121–130 of 182 posts
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Can we end up with a situation like antimicrobial resistance, where cancer itself evolves to resist these new treatments?
evolution is a wrong concept to approach it. cancer is not a separate life form, but a bug in the regeneration system of a complicated life form. it doesn’t exist outside of it, it cannot propagate.
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Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner. One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position. This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that targ…
How does it avoid targeting KRAS in healthy cells? Or is this another form of chemotherapy where we're trying our hardest to deliver the right amount of poison that kills the cancer before it kills the rest of you?
However this is just the first version of the drug, it can be combined with other modalities to allow more selective targeting of cancer versus not cancer cells (e.g antibody-drug conjugation). And when used in earlier stage cancers, rather than the advanced cancers in this first clinical trial, there's the possibility of lower dosing that has less strong side effects.
This is just the first attack that has ever broken through to hit a key weakness of some cancers. It's the start of learning, a breakthrough that will launch refinements, enhancements, and a ton of innovation. That sort of innovation is sometimes derided as "me-too" drugs, and not meaningful, but some of the biggest advancements in cancer care have been from taking very hard to tolerate treatments and making them more tolerable and refined and better for patients, allowing longer and more thorough killing of cancer cells. I would expect we will see a lot of that here, as well as work towards combinations with other drugs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner. One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position. This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that targ…
> Cancer is not one thing, I know this is a popular "well actually" to do, but it is not always useful in a conversation. Yes, all cancers are different, but yes, cancer is also one thing: unchecked, harmful division of cells. Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once. It is reasonable to talk about b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner. One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position. This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that targ…
Can we end up with a situation like antimicrobial resistance, where cancer itself evolves to resist these new treatments?
Ways to avoid specific resistance include multiple treatments simultaneously, since the probability of generating resistance to both is the product of the probability of resistance either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner. One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position. This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that targ…
Can we end up with a situation like antimicrobial resistance, where cancer itself evolves to resist these new treatments?
When we first started getting good at sequencing the DNA of tumors, I remember initial reports of taking samples across the 3D space of a tumor and finding great spatial heterogeneity in the tumor genomes.
I'm actually most excited for using this drug in combination with colon cancer, where KRAS mutation is a common drug resistance evolution in response to drugs that target the gene EFGR (though cancer researchers may all have their favorites to go after, colon cancer went after my family especially hard).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we end up with a situation like antimicrobial resistance, where cancer itself evolves to resist these new treatments?
evolution is a wrong concept to approach it. cancer is not a separate life form, but a bug in the regeneration system of a complicated life form. it doesn’t exist outside of it, it cannot propagate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone dies. Dying 5 years later is a victory. I would go so far as saying if it was you or someone who you care about you would understand. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-... >However, even though the overall number of cases rises as the population grows, fewer people are getting and dying from cancer. Between 2000 and 2021, the incidence rate — or the rate of new cancer cases per 100,…
Unfortunately in this particular case people die about 6 months later, not 5 years. See the article.
If I pulled one person out of a burning building it would be newsworthy. Doctors are and have been pulling train loads every day.
The relevant line is: "oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daraxonrasib
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But that's not a cure. If they don't take that drug, assuming it works, they still have the original mutation in the cancer cells. > Patients that take part in clinical trials really are the heroes here. Are they? To me personally, putting people into a permanent state of requiring drugs to survive, is not really cure. It's just maximizing income for those selling those drugs. And none of those drugs work exceedingly…
I can understand being frustrated and cynical with the pharmaceutical industry, but I have never worked with a single doctor that approaches patient care with the goal of getting them "hooked" on something for life. The pharmaceutical companies are not the ones making clinical decisions - in this case, it's a shared medical decision between a patient and their oncologist. Having seen how horrific pancreatic cancer is…
I think we should also invest more in better diagnostics and early cancer detection. That could save many lives too.