Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials

Post by wfunction » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

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)

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

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…

Post by leeoniya » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 10:30 PM UTC

wfunction wrote: post #61

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)

Yes, please elaborate on what the software engineering effort involves! Is this a bioinformatics thing? What kind of work does it involve? Does it require a strong theoretical background? etc. (Edit: Thanks! Just noticed you added it.)

Post by ddorian43 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 10:50 PM UTC

davesque wrote: post #62

ddorian43 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are you doing something about it (donating/investing/working/etc) ?

Off-topic: is your account named after the diatonic scale? I love the dorian scale.

Post by ihodes » Fri, Jun 24, 2016, 12:03 AM UTC

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…

    1. adoptive CAR T cell transfer 
        (which has been shown to work 
         with varying degrees of success)
    2. PD-1 is CRISPR'd out (to combat exhaustion) 
    3. The TCR is CRISPR'd out (to increase specificity)