Researchers develop treatment that can kill glioblastoma cells in brain pathway | Hacker News Reader

Researchers develop treatment that can kill glioblastoma cells in brain pathway

medicalxpress.com

142 pointswglb19 comments

I think we're on the verge of drastically increasing survival rates for people with Glioblastoma. It's an extremely aggressive form of brain cancer with an estimated average survival rate of 8 months and a 5 year survival rate of 6.9 percent.

I've been following the case of Dr Richard Scolyer who is using himself as a guinea pig to treat his own Glioblastoma. He and Dr Georgina Long created a plan based on their expertise in treating melanoma. So far the results have been fairly spectacular as his brain scans have shown no recurrence over a year after his diagnosis. I hope one day that they both share the Nobel prize in medicine.

https://x.com/profrscolyermia

https://x.com/ProfGLongMIA

Talk about dogfooding!

There’s an excellent episode of Australian Story about him.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-05/an-open-mind-richard-...

Immunotherapy is amazing IF your tumor is immunogenic (i.e. it has many mutations and at least some of them create proteins that are very different from your regular cells). If it’s not, then most immunotherapy treatments don’t work. Melanoma is the poster child of immunotherapy because, as you might guess, the radiation attacked cells typically have a ton of mutations making them immunogenic (though even in melanoma a subset of patients don’t respond).

Exception is Car-T cells because they use your immune cell sure but they hijack them for our own purpose to kill cancers. However they don’t work on solid tumors.

I’m always excited for new developments but I hate it when news is spread to be more optimistic than what it really is. False hope is not a good thing to dangle in front of desperate patients especially when the goal is to extract money from orgs and government.

My mother passed from stage 4 gastric cancer last year. Her doctor, whom I respect and appreciate from the bottom of my heart, suggested we try immunotherapy as a last resort once chemotherapy became ineffective.

Sadly, immunotherapy was without positive effect and the side effects (which were more severe than chemo) ended up ailing my mother more than she should have had to endure.

My takeaway from that harrowing experience is that there is no in-between with immunotherapy, at least with where medicinal science currently stands. It either works miracles or does jack squat, you might as well be flipping a coin because you don't even get to have a dice.

I am also sympathetic to the over-positive delivery of these kinds of information, because... fuck, man, cancer is a fucking bitch. Pardon my French(tm).

Im sorry for your loss, cannot imagine having to watch your loved one suffer helplessly!

There is _some_ good news though, I think diagnostics are getting better at letting doctors know if immunotherapy will work in a patient or not. Hopefully that’ll save patients misery and pain if the drug doesn’t have a chance of working.

Screw cancer.

I’m so sorry to hear.

My sister is a cancer researcher. She said early trials often kill people because they are the sickest cases.

Anecdata:

I know 2 people with horrific glioblastoma who are on multiple years of life. One of them is on year 8+.

Read a great article about this a few weeks ago. Very promising stuff in T-Cell immunotherapy

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/cancer-treatment-imm...

If a loved one has GBM diagnosis, I suggest doing a deep dive into ketones, ketosis and ketogenic therapy.

(My background https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6MBfSY8AAAAJ&hl=en... and also creator of https://cancerdb.com/)

I am reading a bit about this. It is amazing how I keep seeing ketones, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome in general - even more so when it comes to newer research. I got into this rabbit hole when trying to fix my own health.

There are many papers referencing glioblastoma as having a metabolic component. And incidence seems to be increasing, as would be expected if that was the case. And many cancers seem very energy hungry, so it makes sense.

Purely speculative, but now I wonder if cultures that have a tradition of fasting actually had a reason to do that, and if doing so would be a proactive approach. I am not finding studies that look specifically in glioblastoma incidence in such populations.

EDIT: There's also a counterpoint - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-017-0242-x

If fasting truly worked, then as people starved in their final days, the cancer would slow. I don't think that's the case.

It does slow. It just... slows along with the rest of your body.

The problem with all of these pseudoscience leaps at ketogenic treatments for cancer is that they see an obvious fact - that cancer hijacks your metabolic system to fuel its own growth - and believe the solution is to kneecap that system, without also taking into account that you still need that system to keep your own organs functioning.

Without a way of controlling the metabolic system on the level of fantasy nano machines, you can only starve it to death only by starving yourself to death.

There's a ton of emerging evidence that lowering blood glucose via ketosis starves cancer cells without killing the patient. Here's a good read for you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375425/

I don't know anything about medicine, ketosis or cancer, but this author has 9 publications, including 5 as sole author.

Not a good read.

>> The VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System safety that trial enrolled 17 patients, 11 of whom were evaluated. Mean weight loss was significant, and weight loss of ≥ 10% was noted in responders (stable or improved disease) compared with nonresponders. Three patients dieted longer than 16 weeks (survival, 80–116 weeks). One of these patients was alive at 121 weeks.

Maybe you know something particular about metabolic treatments. But if this is just a structural argument from more or less first principles, I think it's structurally weak. There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation.

For example, chemotherapy is poison, just poison that is hoped to poison the cancer much more strongly than the patient. But it always hurts the patient.

Another broader example, fevers are bad for you. But in many situations, they're worse for a pathogen that has infected you, so your body tries a fever in response to some immune observations. This is why you should generally not treat a mild fever, unlike a too-intense fever. Not medical advice, I'm not a doctor.

But maybe, unlike me, you have specific knowledge of the medical issues and you have more-specific reasons to argue that metabolic attacks can't work on cancer?

Normal fevers have no side effects and mainly cost a lot of energy, so comparing it to chemotherapy is rediculus.

>There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation

It's not an assumption, it is knowledge based on a general understanding of how cancer functions.

Even without that knowledge, you should be able to observe that people dying of cancer eat less than is needed to sustain their bodies, and such behavior does not slow down the progression of cancer.

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