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Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

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Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#51

Post by JoshTriplett »

ceejayoz wrote: post #49
JoshTriplett wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very effectively or with the focus you might want, though.

I tend to believe the NIH is better at administrating grants than I am.

I'd absolutely agree they're better than I am personally, since I'm neither a medical researcher nor an expert at evaluating medical research. But I don't believe they're better than an organization focused on solving a specific problem.

As a random example of inefficiency: there's a lot more money going into research on specific degenerative diseases than into the causes and solutions for degeneration. Solve the root cause, not the symptoms.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#52

Post by reasonattlm »

ceejayoz wrote: post #49
JoshTriplett wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very effectively or with the focus you might want, though.

I tend to believe the NIH is better at administrating grants than I am.

They're actually pretty terrible. It isn't a high bar to do better than the NIH when it comes to supporting new technologies. Almost all important early fundamental research, the high-risk part leading up to new knowledge and potential new technologies, is supported by philanthropy.

The NIH really only funds follow-on work for things that are already known. In order to win a grant you have to have already proven your thesis. It is somewhat ridiculous.

So if you want to delegate your vote, delegate it to a non-profit. Or invest in a startup in the field you care about. Anything other than giving to the NIH.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#53

Post by danieltillett »

astazangasta wrote: post #4

I'm calling it here, this trial will fail hard. The basic idea is this: the cancer has a number of mutations that produce novel antigens that don't exist in normal cells. If we can train T-cells to recognize these, they can attack the tumor with great specificity and kill those cells. The problem is, all the tumor has to do to evade this targeting is shed the problematic mutation, which is easily done - tumors are gr…

I agree that this trial is almost certain to fail, but as I am sure you know the resistance mutatants are normally preexisting in the patient before treatment and the treatment just selects for the resistant mutants.

I think one of our bigger problems with fighting cancer is we only trial new treatments in people on deaths door who have failed everything else. Treatments that would help someone newly diagnosed (the treatments we really want) are just not possible to bring to market.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#54

Post by reasonattlm »

baldfat wrote: post #24

Having lost a sister and a son to cancer I hope for this to work. The issues are tremendous for this technique and I don't have high hopes for its use on cancer. I am still having high hopes on immune system techniques that helps the body to mark cancer cells and attack the cells for most cancers. CRISPR big hope is that it can change the cell to stop reproducing or stop invading other cells. Simply put cancer cells…

The SENS approach to cancer is pretty much to turn off its ability to grow in unlimited fashion. If you could compensate for the side-effects, it would be possible to delete telomerase and ALT genes from humans, which would produce cancer free humans - if cancers can't lengthen their telomeres, they die.

Unfortunately, it would also produce humans would be dependent on some form of periodic telomerase therapy targeted to stem cells, or stem cell replacement, or similar. This might be a net gain in a suitably high-tech environment.

A better approach would be something other than permanent removal of telomerase and ALT genes, but perhaps suppressing them globally for a while, or suppressing them in cancerous tissue only. RNAi or other methodologies are pretty reliable for this sort of thing at the present time in the general sense.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#55

Post by danieltillett »

astazangasta wrote: post #45
maxander wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you mean by "fail hard," I suspect. Sure, cancer cells can gain or lose mutations, but if we target a mutation important for cancer development only a fraction of the target cancer will survive the treatment. We might achieve nice-to-have results like reduction in tumor size and increased patient life expectancy, or a "cure" in lucky patients with less agile cancers, which would put this radical new i…

This method is not targeting mutations important for cancer, this is targeting "passenger" somatic mutations. You can't use this mechanism to target important mutations because only a minority of patients are going to be able to present an oncogenic mutation (e.g. BRAF V600E) as an antigen (because of differing HLA types). In those rare cases perhaps this therapy might succeed, although the tumor probably still has w…

I was under the impression that the major reason for the failure of current immunotherapy treatments is due to non-response, not excessive autoimmunity.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#56

Post by cioc »

If you think stuff like this is cool, and you'd like to be a part of the software engineering effort at Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, msg me. ccary@parkerici.org

We are building out our platform for bioinformatics. Some engineering topics:

* Large scale data processing (Cloud & on-prem HPC based)

* Bioinformatics / ML algorithms

* Data storage & retrieval (File systems & databases)

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#57

Post by fabiandesimone »

baldfat wrote: post #24

Having lost a sister and a son to cancer I hope for this to work. The issues are tremendous for this technique and I don't have high hopes for its use on cancer. I am still having high hopes on immune system techniques that helps the body to mark cancer cells and attack the cells for most cancers. CRISPR big hope is that it can change the cell to stop reproducing or stop invading other cells. Simply put cancer cells…

As a parent and a brother, I'm so sorry you had to go trough that.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#59

Post by davesque »

baldfat wrote: post #24

Having lost a sister and a son to cancer I hope for this to work. The issues are tremendous for this technique and I don't have high hopes for its use on cancer. I am still having high hopes on immune system techniques that helps the body to mark cancer cells and attack the cells for most cancers. CRISPR big hope is that it can change the cell to stop reproducing or stop invading other cells. Simply put cancer cells…

Sorry to hear that. Hang in there. I lost my mom to cancer about a year ago.

Re: Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

#60

Post by vosper »

cioc wrote: post #56

If you think stuff like this is cool, and you'd like to be a part of the software engineering effort at Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, msg me. ccary@parkerici.org We are building out our platform for bioinformatics. Some engineering topics: * Large scale data processing (Cloud & on-prem HPC based) * Bioinformatics / ML algorithms * Data storage & retrieval (File systems & databases)

I think this is cool! Are there any particular software engineering skills or experiences that would be really valuable or relevant to this work?
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