There are already many "compassionate use" exceptions out there already. I've family friends be grated that. It helps the pharma company as well as the patient. I'm sure that will happen here.

Yeah putting myself in the shoes of someone with this disease or a loved one with this disease I would be so incredibly angry that we weren't allowed to try something when the alternative is certain death

> what's the worst that can happen?

The patient dies from complications of the drug's use before the cancer.

Things are, at least, getting better with the passage of right to try laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-try_law

These drugs seem to all be only allowed after Phase 1 trials, so still not quite at the level you're describing here.

We might take it too far, but the fear of quack medicine is extremely rational.

I had a relative who died from this around 20 years ago. 50yo slim, sportive and healthy and after going to a diagnostic as she didn't feel good, she was gone within a few months .. So yeah, if there is even a slight chance it works, this should be tried and that'd save people :(

IMO, if you view your question from the ethical framework of "do no harm" i.e. the hippocratic oath instead of "move fast and break things", I can clearly see reason for the apprehension. The standards aren't positioned to catch "quack medicine" but to require full understanding before asking someone else to put something in their bodies. It's somewhat of an entitled stance that youd be okay with other people possibly needlessly dying in any circumstance for something experimental, and not one I'd ever want taken as an official stance by a regulated medical body.

Ethics is a topic I would never trust HN on.

This context is very important.

"Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start to expect will never pay compound interest."

"Then, when one of those people is elected to parliament, or Congress, and start to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or declares that All Research Should Be In The National Interest (whatever that is), I wonder how much we reap what we have sown."

This isn't quite as bad as the garden variety "in mice" studies:

> The combination therapy also led to significant regression in genetically engineered mouse tumours and in human cancer tissues grown in lab mice, known as patient-derived tumour xenografts (PDX).

I wonder how long until we'll start seeing these breakthrough cancer treatment articles for clinical trials done in dogs. Oncologists think dog research is a better fit than mice because of greater genetic similarities to humans and the fact that pet dogs live in similar environments as their owners. I think in general people definitely wouldn't be as ok with inducing cancer in dogs as in mice, but finding volunteers owners of dogs with existing cancer is certainly easier.

Mice have the best drugs.

I opened the comments fully expecting the top reply to be “In mice.” Bingo.

There really has never been a better time to be a critically-ill mouse. They've got something for you.

That is the problem with symptoms in general. Most people who go to the hospital with "chest pain" are not having a heart attack - but it is still the best symptom we have and so emergency rooms "waste" a lot of time one people who have nothing wrong. Or more likely they just have a mild constipation case (look up constipation, and then look up the individual symptoms - most of them are also symptoms of GET TO THE ER NOW type things)

there must be some sort of word for "games-bleeding-into-real-life" for stuff like this.

I remember years ago playing some games, and hearing similar sounds in real life would startle (or amuse) me. And you can't really explain it to anyone around you, lol.

thank you, I did a double take. Drugtrio is my new favorite Pokémon

Same, I'll never look at them the same again.

me too

> Am I misunderstanding the headline?

Yes, what’s being blocked is “tumor resistance” to treatment.

“potentially overcoming treatment resistance in one of the deadliest cancers.”

What's MSK?

In the past decade, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer has nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%. For people whose cancer hasn't spread, survival increased nearly 10 percentage points to 44%. So it's wrong to say that nothing ever seems to make it to daylight.

Source: https://www.uchealth.org/today/slow-but-steady-progress-impr...

1. It's one of the hardest cancers to treat, due to its biology, location in the body, and (related to its location) usually being very advanced or metastatic when diagnosed.

2. Mice =/= humans, as noted.

However we're heading into a new era of treatments for some cancers including pancreatic. New agents targeting RAS/KRAS pathways will likely deliver the first meaningful treatment advances in decades.

Daraxonrasib (which was used in the linked study) is leading the charge, but there are multiple other drugs (including agents that are a little more targeted, and therefore likely slightly better tolerated, like pan-KRAS or KRAS G12D inhibitors) in development too.

Because research on real humans and real diseases is exceptionally difficult. Clinical research is notoriously expensive, results are likely to differ from non-human (preclinical) models, and trials take forever to get started, gather enough data, and get a drug actually reviewed and approved. So even when everyone is excited by the preclinical data, there are so many barriers (both scientific and non-scientific) that getting to an approved drug is pretty unlikely.

I have absolutely no idea what the current frontline treatment drugs are for literally any form of cancer, and would bet the same is true for almost everyone else here. Most of the exceptions are people who know the frontline treatment drugs for one or two forms of cancer that impacted them personally. "And then you never hear about it again" is subtly implying that the drugs behind headlines never proceed beyond that point, but I didn't hear about it when the current frontline became the frontline treatment for any form of cancer. Most people just aren't in the loop about the evolution of the field of oncology, beyond pop-sci headlines.

And yes, most headlines like this don't result in changes to the care provided to anybody outside of clinical trials, but some do, and you and I probably won't hear about those either.

People cancer outcomes have improved a lot in recent decades. Many forms of cancer are essentially cured if you detect them early enough.

The stories are written for a general audience and often lack detail or nuance. "Promising" doesn't mean "likely". "Possible breakthrough" is not a breakthrough. And it may just mean we learn something that we don't know today.

I lost my wife to metastatic melanoma a few years ago. Words used in reference to cancer are often terms of art that have a distinct meaning from the general meaning. Her particular cancer was pretty awful and lacked mutations that allowed for the use of targeted therapy that buy time. Even still, her chances of survival were about 65% in 2023 as compared to 0% in 2013. Unfortunately, the odds didn't end in her favor, despite the incredible efforts of a team of doctors at a national cancer center.

Anything with cancer research and treatment is an testament to standing on the shoulders of those who came before. Many people suffered to give my Molly those odds - she had hope where many others had nothing. And today, we have trials of custom vaccines that will offer others more hope and perhaps safer treatment. Perhaps in some small way her journey and ideal helped those or other developments. That's all we have.

I think this is one of the expected outcomes of "Science by Press Release" (universities motivated to maximize their grants and IP), combined with media/press that wants clicks (articles that talk about cures for cancer get clicks).

It's not funny how people make judgments like this without any factchecking, just by their gut.

Talk to any actual healthcare worker from an oncology ward. (A nurse will do.) With most cancers, your chances of survival are non-trivially better now than even in 2010. Immunotherapy absolutely exploded in the meantime. For example, the vast majority of monoclonal antibodies (not just for treatment of cancer) were only approved in the last 15 years.

There are some notable holdouts like glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, and these tend to draw attention. But there is real progress.

So: half (1+5) of them made it at least 50 days without cancer, and the other half made it at least 50 days with a smaller tumor? This sounds excellent to me. I agree that the sentence you quoted is overselling, though.

Apparently 50 mice days is equivalent to about 5 human years, so even if these other causes of death here directly caused by the treatment (not alleged), surviving this much longer (5-20 years) would be pretty incredible for humans.

Mice are very short-lived compared to us. In humans, the usual standard of judgment when it comes to cancer is "5 year survival". No mouse has ever lived for 5 years yet, that would be like 180 years for us.

Prolonging a mouse's life by a few months is non-trivial and hints (only hints) at potential efficiency of such treatment in other species as well.