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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

Absolute clickbait fraudulent title.

From the article in Cell:

"Given orally, AOH1996 suppresses tumor growth but causes no discernable side effect" is a VERY different result.

Suppressing tumor growth is how you kill cancer, is it not? Cancer cells themselves, like the original cells they mutate from, don't live forever. Depending on which type of cell we're talking about, they can die within hours (e.g. skin cells)/days (e.g. blood cells)/months (e.g. liver cells). The issue with cancer cells is they are reproducing like crazy way faster than they die, which is why the tumors grow bigger and bigger. Chemo and surgery attempt to kill or remove the tumors immediately, yes, but my understanding is that's because we have no way to stop the growth and the only hope is to eradicate them entirely before they grow too big to treat, which is why the cancer could come back if any parts are missed.

You stop the cancer cell reproduction and overall tumor growth, you also kill the cancer.

suppressing growth does not equate to 100% regression.

the growth rate could be suppressed to match the attrition rate and turn into a steady state, rather than eradication of the mutant cell lines (and their progeny).

If it turns into a controlled steady state, does it still fit the medical definition of cancer?

good question, but cancer is generally replicating aneuploidy, so it's curious for sure

> The affected cells show cell-cycle arrest, replication stress, apoptosis [!], and so on. And application of AOH1996 along with other known chemotherapy agents made the cells much more sensitive to those, presumably because they couldn’t deal with those on top of the problems that AOH1996 was already causing.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-mode-cancer-tr...

Clickbait? Maybe. But fraudulent? Hyperbole much?

Hyperbole expands a truth; that title states a falsehood (see the paper) as true.

IN ANIMALS (mice and dogs)

And?

Well, it doesn't mean it will 1:1 map to humans. We have observed promising treatments for Alzheimer's-like conditions in mice multiple times, but alas, we have very little for humans still.

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