I was fortunate to participate in the trial for this drug for over a year. It is nothing short of a miracle drug (although there is still more that can be done). I was forced to withdraw after the drug lost its effectiveness and my disease progressed. That said, though, for over a year all of my tumors either disappeared, shrank, or remained stable. For a disease that was largely considered a near-immediate death sentence, this drug is an absolute game change. I am eternally grateful for the scientists and researchers at RevMed.
monocularvision 5 days ago [-]
Thanks for sharing your story. Praying for you and your family in this time.
gavinray 6 days ago [-]
To offer context for others:
The bigger deal about this is that KRAS was considered an "undruggable" target.
Recent advancements have allowed us to design biologics to do things we previously thought impossible, which broadens the horizons for other treatments in the future.
Baby steps.
Nippon_anzai 6 days ago [-]
What's next then?
pharaohgeek 5 days ago [-]
The Johns Hopkins Children's' Center is looking at trialing it for rhabdomyosarcoma, a particularly deadly form of cancer that primary targets children. If successful, this would represent a HUGE leap forward in its treatment.
SubiculumCode 6 days ago [-]
Other cancers, obesity, name it.
aurisl 6 days ago [-]
Horrible disease. We just buried my wife’s father because of stage 4 pancreatic cancer. A month ago, he was still living his life as usual. Then he developed abdominal pain, was diagnosed, and died three weeks later.
I think we should also invest more in better diagnostics and early cancer detection. That could save many lives too.
ethbr1 2 days ago [-]
> I think we should also invest more in better diagnostics and early cancer detection.
The issue with non-imaging early cancer detection seems to be false positives.
Afaik, medical regulatory agencies have been... resistant... to allowing marketing of tests.
The thinking seems to be "If people get a positive result, they may opt for interventions that are more harmful than their current disease state."
But, to me, that seems to leave unmentioned the fact that there's a finite "untreatable" cancer progression line, and while that's extending to later disease states, it's still a helluva lot easier to treat earlier.
klittle32 6 days ago [-]
I’m sorry for your loss. I lost my father to it. Like you said, it happened so quickly. Truly horrible disease.
fastasucan 5 days ago [-]
This cancer is a pain. My father was extremely lucky, and was diagnosed early. Next up was months of chemo that left him to be a shell of himself. Then he could be operated. They removed parts of his stomach, his spleen and duodenum. And his whole pancreas.
Complications after his surgery meant he had two more. He is now, three weeks after the first operation learning to walk again. It will be an additional week or two untill he can eat. (Without the complication he would have been walking and eating two weeks after the first operation). Oh and he is a diabetic now, since they removed his pancreas.
Just crossing my fingers that he will get out of the hospital without any more complications, and adapt to the new life.
Please remember that science is under attack in the United States - new proposals would gut the nih even beyond the horror that is ongoing. As a scientist I am horrified and I truly hope that we don’t abandon the usas historically strong investment in the future.
fillskills 6 days ago [-]
Kindly share more details
SubiculumCode 6 days ago [-]
1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
Vaslo 6 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nickgros 6 days ago [-]
> 100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts
I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH
> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.
> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.
SubiculumCode 6 days ago [-]
You know so little about this, ad it is terribly frustrating to me. Scientists have been made out to be villains, when, on the whole, these are some the hardest working, most motivated people you will ever encounter.
Vaslo 5 days ago [-]
I know just as much as you do about this, if not more - so it's terribly frustrating to me. I have been a scientist in a time where lots of political nonsense from the left didn't interfere with good science. Scientists are mostly NOT villains, though some use their positions to espouse various progressive nonsense that have nothing to do with good science.
jordanpg 6 days ago [-]
They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.
bregma 6 days ago [-]
The political right is obsessed with minimizing Type II error. They feel it's better to miss good research results than to have the wrong people performing the research or chasing the wrong ideas to start with (a false negative) and the further to the right they are on the spectrum, the more important minimizing the wrong people and ideas becomes. This leads to less discovery and successes because more research gets falsely rejected at the funding level.
The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.
foldr 6 days ago [-]
>This leads to things like Lysenkoism
If the first point of comparison you reach for is the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century, that would suggest that the American political left has not in fact, in recent times, been interfering with science to the same extent as the Trump administration currently.
bregma 4 days ago [-]
The American political "left" is way to the right of centre compared with everywhere else in the world.
foldr 4 days ago [-]
Yes, I know. That is one of several reasons why what Communists did in the Soviet Union in the 1950s isn't particularly relevant to what Democrats have (or haven't) been doing in the past decade or two.
zzleeper 6 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of grants gave this issue, and the cuts have meanwhile being very wide, without any sort of intelligent approach (I know ppl doing stuff like material science at nasa that now have nothing to do because they cut costs of various inputs, while the very expensive lab equipment is sitting there now unused)
meebee 6 days ago [-]
Can you cite any stats or studies that show that this is happening in any substantial amounts? This seems to be one of those "it just makes common sense" when the underlying data is ignored or assumed.
dgellow 6 days ago [-]
You’re asking the anti science side to answer with stats and proofs, that won’t work
thinkingtoilet 6 days ago [-]
>100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.
Vaslo 6 days ago [-]
It’s called the 2024 election. People have had enough leftist politics in their science.
ckosidows 6 days ago [-]
This should go without saying, but the person you're replying to obviously wants you to prove instances of scientists receiving grant money because they know someone or are part of a group. They are not asking you to prove the support of the people.
SubiculumCode 6 days ago [-]
It's called the 2024 election. People have listened to so much propaganda aimed at destroying the anyone with credibility that can challenge whichever "truth" the propagandist chooses to push.
There is no leftist scurge I'm science.
Vaslo 5 days ago [-]
Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's "propaganda". The fact you say things like this show people that they should constantly be questioning the science.
thinkingtoilet 6 days ago [-]
Sigh.
I'm sure the average person was completely fed up with the federal grant process for medical issues and it was a driving force in their voting decision. Excellent proof.
maldev 6 days ago [-]
Could you explain how much the US spends on its science budget compared to peers? It would help us really understand how much he's cutting it and harming our science base if we knew the numbers. For example if we're spending 50% less than EU or Canada.
pvaldes 5 days ago [-]
> Kindly share more details (about your claim that science is under attack in the United States)
Is of public knowledge that the National Science Foundation and funds for thousands of scientific projects were gutted by DOGE in 2025.
Each one of the research lines cut needed typically 10 years to grow, so Trump and GOP had destroyed an incredible amount of years of research just on 2025, with consequences probably extending into 2035 or so. Without any visible benefit for Americans, that had still seen their debt sky-rocketing while their taxes are spent in pools and sinks.
Trump has also assured to engrave into the brains of the whole scientific community that US is now an hostile place for students and researchers. The whole planet had seen the main universities attacked by Trump (with Harvard resisting, and Columbia losing their pride), the foreign students targeted by ICE and the department of Education eviscerated
Also the thousands of workers in USAID and Health and Human Services fired for fun. Without mentioning the DOGE mess done at the national nuclear safety administration with 400 essential workers fired and then asked to return to the job ASAP, please, please.
brandensilva 6 days ago [-]
I've been wondering why they attack science outside of they think it is woke and liberal.
It makes no sense to cut off the hand that saves you even as a rich billionaire who wants to control people in a fascist society.
inglor_cz 6 days ago [-]
Everyone likes to think that their opponents are evil, highly intelligent, silently scheming types like the legendary Cardinal Richelieu.
In reality, mediocre thinkers with inflated egos and little understanding of long-term consequences are pulling the strings almost everywhere.
jeremyjh 6 days ago [-]
They don’t believe in competence because they’ve never experienced it. They think everything is narrative and spectacle.
qingcharles 6 days ago [-]
It pleases their voters. All the MAGAs I know think scientists are scammers, funded by Bill Gates, brewing up "fake" viruses to reduce the population and insert nanobots to track their movements.
svnt 6 days ago [-]
They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.
6 days ago [-]
onesandofgrain 6 days ago [-]
We should be spending the same amount of money on health and disease as we spend on AI. Ogogogogogo
Nifty3929 6 days ago [-]
It is more than plausible that spending money on AI is spending money on healthcare. I believe with little certainty that AI will help us find new ways to fight disease, improve our health and live longer lives.
onesandofgrain 6 days ago [-]
dafuq did u just write u bot? ur negating urself
Nifty3929 5 days ago [-]
Because this? "I believe with little certainty"
Actually, I think it's powerful to acknowledge when my beliefs are weak. I still believe it - I think it's true, and I don't have any conflicting beliefs. But still it would not take a lot of evidence to change my mind, and since this is a prediction about the future, I will not be very surprised to find out I was wrong.
AbstractH24 6 days ago [-]
My mother's cousin just died from pancreatic cancer on Monday. She was in a trial for this drug and failed. Trying to figure out how I feel about this or how my family would.
Personally, I have epilepsy and am increasingly aware that while some paradigm-shifting treatments are on the horizon, they are a decade or so away and likely won't come to market in time to fully help me (particularly reverse small but accumulating damage caused by seizures). And that's a weird feeling.
chilldsgn 5 days ago [-]
I am sorry for your loss... Someone I love was also on this drug and it wasn't effective. I hope it helps some people, this is an awful disease.
AbstractH24 5 days ago [-]
Thank you
Failing a treatment that has held promise for so many others and been heralded as paradigm-shifting is such a weird place to be. There's comfort in knowing others won't suffer, but loneliness is knowing you or a loved one still is.
btown 6 days ago [-]
Another ongoing HN thread from yesterday around some exciting cancer treatment breakthroughs, this time with a CRISPR Cas12a2 mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48505231
This subthread there is a fascinating explainer about one user's journey into funding and incentivizing research into their own rare form of blood cancer, and how they are able to push forward the state of the art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506997 - something of a modern-day (and more accurate) Lorenzo's Oil!
an0malous 7 days ago [-]
I’m surprised Michael Levin’s research hasn’t expanded much beyond a certain YouTube media bubble. They’re able to start and stop cancer growth with only voltage changes between cells, likewise they can also trigger regeneration or anatomical changes using voltage changes. His research seems to suggest a lot of important anatomical plans are stored in an electric field around the body, not in the DNA. This model’s explanation for cancer is that some cells become disconnected from this field and start growing independently of the overall body plan.
6 days ago [-]
neonstatic 6 days ago [-]
I love his work (even though I know little more than what he says in interviews). I am also surprised it's not more widely known / applied. I am very skeptical of conspiracy-minded thinking, so I'd much rather assume his and his team's work hasn't reached escape velocity from obscurity. Especially with larger industries, it takes time and significant breakthroughs to become "a household name", so to speak.
TaupeRanger 6 days ago [-]
They are working on getting in vivo studies going from what I remember - it's going to take a positive result in a trial on real patients to get attention - that's just how medicine works. You have to show it actually improves longevity and/or patient quality of life before anyone has a reason to care.
dominotw 6 days ago [-]
i remember so much excitement around radioligand therapies like 177Lu-PSMA-617 being better than chemo and with way way less sides . And great improvements in pfs and os.
didnt seem to have lived up to the promise. seemed to have accelerated prostate cancer for my father who passed away in mere three months after first dose.
robinsoncrusue 6 days ago [-]
Same. 177Lu-PSMA-617 caused severe blood cell shortage and within a month after the second dose my dad died.
Immunotherapies on the other hand seems to work wonders for many who respond to it. I regret for not trying it.
h4kunamata 5 days ago [-]
Do you think we don't have cure already for cancers???
Look for how much money the pharmaceutic cartels make annually, that is why these "drugs" aka cure will never ever be released because its side effects are still unknown.
3 days ago [-]
6 days ago [-]
gcanyon 7 days ago [-]
As is often the case, the title is hyperbolic. The discovery applies to 20% of tumors, and "one of cancer's significant defenses" or "a key weakness of cancer" would be more accurate.
That said, I'll happily take "we discovered a key weakness in 20% of cancers," please and thank you.
jibal 6 days ago [-]
Not hyperbolic, just incomplete ... this drug inhibits the KRAS mutation that is the "master switch" for 90% of pancreatic cancers and 50% of colon cancers. KRAS was considered "undruggable" so this is a huge breakthrough which is why oncologists gave a standing ovation for nearly a minute in the middle of a talk, with some of them in tears.
asveikau 6 days ago [-]
20% is still a huge number. (Your comment also acknowledges this of course. That just popped out at me.)
inglor_cz 6 days ago [-]
Aren't those 20 per cent of tumors more concentrated on the "intractable" side? If so, then the hyperbole is forgivable.
cschmidt 6 days ago [-]
It does seem like those 20% are exactly on the nasty side. So even more impressive.
DataDaoDe 6 days ago [-]
I'm no expert, and don't know if it applies in this case, but for a cancer I had (lymphoma) I was told that aggressive can often be easier to treat or "cure" (as defined by survival rates, etc.) since it also can often be hit more brutally by the treatments.
Anyway, since many in my family have died from this horrible cancer, its fantastic news to hear of any improvements there.
jibal 6 days ago [-]
Sorry, it does not apply ... this drug inhibits (for the first time) the KRAS mutation (previously considered "undruggable") that is the primary cause of 90% of pancreatic cancers and 50% of colon cancers.
DataDaoDe 6 days ago [-]
No reason to be sorry, that sounds like this is even better news then :)
jibal 6 days ago [-]
I just meant that this doesn't apply to lymphoma, which is not caused by KRAS.
inglor_cz 6 days ago [-]
Lymphoma is a bit of an outlier. In the case of lymphoma, more aggressive types indeed respond better to treatment, and given that we are now fairly good at treating lymphoma, that translates to good outcomes.
That is not true for most cancers, though.
basisword 7 days ago [-]
What does this mean in layman's terms? How will this potentially help me if I get cancer?
epistasis 7 days ago [-]
Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner.
One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.
This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.
This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.
So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.
inigyou 6 days ago [-]
How does it avoid targeting KRAS in healthy cells? Or is this another form of chemotherapy where we're trying our hardest to deliver the right amount of poison that kills the cancer before it kills the rest of you?
epistasis 6 days ago [-]
It doesn't. Cancerous cells have a much higher dependency on RAS signaling to survive, so it's a drug that kills everything that's replicating via RAS signaling, much like standard chemotherapy kills cells in general that are reproducing more quickly.
However this is just the first version of the drug, it can be combined with other modalities to allow more selective targeting of cancer versus not cancer cells (e.g antibody-drug conjugation). And when used in earlier stage cancers, rather than the advanced cancers in this first clinical trial, there's the possibility of lower dosing that has less strong side effects.
This is just the first attack that has ever broken through to hit a key weakness of some cancers. It's the start of learning, a breakthrough that will launch refinements, enhancements, and a ton of innovation. That sort of innovation is sometimes derided as "me-too" drugs, and not meaningful, but some of the biggest advancements in cancer care have been from taking very hard to tolerate treatments and making them more tolerable and refined and better for patients, allowing longer and more thorough killing of cancer cells. I would expect we will see a lot of that here, as well as work towards combinations with other drugs.
jibal 6 days ago [-]
This drug targets cells with a KRAS mutation that locks the KRAS switch in the ON state, driving uncontrolled growth. Cells with this mutation are abnormal and predisposed to becoming cancer ... so by definition are not healthy.
oh_my_goodness 6 days ago [-]
>a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for,
Can you help disambiguate this? Are there treatments now, or are there potential treatments with trials in 1-5 years?
epistasis 6 days ago [-]
The next 1-5 years will tell us which cancers this new drug will work well on, right now it's only been tried in pancreatic cancer when people have failed their first treatment. The new drug from the article, daroxonrasib, has nine trials i see currently, here:
The first two are the trial that just completed and showed success: people that have pancreatic cancer that failed other treatments, then a "trial" that is meant to give quick access to more people now that it's been shown to work.
Then there's a trial for using it as the first-line treatment for pancreatic cancer, one for lung cancer (NSCLC), and also various combinations with other drugs. I expect we'll see a ton of new trials registered in the coming year. Especially something in combination with colon cancer, because a common drug resistance mechanism in colon cancer is to develop KRAS mutation.
The thing is that we don't really know which cancers it will work well in until we try. And there's limited number of people with cancer that enter clinical trials, and we want to give each person their very best chance at survival, and then there's the massive expense of running the clinical trial itself, so learning happens slowly, one month of survival at a time, or one cancer recurrence at a time, or one death at a time. Patients that take part in clinical trials really are the heroes here. (Especially with the side effects of this new drug, which are horrible. It is a revolutionary drug, but we need to learn how to manage the other things it does as well, and that's going to take time.)
shevy-java 6 days ago [-]
But that's not a cure. If they don't take that drug, assuming it works, they still have the original mutation in the cancer cells.
> Patients that take part in clinical trials really are the heroes here.
Are they?
To me personally, putting people into a permanent state of requiring drugs to survive, is not really cure. It's just maximizing income for those selling those drugs. And none of those drugs work exceedingly well; people still die, even if to other disease or frailties. I don't understand this hype in general.
jmcgough 6 days ago [-]
I can understand being frustrated and cynical with the pharmaceutical industry, but I have never worked with a single doctor that approaches patient care with the goal of getting them "hooked" on something for life.
The pharmaceutical companies are not the ones making clinical decisions - in this case, it's a shared medical decision between a patient and their oncologist.
Having seen how horrific pancreatic cancer is, how difficult it is to treat, and the decades of slow research done by academic scientists to get to this point, I am elated that we have a tool to give patients more time with their families even if their cancer can't be "cured" with this particular drug.
This may seem unsatisfying, but it's real, measurable progress. KRAS has been known about since the earliest days of cancer research, so it's a true breakthrough to finally have a drug targeting it.
simulator5g 6 days ago [-]
Pharmaceutical companies do make clinical decisions, it just isn't called a clinical decision. But they decide what research to pursue, and thereby decide which drugs exist for the doctor to choose.
jmcgough 6 days ago [-]
They influence clinical decisions by adding to treatment options, but they do not make clinical decisions. If we believe that a drug's potential risks outweigh its benefits, clinicians will not prescribe it.
michaelmrose 6 days ago [-]
Everyone dies. Dying 5 years later is a victory. I would go so far as saying if it was you or someone who you care about you would understand.
>However, even though the overall number of cases rises as the population grows, fewer people are getting and dying from cancer. Between 2000 and 2021, the incidence rate — or the rate of new cancer cases per 100,000 people — declined by 5.7%, while the annual mortality rate fell by 27.5%.
Cancer is a broad term encompassing many sorts of malfunction and nearly 40% of Americans will be diagnosed with it at some point because if you survive other hazards and maladies cancer is often what gets you.
oh_my_goodness 6 days ago [-]
Unfortunately in this particular case people die about 6 months later, not 5 years. See the article.
michaelmrose 6 days ago [-]
This is just a failure of understanding. This particular advancement is part of a decades long slog which taken together allows a substantial number of people to live meaningful additional durations every single year. 6 months average by itself means that John got another 3 years even if Jane only got 3 more days.
If I pulled one person out of a burning building it would be newsworthy. Doctors are and have been pulling train loads every day.
oh_my_goodness 6 days ago [-]
I support doctors. They're doing great work. I understand that in today's US I probably should have said that explicitly, as many Americans seem to have joined the side of the cancer, viruses, etc., and now oppose doctors (or even blame doctors for the diseases). I'm not one of those irrational people.
I agree that 6 extra months (on average) means some patients get much more time than that. I agree that a statistically significant improvement on the survival rate for this terrible cancer is a very promising result longer term.
My disagreement was much narrower than that. I disagree that 6 extra months is equivalent to 5 extra years. I disagree that people living an extra 6 months on average is equivalent to one person living 3 extra years and one person living 3 extra days. I think 3 days and 3 years average out to about 1.5 years, not to 6 months.
Think of me as a living fossil who takes it for granted that everyone appreciates how much medicine improves our lives.
6 days ago [-]
6 days ago [-]
jamesrcole 6 days ago [-]
it's unfortunate that they live an extra 6 months???
oh_my_goodness 6 days ago [-]
In my comment I pointed out that "5 years" was a bit of an exaggeration compared to the results in the article (6 months). That seemed unfortunate to me. To me 5 years seems much better than 6 months.
try_the_bass 6 days ago [-]
Wow, this is such a wildly pessimistic and cynical take. Are you okay?
> But that's not a cure. If they don't take that drug, assuming it works, they still have the original mutation in the cancer cells.
The person you're replying to called this out specifically:
> and also various combinations with other drugs.
Why do you think they try it in combination with other drugs? You might be right that this drug alone might not be a cure, but if it inhibits cancer growth, then it empowers other drugs to work more effectively.
> people still die
So what... We do nothing, then? This is your complaint? That we can't be immortal, so why bother trying to cure anything?
I don't understand your type in general.
Spooky23 6 days ago [-]
My wife died of aggressive melanoma. Immunotherapy would likely have helped her if not for some complications that delayed it.
Today, only 4 years later, there are two therapies, one RNA based and one CART that would have been usable in her situation. She’d be alive today most likely.
Frankly, you have no idea what you’re talking about as you spew toxic bullshit. 5 year survival would meant being there for her son through high school. That survival rate was 65% in 2022 and closer to 80% now in recent trials.
Normally I’d scroll on, but in these degenerate days it is important to counter bullshit before it becomes policy.
memonkey 6 days ago [-]
I think the meaning is that because we can see success with KRAS mutation of pancreatic cancer, we can now begin clinical trials for other cancers that may have KRAS mutation (colorectal, lung) and see if there is success there. If there is success in treating other cancers during clinical trials, it could be fast tracked through FDA to be more generally available and then become part of the national treatment option (ideally in 1-5 years after clinical trials).
6 days ago [-]
dyauspitr 6 days ago [-]
The golden panacea for this would be a gene editing mechanism that will work in every cell in the body. Once we have something we can do whole hog gene replacement, most human health problems would be solved forever.
tremon 6 days ago [-]
For every cell mechanism that's being abused by cancer to fuel its growth, there are other cells in the body for which that mechanism is crucial for their correct functioning. Wholesale editing every cell in the body mostly guarantees that the patient does not die of cancer -- the cure will kill them before the disease does.
dyauspitr 6 days ago [-]
Only cells that have the necessary signature get the edit
Hendrikto 6 days ago [-]
So the exact opposite of what you said initially.
dyauspitr 5 days ago [-]
No, a mechanism that acts on every cell on the body doesn’t mean it changes every cell. The primary problem with gene replacement therapies is they cannot be effectively delivered to every cell. If we can find a way to deliver to every cell than just the ones with the right signature will get the changes.
redleggedfrog 6 days ago [-]
That was a really good summary, thank you.
throwaway81523 6 days ago [-]
Can we end up with a situation like antimicrobial resistance, where cancer itself evolves to resist these new treatments?
epistasis 6 days ago [-]
Yes, and one of the hallmarks of cancer is a removal of the usual DNA damage checkpoints. Cells have sensors that detect damaged DNA and stop cell division, and once that is gone evolution happens on an extremely accelerated times scale. In lung cancer, for example, we have developed entire series of drugs to go after successive resistance mutations inside the EGFR gene.
When we first started getting good at sequencing the DNA of tumors, I remember initial reports of taking samples across the 3D space of a tumor and finding great spatial heterogeneity in the tumor genomes.
I'm actually most excited for using this drug in combination with colon cancer, where KRAS mutation is a common drug resistance evolution in response to drugs that target the gene EFGR (though cancer researchers may all have their favorites to go after, colon cancer went after my family especially hard).
nicwilson 6 days ago [-]
Absolutely, this is selective pressure at work on cells with malregulated genetics. Most typically, this is in the form of drug efflux pumps, but you can definitely get more specific resistances.
Ways to avoid specific resistance include multiple treatments simultaneously, since the probability of generating resistance to both is the product of the probability of resistance either.
ulbu 6 days ago [-]
evolution is a wrong concept to approach it. cancer is not a separate life form, but a bug in the regeneration system of a complicated life form. it doesn’t exist outside of it, it cannot propagate.
epistasis 6 days ago [-]
Cancer researchers generally refer to it as evolution, and I've never heard any complaints from the population geneticists or evo-devo folks about it, so I don't think it's a tremendously controversial way to talk about it. See for example
sometimes a cancer can then survive on its own back as a single celled organism
throwaway81523 6 days ago [-]
I've heard that some cancers spread by viruses. Viruses do evolve. No idea if that says anything about cancer evolving.
pestatije 6 days ago [-]
thats environmental evolution...what happens here is cell "evolution" within a specific body
basisword 6 days ago [-]
Thanks for the explanation!
juleiie 6 days ago [-]
[flagged]
peterfirefly 6 days ago [-]
I don't much care what happens to most inmates but those with really long sentences should probably not be released early (or at all!) because they pose too much of a risk to the rest of us.
hypfer 6 days ago [-]
I have an even better proposal.
We'll just use you!
epistasis 6 days ago [-]
Are you going to give them cancer first too?
This is a horrifying proposal not only on the ethics front but also in the scientific uselessness of it.
This is exactly the type of thing that gave the Nazis the bad name they deserve.
juleiie 6 days ago [-]
[flagged]
wongarsu 6 days ago [-]
Until you get to the second order effects. If we want to find a cure for some disease, but we don't have enough people to do experiments on (maybe a lot of eligable prisoners died in previous trials) judges now have an incentive to hand out life sentences to people with that medical condition
Even just subconsciously that would have an effect
juleiie 6 days ago [-]
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wongarsu 6 days ago [-]
That won't create justice, only judges that forever encode current prejudices
ycombinator_acc 6 days ago [-]
As opposed to future prejudices?
I agree: the trials are not speedy enough. None of us will live long enough to take advantage of the endgame version of this.
techpression 6 days ago [-]
There’s literally nothing pointing towards this direction, rather the opposite.
Also the problem is not only judges, but the scope of detective work being done and when the crime was discovered etc. Judging comes last, but I guess we could deploy the infallible robot police squad which will do a flawless crime scene analysis etc.
6 days ago [-]
bad_username 6 days ago [-]
> Cancer is not one thing,
I know this is a popular "well actually" to do, but it is not always useful in a conversation. Yes, all cancers are different, but yes, cancer is also one thing: unchecked, harmful division of cells.
Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once. It is reasonable to talk about bacteria and antibacterial medications, it is also reasonable to talk about cancer and cancer treatment. I truly hope cancer will meet its "penicillin" one day (yes I know this is unlikely).
dpark 6 days ago [-]
It seems relevant here because the question was “How will this potentially help me if I get cancer?” and the answer is “Not at all unless you get a particular form of cancer that this applies to”.
> Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once.
Except people don’t ask “what if I get bacteria” the way they ask about cancer. If the story was about a new antibiotic that only affected 20% of common infectious bacteria strains and someone asked “in laypersons terms, how will this help me if I get a bacterial infection”, it would be appropriate to clarify that it only applies to some bacteria.
LoganDark 6 days ago [-]
> Except people don’t ask “what if I get bacteria” the way they ask about cancer.
Yeah, but doctors also don't tell people "you have bacteria" or claim "we found a cure for bacteria". The lack of nuance on average is largely due to a lack of nuance from experts. The media treats cancer as one big thing and bacteria and viruses as separate things. Thus the average joe inherits 'treating cancer as one big thing' from the media.
dpark 6 days ago [-]
I agree with you about the media. Cancer is often presented as a monolithic thing by the media. I don’t agree at all about experts. Doctors and scientists who research cancers do not lack nuance.
jldugger 6 days ago [-]
Is it? I'm pretty sure oncologists will say "you have stage 2 breast cancer," but I wasn't in the room at the time.
dpark 6 days ago [-]
Oncologists are actually way more specific than even that. Because there are many forms of breast cancer and different treatments depending on the type.
But yeah, oncologists aren’t telling people “you have cancer” the way they might say “you have MRSA”.
cogman10 6 days ago [-]
Yeah, it's WAY more specific. We got a genetic breakdown, multiple pamphlets on the drugs being used, what they are targeting, and why they work (along with the risks).
Honestly, I think people probably get false impressions because cancer usually hits old people and old people are, frankly, often not reliable narrators.
bruce511 6 days ago [-]
I understand where you are coming from here, but I think it is helpful for people to overtly grasp that there are very different cancers, very different treatments, and indeed very different outcomes.
Without this understanding it becomes a quick jump from "we're spending all this money on cancer" to "we've made no progress"
An example of the nuance plays out in the common cancers (like breast and prostrate). These have between 90 and 100% 5 year survival rates. Others (like the one in this article, pancreatic) have very poor survivability.
As you note, it's very unlikely that we'll "cure cancer". But we already "cure" (for some definition of cure) some cancers. Progress is slow, methodical, and incremental. It can feel like a lost cause when viewed from afar, but up close very real progress is being made. And that's an important message to pass along.
cogman10 6 days ago [-]
The other part that is simply missing is that cancer, very unfortunately, evolves and mutates. That's how you go from a cancer that responds to treatment to one that is treatment resistant.
Like you said, for a lot of common cancers we have multiple treatments. It's usually not just one magic drug, but rather the doctors working with the most effective treatments down to the least effective treatments.
inigyou 6 days ago [-]
Depressing: evolution has discovered a universal cure for cancer, and it's reproduction. You make a whole new human without the bad bits. Other humans have to evaluate which bits are bad.
warumdarum 6 days ago [-]
The problem is the similarities of cancer to normal cells. We have penicilin that works against all human cells. We call that poison.
Now, "no, i mean poisons that attack the special chemistry of cancer," oh yes, those we call chemo.
cogman10 6 days ago [-]
For chemo it's often "these chemicals kills cancer cells faster than they kill regular cells".
warumdarum 6 days ago [-]
Which is why we got ecchemo.. where the cancer affected pathways get seperated from the regular ciculatory system via shunt and then get fed the chemo seperately and get a little wash before reconnection to the full circulation. It would be even more ideal if you had the whole navel setup in two entirely seperated systems.. sorry, a man can dream..
inigyou 6 days ago [-]
if you can separate a tumour's circulation why not just leave it permanently disconnected?
jurgenburgen 6 days ago [-]
Most likely you can’t isolate the tumor but can do organ-level shunts like e.g. the whole kidney. You don’t want to throw away the healthy bits.
shevy-java 6 days ago [-]
> We have penicilin that works against all human cells.
Penicillin works against bacteria, in particular gram-positive bacteria; to a lesser extent gram-negative bacteria too (this depends on the cell membrane structure of bacteria; there are other penicillin derivatives that are also more effective on gram-negative bacteria than penicillin is, but by and large the main target will be gram-positive bacteria). It does not work against human cells. If your comparison is about drugs in general, then of course cytotoxic drugs will have an effect; simplest example I can remember off-hand is colchicin. Of course it should work against cancer cells and non-cancer cells, unless there are some mutations where colchicin could no longer bind to, but that seems very very rare, due to the natural target of colchicin involved in cellular division.
inigyou 6 days ago [-]
It was an analogy. Just like penicillin kills a broad variety of bacteria we also know substances that kill a broad variety of cancer cells. Arsenic, for instance, and shotgun bullets. The problem is they usually select for all cells or all human cells, not cancer cells more specifically.
6 days ago [-]
shevy-java 6 days ago [-]
> I truly hope cancer will meet its "penicillin" one day (yes I know this is unlikely).
Penicillin blocks a specific enzyme (transpeptidase).
Cancer cells, by definition, are not a uniform mass. It will depend on the cancer type, which in turn is defined by the properties those cells have. And mutations happen all the time, often more in cancer cells when their repair systems also have mutations, e. g. are less efficient. By that definition alone, there can never be a wonder-cure for all cancer types. At best you can find some proteins more important (p53 for instance) and while more than 50% of cancer cells have some form of mutation in p53, others simply don't. By that definition there will never be a penicillin-equivalent to all cancer types.
matthewdgreen 6 days ago [-]
The correct way to read the sentence is “all cancers do not have the same causal mechanism” but people don’t talk like that because it’s off putting. Language is fluid and it’s generally on the reader to infer meaning from context. If we can do so reasonably, we do it, and we don’t need to then write additional posts chiding people over an interpretation that’s highly unlikely to be the intended one. I don’t mean to be pushy about this, btw. It’s just that pedantry can be valuable, but only if it isn’t abused.
otabdeveloper4 6 days ago [-]
Benign cancers are a thing. They might not kill like they show in the Hollywood movies, but your quality of life will be significantly diminished.
inglor_cz 6 days ago [-]
Squamous cell carcinoma does not metastatize, but my god it can disfigure people really badly if not treated in time.
jibal 5 days ago [-]
> Squamous cell carcinoma does not metastatize (sic)
No, they aren't. Cancer is malignant by definition.
There are benign non-malignant tumors.
otabdeveloper4 6 days ago [-]
"Malignant" and "benign" isn't a dichotomy, it is a loose sliding scale.
"Benign" is any cancer where wait-and-watch is a valid medical approach.
jibal 5 days ago [-]
You're simply wrong. Again, cancer is malignant by definition. And again, you seem to be confusing "cancer" with "tumor" -- your description applies to the latter, not the former.
You can label a slow-growing tumor as "not-cancer" if you want, for psychological reasons, I guess; "cancer" just sounds scarier. Some slow-growing "not-cancer" tumors are faster than others. It's a sliding scale, not a dichotomy.
jibal 4 days ago [-]
"cancer is malignant by definition"
> A distinction without a difference.
What distinction? This is a phrase that this confidently wrong ignoramus apparently doesn't know the meaning of.
IshKebab 6 days ago [-]
You've been downvoted but I would say you are right. It would be more accurate to say "cancer does not have one cause".
siva7 6 days ago [-]
It won't help... mind you this is an article from the economist. There is no such thing as a cancer "master switch", that would equal a disease master switch and that point we have solved biology.
sarchertech 6 days ago [-]
What do you mean “it won’t help”?
It most likely will help if you get pancreatic cancer. It might help if you get one of the other types of cancers with this mutation.
And it will likely lead to new treatments for some of the worst kinds of cancer.
GaggiX 7 days ago [-]
One of the many therapies that are being developed so that you can survive longer even with the most lethal tumours.
mrcwinn 6 days ago [-]
Only on HN can you get content like this. What a community.
monster_truck 6 days ago [-]
You should be thankful that they're posting about a real drug that is in human trials and yet another "in mice" pipedream
fhdkweig 7 days ago [-]
The relevant line is:
"oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib."
I kinda want to see a group of oncologists lose it and go wild and party like never before.
pharaohgeek 5 days ago [-]
There was a KRAS conference a couple of weeks ago, and as I understand it that's exactly what happened. It is such a game changer that they could not contain their excitement. For all the ridiculous talk of "they're being paid by 'Big Pharma' to prolong treatment to make them money", I assure you that oncologists DEEPLY want to become "obsolete". They want a cure. They want patients to live. Drugs like this and many others on the horizon are another step in that process.
chrismsimpson 6 days ago [-]
You sir are the salt of the internet
plmpsu 6 days ago [-]
Does anyone have a link to the conference session?
siimianwords 6 days ago [-]
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kofj 6 days ago [-]
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pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
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TaupeRanger 6 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, anecdotes are not data, and although a patient can try anything they want, there is no way to know that such dietary changes are beneficial or potentially harmful for most patients without doing a randomized controlled trial and hoping for strong adherence from the participants.
pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
> anecdotes are not data
It's 2026, this is SOP.
It's why I referenced the metabolic pathways derived from data backed research, linked to a data driven study, and used language like "we had significant success with our loved one" and "if you want something that you can do to try".
Honestly this reads like an "aHCkTualLy!1!" from someone without experience of having a loved one suffering from a cancer diagnosis.
Perhaps you've yet to realize but shallow skepticism against every idea is also distinct from data.
I have had a family member die of pancreatic cancer before age 60. It is, of course, terrible beyond belief. I'm not sure what you mean by "SOP" in this context. Referencing a bio-plausible mechanism is not actually clinically meaningful. It can provide a direction for study, but does not replace an actual clinical trial. As I said, "a patient can try anything they want".
But since we don't actually know whether such a recommendation will harm or help any individual patient, no one should be taking this recommendation as advice, and at the very least you should not be "highly recommending" specific dietary changes to people based on one anecdotal experience.
pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
We all grieve in our own way. I am sorry for your loss.
fartfeatures 6 days ago [-]
Standard Operating Procedure.
esperent 6 days ago [-]
I appreciated your comment, and strongly believe that diet and lifestyle changes are badly ignored when it comes to treating all kinds of diseases, in large part because of the difficulty of getting people to follow through. To be fair, if you're a dementia or cancer patient, making intense lifestyle changes is much harder than pills or surgery.
Anyway, my point is, don't worry too much about the ignorant "but actually" replies here. There's probably been thousands of people who've read your comments and only two felt the need to make these retorts. The others most likely in the majority felt your comment had merit.
pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
> making intense lifestyle changes is much harder than pills or surgery.
This is very true. It was certainly a lot of work for us, and a lot of work for them.
In the first months I was cooking everything.
By the end of the chemo treatment the patient had learned to cook these new meals for themselves.
daedrdev 6 days ago [-]
Did Steve Jobs die from believing something similar (while skipping chemo)
pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think he also did wildly unhealthy things like only eating apples or almonds or somesuch.
We made sure to still cover all nutritional needs while following the diet.
This meant a diverse array of food sources, in sufficient amounts to meet micro and macro nutrient recommended daily values, that we cooked ourselves.
goda90 6 days ago [-]
I dug a lot into "starving cancer" while we tried to save our dog from an aggressive sarcoma. I can't find his name off hand but I recall reading about a researcher who used a ketogenic diet to keep glucose low, and then occasionally gave drugs to "hammer" the cancer by quickly and temporarily depleting glutamine as well.
manmal 6 days ago [-]
Isn’t glutamine also part of vegan diets? I don’t eat meat myself, but your assertion has me wondering about glutamine.
pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
Yes, and your body requires it for things like muscle maintenance.
Also, sugar is essential to what makes you you, that is, the brain requires glucose to function.
The goal is to reduce excess intake of these things to reduce their availability for any cancer cells to use to grow and divide.
manmal 6 days ago [-]
Sure, and the body makes its own glucose. The only way to deplete that is prolonged fasting.
If you‘re specifically aiming for low glutamine, going vegan won’t cut it though, depending on what foods you leave in. Soy is high in it. Eg a glass of milk is lower glutamine than a serving of tofu.
rylando 6 days ago [-]
Do they maintain the same diet today?
pancreaticdiet 6 days ago [-]
Yes.
They slacked a bit some months following the surgery, and their blood markers started to drastically slip almost immediately.
Might be also worth noting that prior to all of this they were a staunch "antivegan midwestern farm boy" for 70 years.
Now, after witnessing the results, they are all in on the new dietary lifestyle change, and tell all their friends.
mgerdts 6 days ago [-]
By any chance does this person live near Montrose CO and tend to the lawn at a church next to the Holiday Inn Express?
6 days ago [-]
DivingForGold 7 days ago [-]
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sharts 6 days ago [-]
May have? It also may have not.
v3ss0n 6 days ago [-]
How many cure for cancer news we have 10 yrs ago and none of them goes online?
sarchertech 6 days ago [-]
This is a drug that has passed phase 3 clinical trials.
The bigger deal about this is that KRAS was considered an "undruggable" target.
Recent advancements have allowed us to design biologics to do things we previously thought impossible, which broadens the horizons for other treatments in the future.
Baby steps.
I think we should also invest more in better diagnostics and early cancer detection. That could save many lives too.
The issue with non-imaging early cancer detection seems to be false positives.
Afaik, medical regulatory agencies have been... resistant... to allowing marketing of tests.
The thinking seems to be "If people get a positive result, they may opt for interventions that are more harmful than their current disease state."
But, to me, that seems to leave unmentioned the fact that there's a finite "untreatable" cancer progression line, and while that's extending to later disease states, it's still a helluva lot easier to treat earlier.
Complications after his surgery meant he had two more. He is now, three weeks after the first operation learning to walk again. It will be an additional week or two untill he can eat. (Without the complication he would have been walking and eating two weeks after the first operation). Oh and he is a diabetic now, since they removed his pancreas.
Just crossing my fingers that he will get out of the hospital without any more complications, and adapt to the new life.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH
> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.
> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.
The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.
If the first point of comparison you reach for is the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century, that would suggest that the American political left has not in fact, in recent times, been interfering with science to the same extent as the Trump administration currently.
Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.
There is no leftist scurge I'm science.
I'm sure the average person was completely fed up with the federal grant process for medical issues and it was a driving force in their voting decision. Excellent proof.
Is of public knowledge that the National Science Foundation and funds for thousands of scientific projects were gutted by DOGE in 2025.
Each one of the research lines cut needed typically 10 years to grow, so Trump and GOP had destroyed an incredible amount of years of research just on 2025, with consequences probably extending into 2035 or so. Without any visible benefit for Americans, that had still seen their debt sky-rocketing while their taxes are spent in pools and sinks.
Trump has also assured to engrave into the brains of the whole scientific community that US is now an hostile place for students and researchers. The whole planet had seen the main universities attacked by Trump (with Harvard resisting, and Columbia losing their pride), the foreign students targeted by ICE and the department of Education eviscerated
Also the thousands of workers in USAID and Health and Human Services fired for fun. Without mentioning the DOGE mess done at the national nuclear safety administration with 400 essential workers fired and then asked to return to the job ASAP, please, please.
It makes no sense to cut off the hand that saves you even as a rich billionaire who wants to control people in a fascist society.
In reality, mediocre thinkers with inflated egos and little understanding of long-term consequences are pulling the strings almost everywhere.
Actually, I think it's powerful to acknowledge when my beliefs are weak. I still believe it - I think it's true, and I don't have any conflicting beliefs. But still it would not take a lot of evidence to change my mind, and since this is a prediction about the future, I will not be very surprised to find out I was wrong.
Personally, I have epilepsy and am increasingly aware that while some paradigm-shifting treatments are on the horizon, they are a decade or so away and likely won't come to market in time to fully help me (particularly reverse small but accumulating damage caused by seizures). And that's a weird feeling.
Failing a treatment that has held promise for so many others and been heralded as paradigm-shifting is such a weird place to be. There's comfort in knowing others won't suffer, but loneliness is knowing you or a loved one still is.
This subthread there is a fascinating explainer about one user's journey into funding and incentivizing research into their own rare form of blood cancer, and how they are able to push forward the state of the art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506997 - something of a modern-day (and more accurate) Lorenzo's Oil!
didnt seem to have lived up to the promise. seemed to have accelerated prostate cancer for my father who passed away in mere three months after first dose.
Immunotherapies on the other hand seems to work wonders for many who respond to it. I regret for not trying it.
Look for how much money the pharmaceutic cartels make annually, that is why these "drugs" aka cure will never ever be released because its side effects are still unknown.
That said, I'll happily take "we discovered a key weakness in 20% of cancers," please and thank you.
Anyway, since many in my family have died from this horrible cancer, its fantastic news to hear of any improvements there.
That is not true for most cancers, though.
One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.
This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.
This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.
So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.
However this is just the first version of the drug, it can be combined with other modalities to allow more selective targeting of cancer versus not cancer cells (e.g antibody-drug conjugation). And when used in earlier stage cancers, rather than the advanced cancers in this first clinical trial, there's the possibility of lower dosing that has less strong side effects.
This is just the first attack that has ever broken through to hit a key weakness of some cancers. It's the start of learning, a breakthrough that will launch refinements, enhancements, and a ton of innovation. That sort of innovation is sometimes derided as "me-too" drugs, and not meaningful, but some of the biggest advancements in cancer care have been from taking very hard to tolerate treatments and making them more tolerable and refined and better for patients, allowing longer and more thorough killing of cancer cells. I would expect we will see a lot of that here, as well as work towards combinations with other drugs.
Can you help disambiguate this? Are there treatments now, or are there potential treatments with trials in 1-5 years?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=daraxonrasib&viewType...
The first two are the trial that just completed and showed success: people that have pancreatic cancer that failed other treatments, then a "trial" that is meant to give quick access to more people now that it's been shown to work.
Then there's a trial for using it as the first-line treatment for pancreatic cancer, one for lung cancer (NSCLC), and also various combinations with other drugs. I expect we'll see a ton of new trials registered in the coming year. Especially something in combination with colon cancer, because a common drug resistance mechanism in colon cancer is to develop KRAS mutation.
The thing is that we don't really know which cancers it will work well in until we try. And there's limited number of people with cancer that enter clinical trials, and we want to give each person their very best chance at survival, and then there's the massive expense of running the clinical trial itself, so learning happens slowly, one month of survival at a time, or one cancer recurrence at a time, or one death at a time. Patients that take part in clinical trials really are the heroes here. (Especially with the side effects of this new drug, which are horrible. It is a revolutionary drug, but we need to learn how to manage the other things it does as well, and that's going to take time.)
> Patients that take part in clinical trials really are the heroes here.
Are they?
To me personally, putting people into a permanent state of requiring drugs to survive, is not really cure. It's just maximizing income for those selling those drugs. And none of those drugs work exceedingly well; people still die, even if to other disease or frailties. I don't understand this hype in general.
The pharmaceutical companies are not the ones making clinical decisions - in this case, it's a shared medical decision between a patient and their oncologist.
Having seen how horrific pancreatic cancer is, how difficult it is to treat, and the decades of slow research done by academic scientists to get to this point, I am elated that we have a tool to give patients more time with their families even if their cancer can't be "cured" with this particular drug.
This may seem unsatisfying, but it's real, measurable progress. KRAS has been known about since the earliest days of cancer research, so it's a true breakthrough to finally have a drug targeting it.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-...
>However, even though the overall number of cases rises as the population grows, fewer people are getting and dying from cancer. Between 2000 and 2021, the incidence rate — or the rate of new cancer cases per 100,000 people — declined by 5.7%, while the annual mortality rate fell by 27.5%.
Cancer is a broad term encompassing many sorts of malfunction and nearly 40% of Americans will be diagnosed with it at some point because if you survive other hazards and maladies cancer is often what gets you.
If I pulled one person out of a burning building it would be newsworthy. Doctors are and have been pulling train loads every day.
I agree that 6 extra months (on average) means some patients get much more time than that. I agree that a statistically significant improvement on the survival rate for this terrible cancer is a very promising result longer term.
My disagreement was much narrower than that. I disagree that 6 extra months is equivalent to 5 extra years. I disagree that people living an extra 6 months on average is equivalent to one person living 3 extra years and one person living 3 extra days. I think 3 days and 3 years average out to about 1.5 years, not to 6 months.
Think of me as a living fossil who takes it for granted that everyone appreciates how much medicine improves our lives.
> But that's not a cure. If they don't take that drug, assuming it works, they still have the original mutation in the cancer cells.
The person you're replying to called this out specifically:
> and also various combinations with other drugs.
Why do you think they try it in combination with other drugs? You might be right that this drug alone might not be a cure, but if it inhibits cancer growth, then it empowers other drugs to work more effectively.
> people still die
So what... We do nothing, then? This is your complaint? That we can't be immortal, so why bother trying to cure anything?
I don't understand your type in general.
Today, only 4 years later, there are two therapies, one RNA based and one CART that would have been usable in her situation. She’d be alive today most likely.
Frankly, you have no idea what you’re talking about as you spew toxic bullshit. 5 year survival would meant being there for her son through high school. That survival rate was 65% in 2022 and closer to 80% now in recent trials.
Normally I’d scroll on, but in these degenerate days it is important to counter bullshit before it becomes policy.
When we first started getting good at sequencing the DNA of tumors, I remember initial reports of taking samples across the 3D space of a tumor and finding great spatial heterogeneity in the tumor genomes.
I'm actually most excited for using this drug in combination with colon cancer, where KRAS mutation is a common drug resistance evolution in response to drugs that target the gene EFGR (though cancer researchers may all have their favorites to go after, colon cancer went after my family especially hard).
Ways to avoid specific resistance include multiple treatments simultaneously, since the probability of generating resistance to both is the product of the probability of resistance either.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1907-7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
sometimes a cancer can then survive on its own back as a single celled organism
We'll just use you!
This is a horrifying proposal not only on the ethics front but also in the scientific uselessness of it.
This is exactly the type of thing that gave the Nazis the bad name they deserve.
Even just subconsciously that would have an effect
I agree: the trials are not speedy enough. None of us will live long enough to take advantage of the endgame version of this.
Also the problem is not only judges, but the scope of detective work being done and when the crime was discovered etc. Judging comes last, but I guess we could deploy the infallible robot police squad which will do a flawless crime scene analysis etc.
I know this is a popular "well actually" to do, but it is not always useful in a conversation. Yes, all cancers are different, but yes, cancer is also one thing: unchecked, harmful division of cells.
Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once. It is reasonable to talk about bacteria and antibacterial medications, it is also reasonable to talk about cancer and cancer treatment. I truly hope cancer will meet its "penicillin" one day (yes I know this is unlikely).
> Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once.
Except people don’t ask “what if I get bacteria” the way they ask about cancer. If the story was about a new antibiotic that only affected 20% of common infectious bacteria strains and someone asked “in laypersons terms, how will this help me if I get a bacterial infection”, it would be appropriate to clarify that it only applies to some bacteria.
Yeah, but doctors also don't tell people "you have bacteria" or claim "we found a cure for bacteria". The lack of nuance on average is largely due to a lack of nuance from experts. The media treats cancer as one big thing and bacteria and viruses as separate things. Thus the average joe inherits 'treating cancer as one big thing' from the media.
But yeah, oncologists aren’t telling people “you have cancer” the way they might say “you have MRSA”.
Honestly, I think people probably get false impressions because cancer usually hits old people and old people are, frankly, often not reliable narrators.
Without this understanding it becomes a quick jump from "we're spending all this money on cancer" to "we've made no progress"
An example of the nuance plays out in the common cancers (like breast and prostrate). These have between 90 and 100% 5 year survival rates. Others (like the one in this article, pancreatic) have very poor survivability.
As you note, it's very unlikely that we'll "cure cancer". But we already "cure" (for some definition of cure) some cancers. Progress is slow, methodical, and incremental. It can feel like a lost cause when viewed from afar, but up close very real progress is being made. And that's an important message to pass along.
Like you said, for a lot of common cancers we have multiple treatments. It's usually not just one magic drug, but rather the doctors working with the most effective treatments down to the least effective treatments.
Now, "no, i mean poisons that attack the special chemistry of cancer," oh yes, those we call chemo.
Penicillin works against bacteria, in particular gram-positive bacteria; to a lesser extent gram-negative bacteria too (this depends on the cell membrane structure of bacteria; there are other penicillin derivatives that are also more effective on gram-negative bacteria than penicillin is, but by and large the main target will be gram-positive bacteria). It does not work against human cells. If your comparison is about drugs in general, then of course cytotoxic drugs will have an effect; simplest example I can remember off-hand is colchicin. Of course it should work against cancer cells and non-cancer cells, unless there are some mutations where colchicin could no longer bind to, but that seems very very rare, due to the natural target of colchicin involved in cellular division.
Penicillin blocks a specific enzyme (transpeptidase).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin-binding_proteins
Cancer cells, by definition, are not a uniform mass. It will depend on the cancer type, which in turn is defined by the properties those cells have. And mutations happen all the time, often more in cancer cells when their repair systems also have mutations, e. g. are less efficient. By that definition alone, there can never be a wonder-cure for all cancer types. At best you can find some proteins more important (p53 for instance) and while more than 50% of cancer cells have some form of mutation in p53, others simply don't. By that definition there will never be a penicillin-equivalent to all cancer types.
This is false; it does so, but slowly.
https://www.moffitt.org/cancers/squamous-cell-carcinoma/diag...
No, they aren't. Cancer is malignant by definition.
There are benign non-malignant tumors.
"Benign" is any cancer where wait-and-watch is a valid medical approach.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/27...
"Malignant tumors are cancerous (ie, they invade other sites)."
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/understanding-cancer/what-is-c...
"Tumors are lumps or masses of abnormal cells (neoplasms) that can be malignant (cancer) or benign (not cancer)."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/benign
"of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life especially : not becoming cancerous"
That cancer is malignant by definition is extremely well known. I won't respond further.
P.S. I looked through your other comments and can highly recommend you to https://www.reddit.com/r/confidentlyincorrect/
A distinction without a difference.
You can label a slow-growing tumor as "not-cancer" if you want, for psychological reasons, I guess; "cancer" just sounds scarier. Some slow-growing "not-cancer" tumors are faster than others. It's a sliding scale, not a dichotomy.
> A distinction without a difference.
What distinction? This is a phrase that this confidently wrong ignoramus apparently doesn't know the meaning of.
It most likely will help if you get pancreatic cancer. It might help if you get one of the other types of cancers with this mutation.
And it will likely lead to new treatments for some of the worst kinds of cancer.
"oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daraxonrasib
It's 2026, this is SOP.
It's why I referenced the metabolic pathways derived from data backed research, linked to a data driven study, and used language like "we had significant success with our loved one" and "if you want something that you can do to try".
Honestly this reads like an "aHCkTualLy!1!" from someone without experience of having a loved one suffering from a cancer diagnosis.
Perhaps you've yet to realize but shallow skepticism against every idea is also distinct from data.
While you chose make this comment without providing links or data to support your claim I will do the real work of finding even more data for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
But since we don't actually know whether such a recommendation will harm or help any individual patient, no one should be taking this recommendation as advice, and at the very least you should not be "highly recommending" specific dietary changes to people based on one anecdotal experience.
Anyway, my point is, don't worry too much about the ignorant "but actually" replies here. There's probably been thousands of people who've read your comments and only two felt the need to make these retorts. The others most likely in the majority felt your comment had merit.
This is very true. It was certainly a lot of work for us, and a lot of work for them.
In the first months I was cooking everything.
By the end of the chemo treatment the patient had learned to cook these new meals for themselves.
We made sure to still cover all nutritional needs while following the diet.
This meant a diverse array of food sources, in sufficient amounts to meet micro and macro nutrient recommended daily values, that we cooked ourselves.
Also, sugar is essential to what makes you you, that is, the brain requires glucose to function.
The goal is to reduce excess intake of these things to reduce their availability for any cancer cells to use to grow and divide.
If you‘re specifically aiming for low glutamine, going vegan won’t cut it though, depending on what foods you leave in. Soy is high in it. Eg a glass of milk is lower glutamine than a serving of tofu.
They slacked a bit some months following the surgery, and their blood markers started to drastically slip almost immediately.
Might be also worth noting that prior to all of this they were a staunch "antivegan midwestern farm boy" for 70 years.
Now, after witnessing the results, they are all in on the new dietary lifestyle change, and tell all their friends.