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Posted by marc__1 3 days ago

Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear(www.rockefeller.edu)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153561082...
475 points | 92 commentspage 3
rvnx 3 days ago||
Related topic: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness...

Claims today of "100% Efficacy Vaccine"

yakshaving_jgt 3 days ago||
The russians have been selling Герпетическая вакцина within russia since the 1990s. Is it approved outside russia? No. Is there any real evidence that it works? No. Is HSV cured in russia? No. Were there systematic reviews or meta-analyses in credible journals to support its effectiveness? No.

Is there any reason to believe in claims of medical breakthroughs in russia? No.

Loughla 3 days ago|||
Maybe this is just my Western sensibilities shining through, but is there reason to trust the reporting coming from Russia? I'm genuinely interested to know if that's just my own bias or if there's something to that.
gbuk2013 3 days ago||
It is mostly your own bias, yes. That said publications about cancer breakthroughs ought to be taken with at least as much salt as those in western mass media.

Some information about the Russian drug from the main (I think) oncology research institute in Moscow: https://new.nmicr.ru/en/pacientam/metody-diagnostiki-i-leche...

I had a quick search and the news is apparently about results of a stage 1 trial and an earlier news article from February guessed it would take at least 2.5 years for this to become available assuming all trials were successful.

I have not found any official announcements about results of the trial, only some somewhat shady (mostly-foreign) news sites reposting each other.

According to the registry of clinical trials (https://grls.rosminzdrav.ru) the ЭнтероМикс phase 1 trials run Nov 24 - Oct 26 so I strongly suspect this is scummy clickbait reporting,

irjustin 3 days ago||
Downvoted.

The mental leaps to connect the two are very very large. If you distrust western medicine's process then let's discuss, but trying say we collectively shouldn't because "look at Russia!" isn't it.

varelse 3 days ago||
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refurb 3 days ago|
Out of 12, only 6 saw their tumor shrink and 2 were tumor free.

Thats 17% saw a complete response, 33% a partial response and 50% no response.

It’s not particularly striking results, though any progress is welcome.

University press releases aren’t exactly the most unbiased sources of scientific information.

Lalabadie 3 days ago||
A 50% occurence of systemic improvements across various cancer types is pretty great.

If it has only minor side effects when treating agressive cancers, it could be a huge quality of life improvement for patients compared to other treatment options.

neuronexmachina 3 days ago|||
Worth noting that all 12 were already metastatic cancer patients, so they probably already had a rather low 5-year survival chance. I'm under the impression that seeing even a partial tumor response is pretty striking.
mcbain 3 days ago|||
As others pointed out, these are stage I trials and these are patients that have had other treatments already. In particular the melanoma patients had already had other immunotherapy - which is known to work for 50+% of cases - so this could help plugging the gap for the rest.
joe_the_user 3 days ago|||
I get the impression that the study involved about patients that normally have no chance of recovery.

But it's worth noting the relatively low effectiveness means that someone who has the option of using an "ordinary" treatment with a known, higher effectiveness should do so.

inglor_cz 3 days ago|||
Please note that these were metastatic patients after unsuccessful earlier treatments, not a random group of freshly diagnosed patients whose tumors would be less aggressive on average.

I don't see any reason to be dismissive of this result. It is, indeed, striking to have half of terminal patients respond to a new treatment and two completely healed.

It is also striking that this treatment works on multiple cancer types.

Overall - striking, yes. N == 1, but I am awestruck. Let us hope that the larger trials won't disappoint us.

jtoberon 3 days ago|||
That's not the way to look at the numbers. First, you'd want to talk about whether the results are statistically significant. Second, when dealing with a fatal disease, people are pretty happy if their odds of survival go up by a few %.
Spooky23 3 days ago|||
Melanoma grows from incredibly fast. Like you can watch it grow fast.

That type of response is pretty incredible. The details of each patient isn’t known, and obviously there is a lot of work to do. But this is an amazing result and a future drug will save lives.

tptacek 3 days ago||
Watch it grow over what timescale?
Spooky23 3 days ago||
Visually… a millimeter or more in 3-4 weeks.

It accelerates from there and doubles every couple of weeks.

znpy 3 days ago|||
> University press releases aren’t exactly the most unbiased sources of scientific information.

Can you blame them? They're always looking for funding for their research, and the current climate is not the best.

awesome_dude 3 days ago|||
I don't blame them for trying to get funding - but I do blame them for over hyping scientific breakthroughs which leads to headlines where a correlation being noticed is reported as a causation has been discovered and people should stop doing whatever immediately (or start eating some new fad diet)

The system is well broken, and the outcome of the over hype is the MAHA movement - people who have not understood the reporting really means "We have found an interesting new avenue of research" not what they hear which is "We've cured disease" which inevitably then leads to "Science is false, they told me they could cure disease, but it didn't, eat more Vitamin C instead"

gus_massa 3 days ago|||
I blame them. The bad headlines didn't star this year, so it's not about the current climate.

In the university we don't allow the students to cheat. We don't allow researchers to make creative titles of research papers (in spite I've seen a few) or just lie inside the papers (in spite I've seen a few). So I think the university press office has a responsibility to give a simplified but accurate report.

Whom are they lying to? Investors take a look at the data or get professional advice. Grant founding committees read the papers (or at least they shoud) and in particular care more about the grant proposal than the press release. So a bad tite only confuse the layman, that after a few clickbait titles that disappear start to doubt that a university professor is more reliable than the guy from Ancient Aliens.

hinkley 3 days ago|||
Any treatment with a low likelihood of disqualifying other treatments is worth having in the toolbox. So the question is not percent efficacy but percent side effects.
Fomite 3 days ago||
Given this is a phase one trial, and the prognosis of the patients in question, those are still pretty striking results.