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by OutOfHere 583 days ago
Why is this not accelerated for every single cancer patient with a tumor?
3 comments

Scientists are working on it. They're not done turning this approach into a generic, off the shelf treatment, though. As the article states, this isn't necessarily new technology.

Having access to a lab and being an expert in the subset of virilogy used as part of the treatment definitely made it easier for this specific scientist to get her hands on this treatment. For someone else to get the same, they'd need to hire scientists dedicated to curing them, and that just doesn't scale to the amount of cancer patients in any normal hospital. Even then it didn't entirely cure her; the tumors were reduced in size but normal cancer treatment took care of the rest.

Give it a few years, maybe decades. A lot of research is being done in this area of medicine and I can't imagine such biotechnology not becoming more widespread in the future.

Decades? In your comment and in your thinking lies everything that is wrong with this world.

It does scale because it eliminates dozens of redundant oncologist visits.

It's an active area of research and as the article says there's already one approved on the market in the US. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus
in short, money and ethics
The former is a reason why there actually is a lot of research into this already/couple drugs approved (cancer is usually very profitable), the latter is why all drugs, not just these, need extensive clinical trials and strong regulation. Because it's measles virus and herpes virus etc etc, and often genetically engineered, so the safety risks are ... obvious
Real ethics isn't what you think it is. Real ethics is in getting the treatment asap to everyone that it can save.