Biotherapies are sensible answers to our illnesses: they use the substances and cells our body normally uses to reverse the condition by mimicking the behavior of healthy people’s cells In Australia these therapies are thriving; one of the more common therapies is to take some white fighter cells from a cancer patient and vaccinate it to the cancer inside the person, telling it “hey this is what you need to fight”. The white cells are then grown in the laboratory to larger numbers and reinjected into the patient. It works brilliantly with no side effects. This same technique can be applied to many serious and chronic illnesses, such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and life threatening infections. To top it all off, often it is less expensive than the traditional surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and drug cocktail treatments.
This is great right? All they do is assist your body, no strange substances or uncomfortable side effects. Well, in the interest of ‘safety’ these therapies are in the process of becoming will tightly regulated to a point that makes them overly costly and cumbersome to produce The culprit in Australia: the Federal Therapeutic Goods Administration.
The TGA argues that treatments in this category, such as transplanted organs and cells from a donor that are mass produced and injected into other people are highly likely to spread infections and rot because they are ‘alive’. The other scare tactic employed is the case of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger who, during gene therapy trials, died at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Gene therapy is where doctors use dangerous virus’s to infect many cells in the body with a new set of DNA instructions. This is a very sad story and these therapies obviously need to be regulated but, what does this have to do with growing a persons own white cells in a lab and putting them back into the same person have to do with these high risk treatments? In terms of risk to the patient there is no comparison between gene therapy and organ transplants and white cell culturing.
The real ‘major risk’ of re-transplanting someone’s own cells back into them is to the Medicinal Monopoly. The MM as I like to call it, earns Billions off of its chemotherapy, radiation, surgery and drug ‘treatments’ for cancer and chronic infections. These painful treatments often leave people infertile and ill for the rest of their lives-sometimes they don’t work at all and often they only keep the illness away for a few months or years before it comes back. The reason the MM likes these treatments is because they have to be done more than once and they encourage other medical problems which they can then treat with their frivolous medications like antidepressants and prescription antacids.
The good news is these treatments, although more difficult and expensive to obtain, are still available to many cancer patients if they are willing to do the research.
References & Resources:
“Biotherapies new medical hope”
By Daniel Stacey
February 28, 2004
The Australian News
