Researchers identify 'switch' to activate cancer cell death
health.ucdavis.edu
health.ucdavis.edu
Really appreciate all the smart people in this field. Thank you for the work you do!
He went the eye doctor and they said his eyes were healthy. Then they suggested more tests and they found the tumor in his head and the one in his lung.
This also points out why cancer is so dangerous, by the time you realize you have cancer it could have spread around your body. Especially cancer in parts with lots of blood supply or close to lymph nodes.
I had seminoma testicular cancer. If you must have one, it's what you want. It's very treatable, but also affects the lymphatic system of the body. I had tumors in one testicle and 2 lymph nodes in my abdomen.
Surgery for the testicular tumor, chemo for the others.
It's not that important, it just struck me that something was missing in the description.
that makes sense, thank you for the explanation.
Hope science will find better treatments than chemo (I don't really care about the surgery) and radiation.
I first heard of dichloroacetic acid about 15 years ago - a cheap drug that also killed cancer cells by allowing mitochondria to induce apoptosis in the cancer cells and not in healthy cells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid#Cancer
It doesn't appear to have gotten a lot of research into what would be a safe dosage, seemingly because it's an old drug that can no longer be patented.
However, in some systems DCA has been shown to PROTECT cancer cells from death. In research with colon cancer cells, DCA prevented the death of the cells in the laboratory and in animals.28 In mice with neuroblastoma, DCA enhanced the growth of tumor cells.29 Another study showed mixed results: DCA did not slow down tumor growth in mice, though it did make it harder for cancerous cells to spread (metastasize).30Not a miracle, but not nothing.
Survival rates have been increasing for almost all forms of cancers so fast that it is astounding. Amazing. Stupendous. Heartening.
We've gone from an overall 50% five year survival rate to over 70% in just a couple of decades.
The pancreatic cancer five-year survival rate is very low, but has tripled since 1999.
When I was born you had a 33% chance of living for five more years if you were diagnosed with prostate cancer. Today you have a ~90% chance.
I don't know why people think nothing is changing.
I personally know many people who have gotten and then gotten over cancer.
It's because people expect a cure the likes of a vaccine, with >95% efficacy.
But it's not entirely their fault, the media all but says "they've cured cancer!" every other day.
When you expect a cure, increasing five year survival rate by 10% falls short.
its part of the stack. earlier detection and improved treatments is a very important area.
we still are absolutely failing in preventing those same cancers from reoccuring because we don't know the sequence of triggers or how to prevent them. like, we might know the trigger, but we don't know why one body really becomes more susceptible to them aside from sometimes behavioral or genetic probabilities. hence why we still focus on remission instead of cured, since the body still remains in a state of susceptibility to the same thing and is exposed to the same unknown things, and doesn't revert back to a baseline of not being so.
Which is a better use of 50k? To give one adult one extra year, or the same money to reduce child mortality for a hundred strangers in a different country?
Does the treatment actually reduce mortality, or is it just an expensive placebo?
Better for whom? Morals are always subjective to your point of view. While points of view of different people sometimes, and even quite often, align with each other enough so that we can talk about shared morals between them, they don't necessary do this all the time. Especially in a scenario of allocation of limited resources.
In the end the only thing that really matters, though, is the point of view of the person who owns these 50k, and nobody else's.
The answer to that one is very clear: the G7 have more than enough money to fix both extreme poverty (it's just 40 billion $ a year to end hunger [1]) and access to quality medical care (which is a purely USA problem, everyone else has sorted that out decades if not - in the case of Germany - centuries ago) at the same time. There is no need to pit these two issues side-to-side at all.
> Does the treatment actually reduce mortality, or is it just an expensive placebo?
At least for stuff that's not on off-label use, proving efficiency is a mandatory criteria for being allowed to be sold. And some quackery aside, most of the off-label stuff at least has some scientific backing proving that it can actually help.
[1] https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-en...
Earlier detection is important but mortality is a better metric than 5-year survival. People tend to conflate the two. If earlier detection doesn't decrease mortality then it's just goosing the 5-year numbers.
This is especially true in geriatric cancers, particularly for example prostate cancers, where most of them are slow growing and not particularly dangerous. You'll outlive the cancer, so knowing about it doesn't mean, well, anything, other than exposing you to risky tests with serious side-effects. Prostate biopsy is really not great.
No-treatment is a great choice in these cases, so really, the detection is all downside, no upside for asymptomatic cases. [1]
[1] https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/older-prostate-cancer-pat...
This is patently false. Only late stage prostate cancers are killers. In most cases you catch them early on.
That doesn't contradict the claim you're replying to.
Has there been a change in actual life expectancy, or does early detection mean that 5 year survival is equivalent to 5-(average years earlier detection) year survival decades ago?
Yes!
There’s been a 25% drop in cancer deaths even ignoring differences in demographics. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184566/deaths-by-cancer-...
Back in 1950 it was 193.9 people died of cancer per 100k population, but it was a much younger population. By 1990 216 people died of cancer per 100,000 Americans due to an aging population and possibly lifestyle etc. But it has fallen literally every year since then despite an aging population.
We are down to 146.2 cancer deaths per 100,000 people.
if you look at day to day or even year to year it looks like things are not moving. However if you look at decades things have gotten much better.
> cancer is actually an umbrella term for scores of different diseases—each with its own unique characteristics and, often, unique treatment needs
https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/10/cancer-i...
So every time I read a headline about a new cancer treatment, I think of it as chipping away at one small rock in a giant field of rocks that we're trying to turn into dust. The university "public affairs" (PR) department may talk about about that small rock as if it were all rocks or all one big rock, and as if the chip was a giant blow. PR people talk like that because their job isn't to convey truth; the PR job is to generate news buzz for the university. So unless you have the time and energy to read those papers, it's best to ignore what the PR people say and just to imagine that picture.
CAR-T has been effective in treating advanced cancers of certain types and solid tumor CAR-T is advancing fast.
Cancer is probably one of the most complex problems we’ve ever tackled with expectation of success. I think it’s considerably harder than quantum computing or other nascent technologies. Further I think we are building fundamental understandings of life itself that leads to enormous adjacent benefits, most especially in aging and longevity.
It’s also not a single disease. It’s a description of a behavior of cells in the body that leads to certain outcomes. The causes, mechanisms, etc, are all specific to the cell types, of which there are many, the individual, and random chance. That makes the problem domain almost infinitely complex, so finding a way through it is hard already. But add onto it that cancer cells are you eliminating them without eliminating you is absurdly hard, and leaving even a small number behind risks a relapse that is resistant to the prior treatments because a few cells happened to have a random mutation that protected them.
All this said, I think cancer treatment will be a domino effect discovery. We will slog along reading these elusive yet promising articles until one day, we have done enough of the discovery and exploration, and things will be very different very quickly. Similar to AI - I wouldn’t have predicted generative AI would have effectively solved NLP two years ago, despite tons of promising headlines and articles for the last 50 years.
Take a look at CAR T-cell therapy, used for Leukemia and blood cancers (and mentioned in this article). The first trials were happening around 2011, and now there are several FDA-approved therapies using this breakthrough. LLS notes [1]: "In some studies, up to 90 percent of children and adults with B-ALL whose disease had either relapsed multiple times, or failed to respond to standard therapies, achieved remission after receiving CAR T-cell therapy." These are people that would have died 10+ years ago.
My younger brother passed away from ALL in 2012 after a clinical trial for one of these treatments didn't work. His participation in the trial, even with the unsuccessful result, helped further the research that is now saving lives that weren't saved before.
CAR T-cell therapy is perhaps the most powerful breakthrough against blood cancer in history. Now, it might be able to tackle other cancers as well. We're making progress. Of course we all want it to go faster, but it's happening.
1: https://www.lls.org/treatment/types-treatment/immunotherapy/...
I disagree. Growing up in my teens that was certainly true, but my fathers been battling stage 4 prostate cancer for a little over a decade and had few if any side effects from the treatments. There is a whole line of targeted chemotherapies you can take one after another after another when one stops being effective. On the other hand this can be perceived as a slow march to death from the flu eventually. It was stated to him ten years ago that he likely won't die from cancer. He's now on the last medication he will likely take, which addresses pancreatic cancer that is derived from prostate cancer.
What I will argue is archaic is how long his doctor ignored rising PSA levels due to some magical number that the insurance company would not act before. At that time, the only route he had was removal of his entire prostate which causes a lot of quality of life issues. Since then they've developed more targeted treatments but I don't know that they're training family practitioners adequately yet still.
Which is to say, I don't agree with your statement. Cancer treatment has made really great strides and continues to do so.
Cancer treatments are improving, but with agonizing slowness due to FDA intransigence: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-ce....
If some treatment had given her 4 years... She'd still be gone by now, and that would still be a tragedy, but she would have had a whale of a time with her boisterous son. He never got to know her. Sure, he would have had to deal with losing his mother. But we all experience love and loss. You can't have one without the other.
Her only treatment was three doses of immunotherapy. Her tumors shrank by two-thirds almost immediately. For the next seven years they just monitored, and finally they declared her cancer-free. She doesn't even have to go in for scans anymore.
- Cancerous cells are very similar to non-cancerous cells, and hard to target without harming the rest of the body
- If one treatment is unsuccessful, cancer can adapt by mutating to bypass your attempt.
- Cancer isn't a single disease. It is thousands of diseases with a similar outcome: uncontrolled growth with invasion. You really have to understand the entire signaling pathway and the various tumor suppressor genes / oncogenes in order to understand all the many ways cell replication can go wrong.
Even within a single classification (say, breast cancer) you have HER2+ breast cancer (which has an overdensity of RTK leading to growth factor independence), estrogen receptor+ breast cancer, and others, all of which require a different treatment approach, and the cancer can adapt by mutating further down the growth factor signaling pathway if you attack it in one place.