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Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

technologyreview.com

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Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#61

Post by givinguflac »

davesque wrote: post #43
pmiller2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hardly think a treatment costing $4000/dose to manufacture is inexpensive.

If I understand that the article is claiming a new treatment could cure cancer for $4000, then this is orders of magnitude cheaper than all the combined treatments that are administered now to treat cancer.

I agree the manufacturing cost of $4,000 doesn't seem unreasonable, but that's the manufacturing cost. The article also states either of these competing treatments would cost insurers half a million $ or more, so it will be much more expensive than today's treatments. Still worth it, but absurdly expensive especially compared to the manufacturing cost.

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#62

Post by mikeash »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #13
gt565k wrote: post #2

'Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it wor…

Point taken, but the title doesn't actually say the universal immune cells cured the disease.

Most clickbait isn't outright false, just highly suggestive in a misleading way.

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#64

Post by drak0n1c »

gdulli wrote: post #31
muninn_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To cure cancer and live? Seems pretty cheap to me.

Some people don't have $4000 so it's not a matter of deciding whether parting with that much money is worthwhile. And the status of a lot of people's health insurance is suddenly up in the air.

The insurance market and the government providing medicaid loves these types of cures. An effective cure that costs a few thousand dollars is obviously worth the healthy cured people living to pay premiums for the rest of their healthy life. Much preferable to a costly patient needing many treatments in the tens of thousands of dollars in the insurance pool. The economics are much better than what the system currently bears.

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#65

Post by Vendan »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #16
guard-of-terra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, given that cancer cells do not evolve between individuals (as opposed to bacteria and virii), if we are to find a efficient immunological treatment it's going to stay efficient. If anything, we will evolve for our cancers to respond better to it.

Somehow it is strange that cancer cells do not try to propage to other organisms, given they try hard to invade their host? Is there any known reason for that (absence of) behavior?

Well, it's because it's not "cancer cells" as something different then the host, it's just "here's some cells that, for whatever reason, decided to start growing and multiplying indefinitely, rather then being restricted by what their programming says". Comparatively, cancer is far "less threat" then most diseases, except for the fact that your immune system treats it like part of your body. Thanks to that "leg up", it can do a lot of damage. If your cancer got into another person, their immune system would treat it as foreign (modulo transplant factors and such), and attack and destroy it.

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#66

Post by CodeSheikh »

"Rights to the London treatment were sold to the biotech company Cellectis, and the treatment is now being further developed by the drug companies Servier and Pfizer."

And that's when it will get sunk into an abyss of bureaucratic processes and this treatment probably won't see sunlight for another ten years.

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#67

Post by tyingq »

pmiller2 wrote: post #23
ryeguy_24 wrote: post #5

"The ready-made approach could pose a challenge to companies including Juno Therapeutics and Novartis, each of which has spent tens of millions of dollars pioneering treatments that require collecting a patient’s own blood cells, engineering them, and then re-infusing them." Is author serious with this statement? Two kids lives were saved with a potentially inexpensive technique and the author think's this point is r…

I hardly think a treatment costing $4000/dose to manufacture is inexpensive.

It appears the treatment was a single dose.

" Two infants with relapsed refractory CD19+ B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia received lymphodepleting chemotherapy and anti-CD52 serotherapy, followed by a single-dose infusion of UCART19 cells"[1]

With that context, it's potentially cheaper than other therapies.

[1]http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/374/eaaj2013

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#68

Post by apathy »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #5

"The ready-made approach could pose a challenge to companies including Juno Therapeutics and Novartis, each of which has spent tens of millions of dollars pioneering treatments that require collecting a patient’s own blood cells, engineering them, and then re-infusing them." Is author serious with this statement? Two kids lives were saved with a potentially inexpensive technique and the author think's this point is r…

Yes, the author is serious that investors worry about losing billions of dollars. If your house or savings became worthless overnight, I suspect you'd be worried too.

It's a statement of fact. If UCARTs come to prominence on the market, Kite & Juno no longer appear to be the only game in town (or even the only CAR-T game in town!). Toss in some grade IV/V events in their clinical trials, and an investor in these companies might have reason to worry.

Individuals and societies can have conflicting priorities. Sometimes the same individual may be conflicted (plenty of oncologist friends invest in various companies, and are distressed if a competing company's drug blows their holdings' product out of the water, even as they consider switching patients to the more effective drug). Put differently, you can own a Tesla and hold Exxon stock ... and that does not make you a bad person.

Infant leukemia is (thankfully) rather rare. Nobody who's ever seen a cold, gray infant in a morgue drawer would ever say that those lives are worth less than some company's profits. But they might regret investing in the company!

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#69

Post by chrisamiller »

eliben wrote: post #35

Does anyone here know which companies are looking for software engineers to help with this kind of stuff?

There are lots of companies in the immunotherapy space. Don't limit yourself to industry, though - lots of academic labs working on this that are in desperate need of good coders and data scientists.

Re: Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

#70

Post by djsumdog »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #5

"The ready-made approach could pose a challenge to companies including Juno Therapeutics and Novartis, each of which has spent tens of millions of dollars pioneering treatments that require collecting a patient’s own blood cells, engineering them, and then re-infusing them." Is author serious with this statement? Two kids lives were saved with a potentially inexpensive technique and the author think's this point is r…

> Two kids lives were saved with a potentially inexpensive technique

Potentially saved. They did get traditional therapy first. This type of conclusion is really premature. Don't get me wrong, this is super exciting. But the reason we have standardized clinical trials is to ensure treatments work reliably and consistently across as many humans as possible.

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