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A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

nytimes.com

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Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#71

Post by pmyteh »

brigandish wrote: post #52
chris_wot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, but that’s a non sequitur. The alternative is not that the drug wasn’t produced. It is that the drug wasn’t developed by private enterprise .

Please don't give insincere apologies, they're rhetorically weak and pairing insincerity with something that should be sincere isn't a good look. Which segues nicely to this pairing of public funding and private enterprise. No, if the drug wouldn't be sold for a profit then the incentive to make it wouldn't exist and the funds would not be applied for and the ironic pairing - if it is ironic, which I don't think it i…

I don't know about medical research, but that's exactly what the rest of us in universities do.

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#72

Post by Gordonjcp »

I'm not sure which immunotherapy drug my mother has been receiving, but after being diagnosed with lung cancer nearly two years ago - a tumour roughly the size of a tangerine right in the top corner of one lung, utterly inaccessible by surgery, in absolutely the wrong place to attempt radiotherapy - it's now gone, save for a little bit of scarring and fibrosis where it used to be. The treatment has left her tired and brain-foggy but that's pretty small potatoes to being a chemo zombie, which she absolutely did not want. Although she's in her early 80s she's otherwise in not too bad shape, so that probably helped.

From here on out, it'll be scans every three months or so to make sure it hasn't come back, but her doctor says that if it does come back it'll grow so slowly and weakly that it's just not going to be worth bothering with.

I expect you can imagine the look on Mum's doctor's face when we went in for the most recent scan results - it can't be often an oncologist gets to give someone the best news in the world.

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#73

Post by LinuxBender »

Merad wrote: post #68
spywaregorilla wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather just die. Throw a party. Tell my kids they're getting a ton of cash. Say good bye on happy terms. Vs. a miserable decay for everyone involved at huge expense. It's not worth it. Forget the money. The emotional toll is large and for whose benefit?

Even ignoring the fact that human euthanasia is illegal in most of the US, it's rarely that easy. Both of my paternal grandparents lived into their 90s but suffered from mental decline (different forms of dementia) and died as shells of their former selves. If you could have spoke to either of them at the end of their lives but with their full mental capacity, I suspect they would have said that they'd have preferred…

Assuming forethought one can set up a living trust. I have one. If I can no longer consent then a family member I designated can consent for me. It isn't without risk and requires a lot of trust.

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#74

Post by LinuxBender »

dekhn wrote: post #14
SiempreViernes wrote: post #12

Using humans, N = 18. Quick search didn't give any estimate of the chance probability of all going into remission by unrelated reasons, but I imagine it's pretty high compared to the number of small cancer trials run around the world.

Cancer rarely, if ever goes into remission on its own (rectal cancer, specifically). You would never see this happen randomly to everybody in a trial unless there was some external factor.

I don't have a link handy but I have read in the past some cases of trial participants being ejected from a trial because they started prolonged fasting and killed their cancer cells. I suppose that is in line with the external factor you mention.

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#75

Post by adamredwoods »

sonicggg wrote: post #67

After reading it, my suspicion was confirmed. Yet another mab. Very powerful, but expensive to scale and synthesise. I guess poor people will have to just suck it up and die. We don't have the tech yet to make these cost effective. Big pharma loves this natural barrier of entry though. Also, don't expect this stuff to be available anytime soon. FDA process is pretty slow, and sometimes political. Maybe if it were eff…

This is why there is a fast-track to accelerate break-through treatments, which dostarlimab utilized (but stalled thanks to covid):

https://www.fda.gov/patients/learn-about-drug-and-device-app...

But, yeah, the FDA is all over the place.

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#76

Post by GordonS »

qgin wrote: post #40
ta988 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the real price of a nursing home in the US? Who can afford that?

You either have enough to pay or you pay until all your assets are exhausted to $0 and then Medicaid takes over.

I'm guessing Medicaid isn't going to pay for the kind of nursing home that costs $10k/month?

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#77

Post by fluidcruft »

Aransentin wrote: post #20

Some napkin math: Given rectal cancer's rate of survival of 67%, and the small size of the study (18 people), you should see similar results due to random chance every 1350th study. A cursory search on clinicaltrials.gov and I can find 7131 cancer studies started in 2021 alone. It's therefore not unreasonable for this one to be just a random fluke.

7131 rectal cancer studies or just cancer studies in general?

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#78

Post by GordonS »

sonicggg wrote: post #67

After reading it, my suspicion was confirmed. Yet another mab. Very powerful, but expensive to scale and synthesise. I guess poor people will have to just suck it up and die. We don't have the tech yet to make these cost effective. Big pharma loves this natural barrier of entry though. Also, don't expect this stuff to be available anytime soon. FDA process is pretty slow, and sometimes political. Maybe if it were eff…

-mab drugs really are incredible. I actually take 2 different ones (erenumab and omalizumab), and the results surpassed all my expectations, especially after negative or lacklustre results from many "conventional" medications beforehand.

But aye, they aren't cheap.

Re: A cancer trial’s unexpected result: Remission in every patient

#80

Post by caddemon »

hughes wrote: post #60
msandford wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing you can do is setup a trust for yourself so that you're broke on paper long before the trust runs out of money. I don't know if it's ethical but it's legal.

What's unethical is a system that completely drains a person's wealth for getting sick.

Certainly this happens for procedures that should be cheap, and nursing homes are also a huge issue. But in the current discussion it's not clear to me that something like a heart transplant should be cheap. Development of a novel treatment can be very expensive and sometimes involves scarce resources.
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