Remarkable New Treatment for Prostrate Cancer May Never Be Realized

Shocking method cures man's prostate cancer,

doctors still 'figuring out how this works'

    © Alexandra Beier / Reuters

An experimental prostate cancer therapy could revolutionize treatment. By “shocking” tumors with large amounts of testosterone and then depriving it of the same hormone, doctors from Johns Hopkins University halted the progression of the disease.

A man with advanced prostate cancer decided to try an unconventional method, and he’s probably glad he did. Doctors from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore “shocked” his tumors with large amounts of testosterone, and he has been cancer free since.

The study was led by Professor Sam Denmeade, who told the Telegraph: "We are still in the early stages of figuring out how this works and how to incorporate it into the treatment paradigm for prostate cancer.”

However, if the results from the test hold up through future testing, it could completely change how prostate cancer is treated. Traditionally, prostate cancer is treated by depriving the cancer of testosterone, because it was thought that the male hormones stimulate and fuel cancer cells, EurekaAlert! reported.

The test took 47 men through at least three cycles of exposing the cancer cells to extremely high doses of testosterone followed by a period of low levels of testosterone, which were caused by a drug that stopped the production of testosterone in their testicles. This treatment is currently known as bipolar androgen therapy (BAT).

Doctors used prostate specific antigen (PSA), a blood marker used to track prostate cancer levels in the men, to study the trajectory of the disease as it was treated. Denmeade said that the PSA levels fell for the majority of the 47 men, with one man with no trace of PSAs in his body.

Calling the results “unexpected and exciting,” Denmeade is planning to take the study to the next level.

"If we find testosterone is superior then we would hope to move on to larger trials. Our problem is this is not a drug that is owned by a pharmaceutical company; it is generic testosterone. So moving forward is going to be difficult due to issues with finding funds to run a bigger trial," he said.

I have complained about this before, the extraordinary cost of human trials and the funding by pharmaceutical companies whose only interest is in profit not patient outcomes is an absurd way to run a pharmacological research system. There must be a better way.

New Alzheimer’s Treatment Fully Restores Memory Function

Of the mice that received the treatment, 

75 percent got their memory function back.

Australian researchers have come up with a non-invasive ultrasound technology that clears the brain of neurotoxic amyloid plaques - structures that are responsible for memory loss and a decline in cognitive function in Alzheimer’s patients.

If a person has Alzheimer’s disease, it’s usually the result of a build-up of two types of lesions - amyloid plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles. Amyloid plaques sit between the neurons and end up as dense clusters of beta-amyloid molecules, a sticky type of protein that clumps together and forms plaques.

Neurofibrillary tangles are found inside the neurons of the brain, and they’re caused by defective tau proteins that clump up into a thick, insoluble mass. This causes tiny filaments called microtubules to get all twisted, which disrupts the transportation of essential materials such as nutrients and organelles along them, just like when you twist up the vacuum cleaner tube.

As we don’t have any kind of vaccine or preventative measure for Alzheimer’s - a disease that affects 343,000 people in Australia, and 50 million worldwide - it’s been a race to figure out how best to treat it, starting with how to clear the build-up of defective beta-amyloid and tau proteins from a patient’s brain. Now a team from the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at the University of Queensland have come up with a pretty promising solution for removing the former.

Publishing in Science Translational Medicine, the team describes the technique as using a particular type of ultrasound called a focused therapeutic ultrasound, which non-invasively beams sound waves into the brain tissue. By oscillating super-fast, these sound waves are able to gently open up the blood-brain barrier, which is a layer that protects the brain against bacteria, and stimulate the brain’s microglial cells to activate. Microglila cells are basically waste-removal cells, so they’re able to clear out the toxic beta-amyloid clumps that are responsible for the worst symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The team reports fully restoring the memory function of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue. They found that the treated mice displayed improved performance in three memory tasks - a maze, a test to get them to recognise new objects, and one to get them to remember the places they should avoid.

"We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics," one of the team, Jürgen Götz, said in a press release. "The word ‘breakthrough’ is often misused, but in this case I think this really does fundamentally change our understanding of how to treat this disease, and I foresee a great future for this approach."

The team says they’re planning on starting trials with higher animal models, such as sheep, and hope to get their human trials underway in 2017.