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Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

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Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#111

Post by estearum »

DivingForGold wrote: post #109
Aurornis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of potential treatments are too easily available and can't be patented. This isn’t really an obstacle, at least not as much as it’s made out to be. There are numerous examples of drugs being brought to market at high prices despite having been generic compounds. Even old drugs can be brought back at $1000/month or more at different doses or delivery mechanisms. One example: Doxepin is an old antidepressant th…

About Doxepin. As many seniors do, I also suffer from extreme inability to stay asleep at night. I have trialed through all the known prescription and non prescription possibilities, only eszopiclone and baclofen seem to show some promise, however, eszopiclone is DEA listed, requires higher and higher doses, and if I take it more than say 2 weeks, it has rather serious side effects attempting to withdraw, addictive,…

Have you tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

I am a lifelong sufferer of insomnia (though mostly sleep onset) and tried all sorts of increasingly risky things. CBT cured me in ~2 months.

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#112

Post by d--b »

estearum wrote: post #104
d--b wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I saw, there are very few experimental therapies that claim 100% efficacy, no side effect, no patent on complex engineering process to produce the drug. I agree with GP that it is very notable. I mean if it works on humans, which is not a stretch, colorectal cancer is done. It's huge.

Yes there are few that claim 100% efficacy and no side effect at this stage, but there are far, far, far fewer who make it to human availability. I wouldn't describe it working in humans as "a stretch" per se. I'm not identifying a specific reason it shouldn't work in humans. I'm just saying that's true of thousands and thousands of really great looking treatments (per year!) that, nonetheless, end up not working in…

If it is the case that there are such treatments (easy to produce, 100% efficacy, no side effect) that cure fairly common deadly disease such as colorectal cancer in mice, and that never make it to human trial, there is something seriously broken about medical research...

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#113

Post by busyant »

kinj28 wrote: post #40

I have been working with my dad on his cancer treatment since last year. My interest in the topic has only peaked ever since. (Disclaimer- I am an engineer and not a microbiologist/doctor) Mutations and wrong copying of genome happens all the time in the body and some enzyme has the job of correcting the mutated genes so it doesn’t get into the system. Level 2 defence is T cells killing it as identified as foreign bo…

I don't know the specifics of efforts to "repair" DNA replication repair (if you get my drift), but I suspect there is some effort in that area.

There definitely are efforts to correct enzymes involved in tumor-suppression (p53 is probably the best known tumor suppressor protein). e.g., here's a study on a small molecule designed to correct mutated p53 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8099409/

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#114

Post by kevincox »

estearum wrote: post #41
colordrops wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between a good and not-good reason to not go to market?

Good reasons: * Most drug candidates just don't work * Even among the drug candidates that do, figuring how to safely deliver them to their target is very hard (looks similar to "just doesn't work") Bad reasons: * It's too expensive to prove that a drug works * It's too difficult to differentiate the patients for whom a drug works and the patients for whom it does not * It is very hard to predict recruitment and to a…

> It's too expensive to prove that a drug works

I'm not sure that is necessary a bad reason. You need to factor in a lot of concerns to determine what "too expensive" means.

But if you are going to spend billions of dollars to develop a drug that only treats about 2 people a year it is likely too expensive even if it is 100% effective. That money would be better spent on treatments that have wider applicability.

Of course this is not simple to measure. Costs aren't known upfront and the research may end up proving invaluable to more widely applicable treatments.

So it is a judgment call and not necessarily a bad reason.

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#115

Post by f6v »

kinj28 wrote: post #40

I have been working with my dad on his cancer treatment since last year. My interest in the topic has only peaked ever since. (Disclaimer- I am an engineer and not a microbiologist/doctor) Mutations and wrong copying of genome happens all the time in the body and some enzyme has the job of correcting the mutated genes so it doesn’t get into the system. Level 2 defence is T cells killing it as identified as foreign bo…

> fixing the enzyme that fixes the wrong copy paste mechanism

The DNA fidelity issues contribute to only some cancers. Many are caused by mutations due to environmental damage and some are caused by viruses. The point is, there's a huge variety of reasons for developing cancer. So you cover more cases by developing treatments that are more "universal".

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#116

Post by wvlia5 »

rwmj wrote: post #87
torben-friis wrote: post #9

100% response, zero side effects? This sounds like world changing news. Can anyone with domain expertise explain the catch, if any?

Certainly good news for mice. I wonder if anyone has tried to engineer a mouse that lives forever by applying all these life enhancing mouse therapies at once.

Yes, Mathuselah Mouse Price

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#117

Post by adrian_b »

allie1 wrote: post #91
teekert wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It starts with mutations (sometimes accelerated by mutagens (smoke, alcohol, etc) or inflammation (viruses, infections, etc) or just chance (things like asbestos up the division rate by constant physical damage and thus up the probability or an error in copying). But there is much more to it. This is a nice paper for an overview: Hallmarks of Cancer (tng) [0]. It (among others) adds the very important and for years u…

Would sports also increase the rate of division? Bodybuilding for example you intentionally make micro tears in muscles to get them to repair and grow (lay person, apologies for the mistakes)

The problem is that many things that reduce the probability of cancer increase the probability of other diseases.

Therefore there is no good solution for this.

For instance, some studies have demonstrated that certain kinds of malnutrition, i.e. the consumption of inadequate amounts of protein and/or with bad amino-acid profile, inhibited the development of tumors caused by carcinogen agents (in rats and mice). This was not really surprising, because tumors grow faster than the rest of the body so they need to synthesize more proteins. If they are starved, they grow slowly and the immune system has time to react and to eliminate the incipient tumors early enough.

Despite this, starving yourself in the hope to avoid cancer would be a very bad idea. While the probability of cancer is lowered, the probabilities of low resistance to infectious diseases or of muscular weakness leading to falling and breaking some limb, or of cardio-vascular diseases, become higher.

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#118

Post by littlestymaar »

jjk166 wrote: post #73
kinj28 wrote: post #40

I have been working with my dad on his cancer treatment since last year. My interest in the topic has only peaked ever since. (Disclaimer- I am an engineer and not a microbiologist/doctor) Mutations and wrong copying of genome happens all the time in the body and some enzyme has the job of correcting the mutated genes so it doesn’t get into the system. Level 2 defence is T cells killing it as identified as foreign bo…

Our L1 defense is actually incredibly good. A human will undergo about 10^16 cell divisions over the course of their lifetime. Around 10^3 to 10^6 of those divisions will result in a mutation that gets past the L1 defenses and need to be eliminated by the T cells. It's not generally easy to make dramatic improvements to something with a 99.9999999% success rate. The immune system is pretty good too, which means any g…

Aren't the elephants and whales orders of magnitude better than us at that though (they have roughly as many cancer as we do, but with respectively x100 and x1000 times as many cells.

Or is it the second layer that works better for them?

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#119

Post by snarf21 »

nine_k wrote: post #67
Smileyferret wrote: post #63

Interesting article, but in the full paper their key figure (Fig 2) shows their treatment group of n=3 mice completely responded to the bacterial treatment, but their methods say they treated n=5 mice? Could be an honest mistake but that’s a little concerning for data manipulation. Also agree that using a PD-L1 mab feels like it’s for show especially considering the cancer model they’re using (Colon-26) was shown to…

Still the idea is beautiful. Since tumors are oxygen-deficient and suppress the immune response, anaerobic bacteria would proliferate there, and wreak havoc, while in the healthy parts of the organism they would be rapidly eliminated. Additionally, since the bacteria accumulate in the tumor, and the immune system has just responded to their invasion, T-cells will flock to the tumor, destroying what remains of it in d…

I'm untrained in this area but it sounds like similar ideas I heard of in the last decade where injected tumor with virus (polio?) that quickly kills the tumor but then is easily cured in the rest of the body since we have solutions to them. Is this a similar situation?

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#120

Post by cassepipe »

littlestymaar wrote: post #118
jjk166 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our L1 defense is actually incredibly good. A human will undergo about 10^16 cell divisions over the course of their lifetime. Around 10^3 to 10^6 of those divisions will result in a mutation that gets past the L1 defenses and need to be eliminated by the T cells. It's not generally easy to make dramatic improvements to something with a 99.9999999% success rate. The immune system is pretty good too, which means any g…

Aren't the elephants and whales orders of magnitude better than us at that though (they have roughly as many cancer as we do, but with respectively x100 and x1000 times as many cells. Or is it the second layer that works better for them?

I am not sure how much consensus there is around it but this is so cool I have to repeat it sorry: Whales and elephants do develop cancers but since those cancers also have mutations, well their cancers have cancers and overall the cancers are never able to grow big enough to threaten the whole organism.

Too big to fail basically

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