Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

innovativegenomics.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–239 of 239 posts

Re: CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

#231

Post by dekhn »

jyounker wrote: post #229
dekhn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically what happens is that the new treatments with bad side effects are given to the sickest patients (who have exhausted all other mechanisms), rather than to the bravest souls with less dire current circumstances. This makes some sense in terms of compassion and matching new experimental techniques with patients with no hope, but it skews the results highly negative because the patients are already very close t…

> I don't think any of this can be changed without large-scale social acceptance of greater risk in clinical trials and significant support from the government. I agree with you about significant financial support from the government if that support is financial and given to smaller groups. I disagree about societal acceptance though. I feel like your point of view may be missing clinical trials and treatments in the…

You are explaining clinical trials to somebody who works in pharma (speccifically a company with many cancer drugs that already got approved). I'm pretty familiar with the area already- for example, I know the drug thalidomide, which was part of the origin story of the FDA, is still prescribed widely as an anti-cancer drug.

Re: CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

#236

Post by MontyCarloHall »

amluto wrote: post #230
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, you’d use multiple guides targeting multiple mutations, so that the probability of having/acquiring multiple resistance mutations abrogating every guide from binding would be infinitesimal.

LNPs have limited capacity, and if the CRISPR/Cas system they’re using requires an exact match, then any additional point mutation or insertion or deletion in the segment being matched would allow the cell to survive. I suppose that approximately 3n extra guide RNAs (where n is the length of the matched sequence) could be added, but that seems a bit messy.

Including additional guides is negligible with respect to the overall LNP capacity, which can contain a few thousand nucleotides. The CRISPR/Cas mRNA is about 5 kilobases total, and each guide is on the order of 100 bases.

Re: CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

#237

Post by bcye »

aroman wrote: post #187
dreambuffer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but don't most people die around age 70-80?

Life expectancy in many countries is mid 80s.

That's dragged down by earlier deaths though, so the probable age you'll die, given that you lived so far is a good bit higher.

Re: CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

#238

Post by dekhn »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #175
dekhn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically what happens is that the new treatments with bad side effects are given to the sickest patients (who have exhausted all other mechanisms), rather than to the bravest souls with less dire current circumstances. This makes some sense in terms of compassion and matching new experimental techniques with patients with no hope, but it skews the results highly negative because the patients are already very close t…

> It does not provide an accurate signal for what the results would be if we gave them to less sick people. It provides an excellent signal because we want to prove that these drugs are doing something that the standard of care is unable to. There's this sense that medicine is easy and some evil cabal are limiting health to their cronies. Most medications never get to trial for their intended indications, and most fa…

I think you misunderstood my point. Results in extremely ill patients don't correlate well with results in mildly ill patients (in cancer), so the signal you get from extremely ill patients is not predictive- it may be a drug fails in extremely ill patients, but would have worked great on the mildly ill patients- basically a false negative.

Re: CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

#239

Post by aroman »

dreambuffer wrote: post #227
aroman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say my claim is not true then proceed to acknowledge it is true. To be clear about the fact: about 1/4 of all countries have a life expectancy >80, and as you said, more than a dozen in mid-80s.

Well, no, no country on earth has an expectancy in the mid 80s, I was being generous with your wording. 40-50 countries have expectancy between 80-84, which is early 80s. Most countries are sub-80.

Now you are retreating into semantics :)

My original statement was that life expectancy in many countries is in the mid-80s. Which is, in fact, true.

If you want to split hairs about what constitutes “mid”, you can, but I doubt many people would agree with you that age 84 does not qualify as “mid-eighties”.

Post reply on HN