[HN Gopher] Researchers identify 'switch' to activate cancer cel...
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Researchers identify 'switch' to activate cancer cell death
Author : DocFeind
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-11-13 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (health.ucdavis.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (health.ucdavis.edu)
| paulpauper wrote:
| It seems like every week there is a new story about some strategy
| or breakthrough that holds promise to treat or cure cancer, yet
| we're still stuck with the same treatments, mainly chemo,
| surgery, and radiation, and generally low survival rates for
| advanced cancers. Immunotherapy has been hyped for decades yet
| far from being a cure. Maybe one day it will happen.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Look at the incentives. To get funding for research, it's
| easier if you have prior research that supports your proposal.
| Hence a lot of stuff gets written up in very optimistic terms,
| to help get more funding to continue the research. It doesn't
| seem to matter that none of it really works in the end. It's
| also the reason people don't publish failed projects, even
| though from a science perspective those might be helpful to
| identify dead ends.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Anecdata, but I personally know three people who've been given
| an extra 5+ years each due to recent developments in cancer
| treatments (better chemo, to be fair), and I'm not exactly a
| social butterfly.
|
| Not a miracle, but not nothing.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >yet we're still stuck with the same treatments, mainly chemo,
| surgery, and radiation, and generally low survival rates for
| advanced cancers
|
| Survival rates have been increasing for almost all forms of
| cancers so fast that it is astounding. Amazing. Stupendous.
| Heartening.
|
| We've gone from an overall 50% five year survival rate to over
| 70% in just a couple of decades.
|
| The pancreatic cancer five-year survival rate is very low, but
| has tripled since 1999.
|
| When I was born you had a 33% chance of living for five more
| years if you were diagnosed with prostate cancer. Today you
| have a ~90% chance.
|
| I don't know why people think nothing is changing.
| m463 wrote:
| I think it's like voice recognition, which was overhyped in
| the 90's, then quietly made its way into phone trees, and
| cars, and now phones so it quietly works everywhere now. I
| think it used to miss a lot of stuff in the beginning, and
| that is conflated with missing words occasionally nowadays
| even though the field has advanced tremendously. which might
| be analogous to fighting cancer.
|
| I personally know many people who have gotten and then gotten
| over cancer.
| wpasc wrote:
| I agree that much is changing in cancer therapy, most
| promisingly around immunotherapies and other immune related
| strategies, but the 5 year survival rate change over decades
| is often attributed to earlier detection as opposed to
| improved treatments.
| elromulous wrote:
| > I don't know why people think nothing is changing.
|
| It's because people expect a cure the likes of a vaccine,
| with >95% efficacy.
|
| But it's not entirely their fault, the media all but says
| "they've cured cancer!" every other day.
|
| When you expect a cure, increasing five year survival rate by
| 10% falls short.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Maybe mentioning vaccines efficacy is not very on point
| with the past few years track record
| cnasc wrote:
| How much of this is due to better detection of cancer? If we
| discover cancers earlier but still don't have effective
| treatment I'd expect the 5-year survival rate to go up even
| though the actual death day never changed.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| which is still fine.
|
| its part of the stack. earlier detection and improved
| treatments is a very important area.
|
| we still are absolutely failing in _preventing_ those same
| cancers from reoccuring because we don 't know the sequence
| of triggers or how to prevent them. like, we might know the
| trigger, but we don't know why one body really becomes more
| susceptible to them aside from sometimes behavioral or
| genetic probabilities. hence why we still focus on
| remission instead of cured, since the body still remains in
| a state of susceptibility to the same thing and is exposed
| to the same unknown things, and doesn't revert back to a
| baseline of not being so.
| tiahura wrote:
| Except we're spending $50k+ on many of these treatments.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > its part of the stack. earlier detection and improved
| treatments is a very important area.
|
| Earlier detection is important but mortality is a better
| metric than 5-year survival. People tend to conflate the
| two. If earlier detection doesn't decrease mortality then
| it's just goosing the 5-year numbers.
|
| This is especially true in geriatric cancers,
| particularly for example prostate cancers, where most of
| them are slow growing and not particularly dangerous.
| You'll outlive the cancer, so knowing about it doesn't
| mean, well, anything, other than exposing you to risky
| tests with serious side-effects. Prostate biopsy is
| really not great.
|
| No-treatment is a great choice in these cases, so really,
| the detection is all downside, no upside for asymptomatic
| cases. [1]
|
| [1] https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/older-prostate-
| cancer-pat...
| ekianjo wrote:
| > had a 33% chance of living for five more years if you were
| diagnosed with prostate cancer.
|
| This is patently false. Only late stage prostate cancers are
| killers. In most cases you catch them early on.
| golergka wrote:
| > Only late stage prostate cancers are killers. In most
| cases you catch them early on.
|
| That doesn't contradict the claim you're replying to.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those things are happening. However it is a decade at best from
| something in a lab to something in general use. That is at
| best, quite often things work in a lab, but don't work in the
| real world. sometimes not work means it works, but the side
| effects are worse than current treatments (or even worse than
| doing nothing!) Sometimes it works on a sub group of people and
| we need more time to figure out who/why it works on and then
| target those people.
|
| if you look at day to day or even year to year it looks like
| things are not moving. However if you look at decades things
| have gotten much better.
| murphyslab wrote:
| One aspect of the problem in talking about "cancer" is that
| we're talking about a large collection of diseases, not a
| singular disease or phenomenon:
|
| > cancer is actually an umbrella term for scores of different
| diseases--each with its own unique characteristics and, often,
| unique treatment needs
|
| https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/10/cancer-i...
|
| So every time I read a headline about a new cancer treatment, I
| think of it as chipping away at one small rock in a giant field
| of rocks that we're trying to turn into dust. The university
| "public affairs" (PR) department may talk about about that
| small rock as if it were all rocks or all one big rock, and as
| if the chip was a giant blow. PR people talk like that because
| their job isn't to convey truth; the PR job is to generate news
| buzz for the university. So unless you have the time and energy
| to read those papers, it's best to ignore what the PR people
| say and just to imagine that picture.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think this is aggressively wrong. First, chemo, surgery, and
| radiation have advanced dramatically over the years. Chemo is
| an umbrella term for quite a lot of treatments and isn't some
| single drug like Tylenol.
|
| CAR-T has been effective in treating advanced cancers of
| certain types and solid tumor CAR-T is advancing fast.
|
| Cancer is probably one of the most complex problems we've ever
| tackled with expectation of success. I think it's considerably
| harder than quantum computing or other nascent technologies.
| Further I think we are building fundamental understandings of
| life itself that leads to enormous adjacent benefits, most
| especially in aging and longevity.
|
| It's also not a single disease. It's a description of a
| behavior of cells in the body that leads to certain outcomes.
| The causes, mechanisms, etc, are all specific to the cell
| types, of which there are many, the individual, and random
| chance. That makes the problem domain almost infinitely
| complex, so finding a way through it is hard already. But add
| onto it that cancer cells _are you_ eliminating them without
| eliminating you is absurdly hard, and leaving even a small
| number behind risks a relapse that is resistant to the prior
| treatments because a few cells happened to have a random
| mutation that protected them.
|
| All this said, I think cancer treatment will be a domino effect
| discovery. We will slog along reading these elusive yet
| promising articles until one day, we have done enough of the
| discovery and exploration, and things will be very different
| very quickly. Similar to AI - I wouldn't have predicted
| generative AI would have effectively solved NLP two years ago,
| despite tons of promising headlines and articles for the last
| 50 years.
| paulirwin wrote:
| > we're still stuck with the same treatments
|
| Take a look at CAR T-cell therapy, used for Leukemia and blood
| cancers (and mentioned in this article). The first trials were
| happening around 2011, and now there are several FDA-approved
| therapies using this breakthrough. LLS notes [1]: "In some
| studies, up to 90 percent of children and adults with B-ALL
| whose disease had either relapsed multiple times, or failed to
| respond to standard therapies, achieved remission after
| receiving CAR T-cell therapy." These are people that would have
| died 10+ years ago.
|
| My younger brother passed away from ALL in 2012 after a
| clinical trial for one of these treatments didn't work. His
| participation in the trial, even with the unsuccessful result,
| helped further the research that is now saving lives that
| weren't saved before.
|
| CAR T-cell therapy is perhaps the most powerful breakthrough
| against blood cancer in history. Now, it might be able to
| tackle other cancers as well. We're making progress. Of course
| we all want it to go faster, but it's happening.
|
| 1: https://www.lls.org/treatment/types-
| treatment/immunotherapy/...
| philjohn wrote:
| Immunotherapy has come along and shown promise - I know someone
| who is still alive almost 15 years later who initially
| presented with metastatic melanoma.
| oooyay wrote:
| > yet we're still stuck with the same treatments, mainly chemo,
| surgery, and radiation, and generally low survival rates for
| advanced cancers.
|
| I disagree. Growing up in my teens that was certainly true, but
| my fathers been battling stage 4 prostate cancer for a little
| over a decade and had few if any side effects from the
| treatments. There is a whole line of targeted chemotherapies
| you can take one after another after another when one stops
| being effective. On the other hand this can be perceived as a
| slow march to death from the flu eventually. It was stated to
| him ten years ago that he likely won't die from cancer. He's
| now on the last medication he will likely take, which addresses
| pancreatic cancer that is derived from prostate cancer.
|
| What I will argue is archaic is how long his doctor ignored
| rising PSA levels due to some magical number that the insurance
| company would not act before. At that time, the only route he
| had was removal of his entire prostate which causes _a lot_ of
| quality of life issues. Since then they 've developed more
| targeted treatments but I don't know that they're training
| family practitioners adequately yet still.
| SmoothBrain12 wrote:
| Click bait with this 1 easy switch!
| sp0rk wrote:
| Is the content of the article not exactly what the headline
| says?
| jquery wrote:
| So have cancer cells... in fact I believe that's the problem.
| verdverm wrote:
| Cell division is imperfect, pretty much impossible to avoid
| mutation and loss over the lifetime of an organism. This
| compounds over time and is the reason most cancers are later in
| life
| postalrat wrote:
| Many animals seem resistance to cancer. Including big animals
| like whales where you'd think if was simply statistics on
| cell division they would be more likely to get cancer.
| esturk wrote:
| But size/height does play a role in humans. For example,
| shorter people tend to live longer average lifespans.[1]
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12586217/
| rindalir wrote:
| I know that these kind of write-ups by universities tend to
| overstate the importance of research. However, it's nice to see a
| write up that at least on the surface goes into some fairly
| interesting detail and actually does NOT seem to overstate the
| significance or imply this will result in a single cure for
| cancer in just a few easy steps.
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(page generated 2023-11-13 23:00 UTC)