'Landmark' cancer vaccine gets FDA approval and Infection, kill thyself

4-29-10
#1
This is talking about how they found a vaccine treatment for prostate cancer has become the first therapy of its kind to win approval for use in U.S. patients. Also how many americans have to us their own white blood cells and using a drug that trains them to more actively attack cancer cells. There are many people would be really to be able to do this if it will save their life. Also this is talking about howthis treatment is intended only for men with so-called "metastatic castration-resistant" prostate cancer, for whom hormone suppressant therapy has not worked. Studies have shown that Provenge prolongs survival by about four to 4.5 months.Also this is talking about how it is unclear whether insurance companies will cover the cost of Provenge and it may be prohibitively expensive for some. Dendreon says it will be priced similarly to other new biologics that prolong survival. Also many people these day have some form of cancer and this will help them. I think this is a really good article and that many people will be happy with waht goes on and wether the government will cover this.

#2
This is talking about how scientists are turning harmful bacteria into agents of their own destruction. In an effort to create antibacterial wound dressings, a new material comes laden with microbial booby traps that are triggered by the activity of harmful bacteria, scientists report online April 20 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Also The researchers tested their strategy by inoculating pieces of fabric with two harmful bacteria — a species of Staphylococcus and a member of the Pseudomonas group, famed for glomming onto medical devices — as well as a harmless type of E. coli.When they placed the fabric scraps in petri dishes along with bacteria, the harmless E. coli grew readily. But the toxin-releasing Staph and Pseudomonas barely grew at all. This suggests that the harmful bacteria did in fact release toxins or enzymes that busted open the vesicles, unleashing the antibiotic inside and sealing their own fate. The E. coli flourished because they left the vesicles intact, the researchers suspect.“This is a nice approach and they’ve shown in principle that it works,” says biomedical engineer Christopher Batich of the University of Florida in Gainesville. However, he cautions that the simple system has many hurdles to overcome before it will be useful in a hospital setting. For example, bacteria can’t be tidily arranged into “good” and “bad” groups where one is toxin-producing and the other is not. “You’d have to work with real bacteria and real wounds to see if it makes a difference,” Batich says.For now, the team is trying to make vesicles that last longer than the current span of minutes to hours. And while the researchers tried their system with bacteria-killing sodium azide, in practice the vesicles would be filled with different antibiotics depending on the patient’s wound.“I think it’s a lovely idea,” says microbiologist Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved with the work. But he wonders whether the technique would make much difference if bacteria were buried deep in a wound. “It’s too early to say if it will be more fruitful,” Silver says. I think that this can use more information.