4 ms·
50 percent of mice treated with two doses of the vaccine...showed complete tumor regression. I would have thought clinical trials would require a higher succes
by jdmitch 13y ago
50 percent of mice treated with two doses of the vaccine...showed complete tumor regression.
I would have thought clinical trials would require a higher success rate... is it only because it's the last resort and patients would otherwise die anyways?
- user24 13y agoI imagine that the success rate varies according to the disease. If it was a flu vaccine then it would be laughed out at 50%, but for cancer I'm guessing 50% is a mindblowingly awesome success rate.
- sswezey 13y agoMy mother just died of ocular melanoma, but was in a trial for all melanomas. The trial drug had an effective rate of 40% and that was considered a huge increase over the previous of about 15-20%. 50% for a melanoma _vaccine_ is great.
- dnautics 13y agounfortunately, 50% in mice is rather low for cancer even. You usually want to start out at 70-80% in mice for cancer. If you get 50% in humans that's a great success rate, but not in mice. The reason for this is that the mouse model is called a xenograft model, you take a human cancer and implant it into the mouse. Typically, you are running the experiment on mice implanted with the cell line that gave the best hit in your in vitro model, so it better do darned well, relatively speaking. I could be wrong about this though, usually the xenograft is done in immunocompromised mice (because otherwise the mice would reject the human cancer line)... So there could be complicating factors.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I would have thought clinical trials would require a higher success rate... Why? If its better than than the alternatives (including consideration of side effects), why would it need to be completely successful in more than 50% of cases to pass a trial?
- jawns 13y agoIt depends on the percentage of people who show complete tumor regression with existing approaches, and on the relative costs and side effects. For instance, if only 25 percent of people show complete tumor regression with existing approaches, then getting the number up to 50 percent is a huge deal. Or, if the percentage is in line with existing approaches but the cost is much lower, that's another big win.
- im3w1l 13y agoMaybe you could even get 1-(1-0.25)*(1-0.5)=0.625 complete tumour regression with a combined treatment.
- santaclaus 13y agoPresuming that each treatment has an independent chance of success.
- haldujai 13y agoActually it's more than likely that the combination will reduce the chance of success as chemotherapy will wipe out the immune system (generally). Although some groups have shown very preliminary results that the combination may work it has to be given in a specific timeframe (in the order of days) and would work in specific subsets of the population.
- zdean 13y agoThis issue was well-presented and discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6375169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6375169
- Alex3917 13y agoClinical trials only require you to prove your treatment is better than a placebo, you don't need to prove that it's better than existing drugs.