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Comment by msie | Hacker News Reader

Well then, I expect a therapy real soon now.

This is not an informed comment. New immunotherapies for cancers are real. It's just that they are very expensive. But it's not right to claim they are very far or imaginative.

But are there therapies for mice?

It'll be here any decade now.

While this particular treatment may go nowhere, cancer treatment has come a LONG way recently. Lots of theoretical “in mice” treatments I recall reading about 5-10 years ago are now actively being deployed clinically. By some measures we’ve had more than a 25% drop in age+health standardised cancer mortality over the last decade.

It’s easy to feel cynical when so many things seem like they get stuck for ages in trials and never make it to an actual treatment, but modern medicine is truly amazing. I have family who are sadly no longer with us, but who likely would have been cured completely if they had developed the same cancer today.

Looking at this graph of breast cancer mortality, the drop has been significant, steady, and showing no sign of leveling off. https://seer.cancer.gov/statistics-network/explorer/applicat...

A caveat for the rest of the world:

> our finding showed a significant increase in breast cancer mortality rate in the world during the past 25 years ... Statistical analysis showed a significant increase for breast cancer mortality rate in all super regions, except for High-income super region. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6745227/

and for women under 40:

> Female breast cancer mortality rates have stopped declining in women younger than 40 years, ending a trend that existed from 1987 to 2010. Conversely, mortality rates have continued to decline in women aged 40–79 years. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.2021203476

The conclusion I'd come to from those quotes is all these "amazing breakthroughs" might be in use sure, but not to the scale (and price) a layman would expect in order for it to be a properly viable solution for many sufferers.

I agree that there's been some progress in therapies and robot-assisted surgery, but the reason for the improvement in mortality seems more to do with early detection. Cancer deaths overall are also improving due to fewer smokers, but that should be accounted for by "health standardized" measurements.

I think this paper explains it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27175568/ "the major factors that accounted for these favorable trends were progress in tobacco control and improvements in early detection and treatment"

I feel like the treatment progress for most metastatic solid cancers have not significantly improved. A significant improvement wouldn't be just improving overall survival by a year or so. What seems possible to achieve (someday soon perhaps) is making cancer either a manageable condition, like HIV now is, or curable.

My wife died from metastatic breast cancer, in 2011. Even then there were advancements. As much as I miss her and envy those who may get advances now, or a “cure”, I am excited to see progress. Maybe she’ll be one of the “last to pass” from this disease.

My sincere sympathies. I lost my kid sister to breast cancer about 6 years ago, much too young. I'm glad the fight continues.

ENPP1 is a known target that has been under active investigation for many years. This press release would like for you to think this Stanford lab discovered it, but it’s been known about for a while. We are just now starting to understand more about how it works in cancer (this work is a part of that). But treatments are already being worked on using this pathway.

I'm afraid I don't share your optimistic view. This being the US, I expect a bidding war on whether the switch should be set to "ON" or "OFF".

This is the dumbest conspiracy ever, stop propagating it.

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