Slashdot Mirror
Personalized Cancer Vaccines Safely Fight, Kill Tumors In Early Human Trials (arstechnica.com)
Emily Mullin reports via MIT Technology Review: Now two personalized cancer vaccine approaches appear to have safely prevented cancer relapse in a dozen patients with late-stage skin cancer. In recent years, scientists have realized that each patient's tumor harbors a unique set of genetic characteristics, or mutations. So for cancer vaccines to be effective, they'll probably also have to be unique. Two clinical trials, detailed today in separate papers in Nature, are among the first to show that this might be possible. In one trial, eight of 13 melanoma patients who got a personalized cancer vaccine were tumor-free nearly two years after being treated. In a smaller study, four of the six patients who received a vaccine had no detectable cancer for more than two years after treatment. All patients had their tumors surgically removed before getting the vaccine. The customized vaccines are an emerging class of therapies that take advantage of neoantigens, proteins that appear on tumors and seem to be specific to each cancer patient. To make the vaccines, researchers first sequenced DNA and RNA extracted from each patient's tumor. They then used computer algorithms to analyze the mutations on each tumor and predict the best targets that code for neoantigens. Based on that data, they created a personalized vaccine containing up to 20 of these neoantigens. Each patient received several injections of the vaccine over a few months.
And 9 out of 10 slashdot AC:s turns out to be morons.
Isn't that premature optimisation? R&D costs money - it's surely a lot cheaper to cost down one working solution than to try to cost reduce every attempt.
Not that long ago "sequencing the DNA" would have been a prohibitingly expensive step. Show that this works for broad classes of cancer patients and we'll find cheaper ways than guessing with lab rats. Lab work can also often be automated to a fraction of the cost in volume. For cancer in young people $500k is not bad if it keeps them cancer free, we spend huge amounts on medicines that only prolong the inevitable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I also expect that we will find some number of relatively common mutations, over time. Cancer is a coding mistake that leads to uncontrolled growth. The fact that we've named certain of these errors, that we know how they progress and how to treat them, tells me that there are common coding mistakes that trigger cancerous growth. If we got this down to 100 or 1000 or 10000 different vaccines that covered 75% of cancers, and you could pick the right vaccine(s) with a DNA test, we'd be kicking ass.