One Drug to Shrink All Tumors • Hacker News Board

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#51

Post by cgoddard » Tue, Mar 27, 2012, 4:30 PM UTC

onemoreact wrote: post #47

weavejester wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the evolution of cancer cells rather more constrained than your average pathogen? A normal pathogen can infect many thousands or millions of hosts, and can evolve immunities over many years, decades or centuries. A cancer is limited to a single host, and cannot pass on any of its tricks; it must start from scratch each time. If we had medicine as potent as penicillin that could attack or inhibit certain cancer…

There are plenty of drugs that work for cancer type A, B, C etc. Unfortunately, there are billions of people in the world all randomly generating Cancer's so all possible mutations are going to show up eventually in somebody. Which presents the problem, let's say the most common 50% of all cancers are easily cured by drug X. Well the other 50% are all less common and moving to 100% is only going to get harder as you…

But keep in mind each of those cancers is developing and evolving independently. Wiping out one type of cancer doesn't make it more likely for the other to proliferate on a population-wide scale. Sure, this treatment might not end up working for everyone, because some people's cancers might have developed chance resistance, but a whole bunch of people are going to be helped and cured without any ill evolutionary consequences.

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#52

Post by marze » Tue, Mar 27, 2012, 4:57 PM UTC

wensing wrote: post #11

Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?

Why hurry things up when the cancer treatment industry is making billions with the status quo?

I'm sure the industry (and by extension, the government regulatory and funding agencies) would rather this research was never funded in the first place.

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#53

Post by Florin_Andrei » Tue, Mar 27, 2012, 5:53 PM UTC

pja wrote: post #35

wensing wrote: post #11

Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?

You read many articles like this because the press likes to latch onto every research finding and shout "Drug X / Prof Y cures cancer!" In reality, cancer is many, many different diseases. About the only thing that cancers share is the property of uncontrolled (and unwanted) growth. Some of these cancers we already know how to cure, others remain incurable to date. The reality is probably that there is no "cure for c…

> You read many articles like this because the press likes to latch onto every research finding and shout "Drug X / Prof Y cures cancer!"

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

Re: One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

#54

Post by d2vid » Tue, Mar 27, 2012, 6:10 PM UTC

frisco wrote: post #12

wensing wrote: post #11

Why is it that I've read maybe a dozen articles like this in the past couple of years but still don't see much change in the way cancer is being treated in the wild? Will there be a year in the not-too-distant future when all of these breakthroughs finally hit the shelves? I realize the answer is "clinical trials take time and don't always work" but can someone please explain the process to me?

First, there's a lot of bad science out there. A large part of this is due to the fact that animal models are almost uniformly terrible at modeling real human disease. Second, a therapy may be highly effective but also highly toxic or have other severe risks or side effects, which are hard to tell in preclinical research. The bar here is very high, and trials can easily be pulled over a few "adverse events." Third, i…

> you're going to be limited to > 45 year old females with Stage IV glioblastoma expressing marker Y

If the drug is approved for a specific use in a specific demographic, then doctors can choose to prescribe it for other uses and to other demographics. Apparently 50% of cancer patients receive an "off-label" drug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-label_use#Frequency_of_off-...