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Comment by Aboutplants | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures” Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself

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In addition to the other comment mentioning CAR-T therapies, we also have therapies based on tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2024...

https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000848 (careful: Figure 1 can be very graphical, but it shows the huge positive impact of this therapy)

We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.

There is no world in which CAR-T is a "cure", especially since this isn't even a scientific term in oncology. We generally say if there is no relapse after 5 years post-treatment, then any cancer is a "new" cancer, so 5 years of remission is the closest thing to a "cure", but this isn't a scientific term.

Also, we barely have more than 3 years data for CAR-T for most cancers. And even still, the survival rates aren't great, in many cases 50% compared to e.g. ~20% for previous chemo-immunotherapies plus marrow transplants. And this ignores how massively immunocompromised (or so permanently brain-damaged you are effectively senile) CAR-T can leave you. You can be severely immunocompromised (literally identical to or worse than AIDS / late-stage HIV) for at least a year in close to half of cases, but maybe even permanently, in perhaps as high as 10% of cases (at least for lymphomas).

I say this as a person that is only alive because of CAR-T treatment 1.5 years ago. CAR-T is amazing, and a far better treatment than previous treatments, but calling it a "cure" is deeply misleading and mostly clueless. Currently, it is simply a much better last-ditch effort than the previous ones.

Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.

Why is it 'of course impossible'? Couldn't we someday have nanobots or other tech that could screen all your cells and be able to indicate whether any cancerous cells remain?

No. It's hard to get even small molecules where we want them in the body, there's no way that the gigantic molecular clusters called "nanobots" could reliably get access to every single cell. (What may be possible is using things like the Moderna cancer vaccine to make your body an inhospitable environment for the growth and multiplication of the cancer cells.)

If we were able to find cancer cells with a precision down to 1 cell, killing them would be trivial. There are lots of cells in a person. It's possible we will get there someday. I think bioengineering is the most likely route. I.e., design a virus to specifically target the type of cancer cell you mean to eradicate.

Strictly speaking, no impossible from our understanding of physics, but also an enormous scientific and engineering problem. research into that would take away from people working on more reasonable approaches today.

We already have these nanobots in our bodies. This is the entire rub with cancer. There is amazingly strong selective pressure to evolve ways to hide from our existing nanobots and make them think these are valid healthy cells. Artificial nanobots would be no different in this respect. As for why our nanobots aren't already perfect, it's hard to get perfect. In fact it can go the wrong way, some people's nanobots end up too aggressive and start attacking their healthy cells (autoimmune disorders).

Correct. The people here saying CAR-T is a cure have no clue at all what they are talking about, and I say this as someone that is only alive right now because of CAR-T https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669

I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years. With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.

CAR T-cell therapies (immunotherapy, tldr priming the immune system to respond)

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/cancer-treat...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

CAR-T is not a cure in any sense of the word, in part because "cure" is just not a scientifically valid concept in oncology. I would know, CAR-T saved my life, but this was at great cost and is not even remotely close to a guarantee, and the side-effects can be beyond devastating https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669. At best, CAR-T is more like a tradeoff: often just a coin-flip's chance to live, for long-term—maybe even permanent—life-shattering consequences.

Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.

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