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by Spooky23 836 days ago
Cancer isn’t one thing and AI is an important tool that will accelerate treatment and drug development.

My late wife detected a mole that was melanoma in 2019. She was within months of being cleared for observation in 2023 when two brain tumors were detected. Despite the best of care, she was gone in 6 months.

If her initial treatment had been in 2024 instead of 2019, it’s 80% likely she would be around for another decade or more. That’s how fast new treatment options are coming to market, and data analysis with AI and other tech is improving it. New trials are using platforms like Moderna to provide custom vaccines that should reduce treatment side effects.

While the hyperbole of the media is annoying, the impacts of new tech to identify genetic vulnerabilities in cancers is near miraculous.
2 comments
mlyle 835 days ago
I'm sorry for your loss.

I was speaking specifically towards screening more and detecting earlier. They have utility, but recent evidence seems to indicate that it's not nearly as much as the public assumes.

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Spooky23 835 days ago
No worries. I share it frequently here because I think the personal connection underscores the import, which sometimes gets lost. It's easy to think about "cancer" in the abstract, and sometimes we miss that it's a mother, a wife, a friend -- I know that I did.

And at the end of the day "cancer" is a category, not a thing. Sometimes (prostate cancer) early detection and intervention is bad, as the cure is worse than the disease! Other times (ovarian cancer), accidental early detection while looking for something else entirely, as symptoms don't present until you've hit Stage 4 typically.

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daniel_reetz 836 days ago
Can you elaborate a little on what's new? Someone close to me had a melanoma scare on almost the same time frame, and had a lot of difficulty finding doctors who would take her seriously.
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Spooky23 836 days ago
In the case of my wife, she would have been given a round of nivolumab or keytruda. These are immunotherapies that enable your immune system to kill the cancer cells.

You have to advocate very heavily. With melanoma, I wouldn’t mess around and seek at a minimum second opinions from the nearest major cancer center.

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