[oofbey]

The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal.

Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.

So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.

[bcjdjsndon]

> Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation

If it never works as well if at all in humans, maybe mice are too different?

[oofbey]

It’s not that. The tumors they create in mice are just really fragile compared to natural tumors. Natural tumors that actually cause problems have probably grown for years and learned to avoid immune responses. They’re not densely packed and easy to get into all the parts.

This kind of treatment triggers an immune response, which the model tumors have never had to fight before. So it’s just an easy target.

[algoth1]

When my mother was fighting cancer, I recall the many disappointments of finding research shrinking tumours in animal models, only to find out the human research showing it didnt work in humans. This was in the 2010s, before llms, but when google search actually searched the web. Then, once you found something that seemed to work in humans, you were hit with the realization that ‘cancer’ is an umbrella term, and you need to account for cell type, and its numerous mutations.. I think the best approach is to collect a sample of the cancer, genotype it, test it against all known anticancer compounds, similar to how you’d deal with a bacterial infection sample, and then hope that the compound that worked for that specific cancer cell will work inside the human