'Cancer-killing pill' is now being tested on humans
news.sky.com
news.sky.com
However, this is just a puff piece, not news at all. Not a single citation etc etc. Cancers are hard, I just hope if I ever have children the science will have advanced beyond what I'm dealing with.
Cancer can be triggered by a foreign agent, but it itself is not a foreign agent. It is your own body's natural processes gone haywire. That makes differentiating cancer cells from other cells more difficult. Chemotherapy works by essentially killing your most active cells. The cells that are constantly reproducing. Those are your hair follicles, your stomach lining, your cancer, etc. It's why the side effects include hair loss and nausea. It's a chemical shotgun blasted into your body with the hopes that one of the casualties is the cancer.
If must depend on the particular treatment and circumstance. I was by a loved one's side for the past several months during chemo (stage IV), and we were pretty shocked how few side effects there were. Basically none.
Radiation, on the hand, was brutal.
It is important to remember, when discussing these things, how clinical trial phases work. There are four main trial phases in a drug development cycle.
A Phase 1 trial is used to determine if a treatment is safe and to determine the maximum dosing. A preliminary result about the effects of the drug is a side product of a Phase 1 trial but this is not sufficient to know if a drug will succeed. Phase 1 trials are primarily about safety.
A Phase 2 trial is used to determine the efficacy of a treatment and to determine the best and most effective way to use that treatment. A drug that has a successful Phase 2 trial is likely to be effective but merely being effective is often insufficient for a drug to be considered a success.
A Phase 3 trial compares the effectiveness of a treatment against the current standard treatments. A new treatment must be better than the existing treatments in some way (e.g. same effect on the disease but lower side-effects, more effective in general, etc) to have a successful Phase 3 trial. A Phase 3 trial is the last regulatory hurdle to the approval of a treatment for use.
A Phase 4 trial, is performed after a treatment is developed and brought to market. The most common type is post-marketing surveillance where data is gathered about the effectiveness of the treatment, side effects, etc from observational studies of the treatment as used. These data are compared with the data developed during the Phase 3 randomized controlled trial to ensure that the treatment is performing like it should in the market. Differences between Phase 3 results and Phase 4 results can result in modifications to the box (e.g. a black box label), prescribing information, or other aspects of the treatment's packaging and marketing.
Hopefully this was helpful.
On https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05227326 , opening up “What is the study measuring?” shows this one has primary outcomes of safety, but also has secondary outcomes around effectiveness of treatment.
There are also nuances here. A drug that's effective against some type of cancer can be deemed safe (or at least safe enough) even if it has truly horrific and/or dangerous side effects, because it's cancer, while a drug with the same safety profile would never be approved for, say, athlete's foot.
Plus, if we've not figured out how to live away from this planet in perpetuity around the same time, we're going to quickly run out of space too.
Looks like Japan is already there, and many developed countries are only increasing in population because of net immigration.
Living in a rich country vs a poor country is living with life extension breakthroughs. Living now vs 200 years ago is living with life extension breakthroughs. Saying that the breakthroughs up to this point were ok, but any more would be some sort of unnatural abomination feels myopic and short sighted. Plus the idea that it is better to let people die rather than figure out how to adapt our society feels grotesque. How is the right answer “don’t research this life saving thing because if we save people’s lives then they will keep hanging around existing”?