My cancer and the magic bullet
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For thousands of years, Chinese medicine and conventional Western medicine appeared to be two unrelated and uncompromising paradigms. The history of acupuncture can be traced back for more than 2500 years but today we can use advanced technology to understand ancient healing methods. Acupuncture should not be used to compete with efficacious treatment modalities that are already available in conventional Western medicine. Exploration of its clinical applications should focus on conditions for which conventional medicine can find no satisfactory remedy.
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Modern chemotherapy has played a major role in our control of tuberculosis. Yet tuberculosis still remains a leading infectious disease worldwide, largely owing to persistence of tubercle bacillus and inadequacy of the current chemotherapy. The increasing emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis along with the HIV pandemic threatens disease control and highlights both the need to understand how our current drugs work and the need to develop new and more effective drugs. This review provides a brief historical account of tuberculosis drugs, examines the problem of current chemotherapy, discusses the targets of current tuberculosis drugs, focuses on some promising new drug candidates, and proposes a range of novel drug targets for intervention. Finally, this review addresses the problem of conventional drug screens based on inhibition of replicating bacilli and the challenge to develop drugs that target nonreplicating persistent bacilli. A new generation of drugs that target persistent bacilli is needed for more effective treatment of tuberculosis.
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The "holy grail" of cancer therapy is to identify and exploit genetic elements and signal transduction pathways capable of selectively destroying tumor cells without eliciting harmful effects in normal cells or tissues. To achieve this objective, subtraction hybridization was combined with a "differentiation therapy" model of cancer in which human melanoma cells were induced to revert to a more "normal" state, growth arrest irreversibly, and terminally differentiate by treatment with fibroblast IFN and mezerein. This strategy permitted the cloning of a variety of genes involved in regulating important physiologic processes, including cell cycle, response to cytokines and viruses, tumorigenesis and metastasis, cancer growth control, apoptosis, and senescence. A specific gene, melanoma differentiation-associated gene-7/interleukin-24 (mda-7/IL-24), displaying cancer-specific apoptosis-inducing properties isolated using this scheme has now come into the limelight as a new gene therapy for divergent cancers. Although the mechanism of cancer cell selectivity of mda-7/IL-24 remains to be delineated, numerous attributes enable this gene as an effective therapy for cancer, including an ability to discriminate between normal and cancer cells, induce apoptosis in diverse tumor cells, promote "bystander" antitumor effects, inhibit tumor growth and angiogenesis in animal models, synergize with radiation, and modulate immune responses. These unique features combined with successful transition into the clinic instill confidence that mda-7/IL-24, as a single or more likely as part of a combinatorial approach, may provide profound therapeutic benefit for cancer patients.
Reports of low mortality rate for severely head-injured children have led to the myth that children have a better outcome than adults after severe head injury. This was examined in the present study by comparing the outcome of 4,041 severely head-injured children with 14,789 adults from five Level I trauma centers in the Pennsylvania Trauma Systems Foundation from 1986 to 1996. Severe head injury was defined as GCS <8, and outcome was defined by mortality. The overall mortality rate for children (<18 years) was 36.5% and for adults 47. 6%. However, for patients involved in motor vehicle accidents, there was no clinically significant difference between children age 3-11 years (35%), age 12-18 years (31.4%) and adults (32.5%). The unprecedented low mortality rate for severe head injury in children was probably due to the selection bias of the patient population. We conclude that children involved in motor vehicle accidents are just as likely to die from severe head injury as adults.