7 ms·

Graduate student takes a problem-solving approach to his brain cancer

69 points by user_235711 12y ago

jbob2000 12y ago
He 3d printed his brain tumor because his doctors gave him access to his health data. Such problem solving!
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  You jest, but this is not the first time a 3D printed tumor has allowed for doctors to better solve the problem: "Man Saves Wife’s Sight by 3D Printing Her Tumor. When his wife was misdiagnosed, Michael Balzer used 3D printing and imaging to get her well" http://makezine.com/magazine/hands-on-health-care/ http://makezine.com/magazine/hands-on-health-care/ With your own health data and access becoming easier to revolutionary medical advancements, you should expect to see more stories like this. You are your own best health advocate, and your time is worth more than a single doctor's experience. You can dig longer and further than someone who needs to get you in and out in 15-30 minutes. EDIT: A good example is my wife's endometriosis. There is no cure, just treatment. I'm working on a non-profit program to have genetic testing done for volunteers to isolate the parts of the genome responsible for endometriosis (statistical analysis; just like 23andme does) so that research can move to removing the responsible genome section using the recently discovered CRISPR protocol: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-crispr-technology-precise-genetic-ethical.html http://phys.org/news/2015-03-crispr-technology-precise-genet...
- chatmasta 12y ago
  My girlfriend is basing her entire PhD around spatial modeling of tumors. It's not as simple as you would expect. She's actually working in a physics lab despite being in a bioinformatics program because the PI is focused on material packing research. Turns out physics does impact cancer! Understanding how cells and populations of cells grow, from a 3 dimensional and spatial perspective, is a fundamental step in understanding our biology because it's research rooted in math and the real world. What do cells actually, physically look like, and how do they interact? These are questions biologists barely have the answers to, if they have them at all, and only recently have we unlocked the ability to try to answer them. Cancer research is a main beneficiary of super computing because it allows us to build simulations much closer to reality than we previously could. Don't take the ability to 3d print a tumor for granted!
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    Tumors are also, sadly, the less scary subcase of cancer. Single tumors can be targeted, shrunk, and often taken out. It's the undetectable "lucky" cells that might survive chemo and radiation that make the disease so hard to fight (because, as with antibiotic resistance, they've now been selected for resistance to the drugs/radiation).
- shas3 12y ago
  If you are pointing out how university news departments are hype machines, you are right. I've seen that this is particularly true of MIT. I don't track these things, but I've seen too many over-hyped research stories coming out of MIT news and Tech Review. Granted, they're not the same organizations, but somehow they both have this common trait.
- xxcode 12y ago
  yes - this is the kind of BS that I alluded to because he is working with Neri Oxman. Neri is an architect who says her work is 'biologically inspired'. BS Central.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Is there any reason why we don't do full-body scans on a regular basis? Is it too much radiation? It seems to me that (a) this is the only way to deal with silent cancers like many pancreatic kinds that are discovered at Stage IV (at which point, the prognosis is terrible) and (b) it would be cheaper to do the scans than to deal with the (expensive, and often ineffective) late stage cancers. I'd imagine that there was a time when this was impractical because of the amount of radiation involved, but is that still the case? Don't we have extremely low-radiation X-ray devices that can make regular full-body scans a reality?
- toufka 12y ago
  Scanning is still fairly invasive (w.r.t. radiation/dosages). And in general, the better the resolution, the more damaging. The bigger reason we don't continually scan people is that everyone has all sorts of little cancerous growths that are entirely benign. They would show up on these scans and freak people out. And often the overreaction of invasively removing those tiny little benign cancers can cause more problems. Don't misuse or abuse this information, but in general the 'abnormal growths' in a person are just that. They do very little and are just little bugs in the system. But the overall system is capable of dealing with them. It's the rare kind that is able to get around the entire body's defenses. But unfortunately it's difficult to tell which/when that happens. But again, if you took whole body scans all the time, and tried to root out all those little growths, you'd cause a lot more harm than good.
  - mikecsh 12y ago
    >Scanning is still fairly invasive (w.r.t. radiation/dosages). And in general, the better the resolution, the more damaging. This guy had MRI scans which don't rely on ionising radiation and have no known adverse effects. >everyone has all sorts of little cancerous growths that are entirely benign When discussing tumours, cancerous and benign mean different things. You cannot have a benign cancerous growth. I think the main reason people aren't scanned routinely is due to the enormous cost of the scanning and the data analysis that currently relies on physicians for interpretation. My personal view is that with ever decreasing costs of MRI and improvements in computer vision and diagnostic algorithms, this could become a viable process in the future. As for not over-treating, that is a physician led decision - just because there is an anomaly on the scan does not mean that it will be removed or even necessarily treated at all.
nickysielicki 12y ago
Not the best place to vent this but having a conversation with my mother the other day about cancer sent my mind racing. I don't think cancer will cured for a very long time. She had watched some evening news show talking about injecting polio into cancer cells, which is some really cool research [1], but in explaining it to me it brought my attention that she held some serious misunderstandings of what cancer is. She said something like, "They would inject polio into the cells so that the body would recognize the cancer as foreign, because for some reason our bodies don't recognize cancer as foreign." I just wonder how many people have absolutely no idea that cancer is just a damaged cell behaving naturally. It's not foreign. And with that in mind, it's kind of ridiculous to think we can do some kind of checksum of DNA at a cellular level, for every cell, for everyone. Cancer is here to stay, because it's as fundamental to life as aging and growing. [1]: http://www.cancer.duke.edu/btc/modules/Research3/index.php?id=41 http://www.cancer.duke.edu/btc/modules/Research3/index.php?i...
- dekhn 12y ago
  actually, tumors are being immunosurveilled constantly, and when the immune system identifies those cells, it tries very hard to eliminate them. The immune system doesn't know or care that the cells are "foreign", just that the cells have properties, or tags that correlate with properties, that make those cells dangerous. While I generally agree there will be no single silver bullet technology by which we "cure all cancer" in a general way with little to no side effects, I think it's not inconcievable that improving our ability to identify potentially damaging our cells will contribute a lot to keeping people cancer-free. And while I also generally agree that cancer is inextricably intertwined with tissue growth, as an existence "proof", cancer has never been observed in naked mole rats; this observation alone is significant.
  - nickysielicki 12y ago
    Wow thanks for commenting, the bit about the naked mole rats is really interesting. Can you explain the significance of injecting polio into cancer cells? Is it just to make the immune system definitely see that the cell is bad?
acoravos 12y ago
The MIT article is heartening, but Steven's speech about his experience is even better. If you have 12 minutes to watch it -- it's worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-WFukOARU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-WFukOARU
- guru_meditation 12y ago
  The talk was both profoundly touching, informative and surprisingly cheerfully optimistic. He really did convince me that MIT and Harvard are some of the best places to be at if you have cancer in terms of resources. A highlight from that talk was the state of the art robotic surgery facility at Brigham and Women's neurosurgery dept. http://www.brighamandwomens.org/departments_and_services/neurosurgery/default.aspx http://www.brighamandwomens.org/departments_and_services/neu... He got operated on by one of the best neurosurgeons specializing in glioma (his condition): http://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/886 http://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/886
u23KDd23 12y ago
One symptom, phantosmia, is the only information he needed to suspect seizures or cancer.
xxcode 12y ago
The problem here is that he is joining Neri's group. Neri is an architect who tries to design articles inspired by biology. It's all wishy washy with her (at-least from the science perspective). So all that enthusiasm is going to Zilch, unless he wants to be a brain skeumorphia artist. Again, this might inspire some awesome things, but maybe not traditional science research. I think most of HN can buy that.

69 points by user_235711 12y ago

jbob2000 12y ago

He 3d printed his brain tumor because his doctors gave him access to his health data. Such problem solving!

toomuchtodo 12y ago
You jest, but this is not the first time a 3D printed tumor has allowed for doctors to better solve the problem: "Man Saves Wife’s Sight by 3D Printing Her Tumor. When his wife was misdiagnosed, Michael Balzer used 3D printing and imaging to get her well" http://makezine.com/magazine/hands-on-health-care/ http://makezine.com/magazine/hands-on-health-care/ With your own health data and access becoming easier to revolutionary medical advancements, you should expect to see more stories like this. You are your own best health advocate, and your time is worth more than a single doctor's experience. You can dig longer and further than someone who needs to get you in and out in 15-30 minutes. EDIT: A good example is my wife's endometriosis. There is no cure, just treatment. I'm working on a non-profit program to have genetic testing done for volunteers to isolate the parts of the genome responsible for endometriosis (statistical analysis; just like 23andme does) so that research can move to removing the responsible genome section using the recently discovered CRISPR protocol: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-crispr-technology-precise-genetic-ethical.html http://phys.org/news/2015-03-crispr-technology-precise-genet...
chatmasta 12y ago
My girlfriend is basing her entire PhD around spatial modeling of tumors. It's not as simple as you would expect. She's actually working in a physics lab despite being in a bioinformatics program because the PI is focused on material packing research. Turns out physics does impact cancer! Understanding how cells and populations of cells grow, from a 3 dimensional and spatial perspective, is a fundamental step in understanding our biology because it's research rooted in math and the real world. What do cells actually, physically look like, and how do they interact? These are questions biologists barely have the answers to, if they have them at all, and only recently have we unlocked the ability to try to answer them. Cancer research is a main beneficiary of super computing because it allows us to build simulations much closer to reality than we previously could. Don't take the ability to 3d print a tumor for granted!
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  Tumors are also, sadly, the less scary subcase of cancer. Single tumors can be targeted, shrunk, and often taken out. It's the undetectable "lucky" cells that might survive chemo and radiation that make the disease so hard to fight (because, as with antibiotic resistance, they've now been selected for resistance to the drugs/radiation).
shas3 12y ago
If you are pointing out how university news departments are hype machines, you are right. I've seen that this is particularly true of MIT. I don't track these things, but I've seen too many over-hyped research stories coming out of MIT news and Tech Review. Granted, they're not the same organizations, but somehow they both have this common trait.
xxcode 12y ago
yes - this is the kind of BS that I alluded to because he is working with Neri Oxman. Neri is an architect who says her work is 'biologically inspired'. BS Central.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Is there any reason why we don't do full-body scans on a regular basis? Is it too much radiation? It seems to me that (a) this is the only way to deal with silent cancers like many pancreatic kinds that are discovered at Stage IV (at which point, the prognosis is terrible) and (b) it would be cheaper to do the scans than to deal with the (expensive, and often ineffective) late stage cancers. I'd imagine that there was a time when this was impractical because of the amount of radiation involved, but is that still the case? Don't we have extremely low-radiation X-ray devices that can make regular full-body scans a reality?

toufka 12y ago
Scanning is still fairly invasive (w.r.t. radiation/dosages). And in general, the better the resolution, the more damaging. The bigger reason we don't continually scan people is that everyone has all sorts of little cancerous growths that are entirely benign. They would show up on these scans and freak people out. And often the overreaction of invasively removing those tiny little benign cancers can cause more problems. Don't misuse or abuse this information, but in general the 'abnormal growths' in a person are just that. They do very little and are just little bugs in the system. But the overall system is capable of dealing with them. It's the rare kind that is able to get around the entire body's defenses. But unfortunately it's difficult to tell which/when that happens. But again, if you took whole body scans all the time, and tried to root out all those little growths, you'd cause a lot more harm than good.
- mikecsh 12y ago
  >Scanning is still fairly invasive (w.r.t. radiation/dosages). And in general, the better the resolution, the more damaging. This guy had MRI scans which don't rely on ionising radiation and have no known adverse effects. >everyone has all sorts of little cancerous growths that are entirely benign When discussing tumours, cancerous and benign mean different things. You cannot have a benign cancerous growth. I think the main reason people aren't scanned routinely is due to the enormous cost of the scanning and the data analysis that currently relies on physicians for interpretation. My personal view is that with ever decreasing costs of MRI and improvements in computer vision and diagnostic algorithms, this could become a viable process in the future. As for not over-treating, that is a physician led decision - just because there is an anomaly on the scan does not mean that it will be removed or even necessarily treated at all.

nickysielicki 12y ago

Not the best place to vent this but having a conversation with my mother the other day about cancer sent my mind racing. I don't think cancer will cured for a very long time. She had watched some evening news show talking about injecting polio into cancer cells, which is some really cool research [1], but in explaining it to me it brought my attention that she held some serious misunderstandings of what cancer is. She said something like, "They would inject polio into the cells so that the body would recognize the cancer as foreign, because for some reason our bodies don't recognize cancer as foreign." I just wonder how many people have absolutely no idea that cancer is just a damaged cell behaving naturally. It's not foreign. And with that in mind, it's kind of ridiculous to think we can do some kind of checksum of DNA at a cellular level, for every cell, for everyone. Cancer is here to stay, because it's as fundamental to life as aging and growing. [1]: http://www.cancer.duke.edu/btc/modules/Research3/index.php?id=41 http://www.cancer.duke.edu/btc/modules/Research3/index.php?i...

dekhn 12y ago
actually, tumors are being immunosurveilled constantly, and when the immune system identifies those cells, it tries very hard to eliminate them. The immune system doesn't know or care that the cells are "foreign", just that the cells have properties, or tags that correlate with properties, that make those cells dangerous. While I generally agree there will be no single silver bullet technology by which we "cure all cancer" in a general way with little to no side effects, I think it's not inconcievable that improving our ability to identify potentially damaging our cells will contribute a lot to keeping people cancer-free. And while I also generally agree that cancer is inextricably intertwined with tissue growth, as an existence "proof", cancer has never been observed in naked mole rats; this observation alone is significant.
- nickysielicki 12y ago
  Wow thanks for commenting, the bit about the naked mole rats is really interesting. Can you explain the significance of injecting polio into cancer cells? Is it just to make the immune system definitely see that the cell is bad?

acoravos 12y ago

The MIT article is heartening, but Steven's speech about his experience is even better. If you have 12 minutes to watch it -- it's worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-WFukOARU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-WFukOARU

guru_meditation 12y ago
The talk was both profoundly touching, informative and surprisingly cheerfully optimistic. He really did convince me that MIT and Harvard are some of the best places to be at if you have cancer in terms of resources. A highlight from that talk was the state of the art robotic surgery facility at Brigham and Women's neurosurgery dept. http://www.brighamandwomens.org/departments_and_services/neurosurgery/default.aspx http://www.brighamandwomens.org/departments_and_services/neu... He got operated on by one of the best neurosurgeons specializing in glioma (his condition): http://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/886 http://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/886

u23KDd23 12y ago

One symptom, phantosmia, is the only information he needed to suspect seizures or cancer.

xxcode 12y ago

The problem here is that he is joining Neri's group. Neri is an architect who tries to design articles inspired by biology. It's all wishy washy with her (at-least from the science perspective). So all that enthusiasm is going to Zilch, unless he wants to be a brain skeumorphia artist. Again, this might inspire some awesome things, but maybe not traditional science research. I think most of HN can buy that.