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Comment by xk_id | Hacker News Reader

* in a 5-10% subset, of a subset, of a subset of cancers.

At risk of taking the bait with this flippant comment, I’d like to highlight your critique of what others used to long for as “targeted therapy” or “personalized medicine”. I suppose we could always step backward to a world dominated by systemic cytotoxic chemo, though. Which, to be fair, still has its place.

Cancer tends to evolve at a rate that outpaces treatment innovation, and the molecular determinants can be wildly heterogenous. For example, a lung cancer patient can have half a dozen tumors that all harbor independent oncogenic drivers. It is not uncommon for a patient to undergo treatment with a target therapy and see complete tumor responses in some lesions, while others grow unimpeded.

We did not develop our own code base. Humans are a black box and drug development is HARD.

It’s not a comment on the value of the treatment, the headline is just wrong. Saying “cancer vanished in every patient” without further qualification is ambiguous, not too different from saying “illness was cured in everyone”. The correct title should have been “Success using a targeted anti-cancer therapy”.

Btw, there is still research that tries to find a general mechanism for interventions. The other day I looked at interesting work that hinged the delivery of disruptive payload on telomerase activity. Telomerase is expressed almost universally in cancer cells and in stem cells; therefore somatic cells would be spared, and it’s hoped that stem cells would be able to recover.

Anyway like you said, both approaches are meaningful, which is why it’s important to tell them apart.

Yep that's part of the advance here. Identifying what those subsets are. This drug went on to be approved for mismatch repair deficient endometrial cancers in 2023

We are going to have to cure cancer about a thousand times before we have cured it.

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