The first cancer vaccine that works

I wish these articles were more useful. However, I will beat my usual drum and point out that a major reason we cannot tell one such article from another is that the original articles are behind a thirty-two-dollar-per-article paywall.

I worked as a cancer researcher for a few years, and I assure you that the details can be quite interesting if you can see them. But from this writeup I can't see a thing. They delivered DNA to a mouse with cancer. Did the mouse have mouse cancer or transplanted human cancer? If the mouse had mouse cancer, how did it get that cancer? Did they administer carcinogens, or use mutant mice with cancer-prone prostates? If the mouse had human prostate cancer transplants (a typical technique) and those were cured by mouse anti-human antibodies formed in response to virus-borne human prostate DNA... does this have any relevance to human treatment at all, given that humans don't routinely come down with cancers that were transplanted from other mammals? And, crucially, what happened to the prostates of the mice? Did they get attacked by the antibodies that attacked the cancer? If not, why not? If so, are we really prepared to attack, say, stomach cancer by inducing an autoimmune response that might also attack the stomach itself? That doesn't sound so great!

These aren't even very sophisticated questions. (I was never a very good cancer researcher.) Anyone with a freshman education in bio could ask these basic but enlightening questions. And maybe someone with a Nature Medicine subscription would be kind enough to answer them. Because this popular-press rehash of a press release sure doesn't help much. As you say, such rehashes all sound the same. The devil is in the details, and the details are always missing.

EDIT: in my eagerness to give examples of basic questions I realize that I'm being a little too cartoonishly obtuse. In fact, we can deduce from the fact that the mice apparently can form antibodies that they are immunocompetent, which implies that they probably do have mouse cancer, because it's hard to transplant human cancer into a mouse with a functioning immune system. They reject it. But I shouldn't have to guess this stuff. It's all right there in Nature Medicine. Somewhere. Pity that the karma I'd earn for this comment isn't worth thirty-two dollars to me.

Honestly, I hadn't heard about this, and I think it is great news. And I think a really interesting technique used. While appeals to authority are frowned upon, the author list is impressive, and gives me more hope that this is not quackery or extremely poor science.

Sometimes the news is really interesting: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-...

tejaswiy, I'm one of the people you can blame for posting stuff like this and you can check the 'submissions' link in my profile for further confirmation. --I've probably submitted on every topic you've listed, and I do so because I consider them interesting and useful.

I'll agree such news is all too often lacking depth and details, but oddly enough, that is the point of a quick news writeup. If the topic interests you enough to do more work, at least you know about it and can now make the choice if it is worth the additional effort and expense since a lot of research sits behind paywalls.

The value of the detail-free "news" articles is simply knowing about the various advancements being made. Even if you have little interest in the topic and mostly forget about it tomorrow, just knowing about it might be really beneficial at some later time. You just never know when trivial and useless minutiae about on-going research and development will suddenly become important knowledge. --When faced with some related problem, you may just recall reading about new and related R&D that can be applied.

After all, terms like "hacking" and "hacker" are nothing more than a marketing push to use sexy-cool names for "Research and Development" and the people who do it.

If research and development news doesn't interest you, that's fine, but if so, then why are you here? --This isn't intended as an insult in any way. I'm actually very curious about what you want HN to be? I'm particularly curious because I seem to be (in part) responsible for the "problem" you mentioned.

What would make HN better for you?

That's a bit like saying sunscreen is a vaccine for skin cancer.

This is a somewhat different category, vaccines that are supposed to direct antibodies against cancer tumors. The HPV/HBV ones are more traditional anti-viral vaccines that confer immunity to certain viruses, rather than specifically anti-cancer ones. They also have the effect of reducing cancer rates, since those viruses increase cancer rates, but only as a side-effect of preventing the viral infection.

Although, as another comment points out, even in the directly anti-cancer category this isn't actually the first; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipuleucel-T is already approved.

I just saw on the news that a low carb diet can prevent cancer but of course the experiment was performed on mice.

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2011/06/10/0...

Take care.