Folding Forum

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31019270/ some type of immuno therapy. what do you think

A big problem has been getting the immune system to “see” cancer as a threat, said Dr. Patrick Hwu, melanoma chief at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Viruses like the flu or polio are easily spotted by the immune system because they look different from human cells.

“But cancer comes from our own cells. And so it’s more like guerrilla warfare — the immune system has trouble distinguishing the normal cells from the cancer cells,” he said.

To help it do that, many cancer vaccines take a substance from a cancer cell’s surface and attach it to something the immune system already recognizes as foreign — in the lymphoma vaccine’s case, a shellfish protein.

“It’s a mimic to what you’re trying to kill, a training device to train the immune system to kill something,” Hwu explained.

Those chemicals are called "adjuvants" and are necessary to induce immunity to poorly immunogenic substances like tumor-specific surface proteins.
One of the tricks in using them is to pick something that the individual won't encounter routinely in future... using a horseshoe crab protein is fine, but you wouldn't want to use a protein from milk or soybeans. And one has to pick the target protein carefully too; if the antibodies generated by the adjuvant/antigen pair are not sufficiently specific for the tumor protein, they may attack other, normal proteins.

What is stanford working on right now? When will it be complete and when will we see these cancer vaccines being given to people? Im really dedicated to folding but I have'nt really been hearing any updates about break throughs or about any big projects that Stanford is working on.

Cancer vaccines are not part of the Pande Lab's current study topics. The original poster in this thread found a discussion of cancer vaccines elsewhere, and simply shared it here.

Right now the Pande Group is putting a lot of effort toward Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease proteins - in terms of protein folding, protein/protein interaction, and protein interactions with small bioactive molecules such as drugs.
Close behind those are the work with ribosomes (the site of protein synthesis and the target of many antibiotics), with tumor suppressor proteins such as p53, and with membrane fusion events like the entry of a virus into a cell. They are also doing work on rates of protein folding, the distribution of energy states in a group of folded proteins, and more accurate ways to compute the interactions between the protein and the water and salts surrounding it.