Top doctor remains brain cancer-free after a year | Hacker News Reader

Top doctor remains brain cancer-free after a year

bbc.co.uk

54 pointsAndrewDucker32 comments

Having a glioma myself (though way less severe than his type), this is exciting news. Brain tumors are often written off as "well, you're done for" and not much progress has been made on the treatment front. Though, the type I have was only discovered in the last 20 years and was lumped (heh) in with others before. Genetic sequencing and gene therapy, wow.

Here's another glioblastoma case going better than expected, maybe of interest: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34136522/

That is very interesting. I'm going to ask my oncologist's opinion about this and see what she says. I'm almost done with my radiation and chemo regimen (approaching 10 months... bleh), so if eating bacon-wrapped hot dogs keeps me out of the next treatment for longer, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make :)

Best of luck!

FWIW I've had thyroid cancer (surgery only; it's usually a nicer class of cancer to get if one must have one). Been eating higher-fat moderate-protein carnivore since.

A few points of note:

1. This doctor is widely-described as a pathologist. So it seems unlikely he would have developed any cancer treatments as a lead investigator.

2. It's much more likely he was part of a team that developed treatments, and that his was a supporting role.

3. A quick glance at Google Scholar indicates work on multiple approaches to melanoma treatment that Scolyer had some kind of role in. The article doesn't say which one was used.

4. There is no "cancer-free" in glioblastoma. Pieces of the tumor always remain after surgery, waiting to grow back. This is part of the reason there is no cure.

5. MRI cannot detect remnants as in (4).

6. Median survival is roughly 12-15 months, so being alive at this point is not in itself much of an indication of success. Three years would be more interesting. Even three years of "clean" MRIs would be more interesting.

This story keeps getting trotted out, and the journalists doing it fail to acknowledge these points. It's an extraordinarily complex disease that does not lend itself to feel-good stories. If it does get squashed into that box anyway, the result is misleading at best.

(4) is what people never understand. Other types of cancer can usually be cut out, as long as it hasn't spread to other organs. Gliomas are always present once they start, and it's a matter of keeping its spread suppressed for as long as possible.

If you have cancer in the fingertip, they can cut the whole hand to be safe. With the brain each milimiter is very important. (IINAMD. They usually cut more carefuly.)

Also, some cancers are isolated from the rest of the body and some are interwinded with the sorrounding tissue. I'm not sure in which type glioblastoma ia is.

Immunotherapy isn't surgery.

We should probably reason about it like it is though.

The extra parenthetical is very much clickbait. The doctor received surgery and care from other doctors using a protocol developed in an institute he helps helm. That's quite different than saying he treated himself.

If it's clickbait - could just be a misreading on the part of the poster - it highlights an important fact - we all yearn to feel we have full control over a situation, even when in this case this sense of control is tenuous at best.

Ok, we've taken that bit out of the title now. (Submitted title was "Top doctor remains brain cancer-free after a year (of his own treatment)")

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> jogging a brisk 9.3 miles

I'll just copy-edit it: "jogging 15km (164 football fields)"

Around the field, across?

I will need it in VW beetles end-to-end.

> Around the field, across?

American football or European?

American VW beetles or European?

That depends on the year. For example:

1947 - 4064 mm // 3682.800 Beetles

1969 - 4031 mm // 3712.949 Beetles

2019 - 4287 mm // 3491.229 Beetles

Honestly pretty much everyone, even Europeans should be able to convert miles to KMs without having to expend any effort.

Do you think mostly everyone can convert from km to miles? I doubt it, specially in USA. I think stating both units is a wonderful middle ground, everyone ends happy.

> Do you think mostly everyone can convert from km to miles?

It's such a simple calculation that anyone from western europe or a commonwealth country or the US should be able to do so back and forth with ease. Same for feet and meters.

Most people in the world would have to look up the translation factor - we stopped using miles 50+ years ago before a good chunk of the current population was born.

nautical miles, I agree are quite useful. Roman, English, international, statute, US survey, German, Russian or Ottoman miles, not so much

A relative recently received immunotherapy for cancer that was spread all throughout their body, even protruding past the collarbone and visible under the skin. A little more than one year later, they have been off chemo for six months and the cancer is completely undetectable.

Immunotherapy is really great science that introduces a chemical that shaves off the heavy sugar coating that hides some cancer cells from the immune system. It has fewer side effects than traditional chemo, and is probably more effective.

Carolyn Bertozzi won the Chemistry Nobel in 2022 for the discovery.

That's dogfooding

Well then, let's roll this out to billions next then

Big Pharma has profit projections riding on this, so right now the plain is to only roll it out to billionaires.

I’m just about to lose a friend from this. So wish the science was further along for everyone. Hopefully in the future for others.

Even if a cure isn't likely this is still exciting.

Light on details. Not worth reading. TLDR it’s a “vaccine” story plus standard of care, with no mention of what exactly they are vaccinating or what they mean by that.

“ was the first to be given a vaccine tailored specifically to his tumor’s characteristics, which would help boost the cancer-detecting powers of the drugs”

> Light on details.

It’s the NY Post, not the Lancet.

I’m impressed the article doesn’t somehow segue into raising money for his treatments on OnlyFans.

It would be better to just not submit tabloid articles to HN. It doesn't matter if that's where one came across a story first, people deserve a higher quality version of the news.

Do a search on "Richard Scolyer", and you will get the details.

This is the real deal. Prof. Scolyer and his team are world leaders in treating melanoma with immunotherapy, which they took from a less than 10% to greater than 50% survival rate. When he got diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he and his team figured they would apply the techniques they developed for treating melanoma to his brain cancer. They had to get special dispensation for what is basically an experiment with what was left of his life.

The result seems to be that the cancer, one of the deadliest around (as melanoma used to be), has gone. It's only a single data point though, and one year might not be enough to speak with confidence. I gather work is underway to organise a wider clinical trial based on this one result. A paper on this one result is under peer review.

The treatment regime was vaccine, followed by surgery to remove the tumour, followed by more vaccine. The initial vaccine dose served to train the immune system to recognise the tumour as foreign, the presence of the tumour being necessary for this to happen effectively. Surgery then removed as much as possible. The vaccines then continued to enable the immune system to mop up any remaining cancer.

The above was gleaned from following this is the press, not from having any particular medical knowledge. Even if it's not proof, this result can't be ignored.

Scolyer is tracking his progress online: https://www.facebook.com/ProfRScolyer/

Article drops the grenade on itself in the second sentence. Glioblastoma is not staged. There is no such thing as a "stage 4 glioblastoma".

The writer is parroting the idiotic trend of people quoting the stage of a cancer as if that means something in a popular context.

We are now living in an idiocracy, although the New York Post got there a while ago.

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