Word: melanoma
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...structure enables ozone to absorb ultraviolet radiation -- a process that is crucial to human health. UV rays can make the lens of the eye cloud up with cataracts, which bring on blindness if untreated. The radiation can cause mutations in DNA, leading to skin cancers, including the often deadly melanoma. Estimates released last week by the United Nations Environment Program predict a 26% rise in the incidence of nonmelanoma skin cancers worldwide if overall ozone levels drop...
...first two patients -- a 46-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman -- both have terminal-stage melanoma, a form of skin cancer. A few months ago, doctors extracted tumor cells from the patients and inserted into the cells the gene that promotes the production of an antitumor hormone called tumor necrosis ^ factor (TNF). The genetically altered cells were grown in a lab and then injected last week into the thigh of each patient. The hope is that the TNF- primed cells will boost the body's immune system into more vigorous attack against the malignancy...
...milestone event should be quickly followed by a second application of human gene therapy, now apparently close to final approval. It has been proposed by NIH's Dr. Steven Rosenberg for treating patients with advanced cases of melanoma, a deadly skin cancer that afflicts 28,000 Americans annually. "We now use radiation, chemotherapy and surgery -- external forces -- on cancer patients," Rosenberg says. "But gene therapy uses the body's own internal mechanism. We're trying to make the body itself reject the disease...
Rosenberg's strategy, devised with the help of Anderson, is to extract immune cells called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) from the tumors of melanoma patients. Rosenberg bathes the TILs in a solution of interleukin-2, a natural substance that invigorates them, and then exposes the TILs to re- engineered mouse leukemia retroviruses...
...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...