Iron Spike: Really exciting stuff happening in oncology, y'all. A doctor with glioblastoma—an aggressive brain cancer that kills most patients less than a year after diagnosis—has now been cancer-free for a year, thanks to a world-first personalized vaccine. www.bbc.com/news/world-a...

Really exciting stuff happening in oncology, y'all. A doctor with glioblastoma—an aggressive brain cancer that kills most patients less than a year after diagnosis—has now been cancer-free for a year, thanks to a world-first personalized vaccine. www.bbc.com/news/world-a...

Richard Scolyer: Top doctor remains brain cancer-free after a yearwww.bbc.com Richard Scolyer has undergone a new treatment for glioblastoma, based on his own melanoma research.

Vaccines trained to fight an individual patient's specific cancer have been the Holy Grail of oncology for years, and now this, coupled with the recent bladder cancer vaccine, may be the first hints of an amazing future.

Soothly, we live in mighty years.

tfw a james bond doomsday weapon is good in real life

Well I mean if I get superpowers that a bonus as well.

what bladder cancer vaccine, do you have a link at hand?

One of the best people I have ever known died earlier this year from complications related to glioblastoma. The sooner it's a solved problem, the better.

Crispr and vaccines might be a way forward. But I'll just warn everyone: cancer will adjust.

cancer isn’t a virus, it doesn’t evolve. it is an accident of cellular malfunction.

This is true, but it's also true that the more we learn to save people from the more common forms of malfunction, the more we'll get to see the LESS common forms of malfunction (because people are dying less)

yeah but everybody dies. that's true of literally every intervention ever. making the doctors delivering babies wash their hands before sticking them inside = more cancer deaths, guaranteed.

Yes- years back I had a conversation with an epidemiologist who said, essentially, curing cancer tomorrow will probably only raise life expectancy by a few years. Heart disease and other things would quickly take up the slack. Still, a massive win in my book!

When we figure out how to grow new hearts and fix atherosclerosis, my anxiety will get SO much better...

Even assuming we don’t make strides in other areas as well, I will take a heart attack over cancer any day. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks about this stuff obsessively

It can evolve, though it's not able to spread those evolutions outside of its host. Surely you've heard of stories of someone who got chemotherapy, it went into remission, but when it came back, the cancer wasn't responsive to chemo at all?

Some small number of cancer cells resistant to that particular chemotherapy survived. When they regrow, that resistance is now heavily represented in the cancer cells. The tumor quite literally evolved due to selective pressure, even if that evolution is forever localized to the patient's body.

the equivalent model isn't a virus, but literally any other disease… even blood pressure medication can sometimes stop working because the body is a complex system. "cancer will adjust" to new treatments is not true at all. no cancer treatment has become steadily less useful on a population.

sigh

It's complicated and it does evolve youtu.be/uoJwt9l-XhQ?...

not in a way that "cancer [as a whole] will adjust [to new treatments]" in the way the statement implied, as if it were a virus or bacteria, affecting a population, becoming resistant. any given cancer in a given person may or may not be eradicated by a given treatment, but Cancer will not Adjust

Ah, yeah that is very true. I skipped over that nuance.

Which part of why this treatment is so appealing since it takes a whole of body approach. A more complete and aggressive approach means less likelihood of surviving cancer.

Sigh.

Cancers don't evolve. Cancer occurs when cells malfunction or are damaged they mutate in harmful ways.

Thank you tech dude with a small follower account. I know, I know I should be more specific since there’s been so many of these who try to lecture me.

You should be much more specific. As people age more rare cancers will be more prevalent, and we'll see more cancers resistant to the current treatments. But the important part is for most of the population this will happen later in life, more people will have more healthy years.

That should have been clear from my previous post.

Yeah it was to some of us :)

I think we’re going to look back on chemo and radiation in 50 years that way we look at surgery without anesthesia now

Agreed. There’s a scene in Star Trek 4 that is about exactly this.

I was going to post that and then saw you] reference it 😄

Also…

Bones wasn’t a big fan of 20th century medicine…

“Sounds like the goddamn SPANISH INQUISITION to me”

I've never been more excited about the prospect of needing to find a new career path

Simultaneously super excited about the science and dreading the end results if we don’t get the profit motive out of healthcare

Exciting, and not just for cancer patients. This would crack a lot of stuff wide open. I've said for a while that when we cure cancer that the "curing cancer" bit will historically end up as a footnote.

Right? Curing cancer, nice, but will likely come with things like “curing autoimmunity” and “understanding how our immune system actually works in relation to itself”.

yeah! like, that is the future i was promised, and i would like it please! that is way cool!

Or curing aging 🤞

Bigger; curing or alleviating a lot of mental illnesses, which are deeply entangled with the immune system.

The article fails to mention this is done with mRna which is really weird. Friend of mine is a genetic researcher and said the mRna/Crisper combo is one of the biggest advances since the discovery of antibiotics.

Remember reading a couple reports last year about other cancer treatments involving mRNA, one of which involved coding and injecting cells that would trigger the immune system to attack tumors, bc the way tumors are built makes them essentially disguised to our system.

That's exactly how it works. This is the customized vaccine they're talking about. It's fast. We could have had a covid vaccine deployed by march 2020. The delay was FDA approval. Crisper to vaccine with sample is something like 72 hours. It's really fast.

My wife's been undergoing treatment for glioblastoma for about 6 months, and what I'd add from experience is that the current state of treatment is pretty amazing, but glioblastoma is an unpredictable type of tumor. Having another treatment to add on top of the others is a welcome change.

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