5 ms·

Great news but bad title as there are no treatments for the common cold.

• cromulent 13y ago
  Your own immune system kills the common cold. That's the point :)
  • ttflee 13y ago
    Yeah, there is no cure for the common cold, except immune system, so far.
• ThomPete 13y ago
  Well there is. Your immune system kills it. Thats what they are referring to here.
  • dekhn 13y ago
    Your own immune system already kills cancer, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunology Your body is constantly surveilling for cancer cells and eliminating them; in doing so, it selects for cells that can evade the immune system. By the time you have large tumors, the cells are already quite good and evading the immune system, at which point your adaptive immunity system can't help you. These scientists are trying to do first-order engineering on the immune cells to make them more effective. We've seen this before in science, with antibiotics. A few major, early wins followed by the long silence of failure, due to second-order adaptation by cells.
    • lsc 13y ago
      >We've seen this before in science, with antibiotics. A few major, early wins followed by the long silence of failure, due to second-order adaptation by cells. I would hardly call antibiotics a "long silence of failure" - they are still pretty goddamn effective, even if they aren't quite as effective as they once were.
      • dekhn 13y ago
        There are also very few new ones, and nearly all the ones we have remaining are becoming less effective. I'm not denying we got some easy wins with penicillin back in the day, or that people can't be treated with antibiotics. But I've been in the medical industry long enough to maintain a very high level of skepticism when it comes to cancer treatment.
    • gmt2027 13y ago
      Are you saying that antibiotics were a failure? While anti-retroviral therapy for HIV/AID does not cure the disease, it has transformed a diagnosis that would otherwise have been a death sentence into a manageable illness. If a "first order" treatment for cancer only extends lives by a few years or even decades, how is that not progress?
      • dekhn 13y ago
        First order treatments typically get you about 6 months, not years or decades.
    • emiliobumachar 13y ago
      "We've seen this before in science, with antibiotics. A few major, early wins followed by the long silence of failure, due to second-order adaptation by cells." But the key difference is that cancer does not pass from person to person, unlike bacteria. All cancer cells die before or with the patient, they don't stick around to "remember" how to defeat the hack. If we do get some major, early wins, they are likely to be very reproducible, indefinitely.
      • dekhn 13y ago
        Tumor cells form populations; within the person, there are many generations of expansion and adaptation. Within that time, they definitely "remember" how to defeat the hack.
        • cLeEOGPw 13y ago
          Yes, but other people are unaffected by that one person. That doesn't mean 100 percent chance of cure, but the chance remains the same for every person.
          • dekhn 13y ago
            you're just pointing out a minor difference in my analogy. in cancer, the "population" is the tumor cells in a single human's body, while with bacteria, the "population" includes invading cells that infect multiple people and carry resistance between them. In both cases, the dividing cells propagate their inherited traits that allow them to evade the immune system or treatment. When you treat a person with a cancer drug, the cancer tumor population evolves (selection and natural variation), when you treat a population with an antibiotic, the bacterial population evolves. That was the point of my analogy.
            • emiliobumachar 13y ago
              The analogy is valid, but the difference is not minor. With infectious disease, if there are ten possible mutations to make the pathogen resistant to treatment, each with a 1% chance of happening within the course of the disease in one patient, then pretty soon all mutations would be present in most of the whole pathogen population on Earth, because of natural selection. With non-infectious diseases such as cancer, in the same scenario, there would be about a 10% chance of the cancer cells developing one or more of the mutations in each patient, period. A tragedy for those 10% of patients, but a cure for the other 90%.
• viame 13y ago
  Title Police. :D