[HN Gopher] The cancer vaccine roller coaster (2009)
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The cancer vaccine roller coaster (2009)
Author : rsfern
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-02-20 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| vajrabum wrote:
| There hasn't been a huge amount of progress in this area since
| this came out in 2009 at least from looking at Wikipedia.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_vaccine
| latchkey wrote:
| While not a direct vaccine, my best friend was just cleared of
| most of his cancer with immune system based therapy that didn't
| exist in 2009.
| derelicto wrote:
| I worked with a genetics therapeutic company a while ago,
| CAR-T is looking to be the future of cancer treatment.
| Extremely expensive but no long term effects observed thus
| far. That said, its very early in the process to say it's the
| "cure to cancer".
| belter wrote:
| "Car-T cancer treatments: From science fiction to saving
| lives "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398672
| hanniabu wrote:
| Is this mRNA therapy?
| jcims wrote:
| Probably not. I'm not GP but the most common are known as
| 'checkpoint inhibitors' that attack one of the pillars of a
| 'successful' cancerous mutation: (over)expression of PD-L1,
| a surface protein that tells the immune system that it's
| sniffing a healthy cell (eg. ~these are not the cells
| you're looking for~). Checkpoint inhibitors work by binding
| to those ligands, effectively disabling their spoofing
| action and allowing unhealthy stench of the cell to flow
| through.
|
| There's also CAR T-cell therapies which effectively extract
| and culture T-cells to be more sensitive to the specific
| disease, then re-introduce them to the patient. These are
| best for blood cancers.
|
| There's also monoclonal antibodies and a variety of
| sensitizers in development and being tested.
|
| We still have a ways to go, but personally it feels like
| the immune system is the best agent we have for fighting
| cancer. It's entire job is to rid the body of pathogens,
| down to the individual cell/particle, with an adaptivity
| and specificity we can only dream of in medicine. Aside
| from the fact that cancers look just like us for the most
| part, it's perfectly suited to the task.
|
| The thing I really am looking forward to specifically with
| the mRNA technology we have today is the ability for a lab
| to take a sample from a biopsy, identify very specific
| markers for those cells, and quickly develop targeted
| therapies for the individual patient. It might be 100 years
| away, but that feels like the future to me.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| look at the pipelines for BioNTech and Moderna (both of
| which predate the diversion of their resources to Covid 2
| years ago) and you'll find exactly what you worry is 100
| years away, already being done. Not kidding.
| carlmr wrote:
| >It might be 100 years away, but that feels like the
| future to me.
|
| I think if it works it's probably quite close now, with
| how much funding the mRNA scene got through covid.
| Plagues, wars and famines can often lead to leaps in
| technology that would have otherwise not worked.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| As for the targeted therapies. This is precisely what
| started being trialed a few years ago. In people, not
| just in mice.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03072-8
| vajrabum wrote:
| Very cool. What was the treatment that he got?
| pizzazzaro wrote:
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| There is a lot of hype behind mRNA as the next step in training
| the immune system to fight cancer. I hope it works
| baldfat wrote:
| mRNA for Covid was built on what was learned from trying to use
| mRNA for Cancer. I personally think mRNA is going to really
| help a lot of people in the future.
|
| My kid passed away at 12 from Bone Cancer and my sister (not
| biologically related to my son) died from brain cancer qat 15.
| There is no treatment for Bone Cancer that actually makes
| survival any better in the past 35 years. This is a potential
| first treatment that might change the percentages for kids and
| adults.
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.64261...
|
| Kid Cancer cures requires a lot more time because kids' cells
| are always growing are much harder to come up with safe
| treatments. There was a 20+ year time when not one new
| chemotherapy was used to treat kids till St. Baldrick's funded
| research finally introduced something new for kids. If we get
| something that works on Adults it will take 10+ years to go to
| kids. If it works on kids then the research will help adults in
| a year or two. That the world focuses 90%+ on adult cancers is
| very frustrating.
| echelon wrote:
| The lowest hanging fruit for cancer cures is regenerative
| cloning. When your body develops cancer, get a head transplant
| onto a monoclonal, antigenless (ABO, HLA, etc.) body grown in a
| lab. The only cancers it doesn't solve are of the brain, blood,
| and head.
|
| Of course we haven't built any of this technology because it's
| "icky". But we need to get over ourselves. Our bodies are
| biological machines. Cloning can be done ethically by
| decephalization genetically or surgically during development,
| then artificial innervation, life support, and hormonal
| development. Grow them in pig uteruses at industrial scale.
|
| This approach also solves heart disease, kidney disease, and
| pretty much everything else.
|
| You get a new heart, set of lungs, thymus... It'd likely increase
| lifespans dramatically.
|
| You could choose your height, build, gender...
|
| Once it's 20-30 years old and accepted tech, we'd probably even
| develop transgenic lines with fluorescent hair, increased
| endurance, magnetoreception, ...
|
| Cancer is hundreds of different molecular breakdowns of different
| cell types. Changes to adhesion, proliferation, signalling, etc.
| Lots of different problems. And if we "fix it", we're doing
| nothing to repair the genes of the cells that directly led to
| cancer. They'll still be sitting on the precipice of developing
| it again.
|
| Replace the body.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Can you even grow the entire human body in less time than it
| takes for it to grow naturally, e.g. some 18 years?
| klipt wrote:
| Maybe not but it only takes 2 years to reach 1/2 adult
| height. That hardly seems the worst problem - better to
| (temporarily) be a midget than dead, surely?
| thelittleone wrote:
| But you wouldn't be a midget. You'd be a 2 year old toddler
| body with an adult head.
| bequanna wrote:
| Growing the replacement body and getting general acceptance is
| probably channeling itself, but seems easy compared to
| connecting the "plumbing and wiring" from the head to the body.
| How close are we to doing this?
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Insanely far away if we never start.
|
| I think this eventuality is a little odd, but it is worth at
| least doing some meta-analysis to see if different parts of
| medicine would be the best to pursue. E.g. we currently focus
| a lot on palliative care, accepting that death is inevitable.
| We need to change that expectation if we're ever going to get
| life extension technology.
| willmadden wrote:
| Until we fully understand the human body, down to the level
| that we can decode thought by observing brainwaves, we don't
| really know that bodies are biological machines. For all we
| know the body could be a form of antenna for energy/physics we
| don't yet perceive or understand. It's important not to assume
| our current understanding of science defines reality. It's our
| best estimate.
| ReaLNero wrote:
| 1) Modern machine learning models like GPT-3 exhibit
| properties of human-like intelligence despite using no magic.
| Occam's razor would tell you that human intelligence is also
| due to the enormous number of neurons and their connections.
|
| 2) This hacker news article is relevant:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350261
| rakejake wrote:
| This is the theme of a Greg Egan short (is there a scenario
| that guy hasn't come up with? Truly an SF beast). The body is
| grown at an accelerated rate with a relatively "dumb" brain.
| The brain has the capacity to carry out normal bodily functions
| and not much else. After a year, the original brain is
| transplanted into the body.
|
| That said, this is more like "very-hard-to-reach golden fruit",
| not low-hanging fruit.
| traverseda wrote:
| I don't think we can join nerves well enough at the moment.
| Seems like a problem we'd need to solve first.
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