Has this been written up in some respected journal? (No, not Nature.)
Their research was published in Cancer Cell.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/engeneic-announces-...
A Universal Cancer Treatment?
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#22Does anyone know about updates on mRNA treatments for cancer? I had big hopes after the impressive corona-virus vaccines. I know BioNTech is investing heavily but not much has changed since then?
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#23It is not a single disease, but rather a result of several errant biological outcomes. The mortality rates have improved a lot with better treatments, and around 60% of the population will develop some form of the disease in their lifespan. The most disturbing part is most people are unaware they are ill until relatively late stages of the disease. If you live long enough, one will know many good people that go this…
Yes, my cancer was discovered pretty early by pure chance in a CT for an unrelated issue. I had zero symptoms, was really fit and pretty much never sick.
Who knows how long it would have had time to mutate and grow otherwise. Early detection is a really important issue for cancer treatments.
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#24I may be missing something but the article does not explain how the bacteria target is actually targeting the cancer cells. Of course, if you can design an ideal universal cancer targeting mechanism, the active ingredient itself is beside the point. Did anyone else catch this?
Stopping DNA replication across the body will be fatal. This is what eventually kills with radiation toxicity.
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#25Early detection?
Whats the best way to detect cancer (money is no object) and how do we get that cost down 10x and get everyone to participate?
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#26It really is remarkable how far cancer treatment has progressed, even in the last few years. I'm one of the unfortunate people who, through a close family encounter with cancer, knows more about this stuff than anyone should have to. The oncologist told my relative that if they had presented with this particular cancer just a decade ago, his recommendation would have been to start hospice care. However, in recent yea…
As others have mentioned it depends. For instance the initial trials with pembrolizumab weren't the silver bullet the media makes them out to be today, until they identified what features might common among patients that did see a response, e.g. mismatch repair deficient cancers, because the tumor needs to be spitting out enough of these tumor-specific neoantigens to be targted by the immune system. That generally happens with highly mutated tumors such as those found in mismatch repair deficient tumors. The reason why the immune system was not targeting the tumors like it should have given the neoantigens until you take the drug is because the tumor cells presents the correct receptors that the immune system expects from healthy cells, which prevents the immune response. When you block that receptor as these drugs do, and also have many of these tumor specific neoantigens being expressed, then the immune system is able to target the tumor cells for death and the drug works well.
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#27Paper from a peer reviewed repo, not press releases please
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#28Oncologist here.
You can think of drug development as an extremely wide funnel with a minuscule exit hole.
At any given time a medium sized pharmaceutical company has 300-500 drug candidates.
From this group 50 make it to phase 1 trials. 40 get slashed due to toxicity, company abandons them, gets bought by third party and sits in sleepy storage.
10 advance to phase 2 trials where 5-8 may not end up having enough efficacy/too toxic, does not improve survival.
The remaining 3-5 advance to phase 3 where they can suffer the above as well.
Tl:dr: Things usually work in the lab where all ideas start. Until a compound goes through thorough human experimentation believe little.
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#29It really is remarkable how far cancer treatment has progressed, even in the last few years. I'm one of the unfortunate people who, through a close family encounter with cancer, knows more about this stuff than anyone should have to. The oncologist told my relative that if they had presented with this particular cancer just a decade ago, his recommendation would have been to start hospice care. However, in recent yea…
As a person who currently has stage IV NSCLC, I can add some context to this: YMMV. One thing to remember is that "Lung Cancer" is not just one thing. There are mutations of different genes, there are overexpressions of different genes. Each one has its own new medicines. Also, some peoples' cancers are more aggressive than others, and while for many they can find the right drug, for some nothing works. Keytruda work…
Shit. My best to you and yours. Thanks for sharing.
Re: A Universal Cancer Treatment?
#30Early detection? Whats the best way to detect cancer (money is no object) and how do we get that cost down 10x and get everyone to participate?
Money is absolutely an object. People are starting to do trials of early detection from circulating tumor DNA, and finding that the hit rate is alarmingly high. A decent portion of the population has some kind of malignancy, but most of these will either be cleared by the immune system, or be completely benign. Another problem is, if we detect this tumor DNA, it doesn't tell us where in the body the tumor might be. So then you're talking massive workups including while body CT scans and such for a problem that isn't going to be a problem for 99% of people. I'm not joking when I say that if rolled out as is, this has the potential to bankrupt the entire healthcare system with unnecessary procedures.
To be clear, I very much think that early detection of tumors will someday be an essential part of cancer treatment. We are not there yet.