Word: bloodstream
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Doctors point out that isotretinoin is hardly a benign drug. In addition to causing side effects ranging from dry, scaly skin to high levels of fat in the bloodstream, the drug is believed to have triggered hundreds of birth defects when it was taken by pregnant women during the early 1980s...
Last week, on the 10th floor of the massive Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., the still unidentified child assumed a historic role. In the first federally approved use of gene therapy, a team of doctors introduced into her bloodstream some 1 billion cells, each containing a copy of a foreign gene. If all goes well, these cells will begin producing ADA, the essential enzyme she requires, and her devastated immune system will slowly begin to recover...
...stem cells, which would continuously manufacture blood cells containing the gene and ensure a steady supply of the enzyme. But researchers have yet to find a way to isolate marrow stem cells effectively. Instead, the NIH researchers opted for T cells, immune-system cells that can survive in the bloodstream for months and even years...
...endowed by recombinant DNA techniques with a human gene. But this gene codes for tumor necrosis factor, a naturally occurring compound that attacks cancer cells. The altered viruses insert themselves and their piggyback gene into the genetic material of the TILs, which are then injected back into the bloodstream of the melanoma patients. If everything goes as planned, the activated TILs will home in on the tumors like guided missiles, attacking the cancerous cells and at the same time releasing the antitumor factor to help finish them...
...Rosenberg technique, used in dozens of U.S. cancer centers, is to extract some of a patient's white blood cells and bathe them in interleukin-2, a hormone that stimulates them, turning them into lymphokine-activated killer, or LAK, cells. Injected back into the bloodstream along with repeated doses of interleukin-2, they attack any foreign cells (including malignant ones) with great vigor. The technique has caused tumors to shrink significantly in a number of advanced melanoma patients and has apparently even effected an occasional cure...