When (if?) you feel ready, there is an organization [1] whose mission is to support siblings, parents, and grandparents of children who have died at any age. I have been heavily active with them since losing my only child 9+ years ago. I commend them to your attention. (Once again, when you feel ready.)
[1] compassionatefriends.org
me too
That's also Caltech's mascot!
Bernoulli the Beaver.
Bit by bit, Canada risks defaulting to suicide over expensive care. That's not what people voted for when it was first proposed.
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/MDRC-...
https://indepnews.org/en/veteran-offered-suicide-instead-of-...
Among many others:
- CAR T therapy going from lab to oncology suite (first launch 2017, but use rapidly growing)
- Approval of Keytruda and similar for many additional forms of cancer (see the 2021-2026 milestones here: https://www.drugs.com/history/keytruda.html )
- Liquid biopsy going from lab to PCP's office - starting with Grail Galleri and moving from there (yes, the NIH results were weak, but the idea of a liquid biopsy at all would be laughed off 10 years ago)
- Move of Atezolizumab and Tecentriq from infusion (hour) to injection (minutes) to increase availability
- Lower dose CT scanning for lung cancer, including for non-smokers
And a long line of immunotherapies that are making the leap from lab to chair right now.
The last 5 years have probably been the most exciting in cancer research since the launch of the monoclonal antibodies in the early 2010s. There is still incredibly far to go, but the trend is in the right direction: https://employercoverage.substack.com/p/decline-in-cancer-mo...
That people aren't actually living longer with cancer, they're living longer while we know they have cancer.
Is there any truth to that?
(95% confidence interval is 0.294-0.887, wide but not too wide, n=157, to be expected for phase 2).
How they work is also completely fucking insane. Intismeran autogene is personalized for every patient via sequencing their tumor DNA. That's sci-fi shit. If you're not impressed by that, you should be. Fast and scalable DNA sequencing, neoantigen identification, RNA synthesis, none of this is easy and all of it relies on recent innovations across multiple fields.
The first proofs of concept for personalized vaccines like this date back to 2017[1] or 2015[2]. The process for designing the vaccines requires a machine learning algorithm first published in 2020[3]. Details of the algorithm aren't available, but it validated against data published in 2019[4], and there have been many recent advancements in algorithms and datasets for biotech ML that it likely relied on. As you might already know, mRNA vaccines were first tested in humans around the 2010s[5].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22991 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25837513/ [3] https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/80/16_Supplement/... [4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138461/ [5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26082837/
What’s your prediction for the next five years?
it was available for [some] UCSF patients more than 5 years ago
[0] https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...
The breakthroughs happening now will benefit average patients later. It's frustrating, but it's not because we've run out of innovations.
So average person with cancer does better when any individuals cancer treatment improves and it keeps compounding over time. This doesn’t mean everyone with cancer gets a slight improvement, often it’s specific types or stages that improve without impacting others. Where general progress comes from is it’s not the same improvements year after year.
How do the iron nano materials get there? probably a combination of vasculature and diffusion.
They have done this kind of stuff before with gold nanoparticles, iron is a lot more abundant.
Though one thing that I might think researchers might not want is people may be too sick to recover even if their cancer disappeared tomorrow.
Here's an insightful blog series about Jake Seliger's experience participating in clinical trials. He was a regular HackerNews user who passed away in 2024: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...
There must be informed consent, no reasonable alternatives (which, in cases we deem terminal, is often the case), and some evidence pointing to the treatment possibly being helpful. It's an excellent ethical program that gives patients a choice and advances science.
When she was diagnosed with leukemia she was able to get into a research study herself that gave us 10 more years together.
One of the horrible but necessary parts of trials is the control group, who receives placebo. This is only done in a few of the trial phases but is essential in measuring efficacy. If someone wants to throw their brainpower and a little bit of AI/tech at the problem, you could end up eliminating a lot of suffering.
"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."
So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.
Mice models of cancer are useful, but you should never be too surprised when something that works in mice doesn't work in the clinic, xenografting or no. Cancer is complicated.
In terms of where _prices_ are set, that negotiation is a function of efficacy relative to other things in the market right? If it ends up treating cancers that each already have a reasonably effective treatment, maybe the pricing isn't that high -- but if it is effective in cases where currently there are no options, the price should be high?
But for something that potentially works against a range of cancers, should we expect to see a sequence of more specific trials (i.e. one phase 1 for basic safety, a bunch of phase 2s for efficacy on specific cancer types, a sequence of phase 3s in descending order of estimated market value? And in 10 years, Alice and Bob with different cancers will pay radically different amounts for almost exactly the same treatment but with small variations in some aspect of the formulation so they can be treated as distinct products?
They have entire teams of people who figure out the viability and pricing of therapeutics before the first dollar is spent, with estimates getting refined the further you get along in the cycle.
(The ad also claims that the water their iron is suspended in is "energized", which makes the rest of the ad seem...questionable.)
Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is essentially irrelevant.
This is one of the issues with the modern cancer cures, thst they are very specific to the cancer, the patient, need one off lab work for each patient and this makes them very expensive and not affordable to many. Despite having public healthcare the managers of it still need to decide what to spend their limited funds on.
I think it matters because oftentimes insurance companies won't cover treatments if a cheaper form of treatment exists. It doesn't matter if the old treatment is less effective or a much worse outcome for a patient. This is especially true for "new" treatments.
yup. every time
This is perhaps the best targeted method devised as it seems to collect basically entirely in tumors. Chemo and Radio therapy just aren't that targeted.
