One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

Great find, thanks. Key quote for those too lazy to read through:

> For the last year, many people have been working to make clinical trials possible. We are now hopeful that the first human clinical trials of anti-CD47 antibody will take place at Stanford in mid-2014, if all goes well. Clinical trials may also be done in the United Kingdom.

So it's coming soon... at least in clinical trials...

Edit: interesting that since I posted this, the post went off the front page. sigh @ opaque moderation...

You would think that for compounds with such potentially far-reaching effects, there would be an expedited clinical trials program with informed consent from terminal patients, or something similar.

It's bad because most journalism is done by press release, especially in science where there are almost no reporters that understand the science. In this particular case, Science Magazine has competent understanding, but Irv Weissman is one of the greatest scientists of our generation, and either he or Stanford's press office is really hyping this particular avenue.

I have a ton of respect for Weissman, but I thought the claims at the time were not merited, given the evidence I saw, but then I didn't have Weissman's experiences or brilliance. Older well-respected scientists do sometimes fall into a trap of getting hypotheses wrong, as is typical in science, but having their hypotheses being accepted as proven before all the work is done