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New cancer drug kinder than chemotherapy
- esturk 3y agoChemotherapy means "Chemical Therapy" so this is still technically categorized under that. But the general term has gotten really negative in recent decades so I suppose it's why they're distancing the branding from it.
- ryeights 3y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. I've got a friend's kid alive because of these newer immunotherapies. They're a great advancement in successful outcomes, and not having the misery of chemo is a very, very nice bonus.
- bertil 3y agoI read that as a dismissal of the title: as you have experienced, chemotherapy is horrible. “Kinder” there can feel like a comically low bar. But this is wonderful progress. Let’s hope is a lot kinder.
- GuB-42 3y agoThat's the point. If kinder to find the leader of a terrorist organization and shoot him with a handgun than it is to nuke their headquarters and the whole city surrounding it. The innovation is in the "search" part.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoFrom wikipedia: > When blinatumomab was approved, Amgen announced that the price for the drug would be US$178,000 per year, which made it the most expensive cancer drug on the market. Merck's pembrolizumab was priced at US$150,000 per year when it launched (in September 2014).[14] At the time of initial approval, only about 1,000 patients in the US had an indication for blinatumomab. I take it they prefer to pump chemotherapy poison ito patients for financial reasons?
- ceejayoz 3y agoIt'll be substantially cheaper in the UK.
- teamonkey 3y agoFor those who need it will be free - but not to the health service, who do have to pay the sticker price.
- ben_w 3y agoNHS is approximately a monopsony, which probably has some advantages for price negotiation.
- teamonkey 3y agoA family member has had immunotherapy on the NHS and it was disclosed to them (not sure how reliable or accurate this is) that a single dose cost the NHS 4 figures. It needed several layers of approval for it to be administered.
- ben_w 3y agoFor one of the same drugs discussed above by Traubenfuchs? If so, unless I've misread the discussion, that looks like 12-140 times cheaper depending on which drug and exactly where in the 1000-9999 GPB it was?
- wlesieutre 3y agoPrices in earlier comment are per year, prices the NHS paid were per dose. Do we know how many doses per year?
- ben_w 3y agoThanks! That means I did misread.
- mdp2021 3y agoCoincidentally, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder published on YT just hours ago about a new treatment - "proton flashes". > one of the most common ways to treat cancer is radiation therapy with x-rays ... You can use these highly energetic photons to kill off cancer cells. The difficulty really is ... killing the cancer cells without killing the patient - but the problem with using x-rays is that you can't shoot them at tumors inside the body without also burning some of the tissue on the way to the tumor and behind it... But you can use beams of other particles instead and this is where particle physics enters ... A beam of protons is far less likely to interact with tissue on short distances And it is still part of the "kinder" set (protons are "kinder" than x-rays). New Cancer Treatment With Proton Flashes Goes on Trial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K515uMQQzV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K515uMQQzV4
- dekhn 3y agoI downvoted you mainly because Sabine is a font of misinformation in areas outside her direct expertise. Particle beams for cancer therapy aren't new; shortly after the invention of the cyclotrone, EO Lawrence did this with neutrons in the late 1940s and proton beams were being used successfully in the 50's. She leaves out these details and only mentions trials from the 1990s.
- blashyrk 3y ago> I downvoted you mainly because Sabine is a font of misinformation in areas outside her direct expertise. Just curious, since I've run into her channel recently and found her generally pleasant and informative (minus the unfunny jokes part), do you have any specific examples of this?
- dekhn 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/15o0fx7/i_just_recently_watched_a_video_by_sabine/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/15o0fx7/i_just_... To be fair, her criticism isn't that LIGO itself was fake, but it's really hard to tell, from the video and from https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo... If you read that blog, you can see she is using a collection of rhetorical techniques to cast down on the LIGO results (for example, using the term retraction out of context). But it's mainly her videos about health-related stuff that doesn't have good support. She approaches most of these things with a "assume a spherical cow" approach, common when physics folks try to do biology.
- mjfl 3y agoAny chemotherapy that damages the immune system should be avoided.
- SpaceNoodled 3y agoIt can be preferable to having your body slowly town apart by its own immune system.
- kepoly 3y agoAs I sit here getting chemo for B-Cell ALL, most of us don’t have any other option, it’s chemo or death.
- Kognito 3y agoFrom one internet stranger to another, I wish you a speedy recovery friend!
- navigate8310 3y agoI hope for your speedy recovery. Be strong.
- bearjaws 3y agoTheres a field of auto-immune disorders, where patients suffer from their own immune system. I believe they would disagree with you.
- sgift 3y agoYeah okay. I could have chosen to die instead. Think that would have been better?
- josefresco 3y agoMy own immune system is attacking my joints. Without treatment I'll be disabled within 10 years. What's your advice doc?
- namuol 3y agoCan you speak from personal experience? Not meant to be a rhetorical question, just wanted to give you a chance to elaborate.
- narrator 3y agoMost cancer papers in the literature: "We found a new way to kill cells. Maybe it will kill cancer cells better than normal cells!"
- mmaunder 3y agoWe need to see a much faster ramp in the pace of innovation in this space. We’re eeking out tiny wins over decades, like Rituximab and this agent. Feels like there’s an ossification of this entire sector that happened years ago and there’s no sense of urgency - just businesses as usual with the occasional modest win to show. 80 years since chemo was discovered, our most successful treatment across the board continues to be poison that kills fast growing cells faster than it kills the host. We are oncological troglodytes.
- echelon 3y agoMolecular solutions are punch card science. I really want to do whole-body clonal work. Our bodies and genes are machines, yet we still haven't put them to work. We're plastering over the breaks with crude tools that feel like modern day bloodletting. The blast radius in the transduction pathways is huge and imprecise. I've written extensively about this topic on HN. Give me a minute and I'll dig up some references. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35321368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35321368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32379247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32379247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30407908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30407908
- slibhb 3y agoWe're nowhere near "head transplants" or "creating braindead clones" (not to mention keeping them alive and healthy for decades). This is science fiction. Actual cancer treatments are moving forward at a good pace. Immunotherapies are a good example. Cancer treatment is an example of medical research working well.
- Apocryphon 3y agoYeah, if we're going to talk sci-fi, at least nanomachines are much less ghoulish than the implications of legalized human cloning.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Log_out_ 3y agoWhy has chemo go through the whole body. Why not ecmo chemo only the combat zone?
- bluGill 3y agoThings like that are done where we can figure out how to get the drugs there. Not an easy problem though.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoUsually the cancer cells are throughout the body, even if the tumors themselves have not spread. This is why you might cut out a solid tumor, and then give chemo
- rubberband 3y agoFor me, they cut out most of a giant tumor, but couldn't get all of it without risking some vital organs. Then I got chemo for the rest. Interesting process. Usually the cancer cells are concentrated where the tumor is. One of the first things they may do upon diagnosis of cancer is a PET scan (which shows you where cancerous stuff is throughout your body). Life advice for all the young folks: don't get cancer.
- s1artibartfast 3y agomy understanding is that the word "concentrated" does a lot of heavy lifting, and modern thought is that most cancers started spreading cells all over the body, even at very early stages. metastatic cancer is a numbers game. for example. at stage 0-1, you might still have millions of cancer cells throughout your body, and there is a good chance your immune system can clean them up. At stages 2 or 3 there might be trillions of non-local cancer cells, with a proportionally greater chance of propagation.
- Johnny555 3y agoWhen my dog had a subcutaneous form of cancer, one treatment discussed was local injection of a chemotherapy agent in the tumor area along with electrochemotherapy to help make the tumor more susceptible to the chemo treatment. We opted for surgical removal instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemotherapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemotherapy
- Johnny555 3y agoI'm hoping that immune therapies for cancer continue to improve. My dog got an experimental immunotherapy for his Hemangiosarcoma tumor (which is incurable). Due to the advanced state of the tumor (he had to have his spleen removed in emergency surgery due to the tumor, plus it had spread to other organs), he was given a 2 - 4 month survival time, he's on month 4 now. There's not enough data to say if the immune therapy is helping (he's on traditional low-dose chemo as well), but it seems promising. The company (Torigen.com) is focused on animal treatment for now, but sees applications for humans in the future.
- jackblemming 3y ago[flagged]
- Johnny555 3y agoWell, medical decisions are rarely that clear cut... the source of the bleeding spleen was unknown. All we knew is that he was bleeding out from his spleen and based on the volume of fluid in his abdomen, he wouldn't survive until tomorrow. It was "probably" a tumor, but the ultrasound was not clear and if it was a tumor, there was a 60% chance it was cancer. And we had 30 minutes to decide whether or not to take the surgical slot as they couldn't hold it beyond then... if we didn't opt for surgery we'd need to euthanize the dog. So the choice was "immediate death or surgery plus a 40% chance of returning to normal". After the biopsy came back and it was Hemangiosarcoma, then we opted for the experimental treatment coupled with low-dose chemo, which had a low chance of side effects that affect quality of life. The experimental vaccine was both to hedge our bets (it wouldn't hurt, and it could help, especially if he developed side effects to the chemo and we had to stop the treatment), and to give the company a little more data on the effectiveness of their treatment (even if we had to pay for it). And indeed, he's had a good quality of life - he was fully recovered from the splenectomy in a week (though we had to keep him movement restricted for another week until the stitches came out), and so far he's 100% back to normal, showing no side effects from the chemo and his activity levels are still back to normal.
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- dendrite9 3y agoThe class of drugs are Bi-specific T-cell engagers from what I understand. I have a relative going through treatment and the possibility of these treatments was raised so I have been reading some but I'm not claiming to be an expert. The risk of side effects like the Cytokine storm seems to be similar to CAR-T, but this type of treatment doesn't require the blood harvesting, cell modification, and return for reinfusion. It seems like a better (more generic) way of accomplishing something similar. In the case of the family member in question it sounds like one of these therapies are an option after CAR-T treatment currently. But it might be a preferable option in the future. I'm not sure if that is related to novelty and lack of data or something else.
- google234123 3y agoIf you otherwise completely healthy, wouldn’t you want to still keep the chemo therapy (even if it’s only a small asditional contribution) I’d want the greatest chance of winning
- andrenotgiant 3y agoChemo has tons of well-known long term negative effects. The idea with replacing Chemo with Blina is that it has a measurable similar short term effect (get rid of the bad cells) with less (so far) long term effects.
- wsc981 3y agoA couple of times on Twitter I encountered people that used a dog dewormer medicine (Fenbendazole) to treat their cancer and these people claimed it cured them. Or people they know of. Interesting and extremely cheap. Seems scientist did find benefits as well in various trials, examples (more can be though with Googling, e.g. I know of a study of the effects on breast cancer in mice): - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30093705/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30093705/ - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9437363/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9437363/ - https://baltimorepostexaminer.com/human-patients-are-given-fenbendazole-as-a-therapy-for-cancer/2022/10/15 https://baltimorepostexaminer.com/human-patients-are-given-f... Not everyone has had success: - https://karger.com/cro/article/14/2/886/820730/Drug-Induced-Liver-Injury-in-a-Patient-with https://karger.com/cro/article/14/2/886/820730/Drug-Induced-...
- antipaul 3y agoWhy can't they say which company made it?
- 1letterunixname 3y agoI'm interested in studies that address the 800 lbs. gorilla in the room: widespread over-nutrition with the post-WW2 "Western diet" is likely the primary suspected cause of a subset of cancers not seen in holdout individuals adhering to traditional diets and portion sizes that avoid too many calories and processed foods. My hypothesis is our immune system and cellular machinery can only effectively kill emergent cell lines under the assumption of sufficient cellular stress and restricted caloric intake. Chemotherapy are late substitute nuclear options, i.e., pausing cell division and/or clamping down on nutrient uptake pathways. I'd be curious to know if people who have endured famines, controlled for age, have lower (and/or higher) rates of some cancers in certain phases of their lives.
- namuol 3y agoI’m new to this idea and NOT educated in biology let alone oncology, but here’s a meta study that suggests early exposure to famine is associated with increased cancer risks, if tenuously: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1279770723002579#:~:text=A%20remarkably%20elevated%20risk%20for,CI%3A%201.13–1.42 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S127977072...). Of course looking at the effect of famine on an adult populations would do more to investigate your hypothesis than the effect on developing children. But famine seems a bit extreme, no? Aren’t there also regional studies that show regional dietary/nutritional factors that correlate with lower cancer rates?
- jart 3y agoLife was not good for people who ate traditional diets. https://jacobin.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-preservatives/ https://jacobin.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-pres...