosis she sought out advice from a different physician.

This new doctor conducted a third biopsy revealing the correct diagnosis. The patient was suffering from stage IV terminal cancer, a melanoma in the stomach and lymph nodes. The prognosis for this is a 47% survival rate for two years. However, the fact that the treatment is so new is showing a good chance for years to come and gives hope to the family about years to come instead of the uncertainty of the future.

She is currently going under immunotherapy and responding to treatment well.

What has happened to this family and many others is tragic, however this story and many alike have a lot to offer to others. Don’t ignore symptoms, err on the side of caution, and go to the doctor to seek advice and care. The earlier cancer is detected the better chance a person has at responding to treatment and being sent into remission.

Tragic events unfold around us every day. The future is unpredictable and inevitable; no one knows what tomorrow is going to be.  I had the opportunity to speak with a family member who was experiencing this tragedy first hand, but despite the adversity she had witnessed and gone through she has been to show the courage to be able to maintain a job and teach. She has been able to inspire me to persevere through the most difficult of times by her example.

No Answer for Cancer?

For decades the war on cancer has showed the public extensive research with little glimpses of hope for a cure. In this post I hope to explain the complexities that are involved in the research of curing cancer.

Cancer is very, very difficult to understand. The idea of one cure for cancer is naïve. There are over 200 different types of cancers, all with their own characteristics making one case different from the next. These tiny differences in our genetic make-up not only effect the progression of the disease but the treatment and medication required as well.

Cancer cells grow and divide picking up different adaptations along the way requiring doctors and researchers to be one step ahead at all times. As Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest” explains the adaptations needed to survive in the animal kingdom, it is a fitting analogy to explain how these cancer cells are adapting within the human body to survive the progression of treatments. Not being bound by genetic coding these cells seem to take up a mind of their own. Multiplying irrationally, these cells even duplicate chromosomes in ways never seen before varying vastly from one another.

Charles Swanton from the Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute made a puzzling discovery when looking at four samples of kidney cancers from a patient. The cells in the cancer at the base of the tumor had genetically mutated as it spread to different parts of the body. As the cancer spread throughout the patient’s body it had genetically mutated into completely different forms of cancer with their own unique traits. This means that this complex diversity of cells will require multiple different treatments to put the cancer into remission. This discovery may have answered the question of why some treatments work at first but some become treatment resistant.

Swanton discovered over 128 different mutations throughout the four different samples. One third of the mutations were common to all of the samples yet one fourth were unique to a single sample. In addition the different samples although taken from a same mass shared some similar genes but had adapted into two different evolutionary paths. By focusing on the similarities within the genetic code of the samples researchers can find the originating tumor and start treatment there. This has shown promising results in patients with kidney cancer who have had the main tumor removed; researchers think that by taking the base of the evolutionary path will cause environmental strain on the remaining tumor cells. These remaining cells are no longer “fit” for the environment and have less chance of survival.

“It seems tumors depend upon these special changes to keep living and growing and we need to be smart about targeting these key changes,” said Dr. Lisa Diller of Harvard Medical School in Boston. “ We need to define the beating heart of a tumor and figure out how to aim our drugs straight at it.” (Shukla, 2012)

As research progresses other innovative techniques has been developed to aid in this ongoing battle. As I have previously discussed in my post “customized medicine” the idea of personalizing medicine, testing, as well as diagnostics seems to be in synch with developing research. Carla Leslie is one example of a success story of personalized medicine treatment. Doctors at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Huston treated her stage 3C breast cancer with chemotherapy and a drug called Herceptin.  The stage at which the cancer was in has mortality rate of up to 60 percent over five years. They chose Herceptin out of many potential drugs due to her specific genetic composition. As of today Carla’s cancer is still in remission. This case is laying an important foundation in this research. With more use technique more success stories like Carla’s are possible.

Researchers are starting to understand that taking a single biopsy of a tumor is not as effective as they once thought. Taking multiple samples from different locations from the tumor shows the cancers progression and further mutation. Looking for similarities within the genetic code researchers can pinpoint the origin of the tumor and begin the treatment at the source. Personalized medicine will come into play to help effectively target remaining mutations that chemotherapy by itself falls short.  The old ideology that a “one size fits all” treatment for cancer is being replaced with newer thinking. Specialized medicine targeting individuals and their specific genetic requirements shows promise for the successful treatment of cancer in the future.

Shukla, R. (2012) Moving Target: Why a Cancer “Cure” is So Elusive. ABC News.

Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/moving-target-cancer-cure-elusive/story?id=15862910#.UWYLuCvwJ5k

Young, E. (2012) World within a tumor – study shows how complex cancer can be.

National Geographic. Retrieved from http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/07/a-world-within-a-tumour-new-study-shows-just-how-complex-cancer-can-be/

Potential Sources

When I picked my topic I was positive that finding information on new medical discoveries would be easy. However, after writing this blog for the past few months finding a blogging community of writers with a similar topic has been difficult. This constant search for interesting articles has me in a waiting game until the next big discovery.

One reason may be because research takes time, not every day are new groundbreaking discoveries being made. So finding interesting, relative, and creditable articles are often one in a dozen. I would declare my blog as an island topic. Sure I have some neighboring writers in the newspapers but they write on a much larger scale when it comes to a particular topic.

However, I myself have had to broaden my range of sources and include articles and online databases for my final analysis paper.

Scientific American has a blogging community but, I have found it difficult to find information that caught my attention. The New York Times however has had numerous articles that I have used as sources in my blog this semester.  News stations such as BBC and ABC have had many amazing stories covered in their papers such as the quadruple amputee that I covered as well earlier this semester. Im still in the search to find a blog similar to mine and hope to include that as well in my paper.

Genetic engineering leads to cure for acute leukemia

Researchers have begun work on a new type of cell therapy that shows promise in treating an acute type of leukemia. Scientists have found that by genetically altering a person's immune cells they are able to fight the cancerous cells within the blood.

The first successful treatment was in a 7-year-old girl, Emma Whitehead saving her "from deaths door into remission nearly a year ago." (Grady) Emma has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) the most common type of childhood cancer. Lymphoblastic leukemia is cancer of the blood and bone marrow [primarily affects B-cells]. It is caused when bone marrow makes too many immature white blood cells. These cells do not work like normal white blood cells and are not able to fight infection effectively. (NCI, NIH) ALL gets progressively worse with age and has a 60% fatality rate in adults and a 10% rate in children. (Grady)

Research was done by Dr. Michael Sedelian, the director of the Center for Cell Engineering and Genetics Lab at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan New York.  He states:

["Usually patients like the ones in this study, who relapse after chemotherapy, usually have only a few months left. But with this new treatment three out of five patients have been in remission for five or more months. Two others have died: one was in remission but passed away from a blood clot, and the other relapsed. The survivors have gone on to have bone marrow transplants. Their prognosis is good but relapse is still possible and only time will tell."] (Grady, Sedelain)

Other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, have become intrigued by this research and plan to conduct similar tests of their own.

How the treatment works: A patient's blood would be extracted and run through a machine separating the T- cells from the blood. A T-cell is a type of white blood cell that helps fight infection and maintain immunity. The researchers would modify the T-cells to attack any cell that carried a certain protein, called CD-19. CD-19 is located in the B-cells that have the cancerous material. The genetically modified T-cells are reprogrammed to attack and destroy any cell containing CD-19. In theory, destroying all B-cells (which can be replaced) along with the cancer sending the patient into remission. (Grady)

Picture from: Google Images

The process itself may be as grueling as chemotherapy. Dr. Brentjens conducted a treatment on an 58- year old individual who was unsuccessful with chemotherapy treatments. This patient experienced a high fever of 105 degrees, a severe drop in blood pressure and a spike in heart rate. This patient was placed under intensive care during this process and after eight days the leukemia was undetectable after numerous tests.

Dr. Carl June, a Professor of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center has sent two of the three patients he has worked with into remission using the same techniques. However these patients did not receive the standard bone marrow transplant. Dr. Carl June said, "Because all three patients have had amazing anti-tumor response, literally pounds of leukemia have been shed off all three patients." (Medical Health Discoveries)

Today bone marrow transplants have been used to treat this acute type of leukemia but Dr. Junes research supports evidence that this alternative treatment may have promising results in curing cancer.

References:

Grady, D. (2013). Cell therapy shows promise for acute type of leukemia. Retrieved March 24, 2013          
         from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/health/altered-t-cell-therapy-shows-promise-for-acute-leukemia.html?_r=1&

Medical Heath Discoveries. (2013) American researchers found cure for leukemia. Retrieved March
         24, 2013. From http://www.medicalhealthdiscoveries.com/2011/08/american-researchers-found-cure-for.html

National Cancer Institute at the National Institute of Health (2013). General Information about 
     Childhood Lymphoblastic Leukemia.  
     http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/treatment/childALL/Patient/page1

Baby cured of HIV

Doctors in Mississippi had a remarkable event occur Sunday when they discovered a baby that had contracted HIV at birth had no sign of the deadly virus.  Dr. Hannah Gay from the University of Mississippi Medical Center said, “We have perhaps inadvertently but in fact cured the child.” This is the first case in history of a baby being cured of HIV.

This case is special in many ways.  The mother had no prior knowledge of having HIV while pregnant so she did not receive the usual prenatal care that reduces the chances of infection in the child.  Due to the child’s high infection risk, doctors treated the infant only 30 hours after birth with three aggressive retroactive drugs to attack the HIV virus. This is a drastic measure that had never been taken before on someone so young.  Usually there is a six-month waiting period before the use of retroactive drugs to see if the child had contracted the virus or just held antibodies from the infected mother at birth.  In this particular case, the doctors kept the child on treatment and tested weekly for the virus. On three occasions the infant tested positive for the virus however, after 29 days of treatment the child had no sign of the virus. For 18 months they continued treatment but unfortunately the mother started missing appointments until nearly a month and a half later.  Expecting the treatment to have failed and the child to have tremendous growth in the infection the scientists were baffled to find no trace of HIV.  At first doctors’ speculations were that they were treating a child that had not been infected; but after numerous testing and help partnering with Johns Hopkins University they concluded that the child did in fact carry the virus. Scientists believe that the aggressive actions taken at only hours old prevented the growth a replication of HIV. After two and a half years the child still has no sign of the virus and no longer requires medicine. Doctors are still hopeful that the virus stays gone and that replication of this treatment can be implemented.

Every year more than 300,000 children are infected with HIV. If this is not a one in a million occurrence and future research shows that this is an effective treatment, thousands of lives can be saved each year.

Dr. Hannah Gay still gives the infant check-ups ever month and said, "I just check for the virus and keep praying that is stays gone." 

References:

Pollack, A. McNeil Jr., D. (2013). In medical first, a baby with HIV is deemed cured.

            Retrieved March 5, 2013 from

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/health/for-first-time-baby-cured-of-hiv-doctors-say.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Castellano, A. (2013). Mississippi baby born with HIV “functionally cured.” Doctors     

          say. Retrieved March 5, 2013 from

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/mississippi-baby-born-hiv-functionally-cured-doctors/story?id=18645410

New Non-invasive Surgery Technique

Yoav Medan, an Israeli doctor, has been working for the past 15 years on a new method of non-invasive surgery that combines two known technologies into one operating procedure.  

The idea of non-invasive surgery is not new.  Non-invasive surgery has been used in various treatments, in varying degrees of effectiveness for decades. The obstacle early pioneers had in this area was not being able to see what was happening during the surgery, and this resulted in surrounding tissue damage similar to the damage seen in invasive surgery.  Also, the non-invasive surgeries were not effective because they could not properly target the area on which to be operated.  Invasive surgery today is still risky and impacts patients for months with pain, physical therapy, and medications. The revolutionary technique would be finding a new effective treatment, without damaging surrounding tissues, therefore maximizing the percentage of success while minimizing recovery times. That’s exactly what this team of scientists has been able to accomplish.  The use of Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI) allows doctors to have real-time visual interaction during surgical procedures.  Focused ultrasound is used today in procedures such as ones to break up kidney stones. Combining the use of MRI and focused ultra sound, researchers at InSightec in Israel and partners around the world, have created the ability to treat such ailments as motor disorders, fibroid tumors, and metastases of the bone using this technique; to be able to operate without damaging surrounding tissue damage and no recovery time. 

Demonstration of focused ultrasound on mimicked issue (silicone)
Pictures from TED talk cited below

Simulated lesion in the silicone without damaging other tissue
Pictures from TED talk 

The operating room of the future could very well consist of a surgeon sitting behind a computer clicking nothing more than a mouse.  For example, a patient being treated for a brain condition would be placed in the MRI chamber with a transducer placed on their head.  The MRI would pinpoint the location and the transducer would project ultrasonic energy to the specific area targeted by the surgeon.  This procedure could be compared to the process done to break up kidney stones, doctors could change the amount of energy directed to an area from a brush of air to a smashing force. The surgeon first locates the affected area by sending a pulse that heats up the area a few degrees; this lets surgeons know if they are focused precisely.  Once the surgeon has correctly focused on the affected area, he or she then sends the ultrasonic pulse to that site.  Patients can literally walk away from this procedure in minutes, with proven relief. 

Simulation of procedure: transducer located around the head before being placed under the MRI
Picture from TED talk

John, a retired professor from Virginia suffered from neurological tremors.  Medicines were no longer effective and his quality of life was poor and he was totally dependent on others.  Many patients are reluctant to undergo traditional forms of surgery and physically cut into the brain.  John underwent this experimental surgery in early 2011, as approved by the FDAID at the University of Virginia.   Here is a sample of John’s handwriting on the morning of his surgery and hours after the procedure. 

"This is my handwriting John S. Watterson III 6-20-11"
Picture from TED talk

Many other patients have seen immediate relief with this type of treatment and their quality of life has been drastically improved.  John is able to live an independent life and enjoys an active retirement life.

This technique could revolutionize surgery and already shows promise in tackling different diseases, all while improving a patient’s quality of life.  

References:

Medan, Y. (2011, Oct). Yoav Medan: Ultrasound surgery-- healing without cuts. [video file]. Retrieved
           from http://www.ted.com/talks/yoav_medan_ultrasound_surgery_healing_without_cuts.html