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Small British Start Up Company May Have Found Cure for Cancer

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Photo Credit: independent.co.ukA single-storey workshop on a nondescript business park in Oxfordshire is not the sort of place where you would expect scientific revolutions to take place. But behind the white-painted walls of this small start-up company, scientists are talking about the impossible – a potential cure for cancer.

For the past 20 years, the former academics who set up Immunocore have worked hard on realising their dream of developing a totally new approach to cancer treatment, and finally it looks as if their endeavours are beginning to pay off. In the past three weeks, the company has signed contracts with two of the biggest players in the pharmaceuticals industry which could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds flowing into the firm’s unique research on cancer immunotherapy – using the body’s own immune system to fight tumour cells.

Immunocore is probably the only company in the world that has developed a way of harnessing the power of the immune system’s natural-born killer cells: the T-cells of the blood which nature has designed over millions of years of evolution to seek out and kill invading pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria. T-cells are not nearly as good at finding and killing cancer cells, but the hard-nosed executives of the drugs industry – who are notoriously cautious when it comes to investments – believe Immunocore may have found a way around this so that cancer patients in future are able to fend off their disease with their own immune defences.

“Immunotherapy is radically different,” said Bent Jakobsen, the Danish-born chief scientific officer of Immunocore who started to study T-cells 20 years ago while working at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. “It doesn’t do away with the other cancer treatments by any means, but it adds something to the arsenal that has one unique feature – it may have the potency to actually cure cancer,” Dr Jakobsen said.

It is this potency that has attracted the attention of Genentech in California, owned by the Swiss giant Roche, and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline. Both companies have independently signed deals with Immunocore that could result in up to half a billion pounds being invested in new cancer treatments based on its unique T-cell therapy.

Read more from this story HERE.

The 16-Year-Old Who Changed Medicine Is Out to Change It Again

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Photo Credit: TEDxNijmegenAt 16 years old, Jack Andraka is already a superstar in the field of science. Earlier this year, he won Intel’s prestigious Gordon E. Moore Award, when he created a groundbreaking testing method that can detect pancreatic cancer in its earliest stages. His work is expected to save thousands of lives.

And in the few short months since then, Andraka has already begun work on his next invention—a handheld device that he hopes will have the ability to scan the human body, read vital signs and detect any disease instantly.

While it sounds straight off the set of Star Trek, Andraka’s tricorder is part of a global science competition started by the XPRIZE foundation. The challenge is to create a mobile device that can diagnose 15 diseases across 30 patients, and at stake is a $10 million prize.

But on this project, Andraka isn’t working alone. He teamed up with two other Intel finalists to create what they call “Generation Z.” So far, they’re the only team made up entirely of kids. Despite being up against other teams like the one from Scanadu—a startup based in the NASA Ames Rsearch Center—Andraka is looking forward to exploring the challenge with kids his own age.

“I really enjoy big challenges and figured that it would be fun to collaborate with a group of teens to work on this prize,” he tells TakePart. “I meet such interesting teens at science competitions, and so we are going to work on this problem together. We may not succeed, but we are going to learn a lot and also learn how to work better in a team on a big project. Hopefully, we will be able to be productive and move the idea forward.”

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Cancer Clinics Still Suffering From Sequester, Ask Why FAA was Fixed, Cancer Ignored

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Photo Credit: José GoulãoCongress should have addressed deep cuts to cancer clinics before tackling airline delays caused by sequestration, people at several of those clinics said Friday.

Both the House and Senate have now voted to restore funding that the Federal Aviation Administration lost through the automatic budget cuts known as “sequestration.” The bill is headed to President Obama’s desk.

Although delays in air travel affect lawmakers personally, cancer clinics say the cuts they are facing under the sequester are far more serious — and should have been a higher priority for Congress.

“I would invite anyone in Washington to come look my patients in the eye and tell them that waiting for a flight is a bigger problem than traveling farther and waiting longer for chemotherapy,” said William Nibley, a doctor at Utah Cancer Specialists in Salt Lake City.

Cancer clinics have seen their Medicare payments slashed under sequestration. They have had to turn away thousands of new patients, and some clinics say they will have to close their doors for good if the sequester cuts are not reversed soon.

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Hypocrite-in-Chief: Blaming Sequester, Medicare Cancer Patients Turned Away While Obama Gives $1.2 Billion to Green Energy

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Photo Credit: Sarah L. Voisin

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca’s clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients. “A lot of us are in disbelief that this is happening,” he said. “It’s a choice between seeing these patients and staying in business.”

Some who have been pushing the federal government to spend less on health care say this is not the right approach.

Read more from this story HERE.

To read about the $1.2 billion giveaway to green energy companies, click HERE.

Critics Slam Taxpayer-Funded Political Attack: National Cancer Institute Funds Study Calling Tea Party Tobacco-funded AstroTurf

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Photo Credit: Free BeaconCritics of a new study on the Tea Party movement that was funded by a federal agency are lashing out at what they see as improper taxpayer funding for academic work with an overtly political message.

The study in question purports to show that the Tea Party movement was created by and works to advance the interests of the tobacco industry.

Its critics have rejected the study’s findings and expressed particular concern that taxpayer funds were used to support “politically motivated attacks,” in the words of one Tea Party-aligned congressman.

The study, conducted by three academics at the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, claims that the Tea Party was actually created in the 1990s by conservative groups fighting anti-tobacco policies with money they had received from tobacco companies.

“Rather than being purely a grassroots movement, the Tea Party has been influenced by decades of astroturfing by tobacco and other corporate interests to develop a grassroots network to support their corporate agendas, even though their members may not support those agendas,” the study states.

Read more from this story HERE.

Toledo Football Player To Forgo Last Year Of Eligibility To Be With Sick Fiancee

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Photo Credit: The BladeA football player at the University of Toledo who has been playing the sport since he was a kid told his coach that he will forgo his last eligible season so he could be at his fiancee’s side while she undergoes treatment for leukemia, The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.

Ben Pike, 22, a 6 foot, 3-inch 260-pound defensive lineman who is coming off his best season and was likely to start next year, learned in January that leukemia returned to his fiancée Ashlee Barrett, the report said.

“I know in some people’s terms, he’s giving up things,” Becky Pike, Ben’s mother, told the paper. “But he’s really not giving up. He’s not giving up anything. He’s really fighting for life. And he’s just turned his forces to he’s going so win a battle for life instead of winning on the football field.”

The attraction between the two appeared to be immediate. They met during a bible study class. Barrett, herself a basketball player at Toledo, was taken by Pike’s confidence when he would discuss various topics in class, the report said. Pike couldn’t help but notice the pretty blonde’s energy.

They began dating and fell in love. Pike took Barrett to Washington, D.C., in December 2011 and proposed, the paper reported. He somehow managed to talk White House security guards into giving them clearance so he could pop the question on the main driveway leading to the White House. They set the date for the summer of 2013.

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Ten Year Old Boy With Terminal Cancer Sworn In to Army

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A ten-year-old boy with terminal cancer received the surprise of his young life this week when his dreams of becoming a U.S. soldier came true.

Khalil Quarles, from Baltimore, had longed to enlist in the army for years before an aggressive form of soft tissue cancer attacked his leg and spread to his lungs in 2011.

And so as a special surprise, troops from the 200th Military Command out of Fort Meade paid him a visit on Wednesday to make the boy an honorary serviceman in the United States Army.

Khalil wore a look of awe and shock as he pledged his allegiance. Earlier in the day, while Skyping with a soldier stationed in Kuwait, he had thought things couldn’t get better.

But as he hobbled outside on his crutches and saw the crowd assembled on his front lawn, the dreams of this little boy with an incurable disease in that moment came true.

The boy’s mother, Cypress Mason told WBal TV of his long battle against the cancer and the multiple rounds of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation he had endured. ‘We decided to just stop the treatment so that Khalil could have the best quality of life that’s possible, being a 10-year-old child, to get to enjoy his life,’ she said.

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Video: Obama PAC blames Romney for Woman’s death; CNN says, “not true”

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An outrageous ad from an Obama Super PAC states that Romney was the cause of a woman’s death from cancer. Surprisingly, CNN cries foul, labeling the ad “not true.” See it all here.

Photo credit: Cain & Todd Benson

The Economics of Abortion: Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Lost

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As we all know, there are so many effects that abortion has on our society and the whole world. What seems to be overlooked is how abortion can hurt the economy. People make the mistake that abortion is solely a moral issue, and therefore cannot be related to the effects of the economy.

In the United States, we have a national debt nearing $16 trillion, which has surpassed the nation’s annual GDP. In other words, our federal government is spending beyond our means. Since abortion was legalized in 1973 by Roe v. Wade, over 50 million babies have died, with over 3,000 killed on a daily basis.

It’s horrible enough that these innocent babies are murdered, but can you imagine how many more contributions those 50 million lives would have made? Perhaps one of those aborted could have found a way to cure AIDS, cancer, or asthma, just to name a few. Plus, with more people contributing to society through work, we would have a higher GDP, which would greatly help reduce the burden of our government spending, which spends about $4 billion daily. Much progress could be made to shore up the social security of the 10,000 individuals who retire every day.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Social Security Administration, Guttmacher Institute, and National Center for Health Statistics, if abortion had never been legalized in 1973, more than 17 million people would be employed, resulting in an additional $400 billion from those workers, with $11 billion contributed to Medicare and $47 million contributed to Social Security. Although it is important to also reduce government spending, these added incomes would nevertheless help the country.

It doesn’t take a world-renowned economist to figure out that when you’re decreasing the youth from abortion and with all the baby-boomers retiring, Social Security is going to eventually run out if we continue with abortions and the amount of spending by the federal government. Even though Social Security cannot last forever with the amount of federal spending today, not having abortion would help Social Security last longer, assuming that the amount of federal spending is the same.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: utsfl