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Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

My biology teacher knew a guy who did this to cure his wife's cancer, and that was back in 2008. How bizarre that this hasn't become a standard treatment after all this time.

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There are a couple OVTs that are approved by the FDA and it's a rather active area of research. One of many in the recent explosion of biological cancer treatments (immunitherapies/cell therapies, etc etc). With any cancer treatment the exact same procedure will struggle to generalize well across cancer types and you have to regulate for safety and efficacy rather strongly. Especially when the treatment is lab grown measles or herpes virus strains that are genetically engineered.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus

> With any cancer treatment the exact same procedure will struggle to generalize well across cancer types

As someone with family members living with cancer, modern genetic sequencing has been the biggest surprise.

Not that we could sequence tumors, but that we could do so at scale and classify therapies by effectiveness against specific mutations (in general, even ignoring targeted therapies).

Widespread cancer sequencing seems like the missing link to promote better outcomes, particularly in metastatic cases.

It's already an importany part of diagnostics and treatment! A lot of therapies are approved not just for specific cancers but for specific cancers with specific mutations. As with everything cancer it turned out to be more complicated than expected (not surprising given that it's essentially an outcome from chaotic uncontrolled genetic mutation and evolution) but sequencing progressing at like an order of magnitude faster than Moore's law and better understanding of all the -omics is making a dent

Yes, when a family member was fighting metastatic pancreatic cancer, their doctor had a tumor biopsied and sequenced to see if they could try one of the new immunotherapies. Sadly no, and I learned that only a small percentage of hard cancers are yet treatable that way (which still helps a significant total number of people though).

Well, there are two broadly different ways in which sequencing can help.

1. "Targeted therapies" that directly target unique surface features that specific mutations create. E.g. BRAF

2. Sorting most effective treatment by cancer type, where cancers driven by different mutations in different types of cells respond to specific treatments better or worse. Especially important for metastatic where you may have a pancreatic cancer mutation tumor in your lungs, etc.

It's likely that sometimes it goes poorly in bigger sample sizes. Maybe the viruses have a chance of causing a cytokine storm which can kill the patient.

There's a long history of OVT clinical trials, if someone's bored and interested they could try tracking down why they (mostly*) failed.

See table 1 for a list (as of 2021, probably incomplete) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913179/

* As the article points out, there is one approved OVT therapy.

It’s even older than that. Much older. Wikipedia “Coley’s Toxins”.

wouldn't that almost certainly be a crime if in the US?

In the US? No you can do pretty much whatever you want here.

To yourself? Mostly. Manufacture and possession of restricted substances is illegal, but administration of them to yourself is not illegal. In other words, being high in your own home isn't illegal.

But if you administer them to someone else it could be considered commerce which is under the purview of the government. Even growing corn on your own land to feed to your own pigs is considered commerce according to SCOTUS

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