10 ms·
CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers
- Ifkaluva 5mo agoI hope this finally works out. I remember almost exactly ten years ago I got excited about one of these proposed cancer cures, tried to talk about it at lunch with my coworkers, and they laughed at me for believing.
- arcticfox 5mo agoI'm pretty optimistic. I think it's a threshold question where we need a number of basic technologies to all get over certain bars before the floodgates start to open. Over the past 1-2 decades there has been unbelievable progress at the basic technology level but most people are unimpressed because they haven't translated yet due to not individually being sufficient to cause an explosion of progress. IMO, we're starting to see it finally as so many different technologies have gotten so cheap, fast, and good.
- dylan604 5mo agoSo we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?
- smm11 5mo agoWe already had this. It was called Theranos.
- fragmede 5mo agoI don't know if we "had" something called Theranos. In fact, I believe that was the subject of a couple of lawsuit because we didn't.
- rowanG077 5mo agoI'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.
- huxley 5mo agoI think you've captured exactly what they are trying to say
- rowanG077 5mo agoThis doesn't exactly make it clearer. I can think of two things it can imply. Neither make a lick of sense: - Theranos was at the forefront of medical technology - Apple is a fraudulent company to the core
- im3w1l 5mo agoApple is first and foremost an affordable luxury brand that makes sleek hardware.
- rowanG077 5mo agoAnd theranos did that too? Theranos, a medical company, was an affordable luxury (??) brand that makes sleek hardware? In fact the hardware was not sleek at all, since it didn't function.
- ben_w 5mo agoUsually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1]. [0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage [1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/ https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/
- dylan604 5mo agoSo according to your timeline, we're ~10 years from medical research becoming enshitified?
- ben_w 5mo agoDepends where in the history of the web you count it as such. For me it was more like the late 2010s when that happened, so 20 years. And of course vanity surgery is already a thing, so it may have already happened to an extent with medicine? 10-20 years for an Alastair Reynolds' style Indoctrinal Virus? I hope not, but I can totally see it happening eventually.
- mattlondon 5mo agoI think realistically we're waiting for someone in the top 10-20 richest people in the world to get cancer (or a close relative etc) who will then throw billions at research to try and fix the problem.
- robotresearcher 5mo agoWe spend upwards of $15B a year globally on cancer research. About half of that is funded by government and charities, half by pharmaceutical companies. If spending billions was the main trick, we’d know it already.
- dylan604 5mo agoDo we actually spend it, or do we raise that much money while only a fraction of it goes to research? <looksAtPinkRibbons>
- visha1v 5mo agothe public experiences biotechnology as decades of nothing, followed by years of everything once bottlenecks align
- toponijo 5mo agoI think it's just a tech thing! Same as when the internet really got going or what's happening with AI
- anovikov 5mo agoThe floodgates open = the market will see that at least some of that can actually work and make money => they will pour funding => new approaches built on that funding will start working, too?
- colechristensen 5mo agoReal in vivo genetic engineering isn't going away and will indeed be a powerful tool to face cancer. Any particular effort is doubtful because this is a journey measured in decades. It is not the same story as any one particular wonder drug fizzling out to nothing, it is a class of tools that is maturing into the realm of early therapeutic deployment.
- sssilver 5mo agoWhat economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.
- eecc 5mo agoI remember seeing a comic strip about this exact argument but I can’t find it any more
- paytonjjones 5mo agoWhen you reframe ads as "control of human attention" it suddenly makes a lot more sense why so many resources are poured into them.
- abirch 5mo agoAnd when you can measure how effective those ads are in changing human behavior; it's easier for businesses to spend there. As an American, I would love it if pharmaceutical companies couldn't market to consumers. It would free up money for research or lower prices.
- strangattractor 5mo agoHumans are a bunch of hairless monkeys that have evolved to scam each other rather than hunt and gather food from Nature.
- odyssey7 5mo agoThe bargaining dynamics are stacked against biology researchers at every stage of their career, from needing years and years of unrelated performance to be admitted to terribly expensive programs before they can begin to do experiments, to requiring costly equipment and resources to work, to needing to work with a small number of very powerful companies. As a result, life science researchers are more price-taking than proce-setting when it comes to their wages / salary. If money is the motivator, then the market as-is isn’t addressing this one.
- bonsai_spool 5mo agoHere's their preprint from a month ago, in case you can't access the Nature paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.08.723607v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.08.723607v1 Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7
- epihelix 5mo ago[dead]
- perlgeek 5mo agoThe article is pretty light on details, but > Much like other CRISPR therapies, delivery is a critical challenge, i.e., getting the large genome-cutting enzyme to all the targeted cells efficiently. makes me think this is in vitro so far. So, years to decades away from being available for actual treatment in humans. Still good news.
- amelius 5mo ago(removed)
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoI suppose it could also be used to assassinate specific persons with the precision of DNA matching. Like FOXDIE.
- ACCount37 5mo agoOld concern, but it really doesn't work that way. Genetics don't respect human ideas like "nationalities" or "borders" - the targeting you can get by selecting on singular DNA variants is coarse enough to make ICBMs look like precision weapons. Like many things of this nature, people keep bringing it up because it sounds Very Scary and Very Dystopian - not because it's worth giving an actual fuck about.
- ikrenji 5mo agoI mean maybe not right now, but in 100-1000 years a complicated enough "nanobot/virus" could possibly be made to target a single person
- ACCount37 5mo agoIf it's year 2126, and you have this kind of tech floating around, and you aren't equipping the entire population with artificial immune systems capable of dealing with known and unknown biological threats? You've done something wrong.
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- sourcegrift 5mo agoOver on reddit people were debating whether cancer should be cured since it disproportionately affects rich people and it made me realise how far reddit has fallen. It's just a botnet now to manipulate elections.
- sebzim4500 5mo agoI'm certain that is not a mainsteam opinion on reddit, but by its nature you will be able to find arbitrarily stupid opinions in individual echo chambers
- airstrike 5mo agoI am not so certain
- OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo agoAfter we launched our startup, we had all sorts of folks reach out to sell their GTM services. I went with one group from Vietnam that would make engagement bait Reddit questions with some accounts, and advertise our product in the comments section with others. It was expensive but it worked
- sourcegrift 5mo agoReddit is a huge danger to society. There's no doubt that subs about specific non political (and non popular) topics are hugely beneficial, the overall damage the echo chambers do still outweigh these benefits.
- whyenot 5mo agoThe way the voting system works at Reddit encourages group think and bubbles. All it takes is five more down votes than up votes and a comment or post essentially disappears from view. It's a design that actively avoids debate.
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- zouhair 5mo agoThis is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago> This is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring. CRISPR was the cause of a huge patent case and likely led to a change in US patent law because of the impracticability of deciding who did something first in the laboratory. It continues to influence research as some nations took a while to decide how they would resolve their own researchers' CRISPR claims with respect to MIT/UC Berkeley. And yet... all the research has continued apace. Edit: the CRISPR patent cases are continuing even today https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/05/12/federal-appeals-court-sends-crispr-cas9-patent-case-back-to-patent-office-for-reconsideration/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/05/12/federal-appeals-court-s... https://www.broadinstitute.org/crispr/journalists-statement-and-background-crispr-patent-process https://www.broadinstitute.org/crispr/journalists-statement-...
- Almondsetat 5mo agoCan anyone point to some resources about how cancers might adapt to CRISPR treatments?
- wombatpm 5mo agoSame problem with chemo and radiation. A tumor may start off with a single cancerous mutation, but by the time it spreads there may be several. Once the cell repair machinery has been broken, the cancer cells are prone for more mutations. Chemo, radiation, and CRISPR will kill everything it can reach that is susceptible. That leaves everything that was unreachable or resistant behind to start growing again. Kill cancer cells is easy. Killing ONLY cancer cells is very hard.
- ordinaryradical 5mo agoCRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus. Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR. I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.
- anovikov 5mo agoBingo! CRISPR has an advantage of being relatively easy to describe to a layman, giving it a PR advantage.
- fragmede 5mo agoSo is the "idea" of microchips in vaccines. Should we just give up and let everything else have the PR advantage
- mondomondo 5mo ago[dead]
- fastball 5mo agoViral vector delivery is indeed harder to sell with PopSci, what with movies like "I am Legend".
- jvanderbot 5mo agoGreat first half of a movie, by the way. Up there with Sunshine for "Sit down for a great hour-long ambiance". I usually end Legend after the mannequin trap, and end Sunshine after the transit of mercury.
- spligak 5mo agoYou're correct about CRISPR Cas9. The off-target affects are difficult to manage. The paper describes Cas12a2. This is a different mechanism with discovery origins in - of all things - agriculture. It does not attempt in any way to reprogram cells. It uses a guide protein to locate a specific mutation with exacting precision and, when it activates, unleashes total destruction of the cell. The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound. Source: I have personally funded novel research based on Cas12a2 for an undruggable condition I have. I have personally seen my condition "cured" in vitro using this technology and it left all of my WT cells unharmed. Some of the researchers I've funded are co-authors in the paper linked. I am a layperson in this field (I'm a SWE, not in biotech), but I am happy to answer questions.
- needSomeCoffee 5mo agoJennifer Doudna again. What an amazing scientist. Wow.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- yieldcrv 5mo agoCool. How can I help
- MontyCarloHall 5mo agoThe idea of using CRISPR/Cas to detect tumor-specific mutations that aren't necessarily oncogenic and then kill the cell is not a new one [0, 1, 2]. However, previous studies used Cas9, which just damages the DNA at the target site; this uses Cas12a2, which is far more destructive because it shreds the chromatin in the cell once activated by detecting the target sequence. As with any cancer treatment, it's likely the tumor will evolve resistance. My guess is that cells will find ways to reject the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the CRISPR/Cas mRNA and associated guide sequence(s), either via modifications to the cell surface (preventing LNP uptake) or via changes to endosomal/lysosomal pathways (causing the mRNA payload to get degraded before it has a chance to be translated into protein). [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28575452/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28575452/ [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30205-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30205-2 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18875-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18875-x
- cyberax 5mo agoThere are some ideas about making it triggerable. So first you load the cells with a protein that is ready to start shredding but is inactive. Then you trigger it with a second compound.
- MontyCarloHall 5mo agoThis would shorten the timeframe for cells to mutate and acquire resistance mechanisms, but would not address the issue of cells with preexisting (epi)genetic resistance mechanisms that would then be promptly selected for.
- cyberax 5mo agoYes, and if you shorten the timeframe enough, there's a chance that it can clear all the cancerous cells. You also ideally would use multiple variations of the therapy to further reduce the chance of a pre-existing escape mutation. That's how we deal with HIV. No single HIV therapy (so far) is effective enough to suppress the virus all by itself, but a combination of them provides a barrier that is too high for mutations to jump.
- red_admiral 5mo agoFor the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amodei-on-ai https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amo... .
- dmbrThnYou 5mo agoThat's a good article with a good point. As a caregiver impatiently waiting for Daraxonrasib, I can at least acknowledge that the institutional machinery is going as fast as it can. I've litterally witnessed a trial patient in the first cohort of a drug (that went no further) be rushed from infusion to the hospital; the trial process cannot be sped up from its current state without endangering lives.
- yelling_cat 5mo ago> As a caregiver impatiently waiting for Daraxonrasib Same here. Are you and your care recipient familiar with the Optune Pax device that the FDA approved in February? https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-its-kind-device-treat-pancreatic-cancer https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr... My father's been using it since April. It's a little cumbersome and only improves overall survival rates by about two months over chemo alone, but we're hoping that it helps him remain relatively healthy until Daraxonrasib becomes available.
- dmbrThnYou 5mo agoThanks for that. I wasn't aware. She doesn't repond well to that regimen, so it doesn't apply to us. We should be alright. We're on track for the expanded access program. Also, it's a long story, but she was taken off an Irinotecan-containing regimen prematurely about a year ago. In hindsight, she was clearly reaponding very well to that particular drug, so we've got that in our toolkit.
- jyounker 5mo ago
- SilverElfin 5mo agoSo how do drugs like this get fast tracked so that people who are in danger of dying can exercise their freedom and opt into experimental treatments very easily
- jyounker 5mo agoFirst thing to remember: cancer drugs attack human cells. Because of this they can very unexpected and traumatic side-effects. Because of this initial trials consume lots of medical staff to deal with the potential side effects. Normal side effects for cancer treatments include: * Your gut lining dissolves, your shit leaks into your body cavity, and you get sepsis. * Your heart stops during the infusion. * Cumulative poisoning that nobody understands. (E.g. some agents have lifetime limits, and if you go beyond that, then you die. Guess how we found out.) * Your immune system, and you get things like disseminated fungal infections. The danger of side-effects like this requires a medical team largely dedicated to the experimental patients. This puts a limit on how many patients you can put into a trial. I'm under the impression that cancer trials are pretty much always full.
- supertroop 5mo agoYes! I have a genetic disease that will take me out in my 70s and I’m really hoping CRISPR gets to it before I do!
- cedel2k1 5mo agoI hope for you and others that they will!
- bloppe 5mo agoA lot of people's genes will take them out in their 70s but cheers to crispy
- supertroop 5mo agoVery true!
- dreambuffer 5mo agoI don't mean to sound insensitive, but don't most people die around age 70-80?
- aroman 5mo agoLife expectancy in many countries is mid 80s.
- dreambuffer 5mo agoThat doesn't seem to be true, the global expectancy is 73 and only a dozen of the wealthiest countries are mid 80s. I wouldn't be worried about dying at 70, but maybe I'm built of tougher stuff.
- aroman 5mo agoYou say my claim is not true then proceed to acknowledge it is true. To be clear about the fact: about 1/4 of all countries have a life expectancy >80, and as you said, more than a dozen in mid-80s.
- himata4113 5mo agoDoes anyone know a website where I can see/read of how many cancers (and their variants) we've effectively solved, have drugs to negate their effects, have experimental drugs for and uncurable cancers? I think that graph would be awe inspiring looking at the past decade of advancements. What's more crazy is that we're slowly going from millenia, to decades, to likely years in the near future from being presented a biological problem and achieving the next milestone in solving it. We might have "AI", but we also have brilliant minds right now that are speeding up development to a pace that would be unimaginable just few years ago.
- tyre 5mo agoHave you asked Claude to pull this and graph it over time? It could build a static site as well.
- bitmasher9 5mo agoIsn’t this likely to lead to inaccurate data? I wouldn’t know enough about the domain to fact-check Claude.
- phyzome 5mo agoHave you tried just mashing on the keyboard and seeing if a great comment comes out?
- r58lf 5mo agoIt's not as great as you might think, despite all the stories you see like this one. That's because most of the stories are in cells (this one) or mice. The big success story, about 20 years old now, is testicular cancer. You can have metastatic testicular cancer with tumors all over your body (like Lance Armstrong had) and they can cure it. They use platinum based chemotherapy and it's not really well understood why it works for testicular cancer, but not others. The story with childhood leukemias is similar. They figured out how to combine a bunch of chemotherapy to get the cure rate up pretty high. Leukemia in a child used to be (1990s) 90% fatal, it's like 10% now. Besides those, most of the advances in the past few decades come from early detection/ surgery or just prevention (stop smoking). There is some hope though. When people first started studying cancers at the molecular level, one of the first things they noticed was how often a gene called Ras was mutated in different cancers. It turns out that designing a drug for Ras was really hard, but it finally got done, it's called daraxonrasib. They just released phase III human trials with this drug in pancreatic cancer a week or two ago and it destroyed the standard of care (Chemotherapy), but that is saying people who were dying in 1-2 months were still alive after 5-6 months. The former senator Ben Sasse was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer last December. Historically, that's like 5% survival rate for 5 years. He is on daraxonrasib. We will see how it works out.
- oexside 5mo ago[flagged]
- Asfand3099 5mo agoWhat stands out to me is how cancer therapy keeps moving from broad destruction (chemo/radiation) toward increasingly precise identification of malignant cells. The challenge no longer seems to be "can we kill cancer cells?" but "can we reliably identify only cancer cells and reach all of them?" This paper looks like another step in that direction.
- TaupeRanger 5mo agoI'm not sure what this comment means - we could always kill cancer cells, and the challenge has always been "how can we ONLY kill the cancer?" We've been burning cancer, cutting cancer out, and drugging cancer cells for decades or centuries depending on the method. What is changing is not the type of challenge, but the precision of our tools - and even then, it remains to be seen if we actually can get the precision while improving the lives of the patients.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- andrewlin247 5mo agobeen hearing about CRISPR since I was in middle school. is there actually any new development here?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- est31 5mo agoIn order to kill all cancer cells in the body, it probably needs to be delivered to every single cell in the organism, and scan the nucleus of that cell. Viruses usually don't infect every single cell, just a small percentage. So one needs to figure out a delivery method that is efficient enough, and that doesn't elicit an immune response. But I guess one can analyze the cancer in the lab and figure out which receptors it expresses, and then bind to those? We could have a toolkit of different delivery methods, tailored for each patient's cancer.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
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- hummuscience 5mo agoApparently this group was a bit late. Here is the first group with the same approach https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10466-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10466-y
- epihelix 5mo ago[dead]
- silexia 5mo agoGo CRISPR! I just lost a good friend Bobby to cancer who was a sweet kind man. Die cancer.
- rballpug 5mo agoGene splicing ATGC nucleotide. [1]: https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2019/02/22/the-history-behind-aspirin-81/ https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2019/02/22/the-history-...
- superze 5mo agoBut the real question all of us ask is: What about hairloss?
- jwst01 5mo agoApoptosis: cell death.
- rxkrbaccord 5mo ago[dead]
- relaychemical 5mo agoGalen's Generations of Seeds [1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/reproduction/galens-generations-of-seeds/10D0FEC73C1AD72841F37015C6D19EFA https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/reproduction/galens...
- markcollins05 5mo ago[dead]