[HN Gopher] New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without...
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New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming
healthy tissue
Author : gradus_ad
Score : 203 points
Date : 2026-03-01 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedaily.com)
| mcc1ane wrote:
| in mice?
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Human breast cancer, in mice.
| jbotz wrote:
| Yes, in mice, but human cancer cells:
|
| "When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice
| bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated
| in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and
| completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."
|
| So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the
| process.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| Xenografted human tumors in mice != human cancer. The support
| structure of the tumor (tumor microenvironment) differs
| between model mice and humans, cells derived from human
| cancer that can be cultivated in a lab and xenografted differ
| from typical human cancer cells, and xenografting requires
| immunodeficient mice, just to name a few factors that affect
| treatment response.
|
| Mice models of cancer are useful, but you should never be too
| surprised when something that works in mice doesn't work in
| the clinic, xenografting or no. Cancer is complicated.
| yyyk wrote:
| Doesn't harm the mouse. But would it harm the normal human
| cells?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Anything that doesn't genetically target cancer cells is just not
| the solution long term. Any progress is good though.
| lightedman wrote:
| Literally reactive oxygen species targets cancer cell DNA. We
| are taking advantage of the unique chemical environment of the
| inside of a cancer cell and using it to generate oxygen in a
| double-whammy to destroy itself.
|
| This is perhaps the best targeted method devised as it seems to
| collect basically entirely in tumors. Chemo and Radio therapy
| just aren't that targeted.
| msie wrote:
| They should give it to some people with fatal stages of cancer.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| I agree, or at least I would stress that people should be
| allowed to consent to that. I don't know what the prevailing
| medical ethics of doing that kind of thing in consenting
| patients in that state, but my uninformed intuition is I would
| disagree with it.
|
| Though one thing that I might think researchers might not want
| is people may be too sick to recover even if their cancer
| disappeared tomorrow.
| tyre wrote:
| In the US, the FDA has a Compassionate Use exemption to
| clinical trials for exactly this circumstance!
|
| There must be informed consent, no reasonable alternatives
| (which, in cases we deem terminal, is often the case), and
| some evidence pointing to the treatment possibly being
| helpful. It's an excellent ethical program that gives
| patients a choice and advances science.
| throwup238 wrote:
| In my experience most legitimate biotech companies working
| on promising drugs and therapies don't want to touch the
| exemption with a 30 foot pole. Since they raise most of
| their money from the public to fund clinical trials, a
| single bad reaction could generate enough bad PR to derail
| fundraising and kill the drug. Sticking to clinical trials
| allows them to control that blast radius so even though the
| FDA approves >95% of applications, in practice very few
| drugs are available that way.
|
| The biggest exception is oncology. Since everyone knows
| that chemotherapy is hell, cancer drugs tend to get a pass
| and pre-approval companies are (slightly) more willing to
| work with compassionate use exemptions.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| Both patient participation in clinical trials and
| compassionate use of experimental treatments are fairly
| common for cancer patients, with various accessibility
| barriers. (One issue with the latter, for example, is that
| the incentives aren't lined up for companies to provide
| unapproved drugs to dying patients, you're way more likely to
| get a horrible complication that leads to bad press than a
| miraculous recovery).
|
| Here's an insightful blog series about Jake Seliger's
| experience participating in clinical trials. He was a regular
| HackerNews user who passed away in 2024:
| https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-
| not-...
| amelius wrote:
| What is the success rate of a clinical trial? Just to see
| things in perspective.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's around 10-15% for the whole drug I-III flow (13.8%
| according to [1]), but that varies dramatically based on
| therapeutic area. On the order of a third of infectious
| disease vaccines might be approved but only maybe 5% of
| oncology therapies because the latter often have a
| different standard for approval so it's cheaper to run
| trials.
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6409418/
| amelius wrote:
| That's interesting, but I was talking about the success
| rate of someone with a terminal illness going the
| clinical trial route. Sorry, I now see that my question
| was not so precise.
| throwup238 wrote:
| For cancer, it doesn't seem to impact survival odds at
| all [1]. In other fields it may improve metrics a small
| bit but that's largely because in clinical trial patient
| selection, they're very careful to exclude anyone with an
| even remotely confounding factor (like weight/BMI).
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/joining-
| cancer-trial...
| contingencies wrote:
| Both of my parents have benefited from access to early
| medical trials. One is currently very late stage IV cancer.
| Access to trials is usually proxied through respected
| doctors/oncologists affiliated with major hospitals rather
| than offered broadly. I assume for reasons of experimental
| protocol and integrity the overseeing doctors are typically
| not the same as the conceiving research team.
| mike_d wrote:
| That is exactly how clinical research works. My mother worked
| running clinical trials for two decades.
|
| When she was diagnosed with leukemia she was able to get into a
| research study herself that gave us 10 more years together.
|
| One of the horrible but necessary parts of trials is the
| control group, who receives placebo. This is only done in a few
| of the trial phases but is essential in measuring efficacy. If
| someone wants to throw their brainpower and a little bit of
| AI/tech at the problem, you could end up eliminating a lot of
| suffering.
| esafak wrote:
| If it worked, how much might it roughly cost per treatment, at
| scale?
| stevekemp wrote:
| Does the cost matter? Many countries subsidize healthcare, so
| there's either no charge or a token payment which doesn't even
| pretend to cover the cost of treatment.
|
| Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is
| essentially irrelevant.
| esafak wrote:
| Of course it does. Countries have budgets. Expensive drugs
| aren't doled out like candy; they require screening, waits,
| connections, and even bribes.
| Groxx wrote:
| Yes? Countries that subsidize healthcare don't calculate
| infinite value per person.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost
| is essentially irrelevant.
|
| I think it matters because oftentimes insurance companies
| won't cover treatments if a cheaper form of treatment exists.
| It doesn't matter if the old treatment is less effective or a
| much worse outcome for a patient. This is especially true for
| "new" treatments.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| The cost absolutely matters. If something costs tens of
| thousands of EUR per month for a long time then it will
| either not be approved or will be used very rarely. The cost
| is not irrelevant because the insurance does not have
| infinite money. They need to decide which cures, medicines,
| operations they fund. They can spend 1000EUR to cure 100
| people of something or to spend 100k to maybe cure someone
| with an experimental treatment.
|
| This is one of the issues with the modern cancer cures, thst
| they are very specific to the cancer, the patient, need one
| off lab work for each patient and this makes them very
| expensive and not affordable to many. Despite having public
| healthcare the managers of it still need to decide what to
| spend their limited funds on.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Cost is always relevant, given that the amount of money in
| any healthcare system is limited and someone must decide
| whether to pay for patient A or patient B.
| alansaber wrote:
| As far as nanomaterial assembly goes MOF syntheis is pretty
| scalable
| abeppu wrote:
| Actually, when in the lifecycle of developing a treatment does
| anyone have a real idea of what cost will be? Can anyone know
| this yet?
|
| In terms of where _prices_ are set, that negotiation is a
| function of efficacy relative to other things in the market
| right? If it ends up treating cancers that each already have a
| reasonably effective treatment, maybe the pricing isn't that
| high -- but if it is effective in cases where currently there
| are no options, the price should be high?
|
| But for something that potentially works against a range of
| cancers, should we expect to see a sequence of more specific
| trials (i.e. one phase 1 for basic safety, a bunch of phase 2s
| for efficacy on specific cancer types, a sequence of phase 3s
| in descending order of estimated market value? And in 10 years,
| Alice and Bob with different cancers will pay radically
| different amounts for almost exactly the same treatment but
| with small variations in some aspect of the formulation so they
| can be treated as distinct products?
| mike_d wrote:
| Pharmaceutical companies don't just fund research without
| having a model of the expected costs to bring something to
| market, the expected market size, and the viability and cost
| effectiveness of other potential treatments.
|
| They have entire teams of people who figure out the viability
| and pricing of therapeutics before the first dollar is spent,
| with estimates getting refined the further you get along in
| the cycle.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Experiencing cancer in my family I can tell for sure all of that
| buzz is quite exciting, but in the last 5 years there haven't
| been breakthroughs that would significantly improve outcomes for
| an average patient.
| Retric wrote:
| Major breakthroughs of the kind you're talking about are
| extremely uncommon. Instead it's lots of little gains that keep
| adding up because cancer isn't adapting overall people still
| get the same mutations they got 10,000 years ago.
|
| So average person with cancer does better when any individuals
| cancer treatment improves and it keeps compounding over time.
| This doesn't mean everyone with cancer gets a slight
| improvement, often it's specific types or stages that improve
| without impacting others. Where general progress comes from is
| it's not the same improvements year after year.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cancer_treatment_d.
| .. I won't debate what merits a major breakthrough. I will
| say, that while there hasn't been any major developments in
| the past five years, I can't draw any conclusions from that
| tidbit of information.
| Retric wrote:
| That cuts out in 2015, but 5 year survival rates keep
| increasing with the USA just crossing 70%. Though across
| longer timeframes some of that is from early detection;
| even limited to late stage diagnosis the statistics still
| show significant improvement. https://acsjournals.onlinelib
| rary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...
| slapshot wrote:
| There have been massive improvements in treatments in the last
| 5 years. Sure, cancer is far from being "cured" - but survival
| today is far better than 5 years ago for many forms.
|
| Among many others:
|
| - CAR T therapy going from lab to oncology suite (first launch
| 2017, but use rapidly growing)
|
| - Approval of Keytruda and similar for many additional forms of
| cancer (see the 2021-2026 milestones here:
| https://www.drugs.com/history/keytruda.html )
|
| - Liquid biopsy going from lab to PCP's office - starting with
| Grail Galleri and moving from there (yes, the NIH results were
| weak, but the idea of a liquid biopsy at all would be laughed
| off 10 years ago)
|
| - Move of Atezolizumab and Tecentriq from infusion (hour) to
| injection (minutes) to increase availability
|
| - Lower dose CT scanning for lung cancer, including for non-
| smokers
|
| And a long line of immunotherapies that are making the leap
| from lab to chair right now.
|
| The last 5 years have probably been the most exciting in cancer
| research since the launch of the monoclonal antibodies in the
| early 2010s. There is still incredibly far to go, but the trend
| is in the right direction:
| https://employercoverage.substack.com/p/decline-in-cancer-mo...
| baxtr wrote:
| You seem to be knowledgeable on this topic.
|
| What's your prediction for the next five years?
| fnord77 wrote:
| mRNA vaccines to teach your body to destroy cancer cells
| greygoo222 wrote:
| I just got nerdsniped for an hour writing up a comment
| about how cool they are.
| baxtr wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/356/
| parineum wrote:
| I've heard that the improvements in cancer survival are
| mostly a statistical trick centered around earlier detection.
|
| That people aren't actually living longer with cancer,
| they're living longer while we know they have cancer.
|
| Is there any truth to that?
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Cool question. What form would an answer take? We need some
| detection benchmark data thats invariant over the period of
| interest. I hope the data exists but I would be surprised.
|
| Another way to come at it would be mortality data. But that
| has a bunch of its own problems.
|
| Everything is changing at once, it makes this kind of
| science so hard.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| Short answer, no.
|
| Long answer, it's a variable you need to consider when
| doing data analysis, and it depends on what exactly you're
| talking about, but it's absolutely not true for
| improvements in cancer survival general. One alternative
| method is to look at per-capita death rates, for example:
|
| Reduction in US and UK childhood cancer death since 2000
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-
| chi...
|
| Reduction in several countries' age-standardized breast
| cancer death since 2000 (Why did it increase in South
| Africa? I'm not sure, maybe socioeconomic factors)
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/breast-cancer-death-
| rate-...
|
| Reduction in global age-standardized cancer death rate
| since 2000 (Scroll down to second graph. Since the
| population is getting older, age-standardization makes a
| fairer comparison)
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates
|
| 2000 is an arbitrary year I picked for clear visual changes
| without needing to haggle over statistics. If you want to
| feel optimistic, switch the childhood cancer death graph to
| 1960-now.
|
| This method has different possible failure points. It could
| be that less people are getting cancer, or that people who
| would get cancer are dying of other causes, or reporting of
| cause of death has changed, though this is very unlikely
| for some figures, such as leukemia death rates for children
| in the US. Statistics is hard. Overall though, the evidence
| is very good that cancer survival has improved a lot due to
| better treatments since 2000.
|
| If you have a more specific claim you're dubious about, I'd
| be willing to look into it for you. I'm very enthusiastic
| about this topic.
| parineum wrote:
| I'm not exactly dubious about anything really, it was
| just something plausible I had heard a while ago and,
| while I don't recall where I heard it, I must have given
| it some credence for it to stick with me.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IIRC survival improvement has happened across all staging
| categories, including the worst one (IV, distant metastases
| found), so the answer would be "no".
|
| A friend of mine, aged 50, has worked in pediatric oncology
| her entire (nursing) career. The ratio of surviving kids
| has flipped from 30/70 to 70/30 during her tenure.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| mRNA cancer vaccines are the most exciting new treatment
| about to hit the clinic. Moderna's Phase 2b intismeran
| autogene randomized trial found a 49% (!!!) reduction in the
| risk recurrence or death for patients with high risk melanoma
| already on standard treatment. Several Phase 3 trials are
| underway. mRNA vaccines have the potential to work for a wide
| variety of tumors.
|
| (95% confidence interval is 0.294-0.887, wide but not too
| wide, n=157, to be expected for phase 2).
|
| _How_ they work is also completely fucking insane.
| Intismeran autogene is personalized for every patient via
| sequencing their tumor DNA. That 's sci-fi shit. If you're
| not impressed by that, you should be. Fast and scalable DNA
| sequencing, neoantigen identification, RNA synthesis, none of
| this is easy and all of it relies on recent innovations
| across multiple fields.
|
| The first proofs of concept for personalized vaccines like
| this date back to 2017[1] or 2015[2]. The process for
| designing the vaccines requires a machine learning algorithm
| first published in 2020[3]. Details of the algorithm aren't
| available, but it validated against data published in
| 2019[4], and there have been many recent advancements in
| algorithms and datasets for biotech ML that it likely relied
| on. As you might already know, mRNA vaccines were first
| tested in humans around the 2010s[5].
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22991 [2]
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25837513/ [3] https://aacrjou
| rnals.org/cancerres/article/80/16_Supplement/... [4]
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138461/ [5]
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26082837/
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| > CAR T
|
| it was available for [some] UCSF patients more than 5 years
| ago
| elcritch wrote:
| Now its available to many standard patients and for more
| types of cancers. Thats huge progress.
| ImageXav wrote:
| It may feel that way due to the iterative nature of medical
| improvements, but over the past few decades there has been a
| consistent reduction in cancer mortality rates across most
| types of cancer [0]. Treatments really are getting better and
| more targeted. Immunotherapy has made huge breakthroughs.
| Combination treatments allow for significantly improved
| lifespans and better quality of life during treatments. There
| are a few cancers that remain hard to treat, but I have a lot
| of confidence that in the coming decades we will make strides
| in attacking them. That being said, I'm very sorry to hear
| about the pain you and your family must be going through. I've
| had a few close loved ones undergo cancer treatment and it was
| tough.
|
| [0]
| https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...
| greygoo222 wrote:
| Examples aside, 5 years isn't long enough for a treatment to
| move from early mice trials to clinical use. The average time
| from application to FDA approval is about 10 years.
|
| The breakthroughs happening now will benefit average patients
| later. It's frustrating, but it's not because we've run out of
| innovations.
| xbar wrote:
| I lost my brother yesterday to cancer. I hope one day this can
| save lives. Go Beavs.
| Barbing wrote:
| <3 awful buddy
|
| me too
| Tagbert wrote:
| I'm sorry you have to go through that. Speaking from
| experience.
| calgoo wrote:
| <3
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Go Beavs._
|
| That's also Caltech's mascot!
|
| Bernoulli the Beaver.
| javiramos wrote:
| And MIT's!
| javiramos wrote:
| <3
| fnord77 wrote:
| Command-F "mice"
|
| yup. every time
| bahmboo wrote:
| Yes, but they were human cancer cells.
| quantummagic wrote:
| Hope this makes it to people soon. Have a family friend who was
| diagnosed with cancer a few days ago. It was here in Canada, so
| they offered her assisted suicide, literally within 30 seconds
| after telling her she had cancer. She didn't even really process
| the diagnosis before they were offering to help her die. They
| didn't offer to try any experimental medicine.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Were you actually there? Because that doesn't sound very
| likely.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Not a comment on the parent post's situation, but MAID in
| Canada isn't quite turning out how it was promised. A recent
| report making a splash in certain circles pointed out that
| ~200 people in Ontario in 2023 got assisted suicide either
| the same day or the day after they filed their paperwork. The
| most notable case was a woman who, after submitting her
| paperwork, changed her mind and wanted hospice instead.
| However, she was denied hospice care and subsequently was put
| down.
|
| Bit by bit, Canada risks defaulting to suicide over expensive
| care. That's not what people voted for when it was first
| proposed.
|
| https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/02/MDRC-...
| theshackleford wrote:
| Uhuh. Sure.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| That sounds extremely promising
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