Cancer breakthrough leads China’s biotech boom

thanks for making your point with humor, it’s underused on hn. i agree with the sentiment too

An outgrowth of American exceptionalism.

Not to say that they're by any means perfect, but I think what you've pointed out might help explain why many Americans i grew up around see the Chinese government as some sinister and inscrutable entity that is out to silently crush everyone. Also, you don't need to make up fake examples when you can look up anything in the past year about how they're making big strides towards reversing their smog problems and how that's somehow an attack on American industry. Even trump has made these claims ( https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/uDFmIDPzCo4znxgzKlT0_jgv4C... )

This deserves a.. LOL

This should be the article linked. Mods can you switch, the current one behind a subscription wall?

Well, I just found my new favorite extension.

Normal person here: why?

What do you think of US companies like https://www.adaptivebiotech.com/ and their work ?

Maybe if you tried it as a first-line treatment instead of on relapsed basket cases it'd work better.

That's not entirely true. It's very effective against blood cancers but less so for solid tumors, where its effect seems to interact strongly with aspects of the tumor microenvironment.

Why would falsifying that data be any harder? Don’t you just substitute patient lived for patient had less headaches or whatever?

This isn't exactly true. People with cancer often have comorbidities that are 'competing events' and survival does not always tell the full story. I published about this topic and it's more complex and subtle than you would think.

https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/research/population-health-...

"80% of China’s clinical trial data are fraudulent, investigation finds"

ust over 80% of clinical trial data submitted to support new drug registrations in China have been revealed as fraudulent or substandard by the country’s drug regulator.

An investigation of data for 1622 new drugs submitted to China’s State Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) for registration said that 1308 of the applications should be withdrawn because they contained fabricated, flawed, or inadequate data from clinical trials.1

In a damning report released on 9 September the CFDA described the findings of widespread fraud as shocking and vowed to crack down on what it described as a “chaotic” situation in the country’s clinical trials industry.

Much of the blame was attributed to the country’s loosely regulated clinical research organisations, which industry insiders claimed operate in …

https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5396

> Everything is verifiable.

Nah. If there's a will, there's a way.

Trustworthy data is more of a social contract thing than anything else.

You could remove individuals that didn’t pass your trial.

Re-engineering a patient's blood cells means first having a patient's blood cells. At some point, some cells have to be extracted for the cells to be available.

That would be cool, but also creepy if my blood cells can destroy cancer in my body while they're still in a lab. What if they start destroying cells in other people's bodies?

This is the end-goal. The delivery of synthetic genetic payloads in a live organism is still a bit tricky. Certain therapies do do this by injecting a synthetic 'virus' directly into your bloodstream. However, since it's so easy to extract T-cells, the risk of withdrawing blood, engineering it, & replacing it, it is worth the extra time to guarantee the delivery of the genetic payload is correct and thorough.

As the sophistication of genetic delivery improves, direct delivery will absolutely become more common - and in fact will likely be a required technological step to curing harder-to-reach cancer and genetic abnormalities. That's why the first gene therapies are for the immunologically privileged, and easily accessible sites of the blood and the eye.

ELI5: Your immune system fights cancerous cells frequently. There's only a problem when the cancerous cells evolve to avoid this by "hiding" (typically by no longer releasing a "kill me" marker). The therapy basically gives your immune system the tools to identify cancerous cells.

T cells kill infected cells by detecting foreign proteins using a lock and key tube mechanism (Key = foreign antigen, Lock = T cell receptor). Normally any given T cell an its off spring have only one specificity of lock (although collectively there are many millions of locks in the body). CAR-T therapy is when they pull out a bunch of T cells for a patient and genetically modify the cell to have a know lock which is specific for a key known to be on the Cancer, then put them back into the patient. So, relatively, there is a massive increase in the frequency of T cell with that specificity in the patient, and hopefully they kill the tumor cells.

Cancer = you, but misregulated. Code for various tissues are turned on at 'incorrect' times, including code for profliferateNow(), ignoreAutoDestruct(), and can start running contradictory code like beNeuronLike() and beMuscleLike() simultaneously.

T-Cells generally sense 'rogue' cells, and command them to auto-destruct. Many cancers are rendered invisible to your immune system because their presentation to the immune system is indistinguishable from a healthy cell in that it doesn't present any feature that is not found elsewhere in the body.

In an engineered Car-T cell, an immune cell is reprogrammed by providing the cell with a DNA blueprint for a synthetically engineered protein called a 'Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)'[1]. That engineered protein has two major functions - sense a particular cell type, and activate the T-cell to kill whatever triggers its sensor. The sensing mechanism is relatively arbitrary from an engineering perspective, so we engineer the sensor to sense a particular cell type which has become cancerous. And the attack trigger is a shortcut of the entire immunological activation pathway - skipping straight to sense->attack, bypassing the natural defenses to prevent autoimmune problems.

Because the sensing mechanism of the synthetic protein is modular, these engineered proteins can swap out various 'sensors' to create new therapies relatively easily. Sense any cell that looks like a [lymphocyte/B-cell] and [kill it]. More sophistocated versions of these synthetic proteins can actually start to incorporate and-gates and other formal logic into their sensing capabilities:

if(sense(neuron && muscle)){ killTarget(); }

(where no neuron-like markers should ever show up with muscle-like markers except in a genetically scrambled cell, i.e. cancer).

[1] https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/car19/

For further reading, I would highly recommend 'Molecular Biology of the Cell'

https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-of-the-Cell/dp/0815...

The people who spent the time and effort to do the research and write the story would like to get paid. Seems like there is a simple solution here...

I count no fewer than eight options on the landing page that would enable you to read this.

Your second and third paragraphs have no relation to each other.

The second paragraph comes from some tabloid about China.

The third one just says “wait and see”