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  • Hacker News
  • Gene splicing ATGC nucleotide.

    [1]: https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2019/02/22/the-history-...

    by rballpug
  • What economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.
    by sssilver
  • Humans are a bunch of hairless monkeys that have evolved to scam each other rather than hunt and gather food from Nature.
    by strangattractor
  • There's a fair bit of frequency illusion involved here. A lot of brilliant human minds aren't, in fact, working on ad tech, and a lot of the people working on ad tech aren't, in fact, that brilliant (as evidenced by them working adversarially against their own fellow humans, for one).

    There's a wide world outside big tech, Silicon Valley, and software in general. It only tends to be a bit less visible online.

    by 9dev
  • >brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.

    And even more brilliant minds are defeating it, every day. I have doubts about how useful they would be in a research lab.

    by tjpnz
  • I don't think an economic model would work. Only a political one would work where the government would redirect a lot of funds towards this, making it a lucrative profession.

    Adtech works because there is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of money in it because people seek quick entertainment, and we have a LOT of people driving the demand.

    Now compare that to cancer research. There's no short term gratification about it.

    by ksd482
  • I said it elsewhere but I'll say it here - we need one of the top 10 richest people in the world - the Bezos, the Musks etc - to suddenly get very interested at a personal level about cancer treatment.

    Then the money will flow.

    by mattlondon
  • When you reframe ads as "control of human attention" it suddenly makes a lot more sense why so many resources are poured into them.
    by paytonjjones
  • The bargaining dynamics are stacked against biology researchers at every stage of their career, from needing years and years of unrelated performance to be admitted to terribly expensive programs before they can begin to do experiments, to requiring costly equipment and resources to work, to needing to work with a small number of very powerful companies.

    As a result, life science researchers are more price-taking than proce-setting when it comes to their wages / salary. If money is the motivator, then the market as-is isn’t addressing this one.

    by odyssey7
  • > would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech?

    Private pharmaceutical R&D spending in the U.S. is around $100bn per year [1]. NIH spends another $50bn a year on biomedical research [2].

    That eclipses total investments into adtech per se, which generously counted shouldn’t exceed $50 to 60bn. (And that only by counting like a third to a half of Google, Amazon, et cetera R&D and capital spending as adtech.) More precisely counted, it probably doesn’t exceed $10bn.

    [1] https://phrma.org/blog/phrma-member-companies-rd-investments...

    [2] https://www.science.org/content/article/final-nih-budget-202...

    by JumpCrisscross
  • In order to kill all cancer cells in the body, it probably needs to be delivered to every single cell in the organism, and scan the nucleus of that cell. Viruses usually don't infect every single cell, just a small percentage.

    So one needs to figure out a delivery method that is efficient enough, and that doesn't elicit an immune response. But I guess one can analyze the cancer in the lab and figure out which receptors it expresses, and then bind to those? We could have a toolkit of different delivery methods, tailored for each patient's cancer.

    by est31
  • What stands out to me is how cancer therapy keeps moving from broad destruction (chemo/radiation) toward increasingly precise identification of malignant cells. The challenge no longer seems to be "can we kill cancer cells?" but "can we reliably identify only cancer cells and reach all of them?" This paper looks like another step in that direction.
    by Asfand3099
  • I'm not sure what this comment means - we could always kill cancer cells, and the challenge has always been "how can we ONLY kill the cancer?" We've been burning cancer, cutting cancer out, and drugging cancer cells for decades or centuries depending on the method. What is changing is not the type of challenge, but the precision of our tools - and even then, it remains to be seen if we actually can get the precision while improving the lives of the patients.
    by TaupeRanger
  • The article is pretty light on details, but

    > Much like other CRISPR therapies, delivery is a critical challenge, i.e., getting the large genome-cutting enzyme to all the targeted cells efficiently.

    makes me think this is in vitro so far. So, years to decades away from being available for actual treatment in humans. Still good news.

    by perlgeek
  • (removed)
    by amelius
  • Yeah. With cancer, delivering to 99% of the cells won't cut it, the surviving 1% will quickly grow back.
    by Metacelsus
  • Basically the issue is often that gene therapies end up in the liver since its the livers job to detoxify, but that may cause a dangerous immune response if the immune system notices it in the liver and attacks the organ, since the person could die from the damage.
    by daedrdev
  • For the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive

    The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amo... .

    by red_admiral
  • That's a good article with a good point. As a caregiver impatiently waiting for Daraxonrasib, I can at least acknowledge that the institutional machinery is going as fast as it can. I've litterally witnessed a trial patient in the first cohort of a drug (that went no further) be rushed from infusion to the hospital; the trial process cannot be sped up from its current state without endangering lives.
    by dmbrThnYou
  • Cancer treatments are really scary things. There are all sorts of impacts that we have no idea about when using drugs that fundamentally attack pieces of our own body.

    My partner of many years had one of the nastiest cancers around, one with no targeted treatments. She went through an experimental combination of existing drugs. Some of the side effects included:

      * Her heart stopping during a drug infusion. This happened multiple times over the 18 months of treatment.

  * Disseminated fungal infections.

  * Sepis because holes were developing in her GI tract.
    This is just a sampler of the horrible effects.

    This was a good response. Other patients just died from the drug combination.

    This is what going slowly looks like in the world of cancer treatment.

    by jyounker
  • I hope this finally works out. I remember almost exactly ten years ago I got excited about one of these proposed cancer cures, tried to talk about it at lunch with my coworkers, and they laughed at me for believing.
    by Ifkaluva
  • Real in vivo genetic engineering isn't going away and will indeed be a powerful tool to face cancer. Any particular effort is doubtful because this is a journey measured in decades. It is not the same story as any one particular wonder drug fizzling out to nothing, it is a class of tools that is maturing into the realm of early therapeutic deployment.
    by colechristensen
  • I'm pretty optimistic. I think it's a threshold question where we need a number of basic technologies to all get over certain bars before the floodgates start to open.

    Over the past 1-2 decades there has been unbelievable progress at the basic technology level but most people are unimpressed because they haven't translated yet due to not individually being sufficient to cause an explosion of progress. IMO, we're starting to see it finally as so many different technologies have gotten so cheap, fast, and good.

    by arcticfox
  • Yes! I have a genetic disease that will take me out in my 70s and I’m really hoping CRISPR gets to it before I do!
    by supertroop
  • I hope for you and others that they will!
    by cedel2k1
  • A lot of people's genes will take them out in their 70s but cheers to crispy
    by bloppe
  • I don't mean to sound insensitive, but don't most people die around age 70-80?
    by dreambuffer
  • CRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus.

    Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR.

    I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.

    by ordinaryradical
  • Bingo! CRISPR has an advantage of being relatively easy to describe to a layman, giving it a PR advantage.
    by anovikov
  • You're confusing the beurocratic FDA stamp of approval with safety and effectiveness. Those are not the same thing.
    by tty456