Catherine Cain
10/26/14
Earth Science D Block/ Mrs. McClellan
Current Event:
Recent
studies on leukemia have found a treatment, which has prolonged the remissions
of many different patients. Patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia that may have
relapsed many times or never responded to traditional treatment were all given
stem-cell transplants. Stem-cell transplants are known to be the most effective
treatment for leukemia and all of the patients had relapsed from the stem cell
transplants leaving them all with short life expectancies. This experimental
form of treatment was using the patients own T-cells. T-cells are a type of
immune cell. Scientists would extract T-cells from the patients and use a
disabled virus to mix other genetics into the T-cells. The new genetics in the
cells reprogramed them to kill all cells with a certain protein in them. The
patients were given the treatment after another stem cell transplant. The
reprogrammed T-cells were then dripped back into each of the patients. This did
not work for all patients 7 out of the 30 patients died after the treatments
did not succeed. However, for the majority of the patients it did work. 19 of the patients have been in prolonged
remission without any form of relapse ever since. Now hospitals have decided to
start testing these treatments on children with advanced acute lymphoblastic
leukemia another later stage of the cancer in hopes to find similar results.
I found this article very interesting and thought it
really connected to what is happening right now in the health world. There is
an estimated 302,800 people in the United States alone living with Leukemia. And
Cancer itself causes about 23% of deaths in America each year. This article which
relating to the treatment of cancer is very relevant because cancer is one of
America’s top killers. This is very important because if these treatments continue
to be effective this may lead to doctors being able to save more lives. This
study on T-cells may also lead to other advances in health and may be able to
treat other forms of cancer one day.
I thought this article was a very interesting read.
However, I thought the overall format of the article was a little confusing.
The way that the author listed facts about the disease and the research was
very all over the place and out of order. I think that it could have been put
in a simpler fashion that would have made the article easier to follow.
Citation:
Grady,
Denise. "T-Cell Therapy Puts Leukemia Patients in Extended
Remission." The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Oct. 2014.
Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
Hyperlink:
I was impressed that scientists could mix old T-cells with disabled viruses and program them to kill cells with certain proteins. This is interesting because I do not know how scientists can disable viruses or target certain proteins. I was also interested to learn that a study with 30 patients in it that tested how well this new method work yielded a relatively high success rate, as I didn’t know that T-cell therapy was in the stage of work where they can test on humans. A third thing that surprised me was that T-cell therapy worked on those on whom other treatments did not. This was new to me because I did not know very much about stem cell therapy and it was surprising because this could be very important to finding treatments for everyone. One thing that I liked about Catherine’s review was her explanation about how this article is important to the world of science. She used statistics to show how many people would be affected if T-cell therapy led to a universal treatment for the disease, which helped the reader understand the relevance of the topic. I also liked that she gave a thorough explanation of T-cells and how scientists were using them, which gave me an understanding of what was happening that helped me draw my own conclusions about the importance of this issue. One thing that I think Catherine could have improved was her grammar. I think she could have proof-red her work to get rid of any errors, but otherwise her review was effective at explaining a topic that is hard to grasp.
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