51–60 of 144 posts
Just FYI, this study was done in mice.
I would be in favor of adding a standardized [in mice] to the titles of all HN submissions about medical breakthroughs. Most of them end up being in mice and many do not reproduce in humans. It would help, at a glance, to know how significant a study's results are.
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.
100% response, zero side effects? This sounds like world changing news. Can anyone with domain expertise explain the catch, if any?
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.
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.
I agree with your overall point though; it's a little annoying that every few weeks we hear about a new experiment that seems to indicate that we'll have a radically new and effective form of treatment for cancer only for it to never materialize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Need the what now?
I believe parent-poster is making a joke at the expense of conspiracy-theorists who believe in lizard-people, rather than endorsing the idea. To paraphrase, something like: "This news article links human survival to something taken from amphibians and reptiles. There are conspiracy-theorists who posit the existence of Lizard people. It would be amusing if those humans discovered this news, and claimed it was a plot b…
Sorry, as someone in this field, this is bullshit. It is in mice. Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote: "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)" PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are, you guessed it, PD-L1 positive. At h…
> Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive. > Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo. This is a nothing burger.
Meh the research didn’t say those were state of the art, but that they were “common” treatments. In other words a baseline for a presumably cheap and well studied animal surrogate.
> CAR-T is ahead of the game, and will be the ultimate winner here as it grows to scale.
Last I read up on it last year CAR-T treatments struggled with solid mass tumors.
Many cancers don’t have unique proteins for CAR-T to target (similar to the pd-l1 issue).
Then CAR-T struggles getting the modified T cells into the solid mass tumors en masse. Interestingly this approach actually makes use of the tumor environment rather than be hindered by it.
"Tumor-Specific Accumulation Mechanism
E. americana selectively accumulates in tumor tissues with zero colonization in normal organs. This remarkable tumor specificity arises from multiple synergistic mechanisms:
Hypoxic Environment: The characteristic hypoxia of tumor tissues promotes anaerobic bacterial proliferation
Immunosuppressive Environment: CD47 protein expressed by cancer cells creates local immunosuppression, forming a permissive niche for bacterial survival
Abnormal Vascular Structure: Tumor vessels are leaky, facilitating bacterial extravasation
Metabolic Abnormalities: Tumor-specific metabolites support selective bacterial growth
Excellent Safety Profile
Comprehensive safety evaluation revealed that E. americana demonstrates:
Rapid blood clearance (half-life ~1.2 hours, completely undetectable at 24 hours)
Zero bacterial colonization in normal organs including liver, spleen, lung, kidney, and heart
Only transient mild inflammatory responses, normalizing within 72 hours
No chronic toxicity during 60-day extended observation"
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…
Most cell types have systems to safely manage replication. Broadly, there are gas pedals (oncogenes) and brakes (tumor suppressors). A classic oncogene is something like RAS, which activates a signaling cascacde and stimulates progression through the cell cycle. A canonical tumor suppressor is something like TP53, the most frequently mutated gene in cancer, which senses various cellular stresses and induces apoptosis or senescence.
Most cancer genomes are more complicated than individual point mutations (SNPs), insertions, or deletions. There are copy number alterations, where you have > or All of the mechanisms that intrinsically regulate cell growth would fall under your "L1 defense". Unfortunately, the idea of reversing somatic point mutations is likely to be a challenging approach to treating cancer given the current state of technology.
First, for the reasons above, cancer is often multifactorial and it would be difficult to identify a single driver that would effectively cure the disease if corrected. Second, we don't have currently delivery or in vivo base editing technology that is sensitive or specific enough to cure cancer by this means. There are gene therapies like zolgensma[2] which act to introduce a working episomal (not replacing the damaged version in the genome) copy of the gene responsible for SMA. There are also in vivo cell therapies like CAR T which attempt to introduce a transgene that encodes for an anti-cancer effector on T cells. These sorts of approaches may give some insight into the current state of art in this field.
Edit: also I should note that the genes involved in DNA repair (PARP, BRACA1/2, MSH2, MLH1, etc) are frequently mutated in cancers and therapeutically relevant. There are drugs that target them, sometimes rather successfully (e.g. PARP inhibitors). But the mechanisms of action for these therapies are more complicated than outright correcting the somatic mutations.
1. https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onasemnogene_abeparvovec
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe parent-poster is making a joke at the expense of conspiracy-theorists who believe in lizard-people, rather than endorsing the idea. To paraphrase, something like: "This news article links human survival to something taken from amphibians and reptiles. There are conspiracy-theorists who posit the existence of Lizard people. It would be amusing if those humans discovered this news, and claimed it was a plot b…
I feel like sometimes the actual act of explaining the joke can actually be funnier than the joke itself. Occasionally when I can explain a super dirty joke with a deadpan and matter-of-fact tone people will laugh more than they would have if they had actually gotten the joke in the first place.