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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

#131

Post by vibrio »

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?

also, Elephants have a much higher copy number of a gene called p53/ It codes a protein that acts to force suicide in cells that have damaged DNA (think from UV light, cigarette smoke, age, etc). In cancer this is a common 'early' mutation that allows collection of further mutation and progession towards cancer. In having many more copies of p53, it makes it less likely the p53 function will be eliminated

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

#132

Post by vibrio »

justinclift wrote: post #23
hyc_symas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of potential treatments are too easily available and can't be patented. If a big pharma company can't make massive profit from it, they won't bother bringing it to market. Consider that a not-good reason. Other treatments may eventually prove to have too many serious negative side effects. That's a good reason to abandon them.

Wonder if some form of FOSS approach would work as an alternative development model for pharma?

This made me think of the "Institute for one world health" . It came out as a non-profit pharmaceutical company in the mid 2000's. Victoria Hale was the founder-it got her a MacArthur fellowship. It is focuses(focused?) on global health and populations underserved by for-profit models. I think they successfully developed a treatment for leishmaniasis. it's an adorable model and should be pushed but as usual it seems like the philantropy money is limiting.

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

#133

Post by vibrio »

mcmoor wrote: post #62
johnwheeler wrote: post #54

I have never once seen a promising cancer treatment I've heard of on the news help people. You hear about the breakthrough treatments all the time, but when people get cancer, all you ever hear about is people getting chemotherapy and radiation. Same old scary shit. Well, I guess Leukemia has been somewhat cured I heard, so that's pretty huge. When I was a kid it was a death sentence IIRC.

There's also AIDS that I heard have been practically cured. Since then I have became less pessimistic about drug progress

AIDS has been treatable for a few decades, with good progression getting it to developing world and some towards a cure. That said, some of this recent progress has been impeded due to differing beliefs of some current governmental regulatory and research leadership, and beliefs that infectious disease treatments and vaccines are not needed for most people that are 'healty'.

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

#134

Post by brailsafe »

xupybd wrote: post #28
brailsafe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not against AI summaries being on HN, however, users should verify and cite sources so others can verify. I don't see how they contribute anything to a discussion. Even a speculative comment organically produced is more worthwhile than feeding a slop machine back into itself. I don't go out for coffee to discuss LLM summaries with friends, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that here. Earlier today…

It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links. It does well at filtering information for you. Going to primary sources is required to verify what it says but it can reduce the leg work rather a lot.

> It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links.

Not in the example I mentioned. It can imagine the links, and the content of the links, and be very confident about it. It literally invented an obituary that didn't exist, gave me a link to a funeral home that 404'd, came up with "in-memoriam" references from regional newsletters that never contained her name. It's actually really scary how specifically fake it was.

I asked it to produce verbatim references from any sources and the links to them, and none of the text it produced could be searched with quotes on any search engine.

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

#135

Post by brailsafe »

duskdozer wrote: post #52
xupybd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links. It does well at filtering information for you. Going to primary sources is required to verify what it says but it can reduce the leg work rather a lot.

The issue as I see it is just straight copy/pasting its output. You want to use it as a search tool to give you pointers on things to look up and links to read? Great. Then use that as a basis to read the sources and write your own response. If you aren't familiar enough with the subject area to do that, then you also shouldn't be pasting LLM output on it.

It's not even copy/pasting in some cases. In my example, it confidentially produced "verbatim" references that don't exist anywhere, to specific pages that never mentioned this person's name or contained any of the text. Sometimes completely different people, 404 pages, huge waste of time

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

#136

Post by itchyouch »

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…

While I can't speak to whether there are enzymes for the proper copy/paste I do have a set of random cancer related bits I've picked up over the years.

There are some basic, well-known nutritional interventions that are generally important/critical for DNA repair processes. The 2 main ones are Vitamin D and Magnesium. Ensuring adequate amount of these tend to be helpful (most folks aren't getting enough sun and greens).

Other than that, a steady and adequate source of the substrates seems to be important: ie protein (nitrogen), and phosphates.

One of the interesting bits about some cancer cells is that while they simply haven't gone through apoptosis, physical sheer stress incurred from physical activity (exercise) can cause cancer cells that travel beyond the tumor point (before it becomes metastatic) to finally self destruct.

It seems important to me that the best strategy for cancer is the compounding of many different strategies that optimize the body's innate defenses to run optimally.

It does seem that ketogenic diets may have adjuvant properties, but there is yet to be a clinical trial that demonstrates it, so it's basically stuck in paper and R&D stages as to whether being in a ketogenic state can be one of the last areas that may help cancer patients extend lifetime from say 1 year to 2 years.

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

#137

Post by xupybd »

brailsafe wrote: post #134
xupybd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links. It does well at filtering information for you. Going to primary sources is required to verify what it says but it can reduce the leg work rather a lot.

> It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links. Not in the example I mentioned. It can imagine the links, and the content of the links, and be very confident about it. It literally invented an obituary that didn't exist, gave me a link to a funeral home that 404'd, came up with "in-memoriam" references from regional newsletters that never contained her name. It's actually really scary how specifically fake i…

Yeah it does punt sometimes but often it works well. Especially on more well written about topics.

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

#138

Post by johnwheeler »

bruce511 wrote: post #61
tombert wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a doctor, but in some fairness, I think there has been a lot of progress in chemotherapy and radiation. "Increasing 5-year-survivability by 0.5%" doesn't make a fun sexy headline, but that's still an achievement that required a lot of hard work and enough of those happening still adds up. I agree with your overall point though; it's a little annoying that every few weeks we hear about a new experiment that se…

"Cancer" is a term that covers a lot of diseases. So there is a lot of research going into a lot of different things, and hence lots of announcements. "Chemotherapy" again is a loaded term covering a lot of different drugs, drug combinations, protocols and so on. So yeah, a lot of cancer treatment us "chemo" - but today's chemo is far removed from 2000 chemo. 5 year survivability has increased tremendously over the l…

My mom died of cancer and had to suffer through chemo. It was in the early 2000s, so I'm curious to know if you know anything about these new chemos and what makes them different.

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

#139

Post by jjk166 »

cassepipe wrote: post #120
littlestymaar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The idea that tumors develop their own tumors, suppressing cancer is known as the Hypertumor Hypothesis and, while it works in computer models, there isn't actually any evidence backing it up.

The hypothesis doesn't really resolve Peto's paradox, the observation that cancer rates don't scale directly with the number of cells in an organism. Not only do large organisms like whales get fewer cancers per cell division, small animals like mice get more cancers per cell division, which can not really be explained by a threshold beyond which hypertumors suppress tumors. The actual evidence suggests organisms just evolve whatever level of cancer resistance they need to have low odds of dying of cancer before something else kills them.

That being said, the main observation underpinning Peto's paradox was actually just due to lack of good data. Over the years much more data has been collected from animal autopsies and it turns out that big animals do get cancer and cancer rates actually do scale with body size, just different species have varying levels of cancer protection, with the levels of protection being similar in closely related species of different sizes.

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

#140

Post by jjk166 »

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?

Different species do have different levels of protection, and different lineages tend to employ different methods of protection. For example elephants have numerous duplicates of cancer suppression genes, whereas naked mole rats produce a variant of hyaluronan which prevents tumor formation. When compared to other great apes, Humans seem to be worse at both layers of defense.

It's worth noting though that humans also have much higher levels of exposure to many carcinogens than most animals, and we screen for cancers at a much greater rate for humans, so just because a species has lower cancer rates doesn't necessarily mean their cancer defenses are better.

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