We are so smart

[pktechgirlbackup]

One potential treatment for cancer is to infect the patient with a virus that kills only cancer cells. But in practice, we've only ever seen temporary gains from this, in part because it's so hard to distribute the virus to every cancer cell.

Another potential treatment is to irradiate the patient nearly to death, which kills the cancer but also their immune system. You can give them a donor immune system, but that's incredibly vulnerable to graft vs. host syndrome. You can extract and save part of their own immune system, but risk a sample contaminated with cancer. Until you can guarantee that the sample is cancer free, the treatment is unusable.

What they're testing right now is extracting a bone marrow sample, treating the sample with the anti-cancer virus, irradiating the the cancer patient, and then reintroducing the sample that you can now guarantee is cancer free. It's so absolutely brilliant I could cry.

Comments

[scythe-of-time.livejournal.com]

Huh! That seems like the logical next step, and yet I never, ever would have thought of it.

Props on your last post, too.