Biotech firm uses tiny worms in test for pancreatic cancer | Hacker News Reader

Biotech firm uses tiny worms in test for pancreatic cancer

asiaone.com

18 pointsgeox14 comments

> In the latest version, the company tweaked the genetic code of the nematodes so that they would swim away from pancreatic cancer samples. Hirotsu Bio started with pancreatic cancer due to its difficulty in diagnosis and speed of progression.

I'm kinda amazed that we are able to change the genetic code of the organisms to make them do something

Yeah this is definitely one of the coolest developments I've read about.

My daughter is studying biotech at university. While I was on the cutting edge for proliferation of computing, she's there on biotech. What an exciting future of discoveries and invention she has ahead of her. We're all now stuck on reinventing shitty web frameworks in nodejs for the 11th time.

Tests are all fine and dandy but what about a decent treatment? I've seen this in my family and it's one of the most horrible ways to go.

i think there's enough people to solve multiple problems simultaneously

Well, in concept yes, we have multiple people and they're able to work on multiple problems.

We don't have "enough people" to solve pancreatic cancer, though, or it would be a solved problem. So if there are two problems, and one of them is pancreatic cancer, we do not actually have enough people to solve multiple problems.

(In fact, we devote a lot more people to attempts to solve cancer than makes sense.)

They are related. If you can detect it early enough you can deal with it. The problem is that most people don't even know they have pancreatic cancer until it has metastasized to other sites, at which point it's basically a lost cause.

Unfortunately the "deal with it" part is very problematic. Radio- and chemotherapy are not very effective, and pancreatectomy is awful for the pacient. What I mean is even if one knows they have cancer there's not much to do.

I don't know. My wealthy friend somehow got his dad free and clear of stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He got him in for am extremely expensive cutting-edge treatment that was in the 7-figure range out of pocket. Maybe he just got lucky, but it seems you can buy your way out of a lot of cancer's now adays.

Lucky him! Money well spent I'd say. Must have been some edge-case though, because usually stage 4 is metastatic, the liver is severely damaged, the lungs and so on.

You are right luck was no doubt involved to a heavy extent. I've seen what normal cancer treatments do to someone and it's awful but, it's the best we have at scale I presume.

Was there some breakthrough in this field because at that stage no amount of money will save you. As others have said, It's more than likely luck. His number just wasn't up.

Yeah... after reading the comments and doing some research, it looks like he was most likely just extremely lucky.

Testing experts can work on tests while treatment experts work on treatment. I would imagine that the two specialties are significantly different.

Pancreatic cancer is so horrible because when symptoms show up. It tends to be to late. Lost some Family to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com