5 ms·

You sound like the doctors on the article that says that "it wouldn't work anyway". I understand that you have a far greater background than I have and I respec

by Novash 17y ago

You sound like the doctors on the article that says that "it wouldn't work anyway". I understand that you have a far greater background than I have and I respect that, but you must keep your mind open. Most of the great anchievements of mankind 'wouldn't work anyway' in the minds of the specialists of the age. And they were wrong. With all due respect, you, giving you background on the matter, can find any technical reason why it wouldn't work? Can any of your colleagues? I am not asking about a real test, just a theorical reason based on everything you know about the field.

marciovm123 17y ago
Very valid points. I'm not saying this kind of work shouldn't be pursued, I just wanted to point out that it is premature to think of this device as a "breakthrough". As I said before, I hope it works, and new approaches are in general a good thing. I just think the way they are reported is more for entertainment purposes then spreading true knowledge. Technically, the idea of killing a tumor w/ a localized toxin is in fact already widely used, not mechanically with tubes but with things like focused X-rays or molecular targeting (drugs that preferentially bind to cancer cells). While this helps, it rarely cures cancer because 1) by the time it is applied cancer cells have circulated throughout the body and seeded new tumors and 2) it's very difficult to kill 100% of cancer cells, and what winds up happening is you kill 99% of them that are most susceptible to being killed by chemo giving the 1% that is most resistant more room to grow. Hence the recurrence is much more difficult to treat.
- berntb 17y ago
  >>it's very difficult to kill 100% of cancer cells, and what winds up happening is you kill 99% of them that are most susceptible to being killed by chemo giving the 1% that is most resistant more room to grow. Hence the recurrence is much more difficult to treat. Isn't the point of a device like this that it can increase the concentration of chemo in tumors while keeping the concentration as low as possible in non-cancerous tissue? Which should help that point (that is, manage to kill off enough cancer cells that the immune system or some other treatment can wipe out any surviving). (As someone else noted, the article referenced some paper supporting doing this method.) Let us all hope this works really well.
- Novash 17y ago
  Now I can see your point. Thanks for the reply. However, this treatment is not only about localized toxin. It has a two-fold approach of both blocking the blood path the tumor is feeding of and using a localized chemo treatment. Wouldn't this approach be more effective than the actual ways? I have another question. Since you claim that localized toxin causes the recurrence to be much more difficult to treat because the 1% that survives is resistant to chemo, wouldn't an unlocalized toxin be much worse because not only it would also not kill these 1% that was resistance, but also it would kill less of those 99% susceptible and would also kill some healthy cells, making the body weaker and the recurrence to occur sooner?
  - marciovm123 17y ago
    sure =). I'm an engineer and not an oncologist so don't quote me on this. The main msg is that treating cancer is really, really hard; as another commenter noted biology is incredibly complicated. multi-pronged approaches do seem to work best; some variation of that already happens. Large tumors are surgically removed, anti-angiogenesis drugs work by blocking new blood vessels from growing, I mentioned some others. The problem is that even the most aggressive combinations of treatments haven't proved to actually work in practice, and death rates for most cancers have barely budged in the last 30 yrs. A reflection of this is that people will pay $50k+ for a drug that will increase life expectancy by a few weeks (or their insurance will, that's another topic). People like me do train their entire lives to improve this, and we are working on many new possibilities, for example tracking circulating tumor cells and figuring out what DNA mutations they have to see if you can make a drug that is targeted towards deactivating whatever fraction of them actually lead to metastatic disease. Look up the National Cancer Institute's nanotechnology in cancer program to see more of this kind of stuff. I don't know what the "unlocalized" side effects are and why things are done that way - I will say any kind of advance in treaments is incredibly difficult to achieve because you have to convince MDs and patients to go with something new when there is a tried and tested method, and it is their lives in the balance.
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      The problem is that even the most aggressive combinations of treatments haven't proved to actually work in practice, and death rates for most cancers have barely budged in the last 30 yrs. [citation needed]
nixme 17y ago
> Most of the great anchievements of mankind 'wouldn't work anyway' in the minds of the specialists of the age. And they were wrong. Really? Care to provide any examples?
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Storage and use of electricity, the lightbulb, the personal computer, the telephone, and the cathode ray tube.
  - Novash 17y ago
    Plus radio, navigation, flight, supersonic flight, space flight, sattelites, computers that break the 1 GHz clock barrier (remember that one?). I daresay everything that was invented since the Greeks owned the world.
    - nixme 17y ago
      Not to draw it out much further, but I don't think a majority of domain experts in a field would (or have in the past) completely discounted the possibility of an invention or achievement. It's usually journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, or self-proclaimed experts who make these types of claims. Are you saying that leading physicists and engineers in the mid-20th century didn't think space flight and satellites were achievable?
      - Novash 17y ago
        You're going too little backwards in time. Spaceflight was proposed in the begining of the 20th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#A_Method_of_Reaching_Extreme_Altitudes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#A_Method_of_R... And yes, it was very criticized at the time but as you said, mainly by the media, as it seems. I doubt, however, that they did it without any backing. And I was wrong about satellites, it seems. I was pretty sure that the idea of using them as communications relay was also dissed, but I couldn't find any references about it. I can, however, give you one solid example of something that was completely discredited by the scientists, which is flight. It was widely believe at the time that no object heavier than the air could fly.
joe_the_user 17y ago
I have worked very, very briefly with medical devices... The main thing to keep in mind is that biology is mind-bogglingly complex. More complex than our human, conscious minds can possible realize. This makes pills, devices and such much less reliable than one would imagine as an engineer inventing things, so the original poster has A point. But... the very complexity of the biology field also means that the received ideas of experts about what is or isn't possible probably aren't right either. Probably, on the average, no one is right. So the experts could easily be wrong in telling you that a given approach will fail ... but it probably will fail anyway, just because most things fails. However, it does seem like machines that rely on external tech might be easier than machines that rely on understanding biology - a machine which just finds and kills cancer cells seems more plausible than something tells the body itself to do something since the machine isn't depending the body to do anything.

by Novash 17y ago

marciovm123 17y ago

Very valid points. I'm not saying this kind of work shouldn't be pursued, I just wanted to point out that it is premature to think of this device as a "breakthrough". As I said before, I hope it works, and new approaches are in general a good thing. I just think the way they are reported is more for entertainment purposes then spreading true knowledge. Technically, the idea of killing a tumor w/ a localized toxin is in fact already widely used, not mechanically with tubes but with things like focused X-rays or molecular targeting (drugs that preferentially bind to cancer cells). While this helps, it rarely cures cancer because 1) by the time it is applied cancer cells have circulated throughout the body and seeded new tumors and 2) it's very difficult to kill 100% of cancer cells, and what winds up happening is you kill 99% of them that are most susceptible to being killed by chemo giving the 1% that is most resistant more room to grow. Hence the recurrence is much more difficult to treat.

berntb 17y ago
>>it's very difficult to kill 100% of cancer cells, and what winds up happening is you kill 99% of them that are most susceptible to being killed by chemo giving the 1% that is most resistant more room to grow. Hence the recurrence is much more difficult to treat. Isn't the point of a device like this that it can increase the concentration of chemo in tumors while keeping the concentration as low as possible in non-cancerous tissue? Which should help that point (that is, manage to kill off enough cancer cells that the immune system or some other treatment can wipe out any surviving). (As someone else noted, the article referenced some paper supporting doing this method.) Let us all hope this works really well.
Novash 17y ago
Now I can see your point. Thanks for the reply. However, this treatment is not only about localized toxin. It has a two-fold approach of both blocking the blood path the tumor is feeding of and using a localized chemo treatment. Wouldn't this approach be more effective than the actual ways? I have another question. Since you claim that localized toxin causes the recurrence to be much more difficult to treat because the 1% that survives is resistant to chemo, wouldn't an unlocalized toxin be much worse because not only it would also not kill these 1% that was resistance, but also it would kill less of those 99% susceptible and would also kill some healthy cells, making the body weaker and the recurrence to occur sooner?
- marciovm123 17y ago
  sure =). I'm an engineer and not an oncologist so don't quote me on this. The main msg is that treating cancer is really, really hard; as another commenter noted biology is incredibly complicated. multi-pronged approaches do seem to work best; some variation of that already happens. Large tumors are surgically removed, anti-angiogenesis drugs work by blocking new blood vessels from growing, I mentioned some others. The problem is that even the most aggressive combinations of treatments haven't proved to actually work in practice, and death rates for most cancers have barely budged in the last 30 yrs. A reflection of this is that people will pay $50k+ for a drug that will increase life expectancy by a few weeks (or their insurance will, that's another topic). People like me do train their entire lives to improve this, and we are working on many new possibilities, for example tracking circulating tumor cells and figuring out what DNA mutations they have to see if you can make a drug that is targeted towards deactivating whatever fraction of them actually lead to metastatic disease. Look up the National Cancer Institute's nanotechnology in cancer program to see more of this kind of stuff. I don't know what the "unlocalized" side effects are and why things are done that way - I will say any kind of advance in treaments is incredibly difficult to achieve because you have to convince MDs and patients to go with something new when there is a tried and tested method, and it is their lives in the balance.
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    The problem is that even the most aggressive combinations of treatments haven't proved to actually work in practice, and death rates for most cancers have barely budged in the last 30 yrs. [citation needed]

nixme 17y ago

> Most of the great anchievements of mankind 'wouldn't work anyway' in the minds of the specialists of the age. And they were wrong. Really? Care to provide any examples?

dcurtis 17y ago
Storage and use of electricity, the lightbulb, the personal computer, the telephone, and the cathode ray tube.
- Novash 17y ago
  Plus radio, navigation, flight, supersonic flight, space flight, sattelites, computers that break the 1 GHz clock barrier (remember that one?). I daresay everything that was invented since the Greeks owned the world.
  - nixme 17y ago
    Not to draw it out much further, but I don't think a majority of domain experts in a field would (or have in the past) completely discounted the possibility of an invention or achievement. It's usually journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, or self-proclaimed experts who make these types of claims. Are you saying that leading physicists and engineers in the mid-20th century didn't think space flight and satellites were achievable?
    - Novash 17y ago
      You're going too little backwards in time. Spaceflight was proposed in the begining of the 20th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#A_Method_of_Reaching_Extreme_Altitudes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#A_Method_of_R... And yes, it was very criticized at the time but as you said, mainly by the media, as it seems. I doubt, however, that they did it without any backing. And I was wrong about satellites, it seems. I was pretty sure that the idea of using them as communications relay was also dissed, but I couldn't find any references about it. I can, however, give you one solid example of something that was completely discredited by the scientists, which is flight. It was widely believe at the time that no object heavier than the air could fly.

joe_the_user 17y ago

I have worked very, very briefly with medical devices... The main thing to keep in mind is that biology is mind-bogglingly complex. More complex than our human, conscious minds can possible realize. This makes pills, devices and such much less reliable than one would imagine as an engineer inventing things, so the original poster has A point. But... the very complexity of the biology field also means that the received ideas of experts about what is or isn't possible probably aren't right either. Probably, on the average, no one is right. So the experts could easily be wrong in telling you that a given approach will fail ... but it probably will fail anyway, just because most things fails. However, it does seem like machines that rely on external tech might be easier than machines that rely on understanding biology - a machine which just finds and kills cancer cells seems more plausible than something tells the body itself to do something since the machine isn't depending the body to do anything.