Posted by marc__1 3 days ago
This feels like we are on the cusp of profound medical breakthroughs treatment of cancer. My thanks to everyone who contributes to this kind of medical and scientific progress.
And then there are the cancers that are truly unfair. That try to jump the line. Go after kids, mothers, professional athletes. If we can fix those, our relationship with cancer will change. Hope those are the ones we can fix first. Or best.
Depending on the sport - strain on muscles, joints, heart
"..cancers that are truly unfair. That try to jump the line. Go after kids, mothers, professional athletes"
Why group athletes with kids and mothers as "unfair" victims of cancer?
I’m sure there are going to be a lot of retired athletes interested in the metastatic melanoma results here of course, but bone or testicular/ovarian cancer hitting 25 year olds (eg, Lance Armstrong) is just kinda brutal.
And childhood leukemia is the biggest dick of them all.
Well, that will be fixed soon. Think of the billionaires!
An immunotherapy treatment was discussed, and it could possibly have helped a lot, but it carried a somewhat high risk of causing a disastrous Crohn's flare that would kill her immediately. The doctor was unwilling to try this because it might kill her. So she died inevitably without it.
It was a classic medical ethics case right there in our crisis. We did a lot of interesting and intense things in those months before she died. Fuck.
I'm really sorry to hear about it playing out that way man. What a horrible dilemma to have to be in. Also, want to ask because I have a few people close to me with Crohns: Obviously there's a lot of nuance and detail in this kind of combination of two illnesses and a specific, very complex medicine, but would you mind sharing a bit more detail of why the immunotherapy was so risky for such a deadly flare? I know immunotherapies are sometimes used to even treat autoimmune diseases, so I'm very curious for this reason too.
Many of the cutting edge immunotherapies for cancer essentially teach the immune system to target the cancerous cells.
However, in combination with an autoimmune disease like Chrons where the immune system has already learned to react to healthy cells, there is a much higher chance that an immunotherapy intended to target only cancerous cells also causes the immune system to target more healthy cells.
For the unfamiliar: Crohn's is to guts what eczema is to skin. They are both autoimmune diseases where the immune system attacks a specific kind of healthy cell. Unhelpful.
That said, fortunately the US is not the only place on earth that smart people can work on medicine. It’s frustrating to me as an American to see the republicans so ecstatic to force a brain drain, but these researchers didn’t suddenly lose their knowledge, they’ll likely just move somewhere else and this research can keep going.
This particular study was funded in part by an NIH grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/3JOZ-0aY0EOBJOb7uLdbzA/proje... and https://reporter.nih.gov/search/3_aBusrtpki2R0Moj7ntjg/proje...
Part of the research was also funded by this grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/lW12o2Q2CEe6M9PKMITWWQ/proje... and seemingly this grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/gjjBtikE4Uuyy875NUyiog/proje...
I count $3,043,276 in funding from the first NIH grant plus $10,515,749 from the second. I don't know how where the funds for the "Robertson Therapeutic Development Fund Early Clinical Development Award" and "The V Foundation for Cancer Research" came from and how much of the broader grants were spent on this research, but this particular research seems to have been funded mostly by the USA.
Really hoping to see a breakthrough in immunotherapy drugs in the next few years.