A lot of folks have been forwarding me this story from the New York Times–
It is a FANTASTIC story about a little girl who had been sick from leukemia for two years, wasnt responding to conventional therapies, and her parents chose to try alternative medicine. Not magic lotions and potions from soulless snake-oil salesmen– A GMO virus, made in part with HIV-1.
What, exactly, her physicians used, I do not know– This is a MSM piece, not a peer-reviewed paper, but Im guessing they used something like what I wrote about last year:
Gene therapy. Her body couldnt figure out how to fight the cancer. Take her T-cells, have HIV-1 deliver a cheat-sheet*, now T-cells know how to kill the cancer. Technically, the T-cells know how to kill the girls B-cells (even the healthy ones), but there are ways to deal with her lack of B-cells, now that the cancer isnt killing her.
While this is an amazing story, this approach did not help everyone in her study. According to the NYT piece, about half of the patients did not respond. But I think cancer is in the same category as HIV-1– We dont need to successfully treat everyone in the first trials. We need to successfully treat some patients. Once we have something that kinda-sorta-sometimes works, we have a starting point for turning the therapy into something that totally-always-completely works.
And like I keep saying, get used to this, folks. Viruses are going to be saving our butts more and more and more in the future. I am *super* pumped mainstream media is finally picking up on this amazing fact, and hope there is a lot less of this make-believe nonsense.
* I realized I havent ever talked about how we actually do this. Look for a post on it later this week!