[HN Gopher] Scientists glue two proteins together, driving cance...
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists glue two proteins together, driving cancer cells to
self-destruct
Author : Jerry2
Score : 604 points
Date : 2024-11-04 00:42 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (med.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (med.stanford.edu)
| mountainriver wrote:
| I feel like I've heard this before, is this something that is
| actually novel?
| staplung wrote:
| Hard to tell. The cynical response is that the novelty is that
| it's coming from Stanford. The perhaps more correct response is
| that the novelty is the mechanism of triggering the apoptosis
| and the specificity.
|
| Here's a paper from 2018 that discusses the prospect of using
| apoptosis for cancer treatment. They even talk about BCL-2.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5855670/
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| It's due to the phrase "self destruct."
|
| For some reason people who write headlines like using this in
| the context of cancer cells.
|
| First noticed it in 2010 when I was researching multiple
| myeloma treatments for my father.
|
| It's medical clickbait.
| F-Lexx wrote:
| Isn't the phrase "self destruct" just meant to be a popular
| term of referring to apoptosis or programmed cell death in
| general?
| emporas wrote:
| Triggering the automatic cell death on demand, instead of a
| period of time, i.e. apoptosis, sounds pretty smart and novel.
|
| After 7 years all of our cells die and regenerate, but using
| biochemistry and some endogenous proteins glued together to
| control that period of time, i haven't heard about it before.
|
| Not a medical expert, but cancers have a vast number of
| variations in the type of the cancer cell they create, but one
| common characteristic of all cancers is that they are derived
| from our own cells. So they should respond to some "commands"
| our own cells follow.
|
| Inducing apoptosis for cancer prevention and treatment is old
| news though. Fasting, water fasting that is, causes apoptosis
| of cells en mass and has proven to be very effective in
| minimizing radiotherapy or chemotherapy sessions, and even a
| total treatment. Instead of doing 20 chemotherapy sessions,
| reducing it down to 1 or 2 and the cancer is gone.
|
| Anyway, someone doing the same using a biochemical pathway and
| light up gene expression, is pretty novel.
| bglazer wrote:
| I think you're overstating the "proven" effect of water
| fasting. That said I'm surprised and happy to see that
| several academic medical centers are running trials of
| fastingin conjunction with chemotherapy.
|
| https://www.cedars-sinai.org/discoveries/fasting-as-next-
| ste...
| emporas wrote:
| I meant "proven" when done by the patients themselves, not
| by the doctors necessarily.
|
| Dr. Gundry has done an interview with a martial arts guy
| who was diagnosed with cancer, and fasted for 20 days only
| water, and 20 days a little meat and nothing else, and one
| or two sessions of chemotherapy or radiotherapy later he
| was clear of cancer. There are many people who talk about
| same experiences, from the patient side.
|
| If some doctors are seriously researching fasting and
| cancer treatment, that's going to produce some measurements
| instead of relying on anecdotes.
|
| I cannot find Gundry's interview, it's 5 years old
| something like that.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| You'll find anecdotal "evidence" for all sorts of stuff
| when it comes to cancer. Some of it is just woo, others
| might just work for really specific genetic mutations,
| etc.
|
| Fasting in general has been known for quite a while but
| (and I'm far from an expert) it only helps with certain
| cancers. Hell, I had a friend die this year from stomach
| cancer and he literally couldn't eat or drink. He only
| went to the hospital when he was already skin and bones,
| got a few chemo treatments, and then it was too late.
| lr0 wrote:
| Same as mountainriver's comment. I really find strange how I've
| been reading news lines over the past years about great
| advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases (like
| Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancers) yet after all that time
| people's treatment is not going any better. I'm not sure whether
| scientific journalism somehow delivered some unintended messages
| to me, or we're just supposed to experience these great
| advancements after couple of decades from the announcement.
| njtransit wrote:
| Why do you think "people's treatment is not going any better"?
| As far as I know, cancer outcomes have greatly improved.
| bb88 wrote:
| It's the articles that decry "Big discovery in X".
|
| This could be because the researchers need funding so they
| will hype the results as much as possible.
|
| Then the articles need as much readership so the journalists
| hype the results as much as possible.
|
| Then the people suffering from the disease want as much help
| as possible so they push the articles/papers to the doctors.
|
| On the other hand, it's been my experience that GLP-1
| agonsists weren't overhyped, I was completely surprised when
| my doctor prescribed Mounjaro for weight loss. Even after
| decades of articles about "NEW WEIGHT LOSS TREATMENT!" (See
| also phen-phen)
| markus92 wrote:
| It's mostly the PR department of universities that boast
| about those big discoveries. Researchers themselves usually
| try to add some nuance to it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Cancer detection/testing has gotten a lot more attention.
| Detected early, many victims are still alive after 5 years
| and considered "cured." But it still gets you in the end. A
| lot of expense and misery while under
| medication/chemo/rad/surgical therapy and in the end you are
| dead just the same.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I'm not sure why this matters. In the end we're all going
| to die, death is inescapable. The ultimate form of your
| rationalization is that we should simply not treat anything
| because we die all the same.
|
| But for many cancers and other diseases not only has early
| detection gotten better but so has treatment and prognosis.
| Treatment isn't nearly as bad to go through and long term
| survival rates are higher. People can live longer with
| cancer while still being fully functioning.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's the measurement that a lot of Covid deniers liked to
| roll out. Death isn't the only metric.
|
| Life is a precious and personal thing. Those years mean
| wishes fulfilled, graduations and weddings celebrated, life
| lived.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > cancer outcomes have greatly improved.
|
| If you stop believing the bullshit headlines you will see
| that newer treatments simply increase OS by a few months and
| that's sufficient to claim significant improvement. In terms
| of patient outcomes, not a major difference, the cancer still
| kills you in the end. it's just KPI hacking.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| What else is there? Are you saying immortality or bust?
| ekianjo wrote:
| What else is there? Long term remission for example. This
| is hardly looked at because we don't see any difference.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Long term remission is just a few months extra to live.
| In the end you have people who die quickly and people
| that live for years. That's why you get averages of a few
| months extra.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Depends. Early cancer? Yes, outlook is getting better.
| Metastatic cancer? It's still very bad outcomes. (Personal
| experience.)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Well, let's see.
|
| Some drug company or group of investors must think it's
| potentially profitable to develop into a real treatment.
|
| Then they have to move up the trials ladder, from mice to
| humans and the steps in-between.
|
| Then they have to get regulatory approval.
|
| Finally, assuming the steps prior didn't fail horribly, they
| need to set up the manufacturing for the drug.
|
| All the meanwhile handing off money to a bunch of people who,
| more likely than not, never worked for the company in the form
| of earnings-per-share.
|
| So, yeah, a couple decades.
| echelon wrote:
| Cancer deaths have been falling since the 90's. Detection and
| treatments are improving.
|
| We don't have a silver bullet because these diseases are so
| incredibly complicated. "Cancer" is a particular type of
| disease behavior, but is essentially a broad class of failure
| states across different types of cells and tissues, with
| different genetic, metabolic, biochemical, and molecular
| dysfunctions.
| derektank wrote:
| The decline in cancer deaths can almost entirely be explained
| by the decline in smoking. Getting from 40% of people smoking
| to 15% was probably the biggest public health victory of the
| latter half of the 20th century
| bb88 wrote:
| similar arguments have been made about lead and leaded
| gasoline being made illegal in the 70s.
| bglazer wrote:
| This is true in the large sense but it obscures that 5 year
| survival rates have been steadily extending for many people
| who _already_ have cancer. Treatments are in fact improving
| cyberax wrote:
| That's not true. Survival rates in most cancers went up,
| not only in lung cancers.
| derektank wrote:
| It's true that there has been some progress in treating
| most cancers and particular success in treating some
| specific cancers e.g. with checkpoint inhibitors. But
| lung cancer is both one of the most common forms of
| cancer (it's still third even with the massive decline in
| smoking) and has a much lower 5 year survival rate than
| the other most common cancers, breast and prostate. The
| massive decline in smoking has played an outsized impact
| on the improvement in reducing both cancer rates and
| deaths from cancer generally
| treflop wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. We now have techniques like immunotherapy
| for some cancers. Cancer rates still continue to fall.
|
| We have a drug now that you can take so you won't catch HIV, as
| well as another drug for HIV+ that keeps it at bay.
|
| We haven't found a cure-all. Rather, now we have a lot more
| treatment options nowadays depending on your specific cancer or
| illness.
| andkenneth wrote:
| And as always, when problems get solved, other problems get
| revealed. We didn't even really know about cancer until life
| expectancies got to the point where dying in your 30s is a
| tragedy instead of being fairly normal.
| xp84 wrote:
| I don't think dying in your 30s has been normal in the
| Western world anytime In the last 500 years. Remember all
| those life expectancy mean statistics were heavily dragged
| down by the huge infant mortality stats.
|
| If your comment was more talking about the Stone Age or
| something, I apologize for misinterpreting :)
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Infant and mother mortality stats.
| anonym29 wrote:
| The idea that most people more than ~120 years ago died in
| their 30s or 40s is a popular misconception. LEAB (Life
| expectancy at birth) used to be in the mid-30s, but this
| was largely due to a bimodal distribution of deaths: a
| large number dying during childbirth, infancy, or early
| childhood, and a lot at more typical old age (60-70, still
| a bit lower than is common in much of the west today, but
| you get the idea). If you made it past puberty, there were
| pretty good odds of you making it to old age.
| mlyle wrote:
| Aside from infant morality, don't forget the massive
| death load from things like accidental death, famine, and
| maternal mortality.
|
| E.g. from Wikipedia, female life expectancy from age 15
| in Britain in the 1400-1500s century was 33 years (so
| reaching 48 years of age).
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| ...and also bubonic plague.
| dahart wrote:
| 100%. I carried this misconception after high school and
| college and was surprised to learn it's completely wrong.
| There's a name for the old-age end of the bimodal
| distribution: longevity. Longevity is the natural
| lifespan of people who don't die of any early mortality
| factors. Most people who have the misconception are
| accidentally conflating life expectancy with longevity. A
| few unscrupulous peddlers of false hope, like Ray
| Kurzweil for example, intentionally conflate life
| expectancy with longevity to reinforce the misconception.
| As I was learning about longevity I started talking to my
| anthropologist brother about it, and he was like, oh
| yeah, people who don't die from war or disease or
| infection have always lived to be about 80 years old for
| all of known history. He mentioned there's plenty of
| written evidence from, e.g. Socrates' day, and also lots
| of human remains that support it from ten thousand years
| ago.
| wbl wrote:
| Well we have a lot less disease and infection now!
| dahart wrote:
| This is why life expectancy has gone up, while longevity
| has mostly remained unchanged (for at least thousands of
| years). Longevity represents the best we can do, and life
| expectancy can't exceed longevity. Life expectancy will
| asymptotically approach longevity as medicine improves.
| jezzamon wrote:
| Cancer was first documented around 3000 BC, and has been
| studied for a long time. https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.
| wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr...
| d_tr wrote:
| Cancer mRNA vaccines for solid tumors are administered to
| real patients in clinical trials right now.
| hanniabu wrote:
| So you'd rather she them before you get cancer?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| As far as I understand it these immunotherapies are
| tailor-made to the very specific cancer and its genetics
| that a patient has, which is also why the stuff is so
| darn expensive. So you can't have a vaccine until you
| already have the cancer.
| weaksauce wrote:
| mrna vaccine had big "breakthroughs" during the 80s and 90s and
| yet it took quite a while for it to be a viable thing. some
| things take time and some things never pan out past the in a
| pitri dish stage.
| melling wrote:
| I don't think we've made any progress in Alzheimer's. Where did
| you read that we have?
| zdragnar wrote:
| There have been a fair number of announcements about possible
| progress, and even several recently related drugs. The
| research and drugs continue to focus entirely on beta amyloid
| buildup in the brain:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/new-alzheimer-s-
| drug...
|
| There's not a shortage of debate on whether they are
| effective, ought to have gotten any approval, or if beta
| amyloid buildup is even a cause or contributor to Alzheimer's
| disease, so whether we've actually made progress remains
| debatable for the short term until results on these drugs are
| in.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Wasn't a lot of the beta amyloid buildup hypothesis based
| of of results from Marc tessier Levine who left Stanford
| under a cloud of accusations of results fakery and is now
| the CEO of the ai startup xaira?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Yes it was mostly a bad hypothesis on which the industry
| wasted billions and 20 years.
| melling wrote:
| Well, which is it "great advancements" or "possible
| progress "?
|
| You're both saying two different things.
| kemmishtree wrote:
| Robust biomarker monitoring in toilets would lead to a 95%
| reduction in cancer deaths.
|
| Robust biomarker _discovery_ in toilets would let us take care
| of most of the other 5%.
|
| That's the main obvious humanitarian purpose of our project
| www.molecularReality.com
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| How do I buy an anticancer toilet?
| esperent wrote:
| Post I spotted earlier today on reddit:
|
| > TIL that scientists at Stanford University have developed
| a smart toilet that reads your anus like a fingerprint and
| monitors the health of your poop and pee. The lead
| researcher said, "We know it seems weird, but as it turns
| out, your anal print is unique."
|
| https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit
| ....
| NemoNobody wrote:
| I had a tech startup back in the day and I always had a
| hard time getting people to understand the significance
| of data and ended up often explaining how incredibly
| valuable the data is about when we simply take a sh*t
| is/would be. Most people couldn't seem to grasp that
| either.
| uoaei wrote:
| The missing ingredient that makes it make sense is the profit
| motive.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Two things. If you follow the news closely, but lack specific
| expertise or knowledge, you develop this nihilistic sense of
| doom to some degree. The narrative of our age is that
| everything is in decline. It pulls clicks.
|
| The other thing is that cancers are not created equal, not all
| treatments are evolving quickly. Your loved one may be
| suffering, and that's your world.
|
| I will say that I lost my beautiful wife a little over a year
| ago. She had an aggressive cancer, for which the 10-year
| survival rate was zero. Thanks to the miracle of immunotherapy,
| the five year survival rate is about 65%. At the same time, my
| 78 year old aunt successfully fought lung cancer that was a
| death sentence 20 years ago.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I've nothing to add to the discussion but just wanted to say
| that, for what it's worth, I'm terribly sorry for your loss.
| EQYV wrote:
| Very much the same from me. I know +1 posts aren't
| generally welcome here but I hope dang can forgive it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Thank you both!
|
| I think it's important to share for a variety of reasons
| but most importantly to add some humanity to a topic that
| gets turned into technocrat babble.
| dools wrote:
| When my Aunt was diagnosed with MS in the 80s it was a
| crippling and degenerative ailment.
|
| When my brother was diagnosed with MS ~30 years later, it was a
| nothing burger. He gets an infusion monthly and suffers no
| significant impact on his quality of life.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| This is great to hear. I had an Aunt that was diagnosed with
| MS around 40 and by 50 she was in long term care - it's the
| only place I ever saw her and she had a terrible quality of
| life, completely incapacitated. I've always had a fear of MS
| bc of this bc apparently she was completely normal before.
|
| Thank you for that comment.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Blame the FDA. It is near impossible to get these treatments
| out to patients.
| equasar wrote:
| Can other countries conduct trials for these treatments at
| the patient's own risk?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| i find this funny. what do you mean "patient's own risk?"
|
| that has always been the case. you go for a minor surgery,
| you sign a waiver. you go to a doctor, they are supposed to
| give reasonable care. No one can guarantee success. the
| same with lawyers or drivers or mechanics or technicians.
| basically anytime you go to someone for assistance, they
| can't guarantee anything. the person is themselves always
| responsible for everything.
| adastra22 wrote:
| With the FDA rules they are not legally allowed to offer
| such services, however.
| dahart wrote:
| Of course there's always some risk with any drug or
| medical procedure. But - _obviously_ - not all risk is
| equal. Unapproved treatments are riskier because they
| haven't been proven effective, and they haven't been well
| tested for side effects. There is an uncountably large
| list of cases throughout history of people willing to
| sell ineffective and /or actively harmful treatments,
| which is the whole reason the FDA exists. Look up people
| who died taking ivermectin for Covid [1], or just pick
| any ailment and do some research on fake treatments,
| perhaps cancer for example [2]. The UN says half a
| million people in Africa alone are being killed every
| year by fake medicine today, currently [3].
|
| [1] https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023
| /03/14/...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_di
| sproven...
|
| [3] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/february-20
| 23/fake...
| adastra22 wrote:
| History is also full of examples of treatments that do
| work under unknown (at the time) circumstances and were
| standardized into common practice through trial and
| error. This includes most over the counter medication and
| procedures today.
|
| Most of that advancement stopped with the introduction of
| the FDA and its equivalents in other countries.
|
| The story of efficacy trials falls apart when you
| consider the complex reality of the human body and
| pharmaceutical action. There are many medical procedures
| and drugs which we know work on certain patients some of
| the time, but we are prevented from giving to new
| patients because the high standards of Phase III efficacy
| haven't been met.
| dahart wrote:
| So what? The U.S. food and drug laws aren't protecting
| against things that accidentally work, they are
| protecting against things that don't work. These laws are
| hard won and represent many people lost to both ignorance
| and greed.
|
| If something has efficacy, then trials will eventually
| prove it, it's just a matter of time. You just made a
| case that the process works. If efficacy can't be shown,
| then it's very risky for people to try the treatment,
| riskier than using something with known outcomes, and
| potentially riskier than doing nothing at all.
|
| Either way this is all irrelevant to your bogus claim at
| the top that the FDA has anything to do with the
| perception that treatments aren't improving. The top
| comment's hypothesis is incorrect, which adds to the
| multiple reasons your proposed explanation is wrong.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Trials? No. There are various other countries you can go to
| in order to have these unapproved treatments performed, at
| great personal cost because there are no economies of
| scale. But there largely aren't countries performing trials
| that would count as an FDA Phase II or Phase III trial.
| reverius42 wrote:
| > at great personal cost because there are no economies
| of scale
|
| I didn't realize the USA was the only Economy of Scale
| adastra22 wrote:
| I'm talking about treatments that aren't approved
| anywhere.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| The US is the Primary economy of scale as it is the
| primary economy in general.
| cyberax wrote:
| > people's treatment is not going any better
|
| That's not true. It's improving steadily:
| https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival , and with the
| newer advances it's going to become even better.
|
| Yes, it's not like an exponential Moore's law graph, but there
| is a steady drumbeat of incremental steps. And they keep
| reinforcing each other.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Only for specific sites of cancer. Many others are just as
| deadly as they have ever been.
| D-Coder wrote:
| Well, yes, but that's typically how progress works in _any_
| field.
| narrator wrote:
| Remember Calico and Altos Labs which were moonshot cure
| longevity companies? After years they emerge out of stealth and
| all they got is some cancer drugs. The gravitational pull of
| the billions of dollars to treat cancer patients and extend
| their lives a few more months eats up all the attention of the
| biotech world because there is such an astronomical amount of
| money in it and you'll just have to come up with a new way to
| kill cells which is relatively easy.
|
| So usually when people talk about new cancer drugs it meant
| that great scientists will make billions wasting their lives
| barely improving the quality of life for some terminally ill
| cancer patients and it's just kind of sad, honestly.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Or maybe heroic efforts are being made to solve a very hard
| but worthwhile problem?
|
| You don't get to decide how long the road is to a complete
| solution. Just whether it will be worth it incrementally and
| in the end.
|
| You don't propose any constructive alternative.
|
| Life, even just extending life of millions of people a bit,
| survival rates just a bit, is worth a lot.
| narrator wrote:
| Here's your alternative that precisely nobody is going to
| make any money off of : https://isom.ca/article/targeting-
| the-mitochondrial-stem-cel...
| wbl wrote:
| HIV has gone from death sentence to completely preventable with
| a single daily pill or every 6 months injection, and readily
| treatable to the point where we have geriatric HIV patients.
| Obesity is now effectively treatable even taking into account
| compliance. Hep C can be cured entirely with just six months of
| oral medication rather than a barely tolerable intravenous
| course that didn't work all that well. These are massive
| improvements that have changed how hundreds of millions of
| people are treated and their prognosis.
|
| The road to the clinic is long, but there have been very big
| improvements.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It seems like stock markets, a lot of bubbles pop, and it's
| easy to miss the trend .. every 5 years some progress is
| made.
| DennisP wrote:
| And stage 4 melanoma used to mean you'd be dead in a year. I
| know someone who got diagnosed with it almost a decade ago,
| got three doses of immunotherapy, and is now cancer-free.
| Doesn't even have to get scans anymore.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Melanoma is the main cancer that responds well to
| immunotherapy, PD-1 inhibitors. Other solid cancers, not so
| much, although in combination with other therapies, is
| seeing some okay results.
|
| They recently found some types of rectal cancer to be PD-1
| sensitive.
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445
| ekianjo wrote:
| > great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases
| (like Alzheimer'
|
| There is virtually no new treatment for Alzheimer for 20 years
| and no progress in understanding its mechanism either.
| randcraw wrote:
| Each medical innovation overcomes but one hurdle on a path to a
| treatment/cure, often revealing new hurdles that weren't
| visible (or important) until the first hurdle fell.
|
| A good example is lipid nanoparticles, which for the first 15
| years or more of their existence were horrifically lethal in
| every hominid, making their potential for delivering
| transformative genetic or immune cargo into cells impossible.
| Finally, PEGylation was introduced into their formulation,
| bypassing the toxic effect they had in precipitating out nearly
| all of each animal's platelets upon treatment. Within just a
| few years, LNPs became a very effective way to deliver MRNA
| vaccines to BILLIONS of human patients, effectively ending the
| worst of the Covid pandemic.
|
| Medical revolutions are like evolutionary punctuated
| equilibrium -- barriers to advancement are overcome
| nonuniformly and often incompletely, requiring a lot of
| continued effort even after a revolution begins. So it
| shouldn't be surprising that more battles are won than wars. We
| should celebrate whatever victories we can. Cancer promises to
| be a war to end all wars.
| drawfloat wrote:
| 10ish years ago Myleoma was a semi death sentence, it's now
| coming close to being treated like a chronic condition. There
| are definitely improvements happening, but we'll often miss
| them because it's incremental rather than "we developed this
| cure for lung cancer and it's no longer a problem"
|
| Edit: some of the replies below are pretty bleak "it's just a
| few months that's nothing". The difference between a 5 year and
| 15 year life expectancy for a parent being diagnosed with blood
| cancer around 60 is huge.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| I am curious: why would it make a difference for a 60 year
| old if they are a parent and have 5 or 15 years vs not? I
| would have thought by that age children are long
| independent...
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| The difference between your grandkids meeting you or not.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Exactly - in my father's case would be difference between
| dying before all your kids marry vs meeting all your
| grandkids, helping to watch them.. and seeing them grow
| up and start going to school.
| eCa wrote:
| Plenty of people have kids in their 40s and 50s.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 60+15 => 75, a pretty normal "lived a full life" age.
|
| 60+5 => 65, maybe dying before you even retire from your
| job.
|
| Seems significant.
| verisimi wrote:
| This all makes sense once you consider health as a business.
| There is no great interest by business in a cure to this or
| that. However, an expensive perpetual treatment (lifetime
| service contract) is far more appealing - the revenue stream is
| superior.
|
| What we call a 'health' industry is a misnomer - it is a
| sickness industry, like the ministry of defence is really the
| ministry of attack.
|
| If you want to really get cynical, you can consider the
| possibility that a lot of treatments are not only unnecessary,
| but actively detrimental to the person receiving the
| "treatment". The person in future may develop diseases that
| will then open further revenue streams from what would
| otherwise be a healthy individual. This would assure a healthy
| pipeline of future revenue for the pharmaceutical companies.
|
| Luckily we have government agencies to manage the
| pharmaceutical products we are given. Unfortunately, it is
| something of an open door policy as senior government staff are
| then given senior positions in pharmaceutical companies.
|
| I'm sure it all works out in the end!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _There is no great interest by business in a cure to this
| or that_
|
| Of course there is. Cures make billions.
|
| This might be a conspiracy theory stupider than flat
| Eartherism. It requires not only every Western pharmaceutical
| company's collaboration, but also every one in every _other_
| country, and also all the public labs, and every world leader
| and their families to suck it up for the conspiracy's sake.
| verisimi wrote:
| Goldman Sachs analysts agree with me!
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-u4cr3fJ0
|
| Most people act against their conscience pretty much every
| day for money, more so in senior positions. That money is a
| great motivator is not really a conspiracy.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Go beyond the YouTube video reporting on the report's
| title and you'll find a thoughtful paper on drug pricing.
| TL; DR Sick people and governments will pay a lot for
| cures.
|
| > _Most people act against their conscience pretty much
| every day for money, more so in senior positions_
|
| This isn't about conscience, it's about greed. Cures are
| great business. Also, again, rich people get cancer. If
| you want to come up with healthcare conspiracies, don't
| pick a disease the rich and powerful get.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Treating diseases makes billions forever curing those
| disease makes billions once.
|
| Which option is selected in a capitalist society?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I really find strange how I've been reading news lines over
| the past years about great advancements in many incurable and
| chronic diseases (like Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancers) yet
| after all that time people's treatment is not going any better.
|
| ... I mean I think you are possibly not just paying attention.
| All sorts of things that were absolute death sentences within
| recent memory are now very treatable. News articles tend to
| overhype, of course, but cancer treatment now is a different
| world to a few decades ago.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _I 've been reading news lines over the past years about
| great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases_
|
| There is a lot of overhype in the news. When they claim that a
| new 80% improvement in batteries we all know it's a joke a
| laugh. When there is a similar exaggeration in cancer cures we
| get sad.
|
| The saddest part is that the overhype shadows all the
| small/local improvements. They are better explained in sibling
| comments. Medicine is not my area so they give better examples
| than what I can choose.
|
| When I read a new about my area or something close enough, it's
| fun to try to guess what was the original new before it was
| badly rewrote by the press and how interesting it is. But when
| there are lives related to the new, it's not fun to read post
| with unrealistic promises.
| DennisP wrote:
| The thing about batteries is that those big discoveries in
| the lab take a long time to reach the market. By the time
| they do reach the market, they're just an incremental
| improvement over all the other big discoveries that are
| already in production.
|
| So we never seem to get a dramatic breakthrough, but what we
| do get is steady improvement over the course of decades. And
| that's why we have electric cars now with ranges over 400
| miles, while back in 1996 the EV1 had 70 to 100 miles.
|
| I think cancer treatments are pretty much the same.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Ok are you fr? The phone I'm typing this on is superior to
| the computer in highschool to play video games on and it's my
| old phone that can't hold a candle to my new phone. The
| batteries in both devices are both MORE THAN 80% superior to
| the battery in my first phone.
|
| F*ck. Progress does exist - life has got enormously better
| but people reuse to see it and focus their entire lives on
| living the same day over and over and wonder why they are
| unhappy.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Mmm... I think we?
|
| The problem is that most of the 80% advance in your
| batteries are small 2-3% advances that never got a huge
| press cover. The 80% improvement press announcement are the
| unrealistic ones.
|
| PS: My favorite weird quantum anecdote that nobody know and
| everyone uses was Giant Magnetoresistance. Have you ever
| read about it? Do you have a device that uses it at your
| home? Is it weird to have two currents instead of one?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance But
| now the SSD ruined the anecdote :( .
| jimbokun wrote:
| > yet after all that time people's treatment is not going any
| better.
|
| What is your basis for this claim?
| interludead wrote:
| Yep, breakthroughs get announced, but the real-world impact can
| feel slow
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| A lot of it is the case of bad science being popularized and
| then blindly built upon. This is exampled by the recent
| redaction of a huge amount of Alzheimer's papers which formed
| the nucleus of Alzheimer's research. Academia and science are
| often the largest purveyors of misinformation despite.
| biotechbio wrote:
| There's a decent amount of cynicism in the comments, which I
| understand. I think this is a really cool and novel study,
| though.
|
| Historically, cancer was treated with therapies that are toxic to
| all cells, relying on the fact that cancer cells divide quickly
| and are unable to handle stress as well as normal cells
| (chemotherapy, radiation).
|
| The last couple of decades we've seen many targeted cancer
| therapies. These drugs generally inhibit the activity of a
| specific protein that lets the cancer cells grow (e.g. EGFR
| inhibitors) or prevents the immune system from killing the cancer
| cells (e.g. PDL1 inhibitors).
|
| This mechanism is way more interesting. The gene BCL6 is usually
| turned on in immune cells when they are mutating to recognize
| foreign invaders. This process involves lots of DNA damage and
| stress, but BCL6 stops the cells from dying and is therefore
| important for normal immune function. Unfortunately, this makes
| BCL6 a gene that is often co-opted in cancer cells to help them
| survive.
|
| The method cleverly exploits the oncogenic function of BCL6 not
| by inhibiting it, but by turning it into a guide, enabling the
| delivery of activating machinery to the targets of BCL6 and
| reversing the inhibitory effects on cell death.
|
| The whole field of targeted degraders, molecular glues, and
| heterobifunctional molecules is a growing area of interest in
| cancer research.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| What would be the kinds of expected side effects of such
| approaches?
| melagonster wrote:
| oop talked about mechanism, so we can't know side effects
| here. someone will publish a new drug that relies on this
| mechanism, and then they will check the side effects of the
| specific drug on cells, rats, or other experimental species.
| joconne wrote:
| My understanding is that even though immunotherapy's
| mechanism may seem more natural than chemotherapy and
| radiation, and in some instances may be a magic bullet, up-
| regulating the immune system can have serious consequences. I
| remember reading about a clinical trial showing similar
| progression free survival but increased grade 4-5 toxicities
| (requiring hospitalization or being fatal). My assumption was
| that these are autoimmune conditions that are aggravated in
| some of the patient population.
| celltalk wrote:
| I haven't read the paper yet but the news article seemed a bit,
| meeh.
|
| BCL-2 inhibitors, mainly Venetoclax, is used in cancer
| therapies quite often which also triggers cell apoptosis and
| it's very effective. It was also designed to target B-cell
| related cancers, but it found to be so effective that FDA
| approved it to be used in primary cases of Acute Myeloid
| Leukemia. So, killing cancer with triggerring apoptosis is very
| well known. I think the novel part might be the two protein, so
| it is probably more targeted for metabolic activities... but
| yeah didn't read the paper yet.
|
| Anyways, for the side effects a major one could be Tumor Lysis
| Syndrome (TLS). Basically, if you apoptose the cancer cells
| super fast, the molecules from those cells spread everywhere
| and it becomes toxic for the patient. This is at least the case
| for Venetoclax.
| sylware wrote:
| How much cancerous cells are similar to let us know how to
| target them and deliver a payload?
|
| I guess some payload delivering mechanisms expect very
| 'standard' features from cancer cells?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Cancerous cells are fairly diverse across individuals, or
| even within a single individual, and many biological
| treatments require precise sequencing of the tumor DNA of
| that individual patient to adjust and work. In some
| cancers, there is a nasty "Russian roulette" effect in
| play, where a certain treatment may be extremely efficient
| (in practice a cure, even though oncologists avoid that
| word) in people with a certain mutation and totally useless
| in others, even though from the macroscopic point of view,
| their tumors look the same.
| sylware wrote:
| Then, basically, each cancer, cancer cells should be
| sequenced, then based on the type of cell and DNA
| sequencing, we have a list of "tools" to deliver payload
| to those very cells (without delivering such payload to
| sane cells, ofc)?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That would be the ideal scenario, yes.
|
| In practice, we can only make use of some known
| mutations. Not just for delivering chemicals, but also
| for "teaching" the immune system to attack such cells,
| which, once it is able to recognize them, it will do
| vigorously.
|
| Let's hope that this catalogue will grow until it covers
| at least all the typical cases.
| ray__ wrote:
| This comment hits the nail on the head. Another big
| consideration with the technology in this paper that hasn't
| been mentioned in this thread is that it opens up a huge range
| of possibilities for targeting "undruggable" protein targets.
| Most drugs are small molecules that bind to sites an
| (relatively much larger) proteins, thereby getting in the way
| of their function. Unfortunately the vast majority of proteins
| do not have a site that can be bound by a molecule in a way
| that 1) has high affinity, 2) has high specificity (doesn't
| bind to other proteins) and 3) actually abolishes the protein's
| activity.
|
| With "induced proximity" approaches like the one in this study,
| all you need is a molecule that binds the target protein
| somewhere. This idea has been validated extensively in the
| field of "targeted protein degradation", where a target protein
| and an E3 ubiquitin ligase, a protein that recruits the cell's
| native proteolysis machinery, are recruited to each other. The
| target protein doesn't have to be inactivated by the
| therapeutic molecule because the proteolysis machinery destroys
| it, so requirement #3 from above is effectively removed.
|
| The molecule in this study does something similar to targeted
| protein degradation, but this time using a protein that effects
| gene expression instead of one that recruits proteolysis
| machinery. The article focuses on the fact that cancers are
| addicted to BCL6. This is an important innovation in the study
| and an active area of research (another example at [1]), but
| leaves out the fact that these induced proximity platforms are
| much more generalizable than traditional small molecules
| because it's the proteins that they recruit that do all the
| work rather than the molecules themselves. This study goes a
| long way to validate this principle, pioneered by targeted
| protein degradation and PROTACs, and shows that it can be
| applied broadly.
|
| [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.27.605429v1
| midtake wrote:
| I am tired of news like this that never gets anywhere. We have a
| billion way to destroy cells, great. Let's get a reliable
| delivery system working now. While that is in the works, I will
| stick to fasting and other simple methods of decreasing oxidative
| load.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| Bought out and shutdown by profiting businesses as usual.
| purplethinking wrote:
| No, this whole spiel of big pharma wanting to keep people
| sick is insane. That could work if there was a single pharma
| company in the world, but all it takes is one company making
| an effective cure for a disease and they will make big bucks.
| Even if you think the people in charge are evil profiteers,
| we all win in the end
| adamredwoods wrote:
| As someone who tried to keep a cancer patient alive for as long
| as possible, this type of news offers hope, and encourages
| young people to become oncologists and researchers, which we so
| desperately need.
| elcritch wrote:
| The entire point of this research is to develop a targeted
| delivery mechanism based on malfunctioning gene activations.
| It's a simple but clever approach IMHO.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| This seems too straightforward to be credible? If I was
| researching in this field surely this is the first thing I'd try?
|
| If it is indeed credible ... this sounds like the "CRISPR moment"
| of cancer treatment, sure. And I'm really happy for that.
|
| But I will be honest and write what I'm thinking: if this is real
| then frankly I'm disappointed it took this long. Do we really
| have our best people working on cancer? I have known so many who
| died waiting.
|
| It seems like there has been roughly the same investment this
| decade (around $200B) in climate tech compared with cancer
| research, and yet electric cars and batteries are now a "solved
| problem" that's just waiting to scale. The progress with Cancer
| is noticeably less. Is the money being well spent? Or are we
| donating $100B-s for researchers and labs to sit on a gravy train
| making sub tier progress.
|
| Here's a wild theory. Perhaps as a society we built the wrong
| prerequisites to get into cancer research and we filtered out all
| the Mozart's and Leonardo's...
| pama wrote:
| I work in this area.
|
| It took time to know what each protein does in a cell (we still
| dont really understand most of them), it took time to find all
| the ways that various cancers use the protein machinery in the
| cell to their benefit (new ways are still being discovered
| these days), it took time to think about molecular glues and
| turn them practical, and it took time to build the right
| chemistry and then test it (it takes time even after you know
| all of the previous steps.) It will still take years, possibly
| over a decade before this particular development can lead to a
| drug that passes human clinical trials and is eventually
| approved. It is not the lack of geniuses that slows things
| down, rather it is the very careful consideration of risks to
| minimize the loss of human life during experimentation, and the
| attempt to optimally allocate the resources across too many
| different challenging problems in order to maximize the long
| term benefit to society. The true amount of money spent in
| cancer research is much higher than the $200B over a decade
| that you mentioned, however the vast majority of it is just
| capital losses of various companies spent on the tools and
| research in early stage discovery across tens of thousands of
| projects, and a separate huge and more obvious chunk goes to
| attempts and failures at human clinical trials. The cost of
| drug discovery has stopped increasing exponentially during the
| last decade but is still pegged at several billion dollars per
| approved drug without counting costs from competitors who never
| get anything approved.
| krisoft wrote:
| > If I was researching in this field surely this is the first
| thing I'd try?
|
| Let me ask a clarifying question: Are you saying that the first
| thing you would have tried is to synthesize bivalent molecules
| that link ligands of the transcription factor B cell lymphoma 6
| (BCL6) to inhibitors of cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs)?
|
| Or are you just saying that you would have tried to drive
| cancer cells to self-destruct (but have no clue how)?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| With a little domain knowledge and research you find out
| pretty quickly that:
|
| BCL6 is lymphoma.
|
| CDK regulate cell death, amongst other things.
|
| So yes, I am saying that it seems very straightforward as an
| approach to attempt to trigger a CDK cell death when BCL6 is
| present.
|
| It seems hard to believe that it is presented as novel with
| the amount of funding that has been spent on cancer.
| krisoft wrote:
| > With a little domain knowledge and research you find out
| pretty quickly
|
| That's cool. Where do you think that domain knowledge comes
| from? Did we just found it in a fortune cookie? Or does the
| cancer research conducted has something to do with that we
| have this knowledge?
|
| > BCL6 is lymphoma.
|
| That's not correct. BCL6 is a protein, or a gene which
| codes that protein. Mutations in BCL6 can lead to B cell
| lymphomas. BCL6 is not lymphoma.
|
| > I am saying that it seems very straightforward as an
| approach to attempt to trigger a CDK cell death when BCL6
| is present.
|
| Excellent. Sounds like you are an oracle of oncological
| research roadmap. What should be the next target to develop
| drugs for?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I am glad that you know these things, but cancer research
| has still failed society as a whole.
|
| 3 of my immediate family have had cancer, 2 took chemo
| and it ruined their lives (it caused weak bones, their
| spines to virtually dissolve, which led to surgeries to
| insert plates and things, which have failed multiple
| times, it has been a mess).
|
| The third was not eligible for chemo because they were
| too sick and they had an existing case of lupus. So we
| started trying things -- probably 100 different things at
| first. What worked for them is taking Sanguinaria
| canadensis daily orally. It is now 15 years later and
| they still have cancer but are living a normal and
| healthy life.
|
| You know, despite being the most effective treatment you
| could possibly hope for in this situation (besides an
| actual cure), there are only a few papers on Sanguinaria
| canadensis, and most research discredits it. Other
| friends of mine have tried chemo and died in a horrible
| way. Now you understand my criticism of cancer research.
| For all the money that has been spent, the most viable
| treatment available through a hospital is still a living
| nightmare.
| equasar wrote:
| Wonder if the study is freely available without paywall.
| Faaak wrote:
| Sci-hub.pub
| jobigoud wrote:
| Is this still working? Am I being blocked at the ISP level?
|
| For me sci-hub.pub opens a simple page listing other sci-hub
| URLs, but each and every one of them fails, ending in "Unable
| to connect" as if the server did not exist. (Tested: sci-
| hub.ee, sci-hub.ren, sci-hub.ru, sci-hub.se, sci-hub.st, sci-
| hub.wf).
|
| Is sci-hub still working for people, I haven't been able to
| use it for a while.
|
| edit: Wow, it works if I go there via VPN... incredible. So
| sci-hub is illegal in France?
| Retr0id wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France
| #...
| skibidisigma wrote:
| We got a cure for cancer before gta 6
| szundi wrote:
| I love these headlines
| moffkalast wrote:
| Using prions to destroy cancer, pitting one cosmic horror
| against the other. Nice.
| dottjt wrote:
| Hopefully it can help people with Sarcomas.
|
| My partner was diagnosed with stage 4 sarcoma about a month ago
| and life as I know it has been flipped upside down.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| I'm so sorry. We all hope for a magic formula, but even with
| clinical trials, bench-to-bedside takes years.
|
| >> the chimeric compound killed only diffuse large cell B-cell
| lymphoma cells
| dottjt wrote:
| It's been a very weird 6 weeks. It's like, everything was
| fine. We had our normal suburban life. Things were going
| great. We had just celebrated our daughter's first birthday.
|
| Then it's like, you realise that everything you had imagined
| over the next 40 - 50 years is suddenly not going to happen
| anymore, and it just feels so surreal.
|
| Thankfully, a lot of the initial hysteria is gone. But
| there's definitely a sense of "why me?"
| elcritch wrote:
| Sorry about your partners disease. Learning such news about
| loved ones is difficult.
|
| I have a chronic condition and spent years wondering "why
| me?". Now my thoughts are more like "why not me?" and to
| try and embrace what life we're lucky to get and live day
| by day. Godspeed
| dottjt wrote:
| Thank you. Did any readings or practices help you?
| mattigames wrote:
| The "why me" for others is the first time they realize they
| have a chronic illness, that sudden realization that the
| universe is an uncaring dance of atoms, the realization
| that every attempt at ordering it's just a house of cards,
| including our DNA and everything else we rely on. I was
| expecting myself to land that line of reasoning into some
| comforting words but I have failed miserably ha, hold on
| tight.
| rkuzsma wrote:
| "There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for
| fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is
| neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The
| stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.
|
| But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the
| world, and it is US!"
|
| -- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of
| Rationality
| kibwen wrote:
| I don't like this quote because it suggests a sort of
| separation between ourselves and the universe, or it
| suggests that the universe is some all-powerful
| omnipotence that might deign to heal us if only we could
| supplicate ourselves to it, but that's mistaken.
|
| We're made of all the same stuff as those stars. We _are_
| the universe, and if we care, that means the universe
| cares as well. When we have the power to do something,
| that means the universe has the power to do something.
| TylerLives wrote:
| Mattigames, there is a logic flaw in your little aphorism
| that seems quite telling. Since you and I are part of the
| Universe, then we would also be indifferent and uncaring.
| Perhaps you forgot, mattigames, that we are not superior
| to the Universe but merely a fraction of it.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Time slows down. We spent our lives week by week. I was her
| care taker and hope-keeper, and I would share oncology news
| like this with her to help keep our family sane. I think it
| helped.
| danieldbird wrote:
| Firstly im so sorry to hear this. I can completely empathise as
| i lost my father who was my best friend to Pancreatic Cancer.
| Like you, one day we were fine and joking, the next day my
| world collapsed with the news. Uncontrollable sadness, then
| anger, then desperation and the why me / why my dad. I just
| wanted to write to you to say that you are not alone. You dont
| know me, i dont know you, but i wish you and your partner well
| and send thoughts and love. It is a surreal thing to happen. I
| remember looking at other people living their regular lives
| smiling and laughing and thinking, how can they be happy. An
| unbelievable amount of varied emotions. Seeing really unhealthy
| people, or bad people on the news, and i know this sounds bad,
| but wondering, why us, why not them. Just mind spinning type
| stuff, a plethora of every conceivable emotion. I hope you have
| loved ones you can vent and talk to. Again, you're not alone.
| dottjt wrote:
| Thank you. I can relate to everything you're saying.
|
| I think what's been helping has been reading about death and
| what that means and potentially feels like. I think part of
| the issue is that the topic of death is so misunderstood and
| feared, that it creates no reasonable way forward mentally.
| So hopefully I can learn more about that over the coming
| weeks.
| unit149 wrote:
| Inducing ketogenesis whose byproduct is the retention of water
| and generation of ATP has historically acted as an epiphenomenal
| method of apoptosis. Survival rates vary but fasting has proven
| to be an effective method.
| Funes- wrote:
| A ketogenic diet or a strict fasting regimen are two health
| strategies that are too frowned upon, still, and unfortunately
| so. Food (or whatever passes for "food" in modern times) has
| become such a crutch, and people have such potent emotional
| ties to it, that the sole idea of restricting one's diet will
| come across as negative from the get go. Nonetheless, there
| have been advancements in that regard, culturally, I believe.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Apparently I'm an incredibly healthy individual - just had a
| physical that stated that. I do have a good genetic base but
| in general I don't live a particularly healthy lifestyle, my
| activity is pretty much the same as everyone else - except my
| diet.
|
| I'm a vegetarian and a celiac (no gluten) so I don't eat a
| lot of processed food. Rice, oatmeal, corn tortillas, black
| beans, cheese, hemp hearts, flax seeds, chia seeds, Sriracha,
| coffee w/honey and hazelnut creamer - all that is easily 90%+
| of my diet. I also drink a protein drink called OWYN daily.
|
| About once a week I'll have a little to eat in the morning
| and then I just won't really get hungry again til really late
| and I'll often just not eat then and go to bed. Intermittent
| fasting is great. A few times a year I'll go a few days
| without really eating - there are so many benefits to the
| process. The primary being autophagy - that I sus is the
| reason I look so much younger than people my age.
|
| The science of sleep radically disagrees with the next thing
| I'm about to say.
|
| The process with food and the body is very similar to the
| process of sleep and the brain.
|
| Occasionally pulling an all nighter playing video games
| (can't be a stressful all nighter) is actually good for you -
| it resets some stuff in your head. This can be particularly
| effective for dealing with certain states of depression or
| melancholia.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| When can this be used to cure prostate cancer?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| All of this stuff is promising, and I hope the diagnostic side
| catches up as well.
|
| Just went to a funeral this weekend for a 40 year old who died of
| breast cancer 4 weeks after diagnosis at her first annual
| mammogram.
|
| A lot of skeptical people under 30 here haven't lived through
| regularly various cancer diagnoses in their friends & family
| group that your late 30s/early 40s starts to bring.
|
| I don't have the data on it, but anecdotally I notice that
| women's cancers seem to strike 5-10 years earlier than mens even
| if they can be caught early & treated well.. Though apparently
| men have overall worse cancer survival rates.
| fwip wrote:
| I believe I read, but can't find the source now, that the sex-
| specific survival rate is mostly explained by men not catching
| it and starting treatment as early as women.
|
| Even for cancers that shouldn't be sex-specific, like lung
| cancer, men are less likely to survive it.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| This is very believable given gender differences in being on
| top of healthcare..
| frowin wrote:
| I'm finishing my PhD in hyperpolarization (hopefully) soon. In
| my opinion, hyperpolarization will significantly contribute to
| early-stage diagnosis. We're designing machines, processes, and
| chemicals that create novel contrast agents for MRI, enabling
| the localization of cancer cells and even tracking their
| metabolism. For example, it's possible to inject hyperpolarized
| pyruvate and track its conversion to lactate. Essentially, this
| technique boosts the MRI/NMR signal of the contrast agent by up
| to 100,000-fold. When the contrast agent undergoes metabolism,
| it creates a unique signal footprint through chemical shift
| changes, which can aid in characterizing cancer.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Sounds exciting. Routine periodic medical imaging seems like
| one of those Star Trek technologies thats in reach but not
| quite been implemented outside of rich countries in Asia.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I have a question, if you don't mind. What are the nuclei
| polarized relative to? The molecules in a liquite rotate a
| lot and I am curious whether the nuclear spins stay aligned
| with the electron systems or if they remain fixed in an
| inertial frame.
| ray__ wrote:
| There are two semi-connected concepts at play here.
| Polarization in this context refers to the ratio of
| neutralizing (i.e. "up" vs "down") spins in a given system.
| For most nuclei in organic systems like protons, carbons,
| and nitrogens, this ratio is naturally very small, which is
| the reason that magnetic resonance approaches like MRI
| usually have poor signal-to-noise. Hyperpolarization
| techniques usually involve the transfer of polarization
| from a source of high ratio, like a free electron, to a
| relevant target (in the original poster's example, 13C in
| pyruvate). The polarization in this case is hyperpolarized
| 13C, which has an "up"-to-"down" spin ratio that is much
| higher than regular 13C, which makes the signal-to-noise
| that you get from the pyruvate much higher than it would be
| otherwise. Tumors love pyruvate so this approach means that
| tumors will light up like a beacon in your MRI.
|
| The physical rotation/tumbling of molecules in an MRI is
| also very important, because the strong magnetic field is
| the thing inducing the "up"-vs-"down" split in the first
| place, and if the molecular motion is happening at a
| certain frequency with respect to the external magnetic
| field there are other interactions that can come into play
| which can affect the coherence of the nuclear spins (i.e.
| they can fall out of sync). Thankfully, the rotation of a
| small molecule like pyruvate is very fast (might higher
| then the "spin" frequency-a.k.a the Larmor frequenct of 13C
| at the magnetic field strengths involved in MRI) so the
| physical tumbling of pyruvate doesn't really come into play
| when trying to measure its signal. It can be another story
| for molecules that don't tumble quickly, like the ones that
| make up tissues, fat, etc.
| interludead wrote:
| The urgent need for advancements not only in treatment but also
| in diagnostics
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Four weeks... I didn't know that it could be so fast. That's
| awful.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| We were surprised, but it happens. Breast cancer can be very
| fast moving. Unless they have family history, women aren't
| told to do annual exams until you hit 40. The symptoms may
| not be too specific or startling even when it is into stages
| 3 & 4.
|
| Worth reminding the women in your lives to check their family
| history and consider getting early exams either way. A lot of
| times it turns out women do have family history that went
| undiscussed until they ask mom, aunts, grandmothers, etc.
|
| The other cancers that worry me are the slow moving
| imperceptible symptomless ones like pancreatic, liver,
| kidney, etc. Know a few people who around 50 discovered they
| had stage 2-3 cases due to unrelated scans they got from an
| accident injury. Some of these you have 5-10+ years window to
| treat it and live without impact to lifespan.. but most
| people don't catch it until stage 4 when they actually feel
| sick and it is too late.
| soperj wrote:
| Pancreatic cancer is the worst. Many people don't get a
| month.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Some people die by cancer, other overcome the cancer, and a
| small amount don't stand the treatment and die by the
| chemotherapy. Sometimes by genetics, and can't always be
| known before. It also depends on how much advanced and
| aggressive is the tumor.
| zackkatz wrote:
| Strange: the New York Times wrote about this on July 26, 2023.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/health/cancer-self-destru...
| Duller-Finite wrote:
| That describes a related but previous Nature paper from the
| same group, whereas this is referring to a more recent Science
| paper.
| mannyv wrote:
| The next challenge is getting the protein in there.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Current SOTA (state of the art) treatment for cancer is:
|
| Sequence patient's tumor mutanome distribution, create
| personalized therapy encoding the top N neoantigens
|
| +
|
| Anti-PDL1 checkpoint inhibitor
|
| +
|
| mRNA encoded albumin-IL2
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