” … mechanism to make blood cancer cells harmless”

“Leukemia is a group of blood cancers that usually begin in the bone marrow due to a lack of normal blood cells and create large numbers of abnormal blood cells. Symptoms may include bleeding and bruising, bone pain, fatigue, fever and an increased risk of infections.

While its exact cause is unknown, a combination of genetic and environmental factors – including smoking, ionizing radiation, exposure to some chemicals, such as benzene, having had chemotherapy, and Down syndrome – are believed to play a role.

Although it is the most common type of cancer in children, more than 90% of all leukemias are diagnosed in adults.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, somehow, highly proliferative leukemia cells that grow and multiply rapidly could revert to normal cells that no longer multiply? Like putting a jack-in-the-box back into the container.

New research led by scientists in Barcelona, Spain – with significant participation by colleagues at the Department of Human Genetics and Biochemistry of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine: Prof. Gideon Rehavi, Nitzan Kol, Chen Avrahami and Sharon Moshitch-Moshkovitz – has managed to do this. They have just published their findings in the high-impact journal Leukemia under the title, “Remodeling of the m6A RNA landscape in the conversion of acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells to macrophages.”

The article describes how leukemia cells become normal cells that no longer multiply by changing the chemical modifications – the so-called epigenetics – of a type of its genetic material called messenger RNA. The Spanish participants included Alberto Bueno-Costa, a researcher with the group of Dr. Manel Esteller, who heads the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute at the University of Barcelona.”

Spanish-Israeli team finds mechanism to make blood cancer cells harmless – The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)

This entry was posted in Health Care. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to ” … mechanism to make blood cancer cells harmless”

  1. Fred says:

    Remarkable news if it can be tried on actual patients and be successful. However, haven’t we been told that messanger RNA, used in the “vax”, doesn’t affect human cells like this would obviously have to do?

  2. Barbara Ann says:

    Excellent. This is what mRNA technology should be used for; curing terminal diseases where alternative therapies are ineffective. And of course to be administered entirely with consent, without threat of sanction on a patient declining treatment, after proper clinical trials and without an indemnity waiver for the drug company.

    • voislav says:

      This is not mRNA technology as it does not involve genetic changes to mRNA or external injection of mRNA. What they discovered is that one of the basic nucleic acid bases in the cell mRNA is slightly modified in patients with leukemia. The base is adenine and it was modified by methylation. So while there was no change in the genetic code of the mRNA (determined by the base sequence), this modification made it more difficult to correctly read the base sequence, leading to errors.

      Higher incidence of modification led to leukemia and stripping away of the modification led cells to revert to normal function. Methylation can be stripped away by chemical means, for example enzymes, which is a type of protein.

  3. Babeltuap says:

    I highly doubt the general population would ever see a drug like that. At least not before the the Biden executive order to kill all the sparrows.

  4. TTG says:

    That’s not the only recent medical news. This item caught my interest a few days ago. don’t know if it relates to the mRNA stuff, but it does monkey with the immune system.

    “A tiny group of people with rectal cancer just experienced something of a scientific miracle: their cancer simply vanished after an experimental treatment. In a very small trial done by doctors at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, patients took a drug called dostarlimab for six months. The trial resulted in every single one of their tumors disappearing. The trial group included just 18 people, and there’s still more to be learned about how the treatment worked. But some scientists say these kinds of results have never been seen in the history of cancer research.”

    “This drug is one of a class of drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors. These are immunotherapy medicines that work not by directly attacking the cancer itself, but actually getting a person’s immune system to essentially do the work. These are drugs that have been around in melanoma and other cancers for quite a while, but really have not been part of the routine care of colorectal cancers until fairly recently.”

    https://www.npr.org/2022/06/07/1103545361/cancer-drug-experimental-rectal-chemotherapy-surgery-treatment-immunotherapy

    • morongobill says:

      I read that the other day. It seems that revolutionary advances are taking place with cancer treatments.

Comments are closed.