9 ms·
I really hope this is not another one of those false cures. It's time we made some real big-news progress against this horrible collection of ailments we call c
by swombat 13y ago
I really hope this is not another one of those false cures. It's time we made some real big-news progress against this horrible collection of ailments we call cancer.
For those who don't want to read through the lengthy human interest story wrapping the news here, from a quick read I gathered they're basically modifying T-Cells:
> In their natural state, T cells usually aren’t able to kill tumor cells, partly because they can’t latch on strongly enough. But June was fascinated by scientific papers showing it was possible to change this. A few researchers—first an Israeli named Zelig Eshhar in the ’80s, then other investigators around the world—had discovered that you could force a T cell to stick to a tumor cell and kill it. To pull this off, you built an “engineered T cell”—a T cell never before seen in nature. You altered the T cell’s genetic blueprint by injecting a new gene into the cell. The new gene would tell it to build a new molecular limb. The limb, called a “chimeric antigen receptor,” would sit partly inside the cell and partly outside, and it could send signals either in or out. One signal it could send was: kill. Another was: replicate.
> June loved this approach. So elegant. Put the immune system on steroids. What if you could train the body to fight cancer on its own? What if, instead of replacing a patient’s immune system (as in a bone-marrow transplant) or pumping him full of poison (chemo), you could just borrow some cells, tweak them, and infuse them back into the patient? In theory, the engineered cells would stay alive in the blood, replenishing themselves, killing any tumors that recurred. It occurred to June that one infusion could last a lifetime.
It seems this research has been going on for 10+ years. How many people have died because of the glacial regulatory pace of cancer research?
- grey-area 13y agoI really hope this is not another one of those false cures. It seems this research has been going on for 10+ years. How many people have died because of the glacial regulatory pace of cancer research? One of these statements explains the other - verifying research is safe with trials takes time, it's not something that should be rushed.
- nazgulnarsil 13y agoBlanket statements like this aren't true. With a lethal ailment, a risk analysis must be done on how many you are killing with each delay.
- redthrowaway 13y agoYou presume the new treatment will save more lives than the current one. Without adequate research and testing, this is an unsupported presumption. It's as likely to do more harm than good if the preliminary research isn't done. We have the regulations we do because we caused harm in the past. They didn't spring fully formed from the minds of regulators, they happened because researchers killed and maimed people by not doing the necessary verification before human trials began.
- fredBuddemeyer 13y agoany way you slice it people are going to die and make grave errors. but open transactions between researchers and free human beings would have drugs evolving much faster than unaccountable and corruptible overlords. reputation systems could replace much of their most important functionality.
- jbri 13y ago> reputation systems could replace much of their most important functionality. I'll start believing this once you show that a "reputation system" (don't these already exist?) actually does anything to stop quacks from peddling diluted water as a cure-all. If you relied on reputation alone to regulate the medical market, feel-good snake oil treatments would prosper at the expense of legitimate medical advancement.
- coldtea 13y ago>reputation systems could replace much of their most important functionality. The same "reputation systems" that saved us from the million miracle-cures sold on late night tv, from "green coffee diet" to "Oxygenated water"?
- 13y ago
- nl 13y agoThere are cases where early results from a trial were so promising that both sides (of a double-blind trial) were put on the treatment. eg: A new prostate cancer drug trial has been so successful doctors have decided to stop it early. Medics at London's Royal Marsden Hospital were testing a powerful alpha radiation drug on 461 people while another group of the same number were being treated with a dummy drug. Patients taking the new drug experienced less pain, side effects and lived longer. Researchers were so astounded with the results they decided to stop the trial and started treating all 922 patients taking part in the study because they said it would be unethical not to. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2041301/Prostate-cancer-treatment-Drug-proves-successful-theyve-stopped-trials.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2041301/Prostate-c...
- IanCal 13y agoYes, but this has to be built into the experiment, or at least considered in the statistical analysis. You cannot just stop something when it's statistically significant. You have to be extremely careful about this, otherwise you can end up with much worse significance than simple analysis would suggest (and then that kills people).
- saalweachter 13y agoYeah, "Stop when the results are positive" is one of the classic ways to fudge a study. Twelve patients (the number mentioned in the article) is way, way premature to end this early. In this case, it's not even the regulatory environment. As the article mentions, the treatment is as fantastically expensive as it is fantastic. A lot of the skepticism isn't that it can't work, but that it might be too expensive to be viable.
- dave_sullivan 13y agoThere's a book I can't recommend highly enough called "the emperor of maladies" and it's a history of cancer up to ~2008. It's pretty depressing in a lot of ways (both the disease itself and the history of the fight against it), but it's one of the most fascinating books I've read in years. The kind of trade offs re: safety vs "getting things done" comes up quite a bit. The key optimism I pulled out of it was that cancer research is progressing exponentially, but this is harder to see because the general public only sees through the lens of "cured/not cured". But I think most cancer researchers would say "progress is being made, and faster than ever before with increasing velocity". Then again, the cure was around the corner in the 70s. But yeah, cancer is bad news and a disease many of us will be forced to face in our lifetimes...
- Mvandenbergh 13y agoProbably not all that many. They were able to move into the clinic pretty quickly once they had gotten the research to that state.
- jostmey 13y agoWhy has it taken 10 years? Because this stuff is really hard. Is there red tape in science? Sure. But even if all the red tape were removed, science would still move incrementally forward at a slow and steady pace. Most areas of research are simply not mature enough to move forward at the exponential pace that computer technology leaped forward into our society. What is required? More hard work!
- WalterSear 13y agoMoney, and the lack of political will to procure it is the problem.