11–20 of 54 posts
I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?
Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?
TL;DR: animal models of disease mostly suck.
The real cancer cure is white blood cell transfusion. Check with LEF for more info (they are funding the trial). Certain Chinese doctors in China will perform it (under the cover), for those in need.
How do I like short comments like this. One cure and your cancer will go away. Yeah, right. And people actually might believe things like that with the result that they don't get proven treatment in time. Cancer is really serious, it can kill you you know, and since there are promising developments (as far as I can tell as not being a doctor), we are still far away from a definite cure to that. You would realy do eve…
Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?
First, there's a lot of bad science out there. A large part of this is due to the fact that animal models are almost uniformly terrible at modeling real human disease. Second, a therapy may be highly effective but also highly toxic or have other severe risks or side effects, which are hard to tell in preclinical research. The bar here is very high, and trials can easily be pulled over a few "adverse events." Third, i…
Cancer itself is such a rollercoaster of emotions for everyone involved and these promises and failures of breakthroughs are a sad and ironic parallel.
This is very promising research indeed but while they have shown Human Tumor Cells in mice shrinking, they have yet to show Human cells in Humans shrinking. Should make for a very cool Phase-1 human trial.
Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?
First, there's a lot of bad science out there. A large part of this is due to the fact that animal models are almost uniformly terrible at modeling real human disease. Second, a therapy may be highly effective but also highly toxic or have other severe risks or side effects, which are hard to tell in preclinical research. The bar here is very high, and trials can easily be pulled over a few "adverse events." Third, i…
The trick to making this work will be hoping that blocking CD47 on healthy cells isn't particularly lethal (in humans), or getting the antibody to target ONLY cancerous cells.
edit: From the paper, it looks like the mice weren't unhappy with the antibody floating around -
"Importantly, the therapeutic anti-mCD47 [antibody] produced no unacceptable toxicity over the course of the experiment, despite having spread systemically. These experiments were analyzed at the end of the therapeutic regimen; acute infusion of these antibodies led to a short-term anemia."
I'm not familiar enough with CD47 to know where else it is expressed, but I'm wondering what the "regular" use of CD47 is. Since it's over-expressed in cancers, I'm assuming the cancer is somehow mucking up the regulation pathway for CD47 and there are regular non-cancer related functions for CD47. The trick to making this work will be hoping that blocking CD47 on healthy cells isn't particularly lethal (in humans),…
GenBank for CD47: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/AAH37306.1
(Should be obvious, but this is woefully incomplete in terms of where CD47 probably actually appears. But can be a good first place to start.)
Weissman's lab has an excellent scientific record so this is as good as it is going to get. The challenge now is to see if these dynamics work the same way in humans.