It was a terrifying diagnosis and literally would have been a guaranteed death sentence in 2017. In 2023, she had a very real chance of pulling through due to immunotherapy. Unfortunately some complications led to the worst outcome and we lost an amazing woman.
I remember that my wife said once that the everything she had on that journey was on the shoulders of those before. So maybe in some small way she helped with the research and a future mother, sister, wife, husband, son, dad will have hope where there was none.
Very true and profound, I'm sorry for you loss, what an inspirational thing to say.
10 years ago, this wasn't an option. 5 or so years ago it wasn't a treatment for her cancer (metastatic renal).
I'm so thankful this treatment is available and that the genetic testing lined up.
I think I could deal with 20:1 odds if I had a clean before and after. Tell everyone you love them, hope to see them soon, then take your 95% chance of having an extra few years.
That said, we all know that these are not perfect solutions. They save some more, they don't save all.
Him and his wife committed hard to tons of clinical trials and is still alive to this day and has no indication he’ll be dying anytime soon.
He’s the very first patient on a number of studies, which he thinks is pretty cool.
> Fc-optimized CD40 agonistic antibody elicits tertiary lymphoid structure formation and systemic antitumor immunity in metastatic cancer
> CD40 agonism enhances antitumor immunity but is limited by systemic toxicity and poor efficacy. Here, we present a phase 1 study (NCT04059588) of intratumoral (i.t.) 2141-V11, an Fc-engineered anti-CD40 agonistic antibody with enhanced binding to the inhibitory receptor FcγRIIB. Among 12 metastatic cancer patients, 2141-V11 was well tolerated without dose-limiting toxicities. Six patients experienced tumor reduction, including two complete responses in melanoma and breast cancer. 2141-V11 induced regression in injected and non-injected lesions, correlating with systemic CD8+ T cell activation and mature tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) in complete responders. In CD40/FcγRs humanized mice bearing orthotopic tumors, i.t. 2141-V11 promoted de novo TLS formation, facilitating i.t. CD8+ T cell effector responses independent of lymph node priming. The resulting local immune responses by 2141-V11 mediated abscopal antitumor effects and sustained immune memory. These findings demonstrate that i.t. 2141-V11 is safe and promotes immune-privileged tumor microenvironments that promote systemic and durable antitumor immunity.
I feel like I'm at the stage where Ill be one of the last people to die from it or I'll be one of the first to be cured of it.
I'm watching companies like Deepmind with great interest. It's my hope that these AI tools speeds up a cure before it's too late.
Tons of drugs in the pipeline that goes after these promising receptor targets. PD-1/PD-L1, CD47, CD40 (as mentioned in the article) etc. Keytruda (PD-1) is an incredible success both clinically and commercially, but there are many many other drugs buried in the clinical trial cemetery that initially showed promising results.
Medicine is really hard.
Mot many that showed such dramatic results across different types of cancer with very low toxicity.
Even if it turns out this drug kills 10% of patients outright, it would still be useful.
> The findings have sparked a number of other clinical trials that the Ravetch lab is currently collaborating on with researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Duke University. Now in either phase 1 or phase 2 study, the trials are investigating 2141-V11’s effect on specific cancers, including bladder cancer, prostate cancer, and glioblastoma—all aggressive and hard to treat. Collectively, nearly 200 people are enrolled in the studies.
And then god forbid it turns out to only work for a couple of major ethnic groups and then is starts to look like eugenics if you don’t immediately plow all the money into creating versions that work properly for everyone else.
If clinical success holds in phase 2 and 3, this is the next Keytruda.
Well, that will be fixed soon. Think of the billionaires!
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.
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.
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.
Really hoping to see a breakthrough in immunotherapy drugs in the next few years.
Claims today of "100% Efficacy Vaccine"
Is there any reason to believe in claims of medical breakthroughs in russia? No.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you blame them? They're always looking for funding for their research, and the current climate is not the best.
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"
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.
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.
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.
It accelerates from there and doubles every couple of weeks.
I learned, as he had, that sometimes bone marrow transplants don’t take and one option is to administer another, or several, which could make you much more chimeric than the average stem cell recipient. But I don’t understand how the marrows don’t end up fighting each other in a death match. Is that a special property of marrow?
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.