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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

This article only talks about colon cancer in mice. BioNTech has multiple mRNA based cancer treatment projects and some of them, such as a melanoma treatment, are already in phase 2 trials [1] on humans. Moderna has similar candidates in the pipeline. It looks like it's time to hold our breaths this time.

[1] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...

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As someone who has already had a severely atypical mole removed before the age of 23, and who has a family history of melanoma on both sides of my family, man do I hope their mRNA cancer treatment works well.

Though luckily, melanoma seems to be waaaay more treatable now than it was even 15 years ago, but hopefully in another 10-15 years, Stage III or IV melanoma isn’t much more serious than a basal cell carcinoma.

When my music teacher had melanoma, they tried so many things. Some of them were so new that when she was first diagnosed they didn't exist outside a research lab. The progression of cancer treatment has been amazing, but with its ultimate spectre of being a disease that could start with any cell division, any time, anywhere in your body it's so good to see more research paying off. I think most people are scared of it, since we know it's going to get us all eventually (if we don't die of something else first).

Sadly my teacher ultimately didn't survive - but without new developments she would probably have died a good five or six years earlier, and her quality of life was really only bad for the last three months or so. She lived to see her children become adults, and she was so grateful for that. But we can dream of a world where nobody in their fifties succumbs to something like this.

Melanoma treatments have come a long way in the last decade.

Immunotherapy is a game changer for so many people, and I’m excited to see these mRNA trials.

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