New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
me too
That's also Caltech's mascot!
Bernoulli the Beaver.
When (if?) you feel ready, there is an organization [1] whose mission is to support siblings, parents, and grandparents of children who have died at any age. I have been heavily active with them since losing my only child 9+ years ago. I commend them to your attention. (Once again, when you feel ready.)
[1] compassionatefriends.org
Bit by bit, Canada risks defaulting to suicide over expensive care. That's not what people voted for when it was first proposed.
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/MDRC-...
"Do no harm" has been replaced with "put them down if it's cheaper and we can get away with it"
After all, using the monopoly power of government and taxation is meant to be more efficient and provide more services at lower costs.
A cynical person might presume that MAID is being used as a cost savings measure more than an empathetic alternative for those who do not wish to wait to die of natural causes.
Are the headlines the tip of the iceberg, or the exceptions that gain notoriety? When the government and health care system are so deeply intertwined, who has access to the data but not an incentive to obscure the facts? With any luck, time will tell.
Separately, why do these services have to move so quickly? It seems like it’s either glacially slow in other countries where people pass before even finishing the paperwork, or insanely fast like in this case. There really should be a balance.
The government is responsible for funding every aspect of this process, though. It regulates the controls and rubrics over who gets what kind of care. The husband may have instigated it, but the system is broken if a person eligible for euthanasia isn't eligible for palliative care or hospice.
Most importantly, I continue to contend that MAID is turning into something that isn't what Canadians voted for. It is, however, turning into something that its opponents feared might come to pass.
>CASE 4B Case Overview Mrs. B was a female in her 80s who had a challenging medical trajectory following coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. She experienced several post-operative sequelae, including wound dehiscence, osteomyelitis, and respiratory failure. She required specialized care in hospital, including additional surgical procedures. Due to physical and functional decline, Mrs. B elected for a palliative approach to care. She was discharged home with palliative supports (i.e., palliative care team and home care support services, including adaptive aids and personal support services). Mrs. B reportedly expressed her desire for MAiD to her family. In response, and on the same day, her spouse contacted a referral service on her behalf. The following day, a MAiD practitioner assessed her for MAiD eligibility. She reportedly told the MAiD assessor that she wanted to withdraw her request, citing personal and religious values and beliefs. She communicated that pursuing in-patient palliative care/hospice care and palliative sedation was more in-keeping with her end-of-life goals. The next morning, Mrs. B presented to the emergency department (ED) of her local hospital. Her spouse was noted to be experiencing caregiver burnout. Mrs. B was assessed to be in stable condition, and thereby discharged home with continued palliative care. Her palliative care physician completed a referral for in-patient palliative care / hospice care due to her social circumstances (i.e., caregiver burnout). Her request was denied for not meeting hospice criteria for end-of-life, and a long-term care application was offered.
On the same day, Mrs. B’s spouse contacted the provincial MAiD coordination service requesting an urgent assessment. A different MAiD assessor from the previous day completed a primary assessment and determined Mrs. B to be eligible for MAiD. The former MAiD practitioner was contacted. This MAiD practitioner expressed concerns regarding the necessity for ‘urgency’ and shared belief for the need for more comprehensive evaluation, the seemingly drastic change in perspective of end-of-life goals, and the possibility of coercion or undue influence (i.e., due to caregiver burnout). The initial MAiD practitioner requested an opportunity to visit with Mrs. B the following day to re-assess; however, this opportunity was declined by the MAiD provider due to their clinical opinion that the clinical circumstances necessitated an urgent provision. An additional MAiD practitioner was arranged by the MAiD coordination service to complete a virtual assessment. Mrs. B was found eligible for MAiD by this third assessor. The provision of MAiD was completed later that evening.
https://indepnews.org/en/veteran-offered-suicide-instead-of-...
So average person with cancer does better when any individuals cancer treatment improves and it keeps compounding over time. This doesn’t mean everyone with cancer gets a slight improvement, often it’s specific types or stages that improve without impacting others. Where general progress comes from is it’s not the same improvements year after year.
Among many others:
- CAR T therapy going from lab to oncology suite (first launch 2017, but use rapidly growing)
- Approval of Keytruda and similar for many additional forms of cancer (see the 2021-2026 milestones here: https://www.drugs.com/history/keytruda.html )
- Liquid biopsy going from lab to PCP's office - starting with Grail Galleri and moving from there (yes, the NIH results were weak, but the idea of a liquid biopsy at all would be laughed off 10 years ago)
- Move of Atezolizumab and Tecentriq from infusion (hour) to injection (minutes) to increase availability
- Lower dose CT scanning for lung cancer, including for non-smokers
And a long line of immunotherapies that are making the leap from lab to chair right now.
The last 5 years have probably been the most exciting in cancer research since the launch of the monoclonal antibodies in the early 2010s. There is still incredibly far to go, but the trend is in the right direction: https://employercoverage.substack.com/p/decline-in-cancer-mo...
What’s your prediction for the next five years?
That people aren't actually living longer with cancer, they're living longer while we know they have cancer.
Is there any truth to that?
Another way to come at it would be mortality data. But that has a bunch of its own problems.
Everything is changing at once, it makes this kind of science so hard.
Long answer, it's a variable you need to consider when doing data analysis, and it depends on what exactly you're talking about, but it's absolutely not true for improvements in cancer survival general. One alternative method is to look at per-capita death rates, for example:
Reduction in US and UK childhood cancer death since 2000 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-chi...
Reduction in several countries' age-standardized breast cancer death since 2000 (Why did it increase in South Africa? I'm not sure, maybe socioeconomic factors) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/breast-cancer-death-rate-...
Reduction in global age-standardized cancer death rate since 2000 (Scroll down to second graph. Since the population is getting older, age-standardization makes a fairer comparison) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates
2000 is an arbitrary year I picked for clear visual changes without needing to haggle over statistics. If you want to feel optimistic, switch the childhood cancer death graph to 1960-now.
This method has different possible failure points. It could be that less people are getting cancer, or that people who would get cancer are dying of other causes, or reporting of cause of death has changed, though this is very unlikely for some figures, such as leukemia death rates for children in the US. Statistics is hard. Overall though, the evidence is very good that cancer survival has improved a lot due to better treatments since 2000.
If you have a more specific claim you're dubious about, I'd be willing to look into it for you. I'm very enthusiastic about this topic.
https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
Combined with your data, that implies that whatever wins we got from decreased cancer rates (e.g., less smoking) or improved treatment have been squandered elsewhere (probably obesity / heart disease).
If life expectancy had dropped over that time, then I guess it could be that cancer was as deadly as ever.
I wonder what the deal is with Greenland in your dataset. Lots of smoking? Lots of radiation?
A friend of mine, aged 50, has worked in pediatric oncology her entire (nursing) career. The ratio of surviving kids has flipped from 30/70 to 70/30 during her tenure.
(95% confidence interval is 0.294-0.887, wide but not too wide, n=157, to be expected for phase 2).
How they work is also completely fucking insane. Intismeran autogene is personalized for every patient via sequencing their tumor DNA. That's sci-fi shit. If you're not impressed by that, you should be. Fast and scalable DNA sequencing, neoantigen identification, RNA synthesis, none of this is easy and all of it relies on recent innovations across multiple fields.
The first proofs of concept for personalized vaccines like this date back to 2017[1] or 2015[2]. The process for designing the vaccines requires a machine learning algorithm first published in 2020[3]. Details of the algorithm aren't available, but it validated against data published in 2019[4], and there have been many recent advancements in algorithms and datasets for biotech ML that it likely relied on. As you might already know, mRNA vaccines were first tested in humans around the 2010s[5].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22991 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25837513/ [3] https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/80/16_Supplement/... [4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138461/ [5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26082837/
it was available for [some] UCSF patients more than 5 years ago
[0] https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...
The breakthroughs happening now will benefit average patients later. It's frustrating, but it's not because we've run out of innovations.
How do the iron nano materials get there? probably a combination of vasculature and diffusion.
They have done this kind of stuff before with gold nanoparticles, iron is a lot more abundant.
Though one thing that I might think researchers might not want is people may be too sick to recover even if their cancer disappeared tomorrow.
There must be informed consent, no reasonable alternatives (which, in cases we deem terminal, is often the case), and some evidence pointing to the treatment possibly being helpful. It's an excellent ethical program that gives patients a choice and advances science.
The biggest exception is oncology. Since everyone knows that chemotherapy is hell, cancer drugs tend to get a pass and pre-approval companies are (slightly) more willing to work with compassionate use exemptions.
Here's an insightful blog series about Jake Seliger's experience participating in clinical trials. He was a regular HackerNews user who passed away in 2024: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/joining-cancer-trial...
Even if you're buying time with every trial, all you've done is turn the patient into a lab rat for physicians to play around with. The ideal patient needs to be dead enough to have no human rights, but alive enough to participate in the trial. The hope of a miracle cure means the patient doesn't believe himself to be dead enough to not have human rights anymore. It's a paradox.
Signing the documents for such a trial is equivalent to signing your consent for euthanasia. It shifts the blame of death from the cancer to the company performing the trial. It's an extended form of organ donations where you donate your entire body while you're still alive.
Trials are also by no means exclusively performed on terminal patients.
When she was diagnosed with leukemia she was able to get into a research study herself that gave us 10 more years together.
One of the horrible but necessary parts of trials is the control group, who receives placebo. This is only done in a few of the trial phases but is essential in measuring efficacy. If someone wants to throw their brainpower and a little bit of AI/tech at the problem, you could end up eliminating a lot of suffering.
This is done for targeted advertising all the time. Frustratingly, the surveillance capitalism industry is precisely the reason the dataset you'd need probably shouldn't exist.
Maybe we'll get some decent lawmakers sometime soon, and problems like that will be fixed via legislation. They'd need to ban the root-cause of the problem. I'm guessing it's more likely the current congress will let private companies steal + sell everyone's info instead.
"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."
So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.
Mice models of cancer are useful, but you should never be too surprised when something that works in mice doesn't work in the clinic, xenografting or no. Cancer is complicated.
Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is essentially irrelevant.
I think it matters because oftentimes insurance companies won't cover treatments if a cheaper form of treatment exists. It doesn't matter if the old treatment is less effective or a much worse outcome for a patient. This is especially true for "new" treatments.
This is one of the issues with the modern cancer cures, thst they are very specific to the cancer, the patient, need one off lab work for each patient and this makes them very expensive and not affordable to many. Despite having public healthcare the managers of it still need to decide what to spend their limited funds on.
You're right about the specificity - Hep C is a bigger-population target than a lot of cancers are - but a lot of the new approaches are looking to be inherently more "personalized" to compensate.
In terms of where _prices_ are set, that negotiation is a function of efficacy relative to other things in the market right? If it ends up treating cancers that each already have a reasonably effective treatment, maybe the pricing isn't that high -- but if it is effective in cases where currently there are no options, the price should be high?
But for something that potentially works against a range of cancers, should we expect to see a sequence of more specific trials (i.e. one phase 1 for basic safety, a bunch of phase 2s for efficacy on specific cancer types, a sequence of phase 3s in descending order of estimated market value? And in 10 years, Alice and Bob with different cancers will pay radically different amounts for almost exactly the same treatment but with small variations in some aspect of the formulation so they can be treated as distinct products?
They have entire teams of people who figure out the viability and pricing of therapeutics before the first dollar is spent, with estimates getting refined the further you get along in the cycle.
(The ad also claims that the water their iron is suspended in is "energized", which makes the rest of the ad seem...questionable.)
yup. every time
This is perhaps the best targeted method devised as it seems to collect basically entirely in tumors. Chemo and Radio therapy just aren't that targeted.