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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Paywall: I read this as an ability to help in immunotherapy which works like a vaccine. I really am interested in what types of cancer this works with the strongest effect. They list soft tumors in Lungs.

The bellow citation seems to show that these are something that could work on all cancer types and is cheap. These are exciting times.

Now it will be another 5 years till we see this even in a trial for children? (Son and sister died of cancer and my daughter's 10 year old friend (same cancer as my sister) is in immunotherapy trial which we are praying for a miracle for her reoccurring brain cancer.

> RNA-LPX vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumour antigen can be encoded by RNA.

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It's very exciting, but as these therapies become more successful, we're going to have to tackle the adverse reactions both acute, and chronic. Granted, you're surviving cancer so that's not the primary concern, but it will be a concern.

Well that is the Number One Reason why they are going immuntheraphy the side effects are minor compared to Chemo and Radiation. This is your own body fighting the cancer.

I don't think "Minor" is accurate. A good friend just went through this to beat a strange form of metastatic blood cancer, and he was in the ICU for a week as a direct result. (and essentially comatose) It was worth it, since he went from, "Plan your death" to, "Full remission!". Still, he was strong going in, a lot of people would have died.

Right now, there's still a lot of art to the balance between having your immune system fight hard enough to kill the cancer, without setting off a cytokine storm that kills you. There's also the issue of longer term autoimmune complications, which I suspect will turn out to be the "secondary cancers" of the immunotherapy world.

There's nothing to say that leveraging your own immune system will necessarily reduce the frequency or severity of side effects relative to current therapies. Your immune system is quite capable of killing just about any cell in your body, foreign or not. The multitude of different autoimmune diseases are clear evidence of that fact.

Out of curiosity, what brain cancer does she have? I had a Grade II astrocytoma in 2013, came back in Sept 2015 as Grade III. Currently undergoing chemo and feeling fine (25 years old).

Assuming this kind of therapy is effective in humans, the rate-limiting step is identifying a protein in the cancer that is either not produced in normal cells or sufficiently mutated relative to the same protein in normal cells, such that the immune system targeting that protein will only kill cancer cells. Otherwise you'd just induce autoimmune disease.

This was my first thought when I read it. How do you aim it(?).

Are you asking how to identify such a target protein? Well, you could sequence cancer peptides using mass spectrometry, or sequence the cancer cells' genome, and look for proteins that are sufficiently mutated relative to the wild type copy. However, we already have pretty good knowledge of which genes tend to be mutated most often in cancer cells, so you could do targeted sequencing on those genes first to look for low-hanging fruit. In general, it's still a hard problem, though.

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