Anti-diarrhoea drug drives cancer cells to cell death • Hacker News Board

Re: Anti-diarrhoea drug drives cancer cells to cell death

#101

Post by curious_fella1 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #95

wittyreference wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of Stahl's Psychopharmacology. Since pretty much every illicit drug has a legal equivalent, but the legals are better studied, you'll probably find that a good source. If your primary interest is illicit drugs, though, I don't have a good suggestion - it's not the sort of book too many careers are built on.

Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology is also free and online[1], and written in a way that people like myself can understand it. edit: actually only sections of it are available online. The book isn't hard to find, though. [1] https://stahlonline.cambridge.org/common_home.jsf

Awesome!

Re: Anti-diarrhoea drug drives cancer cells to cell death

#102

Post by giantg2 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #96

giantg2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but recent trends seem to be toward more targeted approaches. Seems a bit odd to be studying non-targeted approaches if there are a lot of newer targeted approaches emerging and in research that wouldn't have the same side effects.

Cancer isn't one disease. Targeted treatments take a long time to develop, and only cure one type. The vast majority of cancers are still treated using a sledgehammer approach. I had lymphoma, and took both a general poison (bendamustine) and a very narrowly targeted monoclonal antibody (rituximab). The bendamustine kicked my ass a bit because it's simply poison. The rituximab hardly had any side effects at all, beca…

They are working on genomic treatments. These operate within the same framework but can have thousands of variants.

It's conceptually similar to the mRNA covid vaccine. The framework has been figured out and tested, then it's only a matter of days to create the vaccine once you have the target genetic signature.

Re: Anti-diarrhoea drug drives cancer cells to cell death

#103

Post by ssijak » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

wittyreference wrote: post #80

owenversteeg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a really great summary, thank you! If you wouldn't mind, I am very curious about two things: First, what's your opinion on alpha lipolic acid and MDMA neurotoxicity? Given its popularity and its rising use it'd be great to have a simple way to prevent MDMA-induced neurotoxicity, and ALA is pretty widely available and relatively cheap, but there doesn't seem to have been much research on its use in humans.…

So, my interest in these drugs is primarily from a therapeutic standpoint, so those without therapeutic effects are less within my wheelhouse. My ignorance caveated, I'll say with a grain of salt: 1. We have a shitty understanding of chronic MDMA toxicity in human beings. Rat and primate models of MDMA differ in the primarily damaged pathways (non-human primates it has a pronounced effect on serotonergic cells; in ra…

Are animals in his studies which show damage injected with doses which are comparative to what humans inject, adjusted for weight? Or are they using much larger doses?

Re: Anti-diarrhoea drug drives cancer cells to cell death

#104

Post by dmix » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #82

endymi0n wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is just a view limited to opioids. In general, there is no shortage of compounds with an ability to kill cancer cells since the 1950s. The grand (and still largely unsolved) challenge is not killing them, it‘s sparing the rest of the body while doing so.

https://xkcd.com/1217/

After watching enough "Journey to the Microcosmos" I'm not longer convinced a handgun is. good enough analogy for killing cellular life :p

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g

It's a wild and highly resistant world we don't know nearly enough about.

I think this paper's intentions was merely to understand it all better (which is a great thing0, while most people are taking issue, or at least providing much needed context, with an article suggesting some utility in fighting cancer.