51–60 of 100 posts
I loved Michael Levin's thoughts on solving cancer. Kind of similar to immunotherapy but on a level of reprogramming the cells back that got 'lost' from their big purpose in their organ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU&t=8653s
Oncologist 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 effi…
Has this been written up in some respected journal? (No, not Nature.)
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problems: - False-positive results - False-negative results "Mammograms are the best breast cancer screening tests we have at this time. But mammograms have their limits. For example, they aren’t 100% accurate in showing if a woman has breast cancer. They can miss some cancers, and sometimes they find things that turn out not to be cancer (but that still need further testing to be sure)." https://www.cancer.org/cance…
Furthermore the detection method used (x-rays) cause cancer in and of themselves.
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Thank you for pointing out the standard of care in this case, given inability to resect, was the immunotherapy from the start. Obviously very specific for that type of lung cancer and the state of your contact's tumor, but I've been learning more and more about this and have been told by multiple oncologists that immunotherapy is typically only given after more conventional treatments are first attempted and fail to…
The scan that indicated the 80% reduction was after just a couple of weeks, if I recall correctly. Since you're talking about immunotherapy not typically being a first-line treatment, I'll share a morbidly interesting fact that underscores some of the, er... quirks of the US medical system. The oncologist treating my relative initially staged my relative's cancer in the electronic health records as stage IV, despite…
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The extreme complexity of biology. There's no substitute to just trying things and seeing if they work, because you will never understand what's going on beforehand.
funny how many of blockebuster drugs were discovered by accident.
Early 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. S…
Very interesting comment, nonetheless.
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It does, from the article: "“Normally, our blood vessel walls are all sealed pipes,” Brahmbhatt says. “But around wherever the cancer is growing, the blood vessels are known to be very defective. They have got a lot of holes in them.” Brahmbhatt and his collaborator Jennifer MacDiarmid devised a clever ploy. They would send a Trojan horse into malignant cells and turn cancer’s own trickery against it. The Trojan hors…
I see. I do wonder how specific that is though. Potentially it could be toxic to other areas where vasculature could be "leaky". Like in the filtration mechanisms in the kidney. Targeting the cancer's vascular supply is also a known anti-cancer mechanism of action (anti-angiogenics). How will this method not have the same toxicity as that one?
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Thank you for pointing out the standard of care in this case, given inability to resect, was the immunotherapy from the start. Obviously very specific for that type of lung cancer and the state of your contact's tumor, but I've been learning more and more about this and have been told by multiple oncologists that immunotherapy is typically only given after more conventional treatments are first attempted and fail to…
The scan that indicated the 80% reduction was after just a couple of weeks, if I recall correctly. Since you're talking about immunotherapy not typically being a first-line treatment, I'll share a morbidly interesting fact that underscores some of the, er... quirks of the US medical system. The oncologist treating my relative initially staged my relative's cancer in the electronic health records as stage IV, despite…