Frog-derived gut bacterium eradicates tumors in mice
thefocalpoints.com
thefocalpoints.com
They used mice, because they are good for early tries. The researchers had 9 bacterias and only 1 was successful. Experiments in mice are cheaper and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans. (Hey! They even injected the cancer cells in mice and waited a week until it grow. Nobody will approve something like that in humans.)
The title claims that the tumos were eradicated. The title hides that it was a small tumor they injected in the mice and more importantly that it disappeared for two weeks until the experiment ended. It's difficult to guess if it will be useful for humans with bigger tumors because they are harder to detect, and it would work for a interesting enough period like 5 years.
There is also and old comment by octaane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308732 I'll quote it partially:
> Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote:
>> "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)"
> PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are PD-L1 positive. [...] Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive.
> Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo.
> [...]
More like, what's a mouse gonna do about it?
For those unfamiliar with the reference, in Hitchikers guide to the galaxy series, Mice are projections of hyper intelligent extra terrestrial beings from a higher dimension who commission the creation of planet earth complete with fossils as a giant organic computer
Other times I just don't see something for other reasons. I read Augustine's Confessions and never saw the famous line "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee", which is in the THIRD sentence! I'm not sure if the antiquated English [1] threw me off, or what. In fact, I don't remember seeing pretty much every quote people take from Confessions, besides the pear episode. Some of those are theological ideas that are just completely new, some are probably my annoyance at his "confessing" things that aren't really faults [2], and my annoyance at his insistence on quoting the Bible everywhere he could [3]. But I find it strange that I seemed to have simply not seen most of what other people get out of it.
[1] Rant: don't bother reading the out of copyright translations of ancient works, because the 1800s and early 1900s seemed to think that because the works are old, it should be translated into old English. This is stupid. Augustine didn't write in 500 year old Latin, so translating it into 500 year old English is mistranslation.
[2] I am starting to think that maybe "confess" might have meant something different, and it is not confessing a faults but a statement of beliefs.
[3] I suspect that ancient ideas of rhetoric valued quoting trusted sources a lot, kind of how classical Chinese literature quotes older classic literature a lot. Augustine, being a professional rhetorician, would in that case be expected to do that. But it drove me nuts.
Anyway, 5 years is a long time, so I agree shorter times are useful and interesting. But, 5 years is used as an arbitrary threshold like in https://www.webmd.com/cancer/remission-what-does-it-mean so I think it's a good comparison to put "eradicate" in the title.
The article says
> The surviving contingent on the E. americana strain was evaluated for 60 days (Supplementary Figure S5).
The supplementary material only shows a reshot with cancer cells at the day 30. All the other parts also days a total of 60 days. At day 0 the cancer cells were injected, approximately at day 10 the bacteria were injected, and approximately at day 20 the cancer disappeared. So correct my initial comment and say that it's 40 days cancer free.
When the title says "eradication" most people interpret "forever". That is too optimistic and unrealistic, but a 5 years survival rate is somewhat a standard point. 15 or 40 days is too short to know if there are some hidden metastasis, they need more time to grow and be visible.
Also, the initial treatment is only 10 days after the initial shot with cancer cells. IIRC it's an aggressive cancer variant in mice variant that has a crappy inmune system. Gut cancer in humans are detected when they block the guts or bleed or in periodic colonoscopy every few years, so they usually have more than 10 days to develop before detection.
Note that this setup in mice is good for initial test and to filter the promising treatments as they did, but it's difficult to extrapolate to long term treatment of humans.
When they get a 'lump' it grows real quick. They make lovely, interactive pets, and very intelligent but they will break your heart and die too soon.
They make fun affectionate pets if you can stomach the idea that they will die on you.
> The three bacterial strains that successfully induced tumor regression (E. americana, C. portucalensis, and E. ludwigii) were all identified as facultative anaerobic bacteria.
> This finding is consistent with established principles of bacterial cancer therapy, as anaerobic bacteria possess the unique capability to selectively accumulate and colonize within solid tumors due to the characteristically hypoxic and immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment.
> This selective tumor colonization likely enabled efficient intratumoral bacterial proliferation and, in conjunction with activated immune cell responses, contributed significantly to the observed tumor regression phenomena.
Said in other words, the tumours created the ideal environment for anaerobic bacteria to multiply. Eventually causing a reaction from the body’s own immune response (which ignored the tumour but successfully detected the bacterial growth).
So one of the reasons this worked well was that the bacteria acted as a target for the immune cells, and they proliferated inside the tumour thus weakening it.
> Outperforming chemotherapy and immunotherapy
And then later:
> As a facultative anaerobe, it preferentially accumulates within the hypoxic tumor microenvironment, where it rapidly proliferates and exerts direct cytotoxic effects while simultaneously activating a broad immune response. Within hours, tumors become infiltrated with T cells, B cells, and neutrophils, accompanied by surges in key inflammatory cytokines like TNF-α and IFN-γ.
So this is immunotherapy. Although it is clever immunotherapy. Gut bacteria doesn't usually survive long in the bloodstream because there's too much oxygen present (that's part of why it's gut bacteria, its unlikely to go all Leeroy Jenkins on the rest of the organism).
The TME is often so densely packed with growth that its less oxidative than surrounding tissue. So the bacteria that don't find a tumor don't last long enough to cause problems and the ones that do find one see it as a bit of a refuge from the problematic environment and colonize it specifically, throwing off whatever subterfuge the tumor was using to keep the immune system from getting involved.
It's a bit like throwing a brick through the window of a bank that was being quietly robbed by somebody else. The cops show up and realize they've been overlooking a separate problem.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104839/?ref_=fn_t_1
In it, Connery finds what looks to be a rare natural cure to all cancer in the Rain Forest (spoiler: not a frog, but equally as weird), and is literally battling the nearby deforesting and bulldozers. For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre (As a young teen, I saw it in the theaters.. quite a bit less action than a 007 movie but good drama and dramatic Sean Connery acting).
Buddy, if you're trying to tell me it's weirder than Darby O'Gill and the Little People, I am going to need more than Sir Connery in a ponytail.
Check out Zardoz: Connery with a ponytail, a pistol in hand, wearing thigh-high boots and a mankini.
And a giant flying stone head that vomits guns.
I am not joking.
Connery definitely starred in even weirder movies. Have you seen Zardoz?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmI2NjI2OWYtMzU5NS00...
Oh, yes! Just once, but Connery, in just underpants and boots, battling some surreal head-shaped apparitions, is something I won't ever forget. I have no idea what the plot was about - but that's OK, because I had no idea about that either during or just after watching :D
A movie so bad it's kind of good - though second-hand embarrassment (at the performances, effects, plot, characters) was a bit hard to bear at points.
Ewingella Americana itself is a quite common bacterial species, but it seems that the effective strain is the frog-derived and cultivated one. So don't go injecting yourself with a random E. Americana.
Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2...
Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.
So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.
If it never works as well if at all in humans, maybe mice are too different?
This kind of treatment triggers an immune response, which the model tumors have never had to fight before. So it’s just an easy target.
(They can’t taste capsaicin, though now that I know that exists, I’ll pick some up for other projects!)
EDIT: we did revert about 50% of the lawn to native wetland/prairie and we aim to raise that number over time.
You’ll find it’s less effort to mouseproof sheds than pretty much any other option.
Bucket traps with water are a good option. They auto-reset. They don’t maim and are no threat to cats/dogs like spring traps, do not kill predators and increase mouse populations like poison does. They’re more humane than glue, for sure.
We use a combination of those, spring traps (if we can put them in the path the mice take) and electrocution traps (in the house). We’ve killed 100’s of mice.
The other important thing to do is remove all piles of anything within 100 ft of all structures. Wetland/prairie is a good plan if you have a buffer zone.
Under no circumstances call Orkin. Complete waste of time. This comment contains more training than their technicians get, and they don’t do their jobs anyway.
With comments on the current post agreeing that the shadowy cabal will suppress yet another miracle treatment to keep for themselves, so the “goyim” can be sold poison.
Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?
There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.
> happily
I think you answered your own question really, a lot of animals just enjoy eating them (humans included!)
Given that many cancer sufferers are immunocompromised, this isn't necessarily a silver bullet, although it is an interesting result.
And far better to be hiding, than watching and playing a fiddle from atop some convenient high wall. Or plotting how to destroy your fellow alpha arsonists next.
Backwards logic. If they're fond of it then they're the people to be arguing against, no?
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
Yeah, being born in rust belt of the former Eastern Bloc was a privilege like hell. You don't know what you are talking about. If you visit places like Chisinau, you'll get a glimpse of Ostrava cca 1994.
What are the long term effects of the systems that you push? Can you even model them?
Long term effects of Soviet-style Communism were ghastly. Dried lakes, poisoned rivers, mass graves, all in the name "of the people".
Non-market economies can only be sustained by constant violent repression and censorship, and the incentives in such systems where prices aren't serving as a signal are totally out of whack, resulting in extreme waste on one side and constant shortages on the other.
The absolutely worst thing that liberated African and Asian countries did was to introduce Marxist economies. Fortunately most of them already realized just how deep that hole goes. Economic liberalization in India alone will likely lift a billion people out of poverty in mere 20 years or so.
It's like saying desktop enshittification has been caused by Microsoft. This is true in our timeline, even though if Apple had owned the desktop for 30 years they also would have enshittified it.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
yeah well that's because the execution matters and turns out when you give people power to choose who gets what, they abuse it. go figure.
But surely there’s a more sane option than under regulated capitalism with a problematic wealth distribution and fucked up incentives that encourage short term profit at the expense of society, environment and all else?
your system should work with human nature or it will never work.
capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity. socialism falls under greed.
and no there's not a better solution, or at least it hasn't been found yet. if it was it'd still be a form of capitalism, not the other side of the spectrum.
but we disagree on the effects of the current system. capitalism has not been at the expense of society, the opposite in fact. we've had so much prosperity due to it.
same with the environment really. communist countries don't really have better air quality, worse in fact! US has the money from capitalism to develop clean tech.
Communism seeks to mitigate or avoid this human instinct, often failing.
Capitalism throws its hands in the air and says "ok, be greedy and selfish, ignore others and society, and if we're lucky, and it sometimes provides any societal benefit, that's purely incidental and secondary to you making money".
Agreed!
> capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity.
Sadly without representation, that prosperity accumulates around the few that then don’t necessarily disperse it back into the economy but hoard it and lobby against taxes and workers’ rights etc.
From where I stand, both systems suck, just that regulated capitalism is more workable in the more socialist leaning nations from a human welfare perspective, like many of the ones in the EU. Ofc an economic powerhouse that does not make, not necessarily.
And then there’s corruption and various bureaucratic inefficiencies, which you’ll get to some degree in any system.
Communism is an erroneous idea. It starts from a correct premise, that humans who have accumulated much wealth are able to use it abusively for accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the others, and this positive feedback cannot be stopped without some kind of regulation.
However, the solution proposed by communism is an illusion that cannot work with real humans. The communist solution is to confiscate everything valuable from all citizens and put it under the management of the state bureaucrats, who supposedly will administrate it efficiently and in such a manner as to produce maximum benefits for all citizens.
The reality is that of course the communist bureaucrats are composed of the same people who succeed to become politicians or managers everywhere, i.e. those for whom the priority is to satisfy their own interests and greed, and not the interests of the entire society.
Therefore in all socialist/communist countries, those who were supposed to manage resources in the name of the "entire society" behaved exactly like the owners of those resources, so they lived like US millionaires or even billionaires, while most of the population lived in poverty, because all what their parents or grand-parents had in the past had been confiscated and now they were at the mercy of their managers, who decided unilaterally what they should be allowed to work and what they should receive to be able to live.
The only solution that could work would be the exact opposite of communism. Instead of centralizing everything, the production of at least all the things strictly necessary for living should be as distributed as possible, done by numerous small local companies, not by a few huge global monopolies.
Instead of having 3 producers of memory chips for the entire Earth, there should be at least 3 or 4 in every country. Similarly for any other industrial product.
Unfortunately that is extremely unlikely to happen because during the last decades everything has evolved in the opposite direction.
To continue with the same example, when I was young a large fraction of the European countries were still able to make integrated circuits and computer memories, even many of the East-European countries. But then one-by-one most electronics or computing companies have been bought or closed, until none survived. An important role in the disappearance of the electronics industries in most countries had been that of USA, who used various means of pressure and blackmailing to prevent other countries to enact protectionist measures favoring their internal producers against US companies, i.e. exactly what now USA itself uses against China.
Because, per the article, the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors the supposedly "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.
There are people who fervently believe that the world's problems are caused by something like international Jewry or lack of sufficient religiosity or existence of democracy. I fervently hope that they don't get to succeed in their solutions.
"putting power solely in the hands of the wealthiest."
Do you think it is? Then let some of the wealthiest try to obtain a permit in downtown SF for a mere block of flats, the likes of which used to be built by the thousands 100 years ago. If it takes less than a decade, I would be surprised.
There is a lot of power outside the private sector. Every environmental or political group that sues any project does, in fact, wield a lot of power of the "veto" variety, which used to be prerogative of kings.
The very fact that the question "Quod custodiet ipsos custodes?" (who will guard the guards themselves?) was originally formulated in Latin is an indication of how long has this been going on.
Sure that you can get a permit somewhere, that is just federalism. But you may not get it where you want it, and given that data centers are now a part of the general culture war, I expect that many blue states will now attempt to regulate them out of existence, at least in urban and semi-urban areas.
This critique doesn't make sense. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. You're actually a capitalist whether you know it or not and you agree with capitalism at a rudimentary level. Your complaint about "power in the hands of the wealthiest" is a matter of government dysfunction, not the economic system. In fact, the economic system, capitalism, is performing well in spite of the poor performance of the governmental system.
Countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway which are often hailed as model countries for livability and "democratic socialist" states are highly capitalistic, and by some measures more so even than the United States.
In this chain of conversation the grandparent wrote something about the 1% destroying the planet. That's a red herring. Everyone jetting around the world taking vacation, buying bottled water, driving cars, eating cheeseburgers, you name it are doing much more actual damage than just the 1% who, while doing a disproportionate amount of climate damage (however we want to measure that) are not responsible for most of the total amount of climate damage. That's not to excuse them, of course, and as a matter of government dysfunction for example ask why luxury goods like private jets or yachts aren't taxed at a much higher rate, or perhaps aviation fuel for private use (I'm not suggesting these are good or bad policies, but just examples at the surface level).
If you want to address climate change you have to not only demand reform across the board, but make personal changes in your own life. If you are unwilling to do that, you'll find yourself in similar company, shouting from the rooftops if only we taxed the billionaires and finding nothing was done to help or fix the situation.
Thats the most dangerous thought one could have. Simply thinking "its okay because we can fix it later" leads to taking issues lightly and hoping that a fix is eventually discovered in time. We run out of time with climate change for example. There are no fixes.
We will fix it later, I'm not worried about it becuase there is nothing to be done about it. Worrying and panicking about it does no one any good.
Technology marches forward.
One theory of where posts like this come from: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2527316123
Thank you for this; I'd not seen it, but needed to.
Definitely changing, I'm not so sure about destroying. Your house displaced an ecosystem so you could live there but I bet in your ethical system that's fine right? What a surprise
Probably didnt
Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft.
I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/06ab/f83d30ec00bb902bb1aa37...
https://radiolab.org/podcast/best-medicine
They followed a 1100 year old medicine recipe and found the resulting salve was effective against MRSA in their test.
(Note: I am affiliated with the linked website, but I didn't write the article in question)
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/coleys-cancer-killing-concoc...
Edit: Ignore me, I'm sleepy and can't read, lol
Eat more fiber and fermented foods yo
CPMV for Cancer.
Cowpeas are also known as Black-Eyed Peas; which are regarded as good luck and used to be in pastures and thereby human diets.
They get all the good medical breakthroughs.
Vs. there's a whole lotta of money to be made in mouse medicine.
Symbolic, perhaps?
Is there any other source?
Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.