186 points | by ranit5 days ago
This particular work came out of at least 3 NIH grants and indirectly relies on a whole lot more.
A dead comment says this is all a myth but from somebody in the trenches...it's not. No access to the Federal Register means no meetings to evaluate grants, which means no more grants going out at all.
I think it's still important to call both them, and your Republican reps. They keep track of how many people call on issues, and what side they take. I think a lot of reps are worried about retaliation from the POTUS, and the only thing that gives them ammunition is constituents on their side.
As they should be, everyone from the GOP who has ever crossed the golden boy was destroyed by him. And now he has the richest man in the world to finance a campaign to destroy them.
The constituents matter far less to them than those two things. They made a Faustian bargain, and they care about keeping their jobs, which means doing what he tells them, not what you tell them.
>> Over seven years that followed the therapy, 12 patients died due to relapsed neuroblastoma. Among the seven that survived beyond this point, five were cancer-free when given the CAR T-cell therapy but had previously been treated for neuroblastoma using other approaches and were at high risk of relapse. All five were disease-free at their last follow-up, between 10 and 15 years after the CAR T-cell therapy, although the team note they may already have been cured when the therapy was administered.
But chemo is general, it doesn't specialize. So thus, the new chemo called ADCs (anti-body drug conjugates), are really nice. They target AREAS and release generally.
The five year survival rate for stage 3 triple negative breast cancer is normally about ~60% but the clinical trials show with immunotherapy it exceeds 80%. So the survival rates you see online aren't capturing the progress we are making with these drugs. Hashimotos seems worth the risk.
An interesting aside is that the patients in the clinical trials who had adverse reactions to immunotherapy and came off the medication had higher survival rates than patients who stayed on it. The hypothesis is that stimulating an immune system overreaction also means it was also highly effective against the cancer.
Additionally, if there is enough similar cancers we can know the rate of spontaneous remission within a particular band of time. This would be much lower than spontaneous remission at any time so that a spontaneous remission at the specific time of treatment could be a rather unlikely event and start to look like decent evidence.
Not disagreeing that cancer treatment isn't a shit show but I would suggest that such evidence cannot be easily dismissed due to the lack of the gold standard large scale double blind study.
Now I'm not saying that the small time practitioners are always correct, in fact they are mostly wrong. But they deserve some investigation.
> "The other two surviving patients had cancer that was actively growing or spreading when they received CAR T-cell therapy, but subsequently went into complete remission. One of these patients stopped participating in follow-up sessions eight years after treatment, but the other continued and has remained cancer-free more than 18 years."
Based on these statements, the evidence for this treatment is anecdotal at best. Only 2/27 patients lived longer than 7 years.
(There are probably more advancements in the last 10-15 years that have increased efficacy)
people should be investing a lot more in early stage drug discovery biotechs! A lot more!!! (I'm doing an early stage drug discovery biotech)
Full Disclosure: I am an investor in LEAH Labs.
From what I've heard the bottleneck for CAR-T is the lack of technicians who can do the work and automation it make more effective use of the technicians and their time.
It seems like there is a clear path to decreasing the cost of this.
Perhaps I am missing something because to me, going 18 years without cancer after having cancer and going through treatment is...expected? Does canceer treatment not actually get rid of the cancer or something like that?
Its no different than taking a pill for high cholesterol you are not cured of the disease .
When illness originates outside the body, it's usually possible to completely kill/eradicate it, at which point you're "cured." But some things either linger forever (certain viruses, like how chicken pox can come back as shingles) or originate inside your own body (cancer, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis). In the latter case, treatment makes it possible to return to a baseline normal, but there's no guarantee it's all the way gone or won't ever return, so we say it's in remission rather than cured. Cancer lurks; autoimmune diseases go dormant but don't die.
(One autoimmune exception: if you have ulcerative colitis, completely removing your colon cures most people, since the problem lies in that specific organ. But that goes to show how drastic a true cure is!)
There are also some conditions, notably MS, that are described as "relapsing/remitting" because they alternate between periods of relapse and remission. So you'll feel fine for a while, then the symptoms come back, then they go away again, etc.
https://www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrna-vaccines-fight-pancreati...
My family member was ineligible for the trial due to requiring chemo before surgery due to ca19-9 markers being above the limit for surgery eligibility.
Here are some of my observations as someone forced to the outside:
I read the 2017 and phase i papers.
They are both very mathy and talk more about the life spans of their induced T cells than their patients.
Looks like phase i was 19 patients (16 given the vaccine), 2 recurred, one died, they seem to want to blame the patients’ immune system.
The study is: surgery, vaccine, then 12 cycles of chemo regiment, then vaccine booster.
I was frustrated to see a lack of any search results for “diet”, “nutrition”, “sugar”, “glutamine”, in either paper.
I think the mathy science is cool, and a necessary component, but focusing on pharmaceutical solutions and calculating their efficacy based on if their intended biological reaction occurred, seemingly oblivious of, or defiantly ignoring, lifestyle change appears misguided.
Diet and exercise is insufficient on its own, but due to the vast differences in individual diets, studies like these should include lifestyle requirements as a control.
Especially if they are going to point at a patients immune system.
Diet effects on both immune system function and specifically targeting cancers is uncontroversial and scientifically supported.
Why are these two research efforts so siloed from each other?!
We'll probably start seeing more and more mixing of traditional or cutting edge treatments like chemo, radiation, and immunotherapy with having the right lifestyle choices to have a stronger immune system. There is research being done, even if limited.
Another interesting thing I'd like to see more research done on is metabolic therapy. Not just having a diet to boost the immune system, but targeting the metabolism of cancer cells. The Warburg effect[0] means a lot of cancer depends on glucose and glutamine for energy. Some researchers have tried using a ketogenic diet to reduce glucose, since normal cells can survive without it, plus using drugs to temporarily drop glutamine levels with the hope that the cancer cells starve first.
I see this sort of sentiment a lot on this forum: it’s only “science” if it’s pharmaceutical, (see: any thread about semaglutides) when in reality cancer response to diet research is well trodden, and I would argue the better science.
Better science because it has stronger controls on variables.
When you read about diet research the patients are all given the same pharmaceutical regiment and the variable is the diet, whereas on the flip side the diets of the patients are completely ignored.
That’s bad science. It may be great research, but it’s still bad science.
It’d be like the diet researchers allowing the patients to choose their own doses for the pharmaceutical side of their treatment, which would be an absurd confounding variable.
Cancer cell metabolism is thoroughly researched.
The leading cause of death is heart disease, and the leading cause of heart disease is build up of fatty deposits, ie diet.
I’m unsure why people act surprised that the same factors play into the body’s ability to respond to cancer.
Read a study on chemo from the 90s and tell me what’s more “quackery”: the pharmaceuticals they tried back then that now would result in a malpractice suit if given to a patient today, or the diet guidelines that have remained consistent over the same time period?
I made it clear in my op that both are necessary, I just want the pharmaceutical side to acknowledge that reality too.