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by vikramkr 582 days ago
There are a couple OVTs that are approved by the FDA and it's a rather active area of research. One of many in the recent explosion of biological cancer treatments (immunitherapies/cell therapies, etc etc). With any cancer treatment the exact same procedure will struggle to generalize well across cancer types and you have to regulate for safety and efficacy rather strongly. Especially when the treatment is lab grown measles or herpes virus strains that are genetically engineered.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus
1 comments
ethbr1 582 days ago
> With any cancer treatment the exact same procedure will struggle to generalize well across cancer types

As someone with family members living with cancer, modern genetic sequencing has been the biggest surprise.

Not that we could sequence tumors, but that we could do so at scale and classify therapies by effectiveness against specific mutations (in general, even ignoring targeted therapies).

Widespread cancer sequencing seems like the missing link to promote better outcomes, particularly in metastatic cases.

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vikramkr 582 days ago
It's already an importany part of diagnostics and treatment! A lot of therapies are approved not just for specific cancers but for specific cancers with specific mutations. As with everything cancer it turned out to be more complicated than expected (not surprising given that it's essentially an outcome from chaotic uncontrolled genetic mutation and evolution) but sequencing progressing at like an order of magnitude faster than Moore's law and better understanding of all the -omics is making a dent
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snowwrestler 582 days ago
Yes, when a family member was fighting metastatic pancreatic cancer, their doctor had a tumor biopsied and sequenced to see if they could try one of the new immunotherapies. Sadly no, and I learned that only a small percentage of hard cancers are yet treatable that way (which still helps a significant total number of people though).
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ethbr1 581 days ago
Well, there are two broadly different ways in which sequencing can help.

1. "Targeted therapies" that directly target unique surface features that specific mutations create. E.g. BRAF

2. Sorting most effective treatment by cancer type, where cancers driven by different mutations in different types of cells respond to specific treatments better or worse. Especially important for metastatic where you may have a pancreatic cancer mutation tumor in your lungs, etc.

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