[marckemil]

As was pointed out before, those are unpublished results. We cannot extract any significant information from this article. For example, in many early phase trials, the standard treatment is often given WITH the new drug (or vaccine), so we'd have to know the response rate of the control group.

As other pointed out, blood cancers are very different than solid tumors -- they've historically been easier to treat. That's probably due to the tumor micro environnement that makes solid tumor a very different process. To put simply, I would not assume for a second that outcomes for blood cancers can be replicated for solid tumors.

Immunotherapy is all the rage in the cancer world right now. It resonates with patient that "their own bodies can destroy cancer". It's almost romantic. Kinda like when anti-angiogenesis drugs were all the rage a few years ago...

The "cancer vaccine" has been tried many times before. Pretty much every time the cancer finds a way around it. Sipuleucel-T is a commercially available cancer vaccine for prostate cancer. It adds a few months for $$$, but newer, non-vaccine treatments are now doing better.

We're unlikely to find "a" cure for cancer; we'll eventually find "cures" for cancer, but it will be small, incremental steps. In the meantime I'll go back to my clinic and continue to enrol patients on clinical trials

[petra]

What about extremely early and accurate diagnostic screening , which can offer 0% or very close to 0% false negatives(and ~30% false positives, like quanterix talks about), followed by a full panel of the relevant proteins ,guiding to the correct,low dose highly targeted chemo therapies ?

Considering that some results of treating early(by today's standards <2-3mm tumor) we can get to something like 95%-98% 5-years cancer free rates(while suffering some side effects), in breast cancer - it seems possible to make cancer a low-risk ,low-pain disease - as long as you do your regular checkups. Right ?

[marckemil]

Cancer research is not an easy field and many are better than me in that regard. But food for thoughts:

A screening test with 30% false positive is not a great test. One in three test takers would be positive, requiring more investigations (likely many more). Let's say 1000 asymptomatic person take the test, 300 will test positive. Physicians then have to investigate thoroughly those patients. $$$ for those tests, hours of work missed, and very importantly patient anxiety and potential harm (a prostate biopsy, for example, is not trivial and people can die from that)

of those 1000 people screened, 1 has the disease. With a 0% false negative rate, we catch it. Because of the test, it was caught early. Have we really changed his outcomes? would he have discovered it by himself a few weeks later, not impacting any of his treatments? The convention of "catching cancer early will make it easier to cure" is not always true.

In the meantime, we've had to put 300 people through useless agressive investigations...

Moreover, 0% false negative would be revolutionary. -- 0% and 100% are extremely rare in medicine.

Anyhow, screening, especially its drawbacks is one of the most complex concept to explain.

For genotyping and targeted treatments: it's been tried but we're still not there yet. The papers coming out are disappointing in that regard.

[chrdlu]

What are your thoughts on this sort of technology?

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Summary: Cytotropic Heterogeneous Molecular Lipids (CHML) are used to treat patients with multiple cancers. Numerous studies have been conducted in cellular, animal, pre-clinical and clinical trials. Results showed that CHML, as a biological molecular missile, can easily penetrate through the target cancerous cells to perform programmed cancer cell death (cancer apoptosis). Furthermore, CHML has produced anti-cancer angiogenesis and induced immune function increase. CHML was used to treat 592 patients with cancers in clinical trials. Results confirmed the following advantages of CHML treatment: non-toxicity, high response rate, high quality of life, and high survival rate for these patients. The protocols include local injection, arterial drip and intravenous drip to treat cancers of liver, lung, skin, breast, brain glioma, colon and rectum, stomach, head and neck, leukemia, malignant lymphoma, sarcoma, malignant melanoma, myeloma, and metastasis cancers, etc.

Response rates (CR+PR) were as follows: liver cancer 77%, lung cancer 68%, skin cancer 94%, breast cancer 83%, brain glioma 78%, colon and rectum cancer 80%, stomach cancer 50%, head and neck cancer 78%, leukemia 83%, malignant lymphoma 71%, sarcoma 43%, malignant melanoma 67%, and myeloma 50%. No (0) episodes of grade II or above adverse reactions were observed.

[marckemil]

Never heard of it before. That group seems to have published a phase II trial so I would assume they'd be looking at a phase III.

I always look at "promising results" with skepticism, especially when the authors have a direct financial interest in the project.

To keep in mind: complete remissions and partial remissions are good, but they're "softer" outcomes. What we want to see is an impact on "harder" outcomes, mainly overall survival. Cause-specific survival is another good one.

We like to associate tumor shrinkage with better survival but it's not that simple (unfortunately). Do we kill people with our treatment? It shrinks the tumors, but for how long? Is the treatment convenient? How did they define "partial response"? What tool did they use? -- the list goes on.

[Grishnakh]

>We're unlikely to find "a" cure for cancer; we'll eventually find "cures" for cancer, but it will be small, incremental steps.

I completely disagree. There will be a "cure", but it'll be a while, and it won't resemble current medicinal methods at all. I predict that in another century or so (assuming civilization doesn't collapse like the Roman Empire and send us into another Dark Age, but on a global scale), we'll basically become cyborgs, with nanites implanted in us to augment our natural bodily functions. These nanites, basically being nanoscale robots, would improve on or replace our immune systems, eliminating cancer, as well as most aging effects.

[thecus]

Our own bodies destroy 'cancer' all the time. It's when the body loses control that shit gets real.

Source: I stayed at a holiday inn.