Hacker News Reader

Comment by gopalv | Hacker News Reader

There was a giant uptick in personalized treatment for cancer[1] that coincided with the end of the Obama era (Biden driving it after his son's death, in 2015).

I saw bits of it in my space with large scale analysis of genomic testing - particularly things like analyzing old drugs with new genomic data (drugs which failed in the past, retesting for the combo of the cancer:personal-genome SNPs).

My friend went through a Car-T recently for a lymphoma and something like that is near SciFi-tech in discussion when Steve Jobs had cancer, but available through the FDA today.

[1] - https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-can...

View on HN

Does anything in this study confirm that personalized treatment or any cancer treatment is moving the needle? The minor decrease in overall cancer rate seems to be driven by fewer diagnoses rather than increased survival, at least for lung cancer, which is the single biggest change. Skin cancer death rate is lower and that does coincide with the one major technological advancement against cancer that has happened in decades: immune checkpoint inhibitors. Immune checkpoint inhibitors are not very personalized. In general personalized corresponds to a focus on cancer genetics and has had an extremely disappointing outcome (helps a few percent of people a lot or helps more just a little) compared to what was hoped for.

CAR-T therapy is absolutely how we imagined the “genetic age” would be. However, its applications to liver cancer (as well as other solid tumors) are far away from clinics.

Some cancers haven’t seen much progress in the last 30 years. For example, uveal melanoma is a death sentence, same as 30 years ago. Liver metastases don’t give you any chance.

Similarly, glioblastoma (a brain cancer) is still a death sentence. My dad died of it a little over 5 years ago, lasting about a year and a half from initial diagnosis.

Maybe a year later, John McCain came down with the same thing. In a weird way it was comforting to know that all the money and power in the world didn't make any difference in the outcome.

It's strangely satisfying to see a billionaire or a powerful politician die. Reminds you of how human we all are.

I don't hate the idea about personalized treatments, however this will be the excuse by physicians why they can't be replaced by AI and we need to continue the myth of medicine being Art and Science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com