3 ms·

Very unlikely to be a cure for GBM, but there's often the hope that therapies can stack very well-- both from combined effect against disease and sometimes se

by mlyle 3y ago

Very unlikely to be a cure for GBM, but there's often the hope that therapies can stack very well-- both from combined effect against disease and sometimes sensitizing the disease to other therapy. The dogs were not receiving the human standard of care treatment-- who knows what surgery, radiotherapy, immunotherapy, and chemotherapy can do combined.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
The dogs were not humans with human cancer, so we shouldn't expect a clean translation of the results
- mlyle 3y ago
  Of course not, and the relevant xkcd, etc. Not our first rodeo here. It's going to take a long time to get gold standard proof that survival is augmented. It's still exciting news. They're ramping up through phase 1 to phase 2 in humans, and already have evidence of similar immune response in human patients.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    this requires individualized treatment based on the description which will make the implementation costly and impractical. They need to extract a piece of the tumor from the brain.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Surgical resection of glioblastoma is usually (not always) one of the first steps in treatment, so you get that "for free". But yes, I would expect it to be quite costly.
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        yes but thats only the first step in this case. then they need to prepare the individualized mRNA shot from there. How long it takes and how complex it is is another question.
        mlyle 3y ago
        Yes, most of the promise of mRNA with cancer is the prospect for individualized therapy. But individualized therapy intrinsically means you're going to be a doing a patient-specific manufacturing step. Sequencing and RNA synthesizing are widely available commercial services at this point, though not cheap. There's a lot of magic to take mRNA and formulate it to last in the human body and go and do what you want, but it isn't likely to be the costly part of all of this if there's some small volume of people being treated this way.

by mlyle 3y ago

s1artibartfast 3y ago

The dogs were not humans with human cancer, so we shouldn't expect a clean translation of the results

mlyle 3y ago
Of course not, and the relevant xkcd, etc. Not our first rodeo here. It's going to take a long time to get gold standard proof that survival is augmented. It's still exciting news. They're ramping up through phase 1 to phase 2 in humans, and already have evidence of similar immune response in human patients.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  this requires individualized treatment based on the description which will make the implementation costly and impractical. They need to extract a piece of the tumor from the brain.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Surgical resection of glioblastoma is usually (not always) one of the first steps in treatment, so you get that "for free". But yes, I would expect it to be quite costly.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      yes but thats only the first step in this case. then they need to prepare the individualized mRNA shot from there. How long it takes and how complex it is is another question.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        Yes, most of the promise of mRNA with cancer is the prospect for individualized therapy. But individualized therapy intrinsically means you're going to be a doing a patient-specific manufacturing step. Sequencing and RNA synthesizing are widely available commercial services at this point, though not cheap. There's a lot of magic to take mRNA and formulate it to last in the human body and go and do what you want, but it isn't likely to be the costly part of all of this if there's some small volume of people being treated this way.