Word: lak
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That impulse to control is thwarting Vietnam's move to a market economy. The thriving Dak Lak provincial rubber company in Buon Ma Thuot is seeking $5 million from foreign investors to establish a small factory to make tires. "We are stuck," says Tran Le, deputy director of the company. "We have to get [provincial government] approval to spend $30. We have ambitious targets, but until we are independent, the foreign companies don't want to sign a deal." Rice farmers in the Mekong Delta, traditionally Vietnam's breadbasket, face a similar problem. In 1990 the government allowed them...
Indiana at L.A. Lak...
...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...
Rosenberg is working on a new and potentially more powerful therapy called TILs, for tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. In tests on mice, he notes, these cells appear "50 to 100 times more potent than LAK." TILs are actually killer T cells that, like LAK cells, can attack cancer cells. To produce them, researchers expose malignant cells removed from the patient to IL-2. The tissue includes killer T cells that have launched a weak attack; with a sharp boost from the IL-2, they replicate and proceed to destroy the cancer. A month later, the newly potent T cells, vastly increased...
...cells, as if by instinct, sought out the tumors that had spread from the original cancer and attacked them. To keep the TIL cells vigorous and growing, the NCI team had to inject the mice with additional IL-2, but only about a tenth as much as in the LAK treatments. As a result, few serious side effects were apparent. With the addition of cyclophosphamide, a drug that Rosenberg believes suppresses immune-system cells that might otherwise impede the TIL cells, the treatment achieved its spectacular success rates. Most important, the combined therapy cured mice of advanced colon cancers that...