This would've likely saved Steve Jobs, had it arrived 15 years earlier.
Jobs was lucky enough to have a completely different, very treatable type of pancreatic cancer, and unlucky enough to believe in crackpot treatments more than actual science.
FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely terrible. As human beings, we should be prioritizing solving these kinds of problems. I don't think we need to live forever, but a graceful ending later in life remains an objective we haven't fully realized for everyone.
We do. There’s something like half a billion dollars spent on pancreatic cancer research annually in the United States alone. It’s a giant money pit and that’s created an enormous body of research, increased understanding of the biology of the cancer and just how insidious it is, and funded the careers of thousands of scientists, technicians, academics and administrators, but very little of all this translates into b…
> There’s no evidence than just pouring more money into cancer research is going to give us a miracle cure.
The HPV vaccine will almost entirely wipe out cervical cancer: not by curing it, but preventing it entirely. Not sure if that meets your “miracle” standard, but it’s a totally unreasonable standard to apply to scientific research. By definition, a miracle is something that is not physically possible.
Research seems expensive, yes. You have to work in every possible direction, fumbling in the dark metaphorically, because you don’t know the answers yet. It’s a lot messier than giving a hungry person a meal. But hundreds of years of research have made that meal way more abundant and less expensive…
In the grand scope of the country, we spend quite small amounts on research. The U.S. GDP generates half a billion dollars in less than 10 minutes, for example. It’s less than what we spend on takeout coffee.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#63My sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October (48 years old) and died in June from it. I'm glad to see a drug like this developed for people suffering from pancreatic cancer. I don't wish what my sister went through on anyone. Damn if I don't wish it had come a little sooner.
I’m terribly sorry. I lost my wife to metastatic melanoma. It’s hard as in 2013, the treatment was “get your affairs in order”. In 2023 her chances were 60/40 due to immunotherapy. Unfortunately she ended up on the wrong side of those odds. Today, the Moderna trials are improving those outcomes significantly, and I think that cancer will be fully treatable in a decade or so. It’s almost a miracle… but the road to “be…
I'm so, so sorry you lost your wife to cancer. Cancer is cruel, in so many ways.
> but the road to “better” is built on the shoulders of those who came before
This really resonates with me. I appreciate you sharing it. I'll be sharing it with my family, too.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#64stage 4 colon cancer here... Pancreatic cancer is obviously a _very_ different disease, but when i was diagnosed just about a decade ago the conventional wisdom was that KRAS was basically undruggable. I'm KRAS 12D and very excited for future.
No it's not a cure, but this drug is the difference between someone's mother or father making it to one more Christmas, or Birthday, or other life milestone.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#65Metastatic pancreatic cancer is the first indication for this class of RAS-inhibitor, but it certainly won't be the last, and it seems certain that there will be many many more cancers where this drug gets approved. There are mutations to activate KRAS in a substantial fraction of cancers across many organs, and but it's been such a hard protein to target with a drug that even decades ago I was told it was "undruggab…
One downer about this drug is the absolutely horrific side effects, like "your skin feels like you've been dipped in acid" kind of horrific. Still, pancreatic cancer is just that bad, so maybe that's worthwhile.
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Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#66FDA is just too slow. Whole I’d like to do more radical reform, at a minimum this stupid long wait should be tossed. If someone hits a target endpoint auto approval pending further review or something Remember in COVID when results. Came in and they took a month to schedule the meeting?
Self approval? Like Boeing?
Is Boeing terminally ill?
Jake Seliger, HNer, jseliger - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jseliger, who died a couple of years ago, had exhausted the current standards of treatment for head-neck cancer. Drugs available through clinical trials were his last option.
But the workflow to access drugs via clinical trial is terrible. Directions/Instructions aren't documented. Unwritten limitations and optimizations.
Jake and his wife documented his path through the process.
see https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-ce...
also see https://jakeseliger.com/tag/clinical-trials/ and https://bessstillman.substack.com/t/clinical-trial
Also read https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/the-seliger-act-testimon... for a literal post-mortem view of the clinical drug trial process.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have kids. I also travel, socialize, work, code, play video games, solve puzzles, etc. Love all that shit. I'd be sad to "miss" some novels, or to never see the Ocarina remake, etc. Or just the time I spend piddling around with things. But I think if I was about to die and an advance bought me a few months of moderate quality life, it'd mostly be about seeing my kids cross milestones. I don't imagine I'd spend near…
Understood. No doubt I would be similarly inclined if I'd gone down that path in life. My beef is that I feel this is a trope that gets rolled out without question, and it doesn't even bother paying lip service to the diversity of human experience. I feel similarly whenever I hear about someone expressing empathy with someone, but apparently only after realizing they are someone's daughter/brother/sister/mother whate…
It's a trope for a reason. Having kids does shit to your brain and breaks it in a bunch of ways you cannot anticipate. For better and for worse.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self approval? Like Boeing?
Is Boeing terminally ill? Jake Seliger, HNer, jseliger - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jseliger , who died a couple of years ago, had exhausted the current standards of treatment for head-neck cancer. Drugs available through clinical trials were his last option. But the workflow to access drugs via clinical trial is terrible. Directions/Instructions aren't documented. Unwritten limitations and optimizations. J…
From the post-mortem.
"The biggest bottleneck in the clinical trial system is recruitment and retention. It’s hard to get patients, and it’s hard to keep them."
Yes, this was part of the Chinese reforms of 2016 that I mentioned in the next comment. I don't get why people just downvote things without learning more about them.
Like China = always evil? No, they are an authoritarian system, but that does not mean that every single idea coming from them is bad or evil.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#69My sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October (48 years old) and died in June from it. I'm glad to see a drug like this developed for people suffering from pancreatic cancer. I don't wish what my sister went through on anyone. Damn if I don't wish it had come a little sooner.
Sorry for your loss. My best friend died 3 months after diagnosis from pancreatic cancer.
Re: FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
#70Metastatic pancreatic cancer is the first indication for this class of RAS-inhibitor, but it certainly won't be the last, and it seems certain that there will be many many more cancers where this drug gets approved. There are mutations to activate KRAS in a substantial fraction of cancers across many organs, and but it's been such a hard protein to target with a drug that even decades ago I was told it was "undruggab…
One downer about this drug is the absolutely horrific side effects, like "your skin feels like you've been dipped in acid" kind of horrific. Still, pancreatic cancer is just that bad, so maybe that's worthwhile.
The alternative is chemotherapy which is even nastier, on average.