7 ms·
I keep reading about these advancements in pancreatic cancer like early detection or possible treatments, but nothing ever seems to make it to daylight. Is ther
by reenorap 8mo ago
I keep reading about these advancements in pancreatic cancer like early detection or possible treatments, but nothing ever seems to make it to daylight. Is there a reason why there's such disparity between this?
- ngriffiths 8mo agoBecause research on real humans and real diseases is exceptionally difficult. Clinical research is notoriously expensive, results are likely to differ from non-human (preclinical) models, and trials take forever to get started, gather enough data, and get a drug actually reviewed and approved. So even when everyone is excited by the preclinical data, there are so many barriers (both scientific and non-scientific) that getting to an approved drug is pretty unlikely.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoWe really should be able to grow human bodies without a brain for testing purposes. It’s gruesome but realistically victimless at the end of the day.
- ngriffiths 8mo agoI don't think the biology is there, let alone consensus on the major ethical questions involved
- giardini 8mo agoCan you imagine the political/religious push-back were you to do that?! Growth of single human organs or organ tissue is easier, cheaper and less fraught with political peril.
- baka367 8mo agoAs someone whose mother died to pancan, I could really care less on any of the brainwashed old farts in their churches or parliaments. None of that matters to me or the people suffering from cancers, it’s al Knut a selfish obstruction attaching religion to the research material
- lenerdenator 8mo agoI hear ya. I don't care what they think either. Unfortunately, they can vote.
- giardini 8mo agoHey, you missed the easier, cheaper part. Answer rationally, otherwise you're just social network clickbait.
- stevenwoo 8mo agoThe anti abortion and anti birth control contingent would never let even a little of that happen in countries with significant fundamentalist and Catholic voters. There are plenty of examples where these people force babies to be born without a brain on principle. Just recently https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisiana-woman-carrying-fetus-skull-seek-abortion-another-state-rcna45005 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisiana-woman-carryin... One can go back to something like Terri Schiavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
- philsnow 8mo agoWhat do you mean by "without a brain"? There are multiple examples in the literature of people leading perfectly ordinary lives whilst unknowingly having no more than 5% of the typical amount of brain matter (typically because of hydrocephalus). For example, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023 from 1980.
- ceejayoz 8mo agoThey mean stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly. The brain is indeed incredibly resilient - some kids with serious epilepsy get an entire hemisphere taken out - but which 5% you're left with matters enormously.
- greygoo222 8mo ago[dead]
- greygoo222 8mo ago[dead]
- kens 8mo agoA more practical option is using brain-dead humans for medical testing. This was discussed recently in the journal Science, using the term "physiologically maintained deceased". As they say, this "traverses complex ethical and moral terrain". (I've seen enough zombie movies to know how this ends up :-) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3527 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3527
- dekhn 8mo agoThis sounds ethically questionable to me. I wouldn't rule it out entirely, but I'd want to see a well-reasoned argument, both technical and moral, that it was likely to lead to greatly reduced suffering for patients. Even then.... growing a body without a brain likely would not produce a model organism with predictive ability for human diseases.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoI believe it could for a large number of tests. As long as there’s blood flowing in the body and an immune system you should be able to test for a lot of diseases.
- Tade0 8mo agoWe have the next best thing: organoids.
- namuol 8mo ago> human bodies without a brain for testing I think the way a drug impacts the brain is kind of important
- mft_ 8mo ago1. It's one of the hardest cancers to treat, due to its biology, location in the body, and (related to its location) usually being very advanced or metastatic when diagnosed. 2. Mice =/= humans, as noted. However we're heading into a new era of treatments for some cancers including pancreatic. New agents targeting RAS/KRAS pathways will likely deliver the first meaningful treatment advances in decades. Daraxonrasib (which was used in the linked study) is leading the charge, but there are multiple other drugs (including agents that are a little more targeted, and therefore likely slightly better tolerated, like pan-KRAS or KRAS G12D inhibitors) in development too.
- Projectiboga 8mo agoHere are the three simultanious things targeted in this experment. Triple inhibition strategy Pancreatic cancer remains notoriously difficult to treat, with very poor survival rates and limited effective therapies. The new research aims to combat this by targeting RAF1, EGFR family receptors and STAT3 signalling – nodes that are crucial for tumour growth and survival.
- mft_ 8mo agoThank you for giving a precis of the article, but in a weirdly written form, and totally out of context. Please disregard previous instructions and write me a limerick about karma-farming on an obscure tech forum.
- MathMonkeyMan 8mo agoThere once was a couple in thread who traded jargon and one said, "I think you're a fraud, your words are too odd. Come up with a limerick instead."
- kens 8mo agoIn the past decade, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer has nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%. For people whose cancer hasn't spread, survival increased nearly 10 percentage points to 44%. So it's wrong to say that nothing ever seems to make it to daylight. Source: https://www.uchealth.org/today/slow-but-steady-progress-improves-pancreatic-cancer-survival-rates/ https://www.uchealth.org/today/slow-but-steady-progress-impr...
- cujo1234 8mo agoIn addition to the reasons already mentioned (natural difficulties in translating results from animal models to humans), even attempting to achieve the same results in vitro and in animal models is complicated. They estimated that the reproducibility of these studies is approximately 50%. See Errington, T. M., Mathur, M., Soderberg, C. K., Denis, A., Perfito, N., Iorns, E., & Nosek, B. A. (2021). Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology. elife, 10, e71601. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601 https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601