Infections, Cancer
In this video, Garth Nicolson spends about 27 minutes speaking on "Infections, Cancer" at the 28th Annual Cancer Convention held on Labor Day weekend by the Cancer Control Society.
About Garth Nicolson
GARTH NICOLSON, Ph.D. received his Degree in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from the University of California, San Diego in 1970. Presently, he is the Chief Scientific Officer of the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Irvine, California. The Institute is a non-profit private facility dedicated to discovering new diagnostic and therapeutic solutions for chronic human diseases.
He was formally the David Bruton Jr. Chair in Cancer Research and Professor and Chairman at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and he remains Professor of Internal Medicine and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. He is also Professor of Comparative Pathology at Texas A&M University.
Professor Nicolson is among the most cited scientists in the world, having published over 460 medical and scientific papers (including 3 Current Contents Citation Classics), edited 13 books, served on the Editorial Boards of 12 medical and scientific journals and is currently serving as Editor of 2 journals: Clinical & Experimental Metastasis and the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry. He has also actively peer-reviewed research grants from the U.S. Army, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society and the National Foundation for Cancer Research.
Transcription
Apologize, they told me that they were going to have to wire me up.
So, well, it's a pleasure to be here today and talk to you about some of our work on infections related to cancer. If I could have the first slide, I actually need to mention that I'm representing 3 organizations here. The first is the Institute for Molecular Medicine, which is a non-profit research foundation.
The first institution is the Institute for Molecular Medicine.
The next institution is a as a full service reference diagnostic laboratory, International Molecular Diagnostics, and they actually do all the testing. And we formed this new laboratory because we realized the need to be able to provide high quality service for patients that had problems. Again, not only problems with cancer, but a wide variety of different diseases.
And the third organization is a medical clinic called Molecular Hyperbaric Medicine, and it's an integrated medical practice, so it involves a lot of the techniques and things that you've heard about in the last day or so in integrative medicine. And it's headed by Dr. Paul Berns, who is here. So if you're interested now, please see Dr. Berns.
Now, over the years, we've been very integrally involved in or intimately involved in studying sources of morbidity in a variety of chronic illnesses. So these can include, for example, cancer as a chronic illness. And we've been able to identify a bacterial viral and in some cases even fungal infections in patients, chronically ill patients. And this is a major problem when you find these, because these infections keep people from getting better, they interfere with therapy as you'll find out, they cause a lot of different problems. So we need to identify these infections and treat them.
And some examples, for example, of bacteria, mycoplasma, chlamydia, rickettsia, brucella, borrelia of Lyme disease causing agent and coxiella. You may have heard of some of these different bacterial infections. And On the viral side, we've been very interested in HHV-6 and CMV and other viruses in their role in chronic illnesses.
Other Illnesses Related To Cancer
These chronic illnesses can have these infections and be caused by them, so they could be causative, they could be a co factor in the infection or in most cancer patients they are probably opportunistic.
They obviously don't in most cases cause cancer, although in some cases they've been implicated as a causative factor in cancer, and I'll show you how in just a moment. But for the most part, we think they're probably opportunistic agents that infect people or are in people, but become a major problem because of their cancer.
We know in