It's neo-adjuvant (treat prior to surgery) with a three mAbs: Ipi + Nivo, which is a well established combo of immunotherapeutics for many solid tumors, rounded out with relatlimab which I'm less familiar with (LAG-3 inhibition). Neoadjuvant use of immunotherapies is established concept and is utilized in clinical practice for non-small cell lung cancer and colon cancer. This is the first time I've seen a use of 3 immunotherapies used at once: Ipi + Nivo isn't the most tolerable treatment regimen. Other novel aspect is use of neoadjuvant therapy in GBM.
Don’t mean to hijack this thread, but I don’t think HN has DMs. Read some of your comments and as a person with cancer would love to pick your brain a little to develop my mental model further (and of course wouldn’t expect anything for free.) Drop me a line at [my HN username] [at] nearby.org if open to discussing more. Thanks!
Do they give immunotherapy before, after or instead of chemo? Asking because I heard what it is after in some cases and that puzzled me as chemo usually hits immune system.
No chemo. The entire idea of this regime is to hit the tumour with immuno to get the reaction. They want lots of tumour cells and for it to be "treatment naive" - Richard hadn't even had corticosteroids, which dampens immune.
Once they primed his system they excised as much as possible and kept the immuno going while doing a course of radiation.
Profs Long and Scolyer work with melanoma where chemo is rarely used these days.
That was a concern in the early days of development of anti PD(L)-1 agents - that chemo and even steroids would harm the T-cells you’re trying to activate.
Yet there are settings where a deliberate combination of anti PD-1 with chemotherapy is the standard of care. And there are other types of immunotherapy where a combination with chemotherapy is advantageous too.
From what I read (in a book written by Scolyer), the treatment didn't involve chemo. It was along the lines of:
1. immunotherapy
2. Surgery to remove the bulk of the tumour.
3. More immunotherapy
4. Radiation therapy
5. A course of vaccine customised to the genome of the cancer
I would like to see a clinical trial with patients who have Stage 4 disease being treated with multiple immunotherapies, up to 5 or 6 IV and oral immunotherapies. Why are we holding back in a population with poor prognosis??
As far as legislation, we should pass "Right to Try" laws. Allowing anyone with Stage 3 or 4 to pick an immunotherapy regardless of whether it's been approved. We should never allow hope to die!
There is a bound on the degree to which terminal patients are willing to be human guinea pigs, and a bound on which the data is statistically useful to anyone.
I’ve read many reports of terminal patients who wish that they hadn’t wasted the last few months of their healthspan searching for Hail Mary treatment options. If you were to ask yourself what you would do with 1-3 months of healthy life left, would you spend it in a hospital on chemo?
I’m no longer NED from Stage IV colon cancer (first DX 2014), and now it’s returned and inoperable. I was given an option to add Cetuximab which I’d had previously- but the side effects from that were so bad for me that it absolutely isn’t worth it to me to add a few months, but live in misery.
Of course you would make different choices if you could predict the future. But if I only have 1-3 months to live, I am going for Hail Mary treatment options to try to extend that (because I can't predict the future).
You're currently dying of the "being human" cancer. Are you working on or donating to anti-aging research, or do you prefer to do other things with your time? It just comes down to your discount factor. Based on inflation, it's typically about 0.95/year, so you would expect to care about ~10% as much for things 50 years in the future. This means if you had a ~10% better quality of life not working on anti-aging, you're guaranteed to be better off. In reality, you should hedge your bets; if everyone spent just a little time on the disease, we could cure "being human". The same applies to dying fighting cancer. You should be willing to do some experimental procedures, but not if it eliminates your happiness for the rest of your life.
One assumption people making such arguments implicitly assume is that such things are possible, which is not a given. It could well be that you could have infinite money, a billion scientists, and make no progress whatsoever. And I'm only referring to cancer there. Anti-aging seems even less likely.
I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance on this topic from people like Ray Kurzweil. The overwhelming majority of increases in life expectancy over the past millennia have come from reductions in childhood mortality. It's not like people in the past just hit 40 years old and randomly keeled over. But rather people were quite unlikely to make it out of childhood. If one person dies in childhood and the other at 80, you have a life expectancy of 40 years old but it's rather misleading! In reality the average life expectancy (for those that made it out of childhood) has remained pretty similar for millennia - around 70 years. [1]
So for instance the Founding Fathers died at an average age of 72. John Adams lived to 90, and Sam Adams/Jay/Franklin/Madison died in their 80s. The only two who died before their 60s were Hamilton, who was killed in a duel, and Hancock, who'd had poor health throughout most of his life. This is a nice sample because you had Founding Fathers as young as 18 (Monroe) when the Declaration of Independence was signed, so we're certainly not seeing a surviorship bias. They were certainly wealthier than average, but all the wealth in the world doesn't matter when state of the art healthcare was doing things like treating infections by bloodletting (including by leeches) to get rid of 'bad blood' or 'balance the 4 humors.'
I seem to be much more confident that technology could solve the aging problem. Two routes come to mind:
1. We can already splice up DNA with decent accuracy, so it's just a matter of finding what DNA to splice in/out to have the desired effects, and then a method to apply this to every cell.
2. We're close to being able to disassemble someone's nerves and simulate them with a very high accuracy. So, at the very least we could give people new robot bodies.
Now, it's true that even the wealthiest people in the world several hundred years ago had no hope to get either of these done. But it seems entirely plausible that if everyone came together to work on this now, it could be solved in a few decades. I think it isn't happening because (1) people's discount factors aren't high enough to throw everything to their future; (2) the wealthiest people are older, and have the least chance of success; (3) it's a coordination problem that most people aren't even aware they can coordinate on; (4) a significant number of people don't even think it's a problem (because of the stories their ancestors told about death maybe not being the end). The last two are solvable, but the first are just mismatched preferences that you can't really get around.
Not arguing against your general point that post-childhood life expectancy has always been fairly high, but I don't think rich aristocrats make for a "nice sample" when talking about longevity.
Most of the logic about endless life expectancy take improvement in healthcare as the fundamental driving factor. And in the past, the wealthy were no better off than the impoverished here because you couldn't buy that which didn't exist. Germ theory didn't exist, let alone antibiotics, even hand washing as a thing before surgery didn't yet exist. And what I was alluding to in my comment was what happened to George Washington. He died at a relatively early age of 67 of a throat infection, or of the 5 pints of blood that was taken from him to 'cure' that infection leaving portraits of him on his death bed as being white as a ghost.
That's why I always think that the _mean_ life expectancy is a much more useful metric than _average_. Not sure why everybody reports the average everywhere. I have the same exact thought when it comes to salaries. Governments and the like always publish the _average_, which tells very little to the regular person. If anything, it would tell the regular person that they must really be very badly off if most make more than them, having a negative effect. Perhaps that's the desired outcome?
> Not sure why everybody reports the average everywhere.
Because that's the modern definition of life expectancy: the average (mean). Probably because the primary driver behind the production of actuarial tables has always been for insurance, annuities, and similar purposes. For calculating costs and valuations the mean is often a better measure because the distribution of deaths isn't normal. Though in modern actuarial tables you'll often find both.
I would assume popular literature quotes expectancy figures from birth because that's the easiest thing to do when you're just trying to give a single simple figure. But actuarial tables have always been just that--tables. Given a person at age X, what's their life expectancy. The first row will be from birth, but people with money on the line have always understood that number is mostly irrelevant. Here's an actuarial table from the 3rd century which was built for calculating annuities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpian%27s_life_table Interestingly that table seems to use median life expectancy.
Actuarial science was a significant driver in the development of modern statistics and mathematics, especially as the market for financial products exploded over the past several centuries. The tables and models for life expectancy from 150 years ago were startlingly accurate, even in their forecasts of changing life expectancies. When Social Security was passed in the 1930s the models for how life expectancies would change, both from infancy and across all the age brackets, were spot on with actual changes up to the 1990s.
Even then though, in e.g. Victorian times, the median (50th percentile) gets skewed by horrendously high infant mortality.
Looking at the 75th or 80th percentile, or the life expectancy for an 18 year old, is a better measure. High scores for the 75th can mask deaths due to inequality to some extent, but because wealth distributions are _so_ skewed at the top, the 75th percentile typically looks more like an average/poor person than a rich person.
Yeah, even the median life expectancy in the past would be getting awful close to something like 2 years old. [1] Again running with the Founding Fathers as an interesting example, Sam Adams lived until he was 82 and was one of 12 children. Yet of all those brothers/sisters, only 3 lived past the age of 3.
It's this context that I think explains things like infant 'exposure' in various cultures over time that we can't even imagine today - parents simply leaving their child out to the wilds, essentially to die - while retaining that cognitive dissonance that perhaps he might be found and raised by somebody, as was a frequent component in the hero legends, such as with Theseus and Perseus.
I would not. I would focus on family and friends, leaving as little mess to work through for them after my passing and making the best out of remaining days. Quality > quantity for me, always.
Would you accept a 10% decrease in the quality of your life in exchange for an extra year? I probably would. I probably still would if that was a 20% decrease. But I probably wouldn't go for that extra year if I had to accept a 90% decrease in the quality of my life.
The threshold is a personal decision. There are no right or wrong answers. We should even indulge someone who would accept that 90% decrease for an extra year. That should be their choice, and even if I wouldn't make it myself, that's neither here nor there.
> Would you accept a 10% decrease in the quality of your life in exchange for an extra year? I probably would. I probably still would if that was a 20% decrease. But I probably wouldn't go for that extra year if I had to accept a 90% decrease in the quality of my life.
The context is _clinical trials_, tho, so that's not generally what's on offer.
You are not just fighting for yourself, you are fighting for all future generations by helping to contribute toward finding a cure, even if you don’t benefit it from it. It is a noble cause, like going to war to defend your country.
If you only want to contribute toward things if they benefit you, then the real cancer is you.
Whilst this would be great, can I just temper this with a little understanding of how significant some of the side effects of the immunotherapies can be. There are significant limits on how much you can stress an already significantly stressed body and immunotherapy side effects can be WILD
We love to debate headlines, don’t we? But along those lines, it seems like they could just say it’s “new” and that would be good enough; a headline doesn’t need to be any more specific.
Presumably this is the Richard Scolyer case, if anyone was curious.
A brief lookup indicates he could possibly be seeing recurrence; hopefully that's not the case but this is something that many people have said about his trial. We can't say for sure this treatment is going to be broadly effective without more time and experiments.
This one is an unusual case, as the clinical trial is coming after the first patient (Scolyer) was treated. It's also interesting due to its aspect of "Physician, heal thyself", as Scolyer's own research formed the basis of his treatment. Scolyer doesn't seem to have been directly involved in his treatment, in that it was designed by his collaborator, Georgina Long, and executed by another team.
It's always cancer treatments and battery technology that gets pushed to the top of tech news sites for some reason but it never results in a "this problem is now fixed". Battery tech is incremental at best and nowadays may suffer from its own scale, that is, billions invested into battery factories set up to churn out batteries using a certain technique, which disincentivises new techniques.
But with batteries I like to think there's still plenty of investor money and healthy competition, so a large scale solid state battery plant may yet come to be.
This might be related with the case of Richard Scolyer, the Australian pathologist diagnosed with Glioblastoma. He was receiving some kind of experimental treatment for it.
I believe he got just got either Ipilimumab and Nivolumab as a combo therapy or Pembrolizumab. He's a researcher who focuses on neo-adjuvant (use therapy before resection) therapy in melanomas. It was a good gamble to try the same paradigm in Glioblastomas
It's triple therapy, which most doctors won't do, which I think is one of the future steps to stopping cancer. We should have been looking at combination therapy a long time ago. Hopefully this will get oncologists to push the envelope a bit more.
You're mostly correct but immunotherapies do work for a many different type of cancer. The issue is differences in tumor biology plays a major factor. The even bigger caveat is that given a sufficient amount of tumor mutational burden (TMB), immunotherapies are found to be effective for any solid tumor. Granted most patients don't have the sky had TMBs needed for it to be effective
Remind me again what glioblastoma is? Is it some form of diabetes? Cateracts? A bacterial infection? Vitamin D deficiency?
Is this an arthritis treatment?
Is this a fertility treatment?
It is in fact a cancer treatment.
My wife is cooking fish at the moment. Wait, she's coking trout, not "fish". Except wait, slovenly fog brain, she's cooking rainbow trout, not "trout".
The very first sentence of the article makes it clear, in the uncommon case that someone thought the headline meant a universal cancer treatment. 10 words.
What value do you think this pedantry adds to the conversation? Do you really think that many readers here were going to assume it meant a universal cure for all types of cancer and somehow be harmed by getting their hopes up for the second or two needed to read more than the headline?
I've been scolded on here that some folks may be on the spectrum and not understand the implications of these sentences.
I understand that, but I also understand that people who are willfully ignorant and overly pedantic will hide behind any excuse they can get. To be clear I'm not saying all folks on the autism spectrum are those things, just that some people will appropriate whatever title they need to feel vindicated.
I would be surprised if anyone read that headline and thought that it meant every single cancer.
I found the headline confusing. It would have been helpful to include the type of cancer in it. Or if it's a pan-cancer treatment, to say so explicitly.
It cant be coincidental that this news with a misleading headline is being pushed right at the time when a revolutionary Chinese drug changed the landscape.
And yet coincidences happen. So of course it can be.
I suggest avoiding starting any sentences you intend to be credible with that phrase. And avoid starting any sequence of reasoning you wish to have validity with that type of thinking.
It's neo-adjuvant (treat prior to surgery) with a three mAbs: Ipi + Nivo, which is a well established combo of immunotherapeutics for many solid tumors, rounded out with relatlimab which I'm less familiar with (LAG-3 inhibition). Neoadjuvant use of immunotherapies is established concept and is utilized in clinical practice for non-small cell lung cancer and colon cancer. This is the first time I've seen a use of 3 immunotherapies used at once: Ipi + Nivo isn't the most tolerable treatment regimen. Other novel aspect is use of neoadjuvant therapy in GBM.
Don’t mean to hijack this thread, but I don’t think HN has DMs. Read some of your comments and as a person with cancer would love to pick your brain a little to develop my mental model further (and of course wouldn’t expect anything for free.) Drop me a line at [my HN username] [at] nearby.org if open to discussing more. Thanks!
Do they give immunotherapy before, after or instead of chemo? Asking because I heard what it is after in some cases and that puzzled me as chemo usually hits immune system.
No chemo. The entire idea of this regime is to hit the tumour with immuno to get the reaction. They want lots of tumour cells and for it to be "treatment naive" - Richard hadn't even had corticosteroids, which dampens immune.
Once they primed his system they excised as much as possible and kept the immuno going while doing a course of radiation.
Profs Long and Scolyer work with melanoma where chemo is rarely used these days.
That was a concern in the early days of development of anti PD(L)-1 agents - that chemo and even steroids would harm the T-cells you’re trying to activate.
Yet there are settings where a deliberate combination of anti PD-1 with chemotherapy is the standard of care. And there are other types of immunotherapy where a combination with chemotherapy is advantageous too.
From what I read (in a book written by Scolyer), the treatment didn't involve chemo. It was along the lines of: 1. immunotherapy 2. Surgery to remove the bulk of the tumour. 3. More immunotherapy 4. Radiation therapy 5. A course of vaccine customised to the genome of the cancer
I would like to see a clinical trial with patients who have Stage 4 disease being treated with multiple immunotherapies, up to 5 or 6 IV and oral immunotherapies. Why are we holding back in a population with poor prognosis??
As far as legislation, we should pass "Right to Try" laws. Allowing anyone with Stage 3 or 4 to pick an immunotherapy regardless of whether it's been approved. We should never allow hope to die!
There is a bound on the degree to which terminal patients are willing to be human guinea pigs, and a bound on which the data is statistically useful to anyone.
I’ve read many reports of terminal patients who wish that they hadn’t wasted the last few months of their healthspan searching for Hail Mary treatment options. If you were to ask yourself what you would do with 1-3 months of healthy life left, would you spend it in a hospital on chemo?
I’m no longer NED from Stage IV colon cancer (first DX 2014), and now it’s returned and inoperable. I was given an option to add Cetuximab which I’d had previously- but the side effects from that were so bad for me that it absolutely isn’t worth it to me to add a few months, but live in misery.
Of course you would make different choices if you could predict the future. But if I only have 1-3 months to live, I am going for Hail Mary treatment options to try to extend that (because I can't predict the future).
If I had a chance of beating cancer and extending my life by a lot, I'd rather die fighting.
You're currently dying of the "being human" cancer. Are you working on or donating to anti-aging research, or do you prefer to do other things with your time? It just comes down to your discount factor. Based on inflation, it's typically about 0.95/year, so you would expect to care about ~10% as much for things 50 years in the future. This means if you had a ~10% better quality of life not working on anti-aging, you're guaranteed to be better off. In reality, you should hedge your bets; if everyone spent just a little time on the disease, we could cure "being human". The same applies to dying fighting cancer. You should be willing to do some experimental procedures, but not if it eliminates your happiness for the rest of your life.
One assumption people making such arguments implicitly assume is that such things are possible, which is not a given. It could well be that you could have infinite money, a billion scientists, and make no progress whatsoever. And I'm only referring to cancer there. Anti-aging seems even less likely.
I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance on this topic from people like Ray Kurzweil. The overwhelming majority of increases in life expectancy over the past millennia have come from reductions in childhood mortality. It's not like people in the past just hit 40 years old and randomly keeled over. But rather people were quite unlikely to make it out of childhood. If one person dies in childhood and the other at 80, you have a life expectancy of 40 years old but it's rather misleading! In reality the average life expectancy (for those that made it out of childhood) has remained pretty similar for millennia - around 70 years. [1]
So for instance the Founding Fathers died at an average age of 72. John Adams lived to 90, and Sam Adams/Jay/Franklin/Madison died in their 80s. The only two who died before their 60s were Hamilton, who was killed in a duel, and Hancock, who'd had poor health throughout most of his life. This is a nice sample because you had Founding Fathers as young as 18 (Monroe) when the Declaration of Independence was signed, so we're certainly not seeing a surviorship bias. They were certainly wealthier than average, but all the wealth in the world doesn't matter when state of the art healthcare was doing things like treating infections by bloodletting (including by leeches) to get rid of 'bad blood' or 'balance the 4 humors.'
[1] - https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-s...
I seem to be much more confident that technology could solve the aging problem. Two routes come to mind:
1. We can already splice up DNA with decent accuracy, so it's just a matter of finding what DNA to splice in/out to have the desired effects, and then a method to apply this to every cell.
2. We're close to being able to disassemble someone's nerves and simulate them with a very high accuracy. So, at the very least we could give people new robot bodies.
Now, it's true that even the wealthiest people in the world several hundred years ago had no hope to get either of these done. But it seems entirely plausible that if everyone came together to work on this now, it could be solved in a few decades. I think it isn't happening because (1) people's discount factors aren't high enough to throw everything to their future; (2) the wealthiest people are older, and have the least chance of success; (3) it's a coordination problem that most people aren't even aware they can coordinate on; (4) a significant number of people don't even think it's a problem (because of the stories their ancestors told about death maybe not being the end). The last two are solvable, but the first are just mismatched preferences that you can't really get around.
Not arguing against your general point that post-childhood life expectancy has always been fairly high, but I don't think rich aristocrats make for a "nice sample" when talking about longevity.
Most of the logic about endless life expectancy take improvement in healthcare as the fundamental driving factor. And in the past, the wealthy were no better off than the impoverished here because you couldn't buy that which didn't exist. Germ theory didn't exist, let alone antibiotics, even hand washing as a thing before surgery didn't yet exist. And what I was alluding to in my comment was what happened to George Washington. He died at a relatively early age of 67 of a throat infection, or of the 5 pints of blood that was taken from him to 'cure' that infection leaving portraits of him on his death bed as being white as a ghost.
That's why I always think that the _mean_ life expectancy is a much more useful metric than _average_. Not sure why everybody reports the average everywhere. I have the same exact thought when it comes to salaries. Governments and the like always publish the _average_, which tells very little to the regular person. If anything, it would tell the regular person that they must really be very badly off if most make more than them, having a negative effect. Perhaps that's the desired outcome?
> Not sure why everybody reports the average everywhere.
Because that's the modern definition of life expectancy: the average (mean). Probably because the primary driver behind the production of actuarial tables has always been for insurance, annuities, and similar purposes. For calculating costs and valuations the mean is often a better measure because the distribution of deaths isn't normal. Though in modern actuarial tables you'll often find both.
I would assume popular literature quotes expectancy figures from birth because that's the easiest thing to do when you're just trying to give a single simple figure. But actuarial tables have always been just that--tables. Given a person at age X, what's their life expectancy. The first row will be from birth, but people with money on the line have always understood that number is mostly irrelevant. Here's an actuarial table from the 3rd century which was built for calculating annuities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpian%27s_life_table Interestingly that table seems to use median life expectancy.
Actuarial science was a significant driver in the development of modern statistics and mathematics, especially as the market for financial products exploded over the past several centuries. The tables and models for life expectancy from 150 years ago were startlingly accurate, even in their forecasts of changing life expectancies. When Social Security was passed in the 1930s the models for how life expectancies would change, both from infancy and across all the age brackets, were spot on with actual changes up to the 1990s.
Mean _is_ average. You perhaps mean median?
Even then though, in e.g. Victorian times, the median (50th percentile) gets skewed by horrendously high infant mortality.
Looking at the 75th or 80th percentile, or the life expectancy for an 18 year old, is a better measure. High scores for the 75th can mask deaths due to inequality to some extent, but because wealth distributions are _so_ skewed at the top, the 75th percentile typically looks more like an average/poor person than a rich person.
Yeah, even the median life expectancy in the past would be getting awful close to something like 2 years old. [1] Again running with the Founding Fathers as an interesting example, Sam Adams lived until he was 82 and was one of 12 children. Yet of all those brothers/sisters, only 3 lived past the age of 3.
It's this context that I think explains things like infant 'exposure' in various cultures over time that we can't even imagine today - parents simply leaving their child out to the wilds, essentially to die - while retaining that cognitive dissonance that perhaps he might be found and raised by somebody, as was a frequent component in the hero legends, such as with Theseus and Perseus.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
I did mean median yes, my bad. Alright, that makes sense indeed.
>donating to anti-aging research
Not as much as I should've. You've made a good point, thanks.
I would believe that for many people, simply having a chance at fighting would improve the odds.
I would not. I would focus on family and friends, leaving as little mess to work through for them after my passing and making the best out of remaining days. Quality > quantity for me, always.
There are always thresholds, though.
Would you accept a 10% decrease in the quality of your life in exchange for an extra year? I probably would. I probably still would if that was a 20% decrease. But I probably wouldn't go for that extra year if I had to accept a 90% decrease in the quality of my life.
The threshold is a personal decision. There are no right or wrong answers. We should even indulge someone who would accept that 90% decrease for an extra year. That should be their choice, and even if I wouldn't make it myself, that's neither here nor there.
> Would you accept a 10% decrease in the quality of your life in exchange for an extra year? I probably would. I probably still would if that was a 20% decrease. But I probably wouldn't go for that extra year if I had to accept a 90% decrease in the quality of my life.
The context is _clinical trials_, tho, so that's not generally what's on offer.
You are not just fighting for yourself, you are fighting for all future generations by helping to contribute toward finding a cure, even if you don’t benefit it from it. It is a noble cause, like going to war to defend your country.
If you only want to contribute toward things if they benefit you, then the real cancer is you.
This is extremely goofy. No one is obligated to try experimental drugs to benefit other people. And I work in clinical trials!
It is heroic to volunteer oneself into a clinical trial.
In fact, if you feel so strongly about it: you can go do so literally right now. I'm happy to help facilitate.
Whilst this would be great, can I just temper this with a little understanding of how significant some of the side effects of the immunotherapies can be. There are significant limits on how much you can stress an already significantly stressed body and immunotherapy side effects can be WILD
Why can't you start a trial and do just that? Doctors have discretion up to the practical limit of being sued by their patients.
Or their estate.
How is this the “first experimental cancer treatment” ?
It’s not. Of course.
It may be the first triple immunotherapy (3 checkpoint inhibitors), given in a neo-adjuvant setting, in glioblastoma.
Still cool, less catchy
(Or maybe I don’t understand “world-first” ?)
The term "world-first" in this context means that this is the first specific cancer treatment of this type:
> It is the first documented use of neoadjuvant triple immunotherapy in glioblastoma
If the headline read "world's first" then it would imply what you understood
We love to debate headlines, don’t we? But along those lines, it seems like they could just say it’s “new” and that would be good enough; a headline doesn’t need to be any more specific.
Presumably this is the Richard Scolyer case, if anyone was curious.
A brief lookup indicates he could possibly be seeing recurrence; hopefully that's not the case but this is something that many people have said about his trial. We can't say for sure this treatment is going to be broadly effective without more time and experiments.
I'm not a fan of stuff in very early stages like this being posted
This one is an unusual case, as the clinical trial is coming after the first patient (Scolyer) was treated. It's also interesting due to its aspect of "Physician, heal thyself", as Scolyer's own research formed the basis of his treatment. Scolyer doesn't seem to have been directly involved in his treatment, in that it was designed by his collaborator, Georgina Long, and executed by another team.
A scheduled clinical trial is fairly late in the process.
It’s a specific treatment being evaluated not just some pathways discovered in rodents that looks promising.
It's always cancer treatments and battery technology that gets pushed to the top of tech news sites for some reason but it never results in a "this problem is now fixed". Battery tech is incremental at best and nowadays may suffer from its own scale, that is, billions invested into battery factories set up to churn out batteries using a certain technique, which disincentivises new techniques.
But with batteries I like to think there's still plenty of investor money and healthy competition, so a large scale solid state battery plant may yet come to be.
Agreed. Good but very early news isn't that interesting. It needs at minimum a clinical trial.
This might be related with the case of Richard Scolyer, the Australian pathologist diagnosed with Glioblastoma. He was receiving some kind of experimental treatment for it.
I believe he got just got either Ipilimumab and Nivolumab as a combo therapy or Pembrolizumab. He's a researcher who focuses on neo-adjuvant (use therapy before resection) therapy in melanomas. It was a good gamble to try the same paradigm in Glioblastomas
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03512-1
Ipi/nivo/relatlimab and then a peptide vaccine that they haven't written up yet.
Thanks for the link to the paper. I notice that the abstract has a link to the page for the upcoming trial:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06816927
It will be interesting to follow its progress.
This is fantastic news, glioma treatment progress was stagnant for a long time and is finally starting to pick up steam.
This is hopeful news for a really tragic cancer.
Truly hopeful.
This could be groundbreaking I guess! :)
It's not a generic novel treatment against any and all cancers, as much as the headline would lead you to conclude.
It's triple therapy, which most doctors won't do, which I think is one of the future steps to stopping cancer. We should have been looking at combination therapy a long time ago. Hopefully this will get oncologists to push the envelope a bit more.
I thought using multiple therapies for cancer was fairly common, or are you referring specifically to immunotherapies?
You're mostly correct but immunotherapies do work for a many different type of cancer. The issue is differences in tumor biology plays a major factor. The even bigger caveat is that given a sufficient amount of tumor mutational burden (TMB), immunotherapies are found to be effective for any solid tumor. Granted most patients don't have the sky had TMBs needed for it to be effective
[dead]
[flagged]
Remind me again what glioblastoma is? Is it some form of diabetes? Cateracts? A bacterial infection? Vitamin D deficiency?
Is this an arthritis treatment?
Is this a fertility treatment?
It is in fact a cancer treatment.
My wife is cooking fish at the moment. Wait, she's coking trout, not "fish". Except wait, slovenly fog brain, she's cooking rainbow trout, not "trout".
This is a rather pedantic comment, it is a world first for a common cancer type, giloblastoma, therefore world first for cancer treatment is correct.
You’ve got to differentiate between a generalized cure for all cancers and a very specific cancer though.
The very first sentence of the article makes it clear, in the uncommon case that someone thought the headline meant a universal cancer treatment. 10 words.
"Glioblastoma [...] is the most aggressive and most common type of cancer that originates in the brain"
What value do you think this pedantry adds to the conversation? Do you really think that many readers here were going to assume it meant a universal cure for all types of cancer and somehow be harmed by getting their hopes up for the second or two needed to read more than the headline?
I've been scolded on here that some folks may be on the spectrum and not understand the implications of these sentences.
I understand that, but I also understand that people who are willfully ignorant and overly pedantic will hide behind any excuse they can get. To be clear I'm not saying all folks on the autism spectrum are those things, just that some people will appropriate whatever title they need to feel vindicated.
I would be surprised if anyone read that headline and thought that it meant every single cancer.
I found the headline confusing. It would have been helpful to include the type of cancer in it. Or if it's a pan-cancer treatment, to say so explicitly.
Surely that's why you would read the article, sentence one leaves literally no doubt.
I drove a buddy of mine to work for years because of his glioblastoma, once he recovered from having 37 staples in his skull.
Recently I’ve been dealing with cancer as well, lost a nipple in the process. We are both under 40.
Cancer sucks, any positive progress in sorting out ways to treat and defeat cancer is only a good thing.
It cant be coincidental that this news with a misleading headline is being pushed right at the time when a revolutionary Chinese drug changed the landscape.
Out of curiosity, and I'm living under a rock.. which one?
> It cant be coincidental
And yet coincidences happen. So of course it can be.
I suggest avoiding starting any sentences you intend to be credible with that phrase. And avoid starting any sequence of reasoning you wish to have validity with that type of thinking.