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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

So 75% of cancers are “tamed” now? Or is the headline slightly hyperbolic

It’s not terribly hyperbolic. The headline is that they tamed the protein (MYC). That’s more or less true, they found a molecule that binds to and blocks MYC’s activity. Then in the article they (correctly) note that MYC is dysregulated in 75% of cancer cases. They don’t claim that that they cured or tamed 75% of cancer.

Finding a MYC binder is legitimately a big deal. It’s been known as a primary target for cancer for decades but there are zero drugs that block it. Now this shows the way towards drugging it. It’s a big advance for the field.

So would this become a prophylactic drug or a treatment once someone has cancer?

Likely neither. Myc and p53 are these mythical whales that people have been trying to tame for many decades and nothing has happened. Nothing likely ever will. This would probably be the ten thousandth medium impact paper on myc in history to give some context and I’m not exaggerating.

Yeah I do cancer immunobiology and p53, myc, mTOR whatever have been the mythical pan-cancer targets forever. There's just no way they are going to be it. Could an anti-myc be another tool in the toolbox? Sure. But it'll just go in a new version of RCHOP that extends disease free morbidity for like 3 weeks

One exception seems to have been Ras. I would have bet money that Ras would have never been a viable target but here we are now.

Somewhat off topic: Have you read “Tripping over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer”[0]? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23496164

I haven't read this, so I'm sorry, but I cannot really comment on it. I've heard of the Warburg hypothesis but I haven't seen data that support this as the root cause of cancer. I've had my colleagues talk about this book in a way that makes me think it has a pretty good history of cancer and then selects a body of work to convince people of this hypothesis despite a number of failed clinical trials for many cancers.

That being said, I haven't read this myself, so I have to emphasize that I ought to take a look at it before passing judgment. There have been a number of grand hypotheses for cancer that haven't panned out. That doesn't mean we can't benefit from other perspectives.

Definitely a treatment. MYC is only a problem once cancer finds a way to generate too much MYC protein. Only them is it necessary for a drug to knock it back down

Hopefully, but it depends on how it acts in the body. Manx treatments are not used as the side effects are too bad*

If one can bind it, I wonder if that can be used as a generalized (75%) early test indicator for cancer.

If an assay can be made based off this compound i could imagine some sort of screening tool that could be made. You would just need some sort of linker that could fluoresce or produce a signal.

Nope. Just awful science journalism as usual. That 75% number comes from the first sentence of the paper [1] introduction:

> MYC is a critical transcription factor whose aberrant activity is implicated in more than 75% of all human cancer cases.

The rest is just made up vaguely based on the abstract.

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c09615

Sounds like a pretty big deal to me, in the sense that defeating cancer requires a long chain of breakthroughs just like this. MYC-focused drugs might prove to be a promising way to interfere with the growth of tumors and have a real impact on people’s lives

It's a technical achievement, and the headline reads like a breakthrough. I completely understand why people's trust has eroded in media, and especially in science.

The headline is an accurate reflection of the body of the article.

It's been a while since I worked in cancer, but being able to target MYC is a significant achievement, as it has generally been quite difficult to target transcription factors like MYC.

Nothing in the article seems vaguely or concretely "made up" to me, but I'm curious if you can point to some particular sentences that you think are made up.

No, otherwise the title would be "75% of cancers are tamed."

Researched synthesized a chemical that deactivates a protein implicated in 75% of cancers.

It may be that deactivating the protein doesn't cure the cancer. Or it may be that it's infeasible to synthesize a delivery mechanism. Or it may be that the treatment causes significant side effects.

In a petri dish, sounds like it. Specifically it sounds like they can reduce the growth rate ("tame") it, but not necessarily cure it entirely.

It also sounds like they haven't turned this into a treatment yet. They're still working on how to effectively get it where it needs to go in the body. They haven't run things like human tests that might reveal side effects. They haven't turned the "technology" into a "product".

I don't think the headline suggests that they've done more than that. "taming a chaotic protein" isn't "curing cancer", it's "figuring out how to deal with one component of most cancers in isolation". It's a step forwards.

>They're still working on how to effectively get it where it needs to go in the body.

I skimmed the paper, and this is indeed the case. The full extent of their testing was in vitro testing against the lysate of a specific cancer cell line -- that is, against the "raw contents" of a bunch of cancer cells which have had their cell membranes removed.

In my lay understanding, getting their stuff where it needs to go -- and only there -- is likely to be very difficult.

No, otherwise the headline would be “Scientists tame 75% of cancers”. The title doesn’t even really claim to have solved anything. Good title imo

This is "mini breakthrough" in early stage of researches. Basically not interested to anybody outside the research community.

I'd say the headline is mostly accurate, but easy to misinterpreted by a general audience. It's "technically correct".

I wouldn't worry too much about the linked page though. This is the kind of website which underlines keywords for search terms on the same website... That's always a red flag for for me indicating an uninterested seo focused spammy publisher.

They do link to the original article, which is great. And they don't misrepresent it. There's this flexible molecule which enables and accelerates cancers and some scientists found a way to bind to it. Non-trivial first step on one possible path to someday cure most cancers.

They are able to deform a protein involved in DNA transcription so that they can design drugs that will bind to and deactivate it.

Their approach stops all DNA transcription when applied to a cell, so it’s fatal to the cell. It would also be fatal if applied to a mouse or human, except that they don’t have a way to actually deliver it outside cell cultures.

This is interesting basic research, but is far from leading to new cancer treatments.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/

That's why I ignore phys.org they often have sensationalist headlines. They've cried wolf too many times for my liking. The only reason I am typing this is I clicked to see comments by mistake.

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