There is still more testing to be done, as animals are quite different than complex human bodies. However, umbilical cord CIK cells are showing great promise in the near future for human application. Dosage can greatly affect effectiveness, and researchers are currently testing variables regarding dosage, time, and interval of injection. Thus far, CTC researchers have successfully used CIK to kill 9 types of cancer:

From The Economist print edition

Organ-transplant data provide more evidence that stem cells cause cancer

DOCTORS track the long-term health of organ-transplant patients in registries. Such registries make it possible to uncover trends or long-term problems in the population that may be missed in smaller samples. But they can also be pressed into service to support basic research. And a group of researchers led by Sanford Barsky of Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus has done just that. As they reported on June 2nd to a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, in Chicago, they have used one such registry to support the increasingly popular idea that many if not all cancers are caused by stem cells gone bad.

Each organ and tissue in the body has its own collection of stem cells. When these cells divide, they produce two very different daughter cells. One resembles the parent stem cell and thus allows the whole process to continue. The progeny of the other differentiate into mature cells within the skin, kidney, lung or what have you. This is how organs renew themselves over the life of an individual. In a healthy organ, the stem cells divide only when needed—usually in response to injury or when other cells have died. Some cancer scientists, however, think that stem cells can lose this control function and thus divide endlessly, leading to tumours.

Dr Barsky reasoned that if the cancer stem-cell hypothesis is true, then stem cells from a donor organ may cause cancer somewhere else in a transplant recipient's body. Looking in a patient registry, he identified 280 people who had undergone an organ transplant and later developed a solid tumour. In nearly half of these cases donor and recipient were of different sexes, which means the cells from each would have different sex chromosomes (women have two X chromosomes, men an X and a Y). That makes a cancer derived from the transplant easy to identify.

To find out if the tumour cells were the same sex as the body they inhabited, Dr Barsky labelled slices of tumour with green fluorescent tags that bind to the X chromosome and red tags that bind to the Y. And he found transplant-derived cancers in abundance: in 12% of cases, the sex of the tumour matched the donor rather than the recipient. For example, a 48-year-old woman developed skin cancer nine months after receiving a bone-marrow transplant from a man. The tumour cells had a Y chromosome, indicating that the cancer arose from the donated bone marrow. In another case, a 62-year-old man developed colon cancer ten years after receiving a kidney transplant from a female donor. The colon-cancer cells lacked a Y chromosome.

Closer examination of the DNA in the tumour cells and surrounding tissue showed that the tumours definitely did originate from the donor organs, not the recipients. Dr Barsky also found that if a tumour formed in the transplanted organ, it could be derived from either recipient or donor cells.

In each of these cases, the tumour that formed resembled any other tumour that would form in that site. The 48-year-old woman's looked like skin cancer, not cancer of the bone marrow. The 62-year-old man's looked like colon cancer and not like a kidney tumour. Thus, once a cell migrated to a new site, it took on the behaviour and appearance appropriate to that location—losing the identity it had held in its organ of origin.

This observation does not absolutely prove that the migrating cells are stem cells, but it would be astonishing if fully differentiated cells from one tissue could up sticks to another organ and then take on the characteristics of that organ. Besides, biologists do know that stem cells in the bone marrow move into the blood stream. Thus the formation of donor-derived tumours in distant tissues after a bone-marrow transplant is not entirely unexpected. A few reports also exist in the medical literature of donor-derived tumours arising after a solid organ, such as a liver or a kidney, has been transplanted. Dr Barsky's data, though, show that this is not such a rare event after all. Stem cells in one organ thus seem malleable enough to adopt a whole new developmental programme in another organ, even late in a person's life.

More important, though, in Dr Barsky's opinion, is that the new data support the idea that tumours arise from stem cells that have gone wrong. It is not clear whether those stem cells are healthy when they migrate to a new site and mutate into cancer stem cells after they have taken up residence, or if they mutate first and then migrate. Either way, however, transplant registries may just have shed light on a fundamental question in cancer biology.

From The Economist

Cancer may be caused by stem cells gone bad. If that proves to be correct, it should revolutionise treatment.

MUCH of medical research is a hard slog for small reward. But, just occasionally, a finding revolutionises the field and cracks open a whole range of diseases. The discovery in the 19th century that many illnesses are caused by bacteria was one such. The unravelling of Mendelian genetics was another. It now seems likely that medical science is on the brink of a finding of equal significance. The underlying biology of that scourge of modern humanity, cancer, looks as though it is about to yield its main secret. If it does, it is possible that the headline-writer’s cliché, “a cure for cancer”, will come true over the years, just as the antibiotics that followed from the discovery of bacteria swept away previously lethal infectious diseases.

Source: Chinese Red Cross Foundation 

By  Niu Qi, Beijing GreatWall International Cancer Center(BGWICC)

Non-small cell lung cancer, normally adenocarcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma, is not sensitive to traditional chemotherapy. For the advanced lung cancer patients for whom the surgery is no longer avaliable, chemo only treatment is not a very good option, for it has the problems of long round, high toxicity and lot of side effects and it may severely hurt the patient’s general health and immune system. According to the feature of advanced NSCLC as large tumor burden with local lymph metastases and spread organ metastases, targeted Argon-Helium Cryoablation, a minimal-invasive technique, can ablate the mass quickly to relieve the tumor burden. In addition, immunotherapy can eliminate the tiny invisible during surgery or spread cancerous cells, thus to prevent and control recurrence and metastasis. This therapeutic scheme can significantly shorten the treatment period and prolong the survival time.

Targeted Argon-Helium Cryoablation is a minimal-invasive technique that has been made extensive application in and outside of China, and its therapeutic effects have been approved.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2008) — A unique study proposes a new paradigm in cancer treatment: instead of selectively attacking cancer cells, protect all the healthy cells. Animal studies and in vitro human cell studies show that a short fast protects healthy cells against chemotherapy, while tumor cells remain sensitive to the drugs.

Fasting for two days protects healthy cells against chemotherapy, according to a study appearing online the week of Mar. 31 in PNAS Early Edition. Mice given a high dose of chemotherapy after fasting continued to thrive. The same dose killed half the normally fed mice and caused lasting weight and energy loss in the survivors.

The chemotherapy worked as intended on cancer, extending the lifespan of mice injected with aggressive human tumors, reported a group led by Valter Longo of the University of Southern California. Test tube experiments with human cells confirmed the differential resistance of normal and cancer cells to chemotherapy after a short period of starvation. Making chemotherapy more selective has been a top cancer research goal for decades. Oncologists could control cancers much better, and even cure some, if chemotherapy were not so toxic to the rest of the body. Experts described the study as one of a kind.