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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate the down-to-earth-ness of this interview, this man is being very honest. It's good not to create false hope and present cancer immunotherapy (yet perhaps) as the thing that will cure any cancer.

However, it is the only real curative treatment next to surgery and really the only treatment that can cure metastatic cancer. At the moment though, only in small percentage of people with specific cancers (mostly melanoma, skin cancers.) So there certainly is reason to be excited, the cancer field is all over this at the moment so advances in the near future can be expected.

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My mother in law is in this therapy right now. The doctors were surprised it isn't working (prior chemo worked pretty well giving her another year of life, once it stopped they switched her to this treatment). They're looking at hospice care right now.

When the cancer gets to stage 4, you're looking at when not if the cancer is going to kill you. So to everyone you know that doesn't get regular checkups, encourage them to do so. Both my parents have had cancer but it was caught early, my mother in law never went to a doctor after having her last kid ~25 years ago.

I have a dumb question but ... how do you know when to check? I suppose I should google that. AFAIK doctors don't generally check until you show some kind of symptom (no idea what those symptoms are)

I also remember a Ted talk about a high school student who designed a way to test for any cancer for $0.01 per test with 99.9% accuracy. No idea whatever happened to that

https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_...

Blood tests can detect a lot of cancers. I've been working in Japan for many years now. It is normal for people to get blood work done every year here. After age 40 they also do a barium test for stomach cancer. I think every year for that is a bit much, so I skipped it this year... They also usually do a chest X-ray every year which can catch tuberculosis as well as lung cancer. And for women obviously yearly pap smears and mamograms. Over 35 for men, I think you are supposed to get yearly prostate exams. I have not done this and I am planning to get an exam as soon as I can manage it.

Don't wait for symptoms. It's sounds like a lot, but doing the above is really fairly straight forward and not expensive.

> the down-to-earth-ness of this interview

That would be the interview at http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35585571. We changed the URL to a text version of the story.

Immunotherapy CAN cure any one case of cancer just not all cases. As it stands, immunotherapy has risen to 10% of success in many trials outside of even melanoma/leukemia. That's 10% of cases that are were previously out of options. Heck, I saw an ad of Opdivo (nivolumab) just the other day for lung cancer.

People don't realize the significance but 10% is a lot. Simply because there's so many cancer cases, 10% can already save millions.

The method by which vaccinations work is immunological. I think the most exciting frontier in cancer biology is prophylactic (preventative) vaccination. If we are able to develop effective vaccines against cancers, that will very much change the game.

This is currently a research frontiers area--but in 10-20 years, I believe that we will have made significant inroads on it.

Since every cancer is different in the markers it displays, I think that is unlikely to happen. It would mean an insane amount of vaccinations and the assumption that they have none to acceptable side effects.

Sure--you won't be able to get every tumor. But there are certain markers that are more common than others, so if you can get the top ~10 done within reasonable measures of safety, you could prevent a nontrivial number of cancers.

There are a handful of embryonic proteins that are normally expressed during development but are absent in the adult that are particularly promising. One of the hallmarks of cancer is dedifferentiation--losing specific markers and function and looking more and more like a stem cell that can continue to replicate, and these embryonic proteins are known to be reexpressed in many tumors.

Not to mention the risk for an auto-immune complication... because the cancer is just slightly different from "self", any immune response will have a very high risk for auto-immune recognition.

That's why CAR-T treatments are considered only in the cases where all other options have been exhausted.

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