Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

Your comment was just unnecessary cynicism.

http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline

"Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds nothing of value to the community. It is unpleasant to read and detracts from actual work. If you have something important but negative to say, that's fine, but say it in a respectful way."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Avoid gratuitous negativity." "Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Oops, it was PhD comics, not XKCD:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162

> "...and it makes boring reading."

I've always felt that this was wishful thinking on the part of the mods. Discussions about downvotes (or completely legitimate questions as to why something was downvoted) are no more boring than hundreds of other topics discussed here every day.

I haven't read the paper, but according to the article, "The treatment, known as immunotherapy, uses the body's immune system to attack cancerous cells." Rather than trying to kill the cancerous cells, the drugs allow your body to attack the tumors.

To give some background, your own body already tries to kill cancerous cells through cytotoxic t cells. The tumors that get serious are the ones that escape the immune system. However, strengthening the immune system has its own problems, since it can attack your own cells (autoimmune diseases), or cause other problems (like Crohn's disease).

So I'd imagine the cancer cells probably won't get immunity to the drugs, but other serious side effects could come from the treatment.

Some context. One of the drugs in the combination Ipillimumab has been used for a while now, and seems to produce long term survival in about 10% of patients with incurable melanoma. Some of these patients seem effectively cured, having survived 7 years or more without any other treatment. It seems likely that combination therapy will produce a better rate of effective cure. This is a pretty big deal, because advanced melanoma is otherwise a disastrous cancer to have.

Cost effectiveness... well ipillimumab costs 100k a year for 4 doses, and nivolumab is probably going to cost another 100k at least on top of that, and is generally continued indefinitely, and the medication to turn off overly vigorous immune responses can also be expensive...

But this is modern medical science how it should be. These are incredible, life changing drugs. The hype is justified. They are already spreading through many different types of cancer: lung, renal cancer, liver cancer, some breast cancer, some colon cancers. Toxicity is an issue, but this is generally temporary, and the quality of life tradeoff is different when there is the possibility of making the next 7 christmases. Furthermore, you have to balance the toxicity with the symptoms from progressive cancer or old style ineffective chemotherapy.