7 ms·
World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial
- doormatt 2y ago[flagged]
- ktallett 2y agoThis is a rather pedantic comment, it is a world first for a common cancer type, giloblastoma, therefore world first for cancer treatment is correct.
- ziddoap 2y ago"Glioblastoma [...] is the most aggressive and most common type of cancer that originates in the brain"
- acdha 2y agoWhat value do you think this pedantry adds to the conversation? Do you really think that many readers here were going to assume it meant a universal cure for all types of cancer and somehow be harmed by getting their hopes up for the second or two needed to read more than the headline?
- Loughla 2y agoI've been scolded on here that some folks may be on the spectrum and not understand the implications of these sentences. I understand that, but I also understand that people who are willfully ignorant and overly pedantic will hide behind any excuse they can get. To be clear I'm not saying all folks on the autism spectrum are those things, just that some people will appropriate whatever title they need to feel vindicated. I would be surprised if anyone read that headline and thought that it meant every single cancer.
- ihaveajob 2y agoI found the headline confusing. It would have been helpful to include the type of cancer in it. Or if it's a pan-cancer treatment, to say so explicitly.
- ktallett 2y agoSurely that's why you would read the article, sentence one leaves literally no doubt.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoRemind me again what glioblastoma is? Is it some form of diabetes? Cateracts? A bacterial infection? Vitamin D deficiency? Is this an arthritis treatment? Is this a fertility treatment? It is in fact a cancer treatment. My wife is cooking fish at the moment. Wait, she's coking trout, not "fish". Except wait, slovenly fog brain, she's cooking rainbow trout, not "trout".
- dgfitz 2y agoI drove a buddy of mine to work for years because of his glioblastoma, once he recovered from having 37 staples in his skull. Recently I’ve been dealing with cancer as well, lost a nipple in the process. We are both under 40. Cancer sucks, any positive progress in sorting out ways to treat and defeat cancer is only a good thing.
- unstyledcontent 2y agoThis is hopeful news for a really tragic cancer.
- j45 2y agoTruly hopeful.
- wisaacj 2y ago[dead]
- Panzer04 2y agoPresumably this is the Richard Scolyer case, if anyone was curious. A brief lookup indicates he could possibly be seeing recurrence; hopefully that's not the case but this is something that many people have said about his trial. We can't say for sure this treatment is going to be broadly effective without more time and experiments.
- crispycas12 2y agoIt's neo-adjuvant (treat prior to surgery) with a three mAbs: Ipi + Nivo, which is a well established combo of immunotherapeutics for many solid tumors, rounded out with relatlimab which I'm less familiar with (LAG-3 inhibition). Neoadjuvant use of immunotherapies is established concept and is utilized in clinical practice for non-small cell lung cancer and colon cancer. This is the first time I've seen a use of 3 immunotherapies used at once: Ipi + Nivo isn't the most tolerable treatment regimen. Other novel aspect is use of neoadjuvant therapy in GBM.
- trhway 2y agoDo they give immunotherapy before, after or instead of chemo? Asking because I heard what it is after in some cases and that puzzled me as chemo usually hits immune system.
- femto 2y agoFrom what I read (in a book written by Scolyer), the treatment didn't involve chemo. It was along the lines of: 1. immunotherapy 2. Surgery to remove the bulk of the tumour. 3. More immunotherapy 4. Radiation therapy 5. A course of vaccine customised to the genome of the cancer
- mft_ 2y agoThat was a concern in the early days of development of anti PD(L)-1 agents - that chemo and even steroids would harm the T-cells you’re trying to activate. Yet there are settings where a deliberate combination of anti PD-1 with chemotherapy is the standard of care. And there are other types of immunotherapy where a combination with chemotherapy is advantageous too.
- mcbain 2y agoNo chemo. The entire idea of this regime is to hit the tumour with immuno to get the reaction. They want lots of tumour cells and for it to be "treatment naive" - Richard hadn't even had corticosteroids, which dampens immune. Once they primed his system they excised as much as possible and kept the immuno going while doing a course of radiation. Profs Long and Scolyer work with melanoma where chemo is rarely used these days.
- sokols 2y agoThis might be related with the case of Richard Scolyer, the Australian pathologist diagnosed with Glioblastoma. He was receiving some kind of experimental treatment for it.
- crispycas12 2y agoI believe he got just got either Ipilimumab and Nivolumab as a combo therapy or Pembrolizumab. He's a researcher who focuses on neo-adjuvant (use therapy before resection) therapy in melanomas. It was a good gamble to try the same paradigm in Glioblastomas
- mcbain 2y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03512-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03512-1 Ipi/nivo/relatlimab and then a peptide vaccine that they haven't written up yet.
- femto 2y agoThanks for the link to the paper. I notice that the abstract has a link to the page for the upcoming trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06816927 https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06816927 It will be interesting to follow its progress.
- femto 2y agoIn news announced a few minutes ago, Richard Scolyer's cancer has come back and the prognosis is a few months to live. https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/former-australian-of-the-year-down-to-months-not-years-after-brain-tumour-returns-20250309-p5li64.html https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/former-...
- fragmede 2y agoIt's not a generic novel treatment against any and all cancers, as much as the headline would lead you to conclude.
- crispycas12 2y agoYou're mostly correct but immunotherapies do work for a many different type of cancer. The issue is differences in tumor biology plays a major factor. The even bigger caveat is that given a sufficient amount of tumor mutational burden (TMB), immunotherapies are found to be effective for any solid tumor. Granted most patients don't have the sky had TMBs needed for it to be effective
- adamredwoods 2y agoIt's triple therapy, which most doctors won't do, which I think is one of the future steps to stopping cancer. We should have been looking at combination therapy a long time ago. Hopefully this will get oncologists to push the envelope a bit more.
- suzumer 2y agoI thought using multiple therapies for cancer was fairly common, or are you referring specifically to immunotherapies?
- adamredwoods 2y agoSequentially? Yes. Simultaneously? Rare. Doxorubicin and cisplatin, has been done, but keytruda was quite interesting when it started to do clinical trials in combination with various chemos so that the FDA would approve it. My late-wife's oncologist was hesitant on combining anything, but I kept pushing for pembro plus anything. But this was also systemically applied, these new ADCs are targeted, much stronger with combination payloads. Sadly, not as effective for harsher cancers like triple-negative BC.
- suzumer 2y ago
- kohbo 2y agoI'm not a fan of stuff in very early stages like this being posted
- 1970-01-01 2y agoAgreed. Good but very early news isn't that interesting. It needs at minimum a clinical trial.
- Retric 2y agoA scheduled clinical trial is fairly late in the process. It’s a specific treatment being evaluated not just some pathways discovered in rodents that looks promising.
- femto 2y agoThis one is an unusual case, as the clinical trial is coming after the first patient (Scolyer) was treated. It's also interesting due to its aspect of "Physician, heal thyself", as Scolyer's own research formed the basis of his treatment. Scolyer doesn't seem to have been directly involved in his treatment, in that it was designed by his collaborator, Georgina Long, and executed by another team.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoIt's always cancer treatments and battery technology that gets pushed to the top of tech news sites for some reason but it never results in a "this problem is now fixed". Battery tech is incremental at best and nowadays may suffer from its own scale, that is, billions invested into battery factories set up to churn out batteries using a certain technique, which disincentivises new techniques. But with batteries I like to think there's still plenty of investor money and healthy competition, so a large scale solid state battery plant may yet come to be.
- JohnMD 2y agoI would like to see a clinical trial with patients who have Stage 4 disease being treated with multiple immunotherapies, up to 5 or 6 IV and oral immunotherapies. Why are we holding back in a population with poor prognosis?? As far as legislation, we should pass "Right to Try" laws. Allowing anyone with Stage 3 or 4 to pick an immunotherapy regardless of whether it's been approved. We should never allow hope to die!
- s1artibartfast 2y agoWhy can't you start a trial and do just that? Doctors have discretion up to the practical limit of being sued by their patients.
- LadyCailin 2y agoOr their estate.
- lumost 2y agoThere is a bound on the degree to which terminal patients are willing to be human guinea pigs, and a bound on which the data is statistically useful to anyone. I’ve read many reports of terminal patients who wish that they hadn’t wasted the last few months of their healthspan searching for Hail Mary treatment options. If you were to ask yourself what you would do with 1-3 months of healthy life left, would you spend it in a hospital on chemo?
- drysine 2y agoIf I had a chance of beating cancer and extending my life by a lot, I'd rather die fighting.
- programjames 2y agoYou're currently dying of the "being human" cancer. Are you working on or donating to anti-aging research, or do you prefer to do other things with your time? It just comes down to your discount factor. Based on inflation, it's typically about 0.95/year, so you would expect to care about ~10% as much for things 50 years in the future. This means if you had a ~10% better quality of life not working on anti-aging, you're guaranteed to be better off. In reality, you should hedge your bets; if everyone spent just a little time on the disease, we could cure "being human". The same applies to dying fighting cancer. You should be willing to do some experimental procedures, but not if it eliminates your happiness for the rest of your life.
- dumbledoren 2y agoIt cant be coincidental that this news with a misleading headline is being pushed right at the time when a revolutionary Chinese drug changed the landscape.
- aj_icracked 2y agoOut of curiosity, and I'm living under a rock.. which one?
- Nevermark 2y ago> It cant be coincidental And yet coincidences happen. So of course it can be. I suggest avoiding starting any sentences you intend to be credible with that phrase. And avoid starting any sequence of reasoning you wish to have validity with that type of thinking.
- dumbledoren 2y ago> And yet coincidences happen. So of course it can be For some reason, those 'coincidences' seem to always coincide with something China is doing. China has a revolutionary cancer drug? Cue misleading articles in the Western press about some drug that doesn't even compare. China reforests deserts? Cue numerous articles in the Western media saying how "Deserts are good because they help rainforests". And that also was misleading - no other rainforest on the planet receives any kind of dust as the Amazon receives from the Sahara and they are just as good. So all these 'coincidences' seem to 'coincide' with China's stuff. That couldn't possibly be because of stuff like the $500 million fund that the US Congress allocated to doing propaganda against China now, could it...
- d_tr 2y agohttps://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/china-biotech-global-disruption-intl-hnk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/china-biotech-gl... Are you referring to this?
- Nevermark 2y ago> For some reason, those 'coincidences' seem to always […] You are doing it again. Only if you actually find hard statistical evidence, or direct (not pre-supposed) causational evidence, can you can talk about coincidences and non-coincidences with any rationale for being able to tell the difference. Otherwise, you are passing off self-bullshitting as reasoning. The fact that you can, and are willing and motivated to, fool yourself with subjective “logic” isn’t something advantageous to share with other people. And that is the only actual information you are sharing. Don’t accept or publish imaginary results as results. If you want to reason effectively or be credible to others.
- tanujsh979 2y agoThis could be groundbreaking I guess! :)
- catoc 2y agoHow is this the “first experimental cancer treatment” ? It’s not. Of course. It may be the first triple immunotherapy (3 checkpoint inhibitors), given in a neo-adjuvant setting, in glioblastoma. Still cool, less catchy (Or maybe I don’t understand “world-first” ?)
- cryptopian 2y agoThe term "world-first" in this context means that this is the first specific cancer treatment of this type: > It is the first documented use of neoadjuvant triple immunotherapy in glioblastoma If the headline read "world's first" then it would imply what you understood
- skybrian 2y agoWe love to debate headlines, don’t we? But along those lines, it seems like they could just say it’s “new” and that would be good enough; a headline doesn’t need to be any more specific.
- baggachipz 2y agoThis is fantastic news, glioma treatment progress was stagnant for a long time and is finally starting to pick up steam.
- alsoforgotmypwd 2y agoI'm wondering though if this research and clinical trials has had their funding threatened recently.
- animitronix 2y agoDisappointed this wasn't about Venus