"Car-T cancer treatments: From science fiction to saving lives "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398672

Probably not. I’m not GP but the most common are known as ‘checkpoint inhibitors’ that attack one of the pillars of a ‘successful’ cancerous mutation: (over)expression of PD-L1, a surface protein that tells the immune system that it’s sniffing a healthy cell (eg. ~these are not the cells you're looking for~). Checkpoint inhibitors work by binding to those ligands, effectively disabling their spoofing action and allowing unhealthy stench of the cell to flow through.

There’s also CAR T-cell therapies which effectively extract and culture T-cells to be more sensitive to the specific disease, then re-introduce them to the patient. These are best for blood cancers.

There’s also monoclonal antibodies and a variety of sensitizers in development and being tested.

We still have a ways to go, but personally it feels like the immune system is the best agent we have for fighting cancer. It’s entire job is to rid the body of pathogens, down to the individual cell/particle, with an adaptivity and specificity we can only dream of in medicine. Aside from the fact that cancers look just like us for the most part, it’s perfectly suited to the task.

The thing I really am looking forward to specifically with the mRNA technology we have today is the ability for a lab to take a sample from a biopsy, identify very specific markers for those cells, and quickly develop targeted therapies for the individual patient. It might be 100 years away, but that feels like the future to me.