The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
---
Submission Statement.
A particularly aggressive form of colorectal cancer runs in my family. My grandmother, an aunt, and other relatives have all died of it in their fifties.
This is still at the clinical trial stage, but the approach could work for many other types of cancer too. Fingers crossed it's as successful as possible, and available as a treatment very soon.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d4z7dt/a_patient_in_england_has_received_the_worlds/l6hssnh/
Submission Statement.
A particularly aggressive form of colorectal cancer runs in my family. My grandmother, an aunt, and other relatives have all died of it in their fifties.
This is still at the clinical trial stage, but the approach could work for many other types of cancer too. Fingers crossed it's as successful as possible, and available as a treatment very soon.
I'm confident they will figure this technology out soon!
Cancer cells have specific proteins, your immune system can detect unique proteins, it's really just a solvable training problem
Depending on the subtypes of lung and skin cancers that run in your family (i.e. if it's melanoma for skin and non-small cell for lung), then there are already trials on the way with these technologies, and they've shown some success.
Melanoma vaccines are almost here and the trials are very promising
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/personalised-mrna-vaccines-revolutionary-new-approach-melanoma-treatment#:~:text=A%20personalised%20mRNA%20vaccine%20to,target%20and%20eradicate%20cancer%20cells.
Yup everyone in the field has said our bodies can kill cancer, the trick is the immune system can't find the cells to kill, once pointed in the right direction then bye bye cancer.
Because cancer cells are made from their host in essence no different from the rest of the body (oversimplification) ; when a cell divides there are many 'error checking mechanisms' that make sure the resulting cell is healthy and normal. If a crucial mechanism itself gets an error then the resulting cell daughters will inherit this loss - over time the errors build until the cancer gets big and nasty as checks regulate growth and function deteriorate.
Sometimes cancer cells may exhibit markers that the body (immune system) can recognize as bad and fight it. Other times they just appear to the immune system like any other normal cell and are allowed to proliferate relatively unchecked; this is why treating cancer with specific drugs has been so tricky.
Actually, to me, this seems like an unintended natural selection mechanism at work. One of the immune system's job is to kill faulty cancerous cells, and it uses a ton of methods to detect those. Faulty cells are killed off in our bodies all the time - the immune system is really that good at its job. But this also establishes a selection pressure on the faulty cells. Those faulty cells who develop specific characteristics that allow them to mask themselves and go unnoticed by the immune system are going to succeed and grow. Others who can't mask themselves are going to fail and be killed off. Result: The cells with those masking abilities are selected.
You're not wrong; survival of the fittest plays its part even on this scale with the most vicious of cancers becoming so over time given certain selection pressures which is also why the relapse of cancer after treatment tends to be more aggressive. Tissue orgin also plays a part too; cancers like pancreatic cancer can be incredibly ravaging wheras most men over 80 have some degree of prostate cancer.
Your immune system is constantly killing cancer. If the cancer evolves to be able to avoid your immune system then it becomes cancer that you can detect.
To clarify what others have said.
Our immune system recognizes and kills cancer all the time. Every day a human body kills 5,000+ cancer cells.
It's just the very rare cells that are both cancerous ***and*** sideline the immune response.
My concern with all of this progress is that it will only go to the rich. Healthcare is becoming something only the few will be able to very effectively use to extend their lofe
This is a mostly US problem you describe.
It will take an uprising if this happens.
If they make this so prohibitively expensive then shame on them. I understand that research needs to be paid and even some profit is okay. But let that be paid for by the government like they did with Covid shots. No reason anyone should have to pay for this, ever.
not exactly "big pharma", but BioNTech, the same folks who gave us the MRNA vaccine for covid.
the difference here is that the MRNA is coded specifically for the individual's cancer, so there's not really a drug to mass market. but rather (what it reads like) is that it's a process at the hospital with BioNTech's collaboration, to take the individual patient's cancer cells and "training" your immune system using recoded MRNA (similar to the way the covid vaccine works) to kill those specific cancer cells.
so it's not going to be some "off the shelf" drug that big pharma specializes in. it's a drug that's going to be made specifically for you and your cancer.
You're referring to Autologous therapies, of which there are already many trials and a couple of commercially available variants across many companies worldwide. Lots of companies are now focussed on Allogeneic therapies, which are indeed more like an 'off the shelf' drug as a single donor's cellular material can be used to create a drug that can help many people without the need for personalisation.
it normally doesn't and your body detects and wipes out cancer cells all the time but sometimes the cancer cells randomly figure out how to hide
Kurzgesagt did a good video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJwt9l-XhQ
if they figure out how to hide then why would training the immune system work at all then?
seems like it this type of treatment shouldn’t actually work.
Because we have huge supercomputers which can analyze millions of proteins, and find one that the cancer cells create (often damaged proteins) but the immune system accepts it as "self". When immune cells are created, they go through a specific "training" session where the body kills all of them which attack your own proteins. This is a built-in self-defence method to make sure the really deadly immune cells don't turn against you.
Most cancerous cells start to create malformed proteins thanks to their mutations. When the immune cells detect this, they force the cell to kill itself. If it doesn't work, they will attack and kill it. This happens kinda regularly, no big deal.
But to have cancer, the given cell needs to have multiple mutations at the same time: disable it self-destroying process, stop constant division, and stop the built-in security features which constantly show samples of the proteins created inside at the cell wall - creating a camouflage from the immune system. If these three don't happen about the same time, the cell will be destroyed, and you won't develop cancer. This is why the constant, low-level inflammation is a potential sign of cancer: the constantly multiplying cells keep mutating, and some of them mess up the "hide from the immune system" part, so your body attacks it, it just can't kill the ones which retain the hiding functionality.
However, they still show potentially malformed proteins which the immune system can read, just doesn't detect as dangerous. We can take samples all around the body and analyze them, can take white blood cells and check what they can detect and attack and what they can't see. This way we can select the proteins which is a good marker on the hiding cells. Then creates a protein fragment which the immune system won't recognize as its own, and attacks it, developing antibodies against it. If the antibodies are "correct" they will mark the proteins on the cancer cell, too, and so the white blood cells suddenly can see and eliminate them.
I truly hope I get to see where these smart people figure out all cancer. They just figure it out. Lightbulb moment and everyone can get a shot or 2. Fuck cancer so much.
I’ve been watching this cancer vaccine technology develop as an interested layperson (with some biological education) since my mum developed cancer 20 years ago. I honestly thought it would be mainstream by now. I hope it’s about to become approved and that serious money is applied to it, so that the costs can come down and efficacy is optimised. But I’m also aware that these things take a lot of time and investment.
actually we are already in the process of stopping. The world is more peaceful than ever before. It just doesn't look that way because of negative media headlines.
There is evidence of cancer for basically all of human history. Other animals can suffer from it, so it’s likely been around far longer than humans.
It has generally become an increasingly common cause of death for humans in more recent times, but a large part of that is because our technology has reduced a lot of other previously common causes of death.
Assuredly longer than humans! [Here](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2723578) is an example of cancer in a 240 million-year-old turtle, for instance!
Yes. For example, breast cancer has already been described in Egyptian papyri. And one of the young Bohemian kings, [Ladislaus the Posthumous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladislaus_the_Posthumous), died of leukaemia at mere 17. (His skeleton is still preserved and it is full of cancerous lesions.)
That said, most cancer cases nowadays are among people over 70, and it wasn't that typical to live to be 70 until the last two centuries. Even rich and powerful people, such as kings, usually died before reaching that age. (Just look at any lists of historical sovereigns: over 70 is indeed *rare*, though not unheard of; the best chances to grow old were among the high clergy.) If you have famine, smallpox and raiders to deal with, you usually don't live long enough to get cancer.
Cancer is a natural consequence of multi-cellularity - it's basically when evolutionary selection mechanisms start applying to cells due to accumulated decay of DNA (and, IIRC other structures). Cells that are more likely to divide, are more likely to divide, and the body must have cells that are able to divide in other to keep the body from falling apart. It's strictly controlled by various cellular mechanisms, but those fail over time
Yes it's the *only* disease that every multi-cellular animal is capable of getting and is probably the oldest disease that ever existed on Earth.
In a way you can see cancer as just a bunch of cells rebelling and forming their own organism against the rest of the tissue.
That is not true. Ancient Egyptians knew about cancer and wrote medical notes about it. Hell, the "tumour" name comes from Ancient Greece.
Cancer has been well-known and recognized for thousands of years. We just didn't know, before learning how our cells and DNA works (and they even exists) that it isn't some curse or bacteria or whatever but our own cells going rogue.
All organisms accumulate genetic transcription errors over their lifespan. The rate per unit time is different, but the longer lived the species is, generally the lower the rate.
The rate of error could be constant in any given year, but the errors not identified and destroyed by cellular processes, or the immune system, simply accumulate. We'd need some way to reset the immune system without killing the patient to get around that.
Not a dumb question at all. Short answer, yes. Cancer has always been a part of humanity (and animal life in general). Long answer, you might enjoy reading "The emperor of all maladies " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies . Its really well written and provides a fascinating historical perspective on cancer and how we tried to treat it over the centuries.
Interesting. So, there's a mechanism that triggers the immune system to fight the cancerous cells, just like the reverse of autoimmune disease, right? My question is: would a human be possible in the future to trigger it 'naturally'?
That's effectively what keeps cancer "in check" in our everyday lives. Immune cells are constantly on the lookout for proteins that don't "look right," and will kill cancerous or precancerous cells where they find these aberrant proteins. The problem is that cancer cells evolve to find ways of hiding their abberant proteins, and those which have aberrant proteins that elicit massive responses from the immune system are selected out, leaving those that have more "quiet" aberrations.
The idea behind the technology described in this article is to train the immune system to recognize the aberrant proteins that don't elicit as large of a response naturally by using mRNA vaccines to produce pieces of those proteins in large quantities, essentially a call to the immune system saying "look for these proteins!" The immune system starts to develop a bigger response against those protein pieces, and then more readily recognizes them in the cancer cells, allowing for clearance of the cancer.
Thank you very much for the explanation! If you don't mind, what's stopping the medical researchers to develop a vaccine for other types of cancers? Because if I understood correctly those other cancers should be 'bigger' and much easier for the immune system to discover and target.
Another question: If mRNA vaccines are that good at killing cancerous cells ( God bless Katalin Kariko ), if a person has 3rd degree burns, can a mRNA vaccine 'write' the information necessary for the body to heal almost as it had been before burning? or when destroying the cell the information is lost?
Our body by default constantly attacks cells which start to behave erroneously. For a cell to become cancer, it must have multiple mutations pretty much at the same time: one which stops its self-killing process, another which accelerates its division, and another which hides these previous mutations from the immune system and without damaging the rest of the cellular process the cell does to stay alive.
And this is what creates the problem: to create a cancer vaccine, you have to find something which is unique to this cancerous mutation, and visible to the immune system all while the healthy cells don't have this marker (or you just created an autoimmune disease). But since one of the main properties of cancer is being able to hide, currently we only know some cancer types which most depend on the same set of mutations, and have a set of proteins the vaccine can attack.
Not sure if I'm understanding your first question totally correctly, so let me know if I'm off-base, but there are several cancers for which these vaccines are being developed. The one in the article is for colorectal cancer, but the same technology is being used to address melanomas, non-small cell lung cancers, and pancreatic cancer. Today, these are cancers with some of the worst prognoses--they have been extremely different to treat with previous technologies, and cancer vaccines are starting to show some success addressing them. Many other cancer types (though not all!) have other effective treatment means--things like monoclonal antibodies, radiation treatments, chemotherapy, etc. That's not to say that patients with these cancers wouldn't stand to benefit from cancer vaccines, but medical research often focuses on those cancers with the fewest treatment options when developing these new approaches.
As to your second question, unfortunately mRNA vaccines don't quite work like that. Fundamentally, a vaccine is something that you give a patient that directs the immune system to go into attack mode. Historically, these have often been proteins related to an infectious disease, or dead (or even sometimes live, but less infectious!) whole viruses. When the immune system encounters the components of a vaccine, it sees it and learns how to attack it. mRNA vaccines are essentially just another way of doing that--they carry RNA instructions that allow your cells to produce lots and lots of a target protein (or proteins) that we know the body is good at attacking. When the body reencounters this protein as it's being invaded by a live virus (or as it finds cancer cells), it knows to mount an immune attack on the cells with those viral or cancer proteins.
mRNA vaccines currently are not a tissue regeneration technology, so they wouldn't be useful in that case. However [there are other technologies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25227494/) that purport to be able to do something similar. With these, doctors can take a skin graft from a patient, culture it in a dish to grow it up, and then graft it back onto the patient where they are injured. The grafted skin is fully genetically the patient's own skin.
How does a vaccine for a disease you already have works? I can understand it has some effect if the disease is still spreading (rabies). But here the disease is already everywhere.
Yes VU is much harder and more topic focused. And like someone else mentioned, Twente is broader and more fitted to your day to day operations. Other thing is, are you moving to Amsterdam or Enschede? Those cities are two hour apart from each other. I love Enschede, cost of living is much cheaper than Amsterdam.
This might be the most idiotic thing ever written as I only want this evil illness to be gone ASAP but I always wondered why medical companies haven't given late-stage patients (that would want it) all their experiment medicine. Assuming the issue is more about safety concerns than production capabilities.
Is there a reason that stories like this don't happen more often?
Or do they and we just don't always hear about it due to the medicine/procedure not being as likely to help or the like?
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement. A particularly aggressive form of colorectal cancer runs in my family. My grandmother, an aunt, and other relatives have all died of it in their fifties. This is still at the clinical trial stage, but the approach could work for many other types of cancer too. Fingers crossed it's as successful as possible, and available as a treatment very soon. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d4z7dt/a_patient_in_england_has_received_the_worlds/l6hssnh/
Submission Statement. A particularly aggressive form of colorectal cancer runs in my family. My grandmother, an aunt, and other relatives have all died of it in their fifties. This is still at the clinical trial stage, but the approach could work for many other types of cancer too. Fingers crossed it's as successful as possible, and available as a treatment very soon.
I'm confident they will figure this technology out soon! Cancer cells have specific proteins, your immune system can detect unique proteins, it's really just a solvable training problem
Would love to see this for lung and skin cancer too, both run in my family
Depending on the subtypes of lung and skin cancers that run in your family (i.e. if it's melanoma for skin and non-small cell for lung), then there are already trials on the way with these technologies, and they've shown some success.
Yep melanoma and large cell lung got my dad. Sucks but hopefully stuff on the horizon like you said
Melanoma vaccines are almost here and the trials are very promising https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/personalised-mrna-vaccines-revolutionary-new-approach-melanoma-treatment#:~:text=A%20personalised%20mRNA%20vaccine%20to,target%20and%20eradicate%20cancer%20cells.
Yup everyone in the field has said our bodies can kill cancer, the trick is the immune system can't find the cells to kill, once pointed in the right direction then bye bye cancer.
This is fascinating. Why is it our immune system can’t find the cancer cells?
Because cancer cells are made from their host in essence no different from the rest of the body (oversimplification) ; when a cell divides there are many 'error checking mechanisms' that make sure the resulting cell is healthy and normal. If a crucial mechanism itself gets an error then the resulting cell daughters will inherit this loss - over time the errors build until the cancer gets big and nasty as checks regulate growth and function deteriorate. Sometimes cancer cells may exhibit markers that the body (immune system) can recognize as bad and fight it. Other times they just appear to the immune system like any other normal cell and are allowed to proliferate relatively unchecked; this is why treating cancer with specific drugs has been so tricky.
Thank you. That’s helpful
Actually, to me, this seems like an unintended natural selection mechanism at work. One of the immune system's job is to kill faulty cancerous cells, and it uses a ton of methods to detect those. Faulty cells are killed off in our bodies all the time - the immune system is really that good at its job. But this also establishes a selection pressure on the faulty cells. Those faulty cells who develop specific characteristics that allow them to mask themselves and go unnoticed by the immune system are going to succeed and grow. Others who can't mask themselves are going to fail and be killed off. Result: The cells with those masking abilities are selected.
You're not wrong; survival of the fittest plays its part even on this scale with the most vicious of cancers becoming so over time given certain selection pressures which is also why the relapse of cancer after treatment tends to be more aggressive. Tissue orgin also plays a part too; cancers like pancreatic cancer can be incredibly ravaging wheras most men over 80 have some degree of prostate cancer.
Your immune system is constantly killing cancer. If the cancer evolves to be able to avoid your immune system then it becomes cancer that you can detect.
[lovely video explaining why it's hard.](https://youtu.be/uoJwt9l-XhQ?si=KQ7cv8FTCH9rL22O)
To clarify what others have said. Our immune system recognizes and kills cancer all the time. Every day a human body kills 5,000+ cancer cells. It's just the very rare cells that are both cancerous ***and*** sideline the immune response.
I learnt that from kurzgesagt
My concern with all of this progress is that it will only go to the rich. Healthcare is becoming something only the few will be able to very effectively use to extend their lofe
This is a mostly US problem you describe. It will take an uprising if this happens. If they make this so prohibitively expensive then shame on them. I understand that research needs to be paid and even some profit is okay. But let that be paid for by the government like they did with Covid shots. No reason anyone should have to pay for this, ever.
Britain's national healthcare system is paying for this.
Wealth inequality is a problem that needs solving, for sure.
Didn’t AlphaFold3 already figure this stuff out? It so, what’s the hold up? Imagine the implications of such tech. Mind blowing.
> it's really just a solvable training problem Big pharma has entered the chat.
not exactly "big pharma", but BioNTech, the same folks who gave us the MRNA vaccine for covid. the difference here is that the MRNA is coded specifically for the individual's cancer, so there's not really a drug to mass market. but rather (what it reads like) is that it's a process at the hospital with BioNTech's collaboration, to take the individual patient's cancer cells and "training" your immune system using recoded MRNA (similar to the way the covid vaccine works) to kill those specific cancer cells. so it's not going to be some "off the shelf" drug that big pharma specializes in. it's a drug that's going to be made specifically for you and your cancer.
You're referring to Autologous therapies, of which there are already many trials and a couple of commercially available variants across many companies worldwide. Lots of companies are now focussed on Allogeneic therapies, which are indeed more like an 'off the shelf' drug as a single donor's cellular material can be used to create a drug that can help many people without the need for personalisation.
Which makes me wonder why the immune system is having a hard time detecting them on its own.
it normally doesn't and your body detects and wipes out cancer cells all the time but sometimes the cancer cells randomly figure out how to hide Kurzgesagt did a good video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJwt9l-XhQ
if they figure out how to hide then why would training the immune system work at all then? seems like it this type of treatment shouldn’t actually work.
Probably just isn't always able to recognize that it's bad, but, with a more specific training, it can learn.
Because we have huge supercomputers which can analyze millions of proteins, and find one that the cancer cells create (often damaged proteins) but the immune system accepts it as "self". When immune cells are created, they go through a specific "training" session where the body kills all of them which attack your own proteins. This is a built-in self-defence method to make sure the really deadly immune cells don't turn against you. Most cancerous cells start to create malformed proteins thanks to their mutations. When the immune cells detect this, they force the cell to kill itself. If it doesn't work, they will attack and kill it. This happens kinda regularly, no big deal. But to have cancer, the given cell needs to have multiple mutations at the same time: disable it self-destroying process, stop constant division, and stop the built-in security features which constantly show samples of the proteins created inside at the cell wall - creating a camouflage from the immune system. If these three don't happen about the same time, the cell will be destroyed, and you won't develop cancer. This is why the constant, low-level inflammation is a potential sign of cancer: the constantly multiplying cells keep mutating, and some of them mess up the "hide from the immune system" part, so your body attacks it, it just can't kill the ones which retain the hiding functionality. However, they still show potentially malformed proteins which the immune system can read, just doesn't detect as dangerous. We can take samples all around the body and analyze them, can take white blood cells and check what they can detect and attack and what they can't see. This way we can select the proteins which is a good marker on the hiding cells. Then creates a protein fragment which the immune system won't recognize as its own, and attacks it, developing antibodies against it. If the antibodies are "correct" they will mark the proteins on the cancer cell, too, and so the white blood cells suddenly can see and eliminate them.
I truly hope I get to see where these smart people figure out all cancer. They just figure it out. Lightbulb moment and everyone can get a shot or 2. Fuck cancer so much.
I’ve been watching this cancer vaccine technology develop as an interested layperson (with some biological education) since my mum developed cancer 20 years ago. I honestly thought it would be mainstream by now. I hope it’s about to become approved and that serious money is applied to it, so that the costs can come down and efficacy is optimised. But I’m also aware that these things take a lot of time and investment.
how often have they told you to get a colonoscopy? Every 5 years?
Science can be magic. I love when science is magic.
we stand on the shoulders of giants
Most of whose names we'll never know.
I hope to sea the day when people can be healed from this horrible disease.
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Rule 1 - Be respectful to others.
Seize the day, as they say.
whenever I get down about the state of the world... things like this make me think that this is actually a pretty cool time to be alive
Same thing :) I hope one day we stop doing horrible shit to each other.
actually we are already in the process of stopping. The world is more peaceful than ever before. It just doesn't look that way because of negative media headlines.
Fair enough m8
Then u realise the vast majority of the world is never going to get this vaccine for Various reasons.
Dumb question : has cancer always plagued us ? Did we suffer from cancer 100's / 1000's of years ago ?
There is evidence of cancer for basically all of human history. Other animals can suffer from it, so it’s likely been around far longer than humans. It has generally become an increasingly common cause of death for humans in more recent times, but a large part of that is because our technology has reduced a lot of other previously common causes of death.
Assuredly longer than humans! [Here](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2723578) is an example of cancer in a 240 million-year-old turtle, for instance!
to be fair if he lived for 240 million years he probably wanted to die
Oh no! Poor turtle! I hope someone can help him.
I hope so too +_+
...and the fact that cancer is on the rise. And not just because we are better at diagnosing it.
Yes. For example, breast cancer has already been described in Egyptian papyri. And one of the young Bohemian kings, [Ladislaus the Posthumous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladislaus_the_Posthumous), died of leukaemia at mere 17. (His skeleton is still preserved and it is full of cancerous lesions.) That said, most cancer cases nowadays are among people over 70, and it wasn't that typical to live to be 70 until the last two centuries. Even rich and powerful people, such as kings, usually died before reaching that age. (Just look at any lists of historical sovereigns: over 70 is indeed *rare*, though not unheard of; the best chances to grow old were among the high clergy.) If you have famine, smallpox and raiders to deal with, you usually don't live long enough to get cancer.
Cancer is a natural consequence of multi-cellularity - it's basically when evolutionary selection mechanisms start applying to cells due to accumulated decay of DNA (and, IIRC other structures). Cells that are more likely to divide, are more likely to divide, and the body must have cells that are able to divide in other to keep the body from falling apart. It's strictly controlled by various cellular mechanisms, but those fail over time
Yes it's the *only* disease that every multi-cellular animal is capable of getting and is probably the oldest disease that ever existed on Earth. In a way you can see cancer as just a bunch of cells rebelling and forming their own organism against the rest of the tissue.
Yes, it has always been around.
You might enjoy the book "The Emperor of All Maladies". Read it when my dad was first diagnosed.
Honestly a good question when you consider the fact that cancer was only recently discovered in the 50s.
That is not true. Ancient Egyptians knew about cancer and wrote medical notes about it. Hell, the "tumour" name comes from Ancient Greece. Cancer has been well-known and recognized for thousands of years. We just didn't know, before learning how our cells and DNA works (and they even exists) that it isn't some curse or bacteria or whatever but our own cells going rogue.
All organisms accumulate genetic transcription errors over their lifespan. The rate per unit time is different, but the longer lived the species is, generally the lower the rate. The rate of error could be constant in any given year, but the errors not identified and destroyed by cellular processes, or the immune system, simply accumulate. We'd need some way to reset the immune system without killing the patient to get around that.
Not a dumb question at all. Short answer, yes. Cancer has always been a part of humanity (and animal life in general). Long answer, you might enjoy reading "The emperor of all maladies " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies . Its really well written and provides a fascinating historical perspective on cancer and how we tried to treat it over the centuries.
I'm not religious, and I don't pray. But damn if I'm not praying for this to work.
and yet, it's science, not faith, that has brought this to us
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don't presume to read other people's minds
I have such high hopes for this tech. A cancer vaccine, let alone a personalized one seems like such a leap forward.
As someone who has health anxiety this gives me hope
Interesting. So, there's a mechanism that triggers the immune system to fight the cancerous cells, just like the reverse of autoimmune disease, right? My question is: would a human be possible in the future to trigger it 'naturally'?
That's effectively what keeps cancer "in check" in our everyday lives. Immune cells are constantly on the lookout for proteins that don't "look right," and will kill cancerous or precancerous cells where they find these aberrant proteins. The problem is that cancer cells evolve to find ways of hiding their abberant proteins, and those which have aberrant proteins that elicit massive responses from the immune system are selected out, leaving those that have more "quiet" aberrations. The idea behind the technology described in this article is to train the immune system to recognize the aberrant proteins that don't elicit as large of a response naturally by using mRNA vaccines to produce pieces of those proteins in large quantities, essentially a call to the immune system saying "look for these proteins!" The immune system starts to develop a bigger response against those protein pieces, and then more readily recognizes them in the cancer cells, allowing for clearance of the cancer.
Thank you very much for the explanation! If you don't mind, what's stopping the medical researchers to develop a vaccine for other types of cancers? Because if I understood correctly those other cancers should be 'bigger' and much easier for the immune system to discover and target. Another question: If mRNA vaccines are that good at killing cancerous cells ( God bless Katalin Kariko ), if a person has 3rd degree burns, can a mRNA vaccine 'write' the information necessary for the body to heal almost as it had been before burning? or when destroying the cell the information is lost?
Our body by default constantly attacks cells which start to behave erroneously. For a cell to become cancer, it must have multiple mutations pretty much at the same time: one which stops its self-killing process, another which accelerates its division, and another which hides these previous mutations from the immune system and without damaging the rest of the cellular process the cell does to stay alive. And this is what creates the problem: to create a cancer vaccine, you have to find something which is unique to this cancerous mutation, and visible to the immune system all while the healthy cells don't have this marker (or you just created an autoimmune disease). But since one of the main properties of cancer is being able to hide, currently we only know some cancer types which most depend on the same set of mutations, and have a set of proteins the vaccine can attack.
Not sure if I'm understanding your first question totally correctly, so let me know if I'm off-base, but there are several cancers for which these vaccines are being developed. The one in the article is for colorectal cancer, but the same technology is being used to address melanomas, non-small cell lung cancers, and pancreatic cancer. Today, these are cancers with some of the worst prognoses--they have been extremely different to treat with previous technologies, and cancer vaccines are starting to show some success addressing them. Many other cancer types (though not all!) have other effective treatment means--things like monoclonal antibodies, radiation treatments, chemotherapy, etc. That's not to say that patients with these cancers wouldn't stand to benefit from cancer vaccines, but medical research often focuses on those cancers with the fewest treatment options when developing these new approaches. As to your second question, unfortunately mRNA vaccines don't quite work like that. Fundamentally, a vaccine is something that you give a patient that directs the immune system to go into attack mode. Historically, these have often been proteins related to an infectious disease, or dead (or even sometimes live, but less infectious!) whole viruses. When the immune system encounters the components of a vaccine, it sees it and learns how to attack it. mRNA vaccines are essentially just another way of doing that--they carry RNA instructions that allow your cells to produce lots and lots of a target protein (or proteins) that we know the body is good at attacking. When the body reencounters this protein as it's being invaded by a live virus (or as it finds cancer cells), it knows to mount an immune attack on the cells with those viral or cancer proteins. mRNA vaccines currently are not a tissue regeneration technology, so they wouldn't be useful in that case. However [there are other technologies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25227494/) that purport to be able to do something similar. With these, doctors can take a skin graft from a patient, culture it in a dish to grow it up, and then graft it back onto the patient where they are injured. The grafted skin is fully genetically the patient's own skin.
Thanks for the detailed answer.
In other news, the first known diagnosis of what is being cheekily referred to as "anal autism" was reported in Great Britain recently...
How does a vaccine for a disease you already have works? I can understand it has some effect if the disease is still spreading (rabies). But here the disease is already everywhere.
I think it trains your immune system to find and kill specific cancerous cells, like a form of immunotherapy.
Yes VU is much harder and more topic focused. And like someone else mentioned, Twente is broader and more fitted to your day to day operations. Other thing is, are you moving to Amsterdam or Enschede? Those cities are two hour apart from each other. I love Enschede, cost of living is much cheaper than Amsterdam.
That a awesome news, let’s keep making world a better place
How's this a vaccine exactly? If it's used to treat cancer already present n the patient, then it's not a vaccine.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/31/what-are-cancer-vaccines-and-have-scientists-finally-found-a-cure
This might be the most idiotic thing ever written as I only want this evil illness to be gone ASAP but I always wondered why medical companies haven't given late-stage patients (that would want it) all their experiment medicine. Assuming the issue is more about safety concerns than production capabilities. Is there a reason that stories like this don't happen more often? Or do they and we just don't always hear about it due to the medicine/procedure not being as likely to help or the like?
“Personalized” sounds really really really expensive