The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amo... .
My partner of many years had one of the nastiest cancers around, one with no targeted treatments. She went through an experimental combination of existing drugs. Some of the side effects included:
* Her heart stopping during a drug infusion. This happened multiple times over the 18 months of treatment.
* Disseminated fungal infections.
* Sepis because holes were developing in her GI tract.
This was a good response. Other patients just died from the drug combination.
This is what going slowly looks like in the world of cancer treatment.
This makes some sense in terms of compassion and matching new experimental techniques with patients with no hope, but it skews the results highly negative because the patients are already very close to death's door. It does not provide an accurate signal for what the results would be if we gave them to less sick people.
I don't think any of this can be changed without large-scale social acceptance of greater risk in clinical trials and significant support from the government.
It provides an excellent signal because we want to prove that these drugs are doing something that the standard of care is unable to.
There's this sense that medicine is easy and some evil cabal are limiting health to their cronies. Most medications never get to trial for their intended indications, and most fail trials. There's no reason to believe oncology medications are somehow uniquely unlikely to go through this well-described process of failure.
I agree with you about significant financial support from the government if that support is financial and given to smaller groups.
I disagree about societal acceptance though. I feel like your point of view may be missing clinical trials and treatments in the USA. The laws we have are written in blood, and the laws more sophisticated than I think you appreciate.
There are various options for fast-tracking drug development if the conditions are serious enough or the drugs promising enough. I suggest actually reading about how these processes work, and the history of what happens when we don't have these protections, before deciding that approvals are overly cautious.
We relax ‘do no harm’ quite a bit when the alternative is certain death. People like to try stuff in order to hang on to hope. Towards the end I became convinced that she made the wrong choice to do aggressive interventions. Quality of life was very bad.
On the other hand, she gave it her all trying to survive. Hopefully that was satisfying for her.
Same here. Are you and your care recipient familiar with the Optune Pax device that the FDA approved in February?
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
My father's been using it since April. It's a little cumbersome and only improves overall survival rates by about two months over chemo alone, but we're hoping that it helps him remain relatively healthy until Daraxonrasib becomes available.
We should be alright. We're on track for the expanded access program. Also, it's a long story, but she was taken off an Irinotecan-containing regimen prematurely about a year ago. In hindsight, she was clearly reaponding very well to that particular drug, so we've got that in our toolkit.