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Doctors Hail World First as Woman's Advanced Breast Cancer is Eradicated (theguardian.com)
A woman with advanced breast cancer which had spread around her body has been completely cleared of the disease by a groundbreaking therapy that harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours. From a report: It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient's own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body. Judy Perkins, an engineer from Florida, was 49 when she was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas. At the time, she was given three years to live. Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said Perkins's response had been "remarkable": the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that she has now been free of the disease for two years. "My condition deteriorated a lot towards the end, and I had a tumour pressing on a nerve, which meant I spent my time trying not to move at all to avoid pain shooting down my arm. I had given up fighting," Perkins said. "After the treatment dissolved most of my tumours, I was able to go for a 40-mile hike."
What a horrible disease this is. I'm so proud of the scientists working on ways to fight it, and wish them all success.
Actually curing breast cancer is a lot more interesting than anything coming from apple where they do stuff like rationalize removing audio jacks.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Just w/o that ghastly appearance side effect.
Kudos to those involved in figuring this out.
You know our societies priorities are wrong when there's an apology for not telling us about minor functions being added and removed from people's smartphones, in announcment someone's cancer being cured!.
Wait, so now I'm confused. One of the features of iOS 12 is that it will eradicate breast cancer?
Imma go put some money into Apple stock, stat.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
FTA: To create the treatment, doctors first cut small pieces of tissue from Perkins’s tumours and studied the DNA to find mutations specific to her cancer. They focused on mutations that disrupted four genes which produced an array of abnormal proteins in the tumours.
Next, the doctors extracted immune cells known as tumour infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs, from the tumour biopsies. These are cells from the patient’s immune system that have invaded the tumour in a bid to kill it, but which failed in the task by being either too weak or too few in number.
After growing billions of these immune cells in the lab, the researchers screened them to find which ones would most effectively find and destroy the woman’s cancer cells by recognising their abnormal proteins.
The doctors treated Perkins by injecting 80 billion of the carefully-selected immune cells into her body. The therapy was given alongside pembrolizumab, a standard drug that can help the immune system to attack cancers. Tests after 42 weeks showed Perkins was completely cancer free. She has remained so ever since.
“It feels miraculous, and I am beyond amazed that I have now been free of cancer for two years,” Perkins said.
“I had resigned my job and was planning on dying. I had a bucket-list of things I needed to do before the end, like going to the Grand Canyon,” she added. “Now, I have gone back to normal everyday life.”
While the US doctors who developed the therapy cannot be sure how much the infused immune cells contributed to her recovery, the use of pembrolizumab alone has not been very effective for advanced breast cancer in the past. The infused T cells were found in Perkins’s system for at least 17 months after her treatment began.
The success, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, is all the more remarkable because breast cancers, like prostate and ovarian cancer, have relatively few mutations, which makes them harder for the immune system to spot amid the body’s healthy tissues.
Alan Melcher, professor of translational immunotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, who was not involved in the study said: “The work shows that even cancers like breast cancer, which don’t have many antigens, are amenable to this sort of treatment. It would certainly be applicable in principle to a range of tumours, and even those in which immunotherapy hasn’t worked so well yet.”
Yeah sometimes tech makes me sad. Advertising, Cambridge Analytica, etc.
But then I read this, and I'm glad again that I'm a geek.
Maybe it stops the cell phone from emitting radiation so that women who keep their phone in their cleavage won't get breast cancer anymore?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I wonder if men's prostate cancer will eventually start getting the attention women's breast cancer currently does?
Could this same type tx be used for this and other forms of cancer?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
People, and animals get cancer all the time. The immune system is constantly killing off those aberrant cells. It makes sense to use the existing cellular framework and improve that which already does a fantastic job.. Currrently there are HUNDREDS of drugs in stage III FDA clinical trials that work in a similar fashion. Unfortunately, every cancer is basically different - yes there are some common mutation points, but for example - there are many, many different types of breast cancer. There will be no cure for "cancer", but there will be many cures.
This is going to be a cancer treatment revolution.
..........FULL STOP.
I suspect that shoving it between your thruppennies would count as "holding it wrong".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The thought of a cure like this being validated and then made ready for the public, only to be priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.
Instead of the scientists who did all of the hard work?
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
That's just what the patriarchy wants you to think!
http://theredpillmovie.com/
There have been successes like this in the past. It should be normal by now to do a DNA analysis of the cancer cells and the normal cells to isolate the combination of mutations causing any particular cancer. In some cases, they've developed vaccines that cause the immune system to target specific mutations. I've seen before and after photos of an amazing recovery. The problem is that a few months later, the cancer came back, and the patient soon died.
So why did the cancer come back?
Well, when you get cancer, the cells divide uncontrollably. With such rapid cell division, you also get new mutations. It's not unusual, therefore, for cancer to cause cancer. So you may kill off all the cancer cells with the original mutation, but you may get a new combination of mutations that the treatment misses.
“I had resigned my job and was planning on dying. I had a bucket-list of things I needed to do before the end, like going to the Grand Canyon,” she added. “Now, I have gone back to normal everyday life.”
Hopefully, going back to the routine mundane'ness of life won't delay the completion of her bucket-list or stop her from adding more items. (Enjoy this spinning rock in the vast galaxy while you can.)
I know this is a troll, but to react with data, there's good reason breast cancer gets so much more attention, it's 44 times more likely to happen to a person under 40 than prostate cancer is.
Also, as noted by others, prostate, ovarian, and breast cancer have been considered in the same boat with respect to being tricking for immunology based approaches for treatment, so if this is validation of a procedure rather than a lucky one-off, this would be fantastic news for people worried about prostate cancer as well.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We've seen worse.
Immunotherapy is not breast cancer specific. It can be used on most types of cancer.
Cancer is really an immune system malfunction. Most tumors are detected and destroyed by your immune system when they are still microscopic. It is only when the immune system fails that they grow and spread. So it is much better to focus on the root cause by fixing the immune system rather than just trying to kill the tumor with surgery, radiation, or chemicals.
Not all men, just whiners like you.
Maybe the OP wanted someone to praise god for creating the cancers that cause so much pain and suffering?
Some people re into weird sh!#.
No wonder this was done in Florida, the only (to my knowledge) State where after the bankrupt caused by the medical expenses from this procedure, the engineer didn't lose her home.
Don't, curing cancer is not profitable.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Instead of the scientists who did all of the hard work?
Give credit where due. If it weren't for "God" creating cancers and other diseases these scientists wouldn't get the glory of curing them.
Now perhaps we can make Chemo the therapy of last resort instead of continuing to attach leaches to people.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Seriously, who gives a shit?
Depends, if it requires regular therapy to continue to update your immune system, to continue to fight off the cancer. That could be a fantastic way to make customers for life. If you stop paying, the cancer comes back.
It 'cures' it as long as you receive your immune treatment.
Wow. We couldn't even just look this over as the person is obviously either A. a troll or B. posting in the wrong thread.
Instead we had to have open invites to bash on hardware/software we didn't like and no one is forcing us to use.
To top if off, we have people up modding a blatant bash on an off topic post.
No wonder things are going to shit at such a fast rate.
Did you read it? Perhaps if you spent the time to educate yourself it would stop looking like just another wall of text.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
So you went out of your way to make up something to complain about when you didn't find it on your own? This speaks more of you than anything you were going to complain about.
Is this another successful treatment with CAR-T, similar to previous work? Or is it something completely new?
Research doctors have been using the immune system to fight cancer for 5-10 years now. It would be nice to know if this in an adaptation of existing techniques or something truly innovative.
The article indicates "we are on the ‘cusp of a major revolution’ in being able to target cancer with immunotherapy", but there is nothing that puts this particular treatment in context.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I guess Apple could had removed it, and not mentioned it and no one would had really known.
Heck most of the people complaining about it were the Android fanbois who wouldn't get an Apple product anyways.
But having a case where cancer was cured, is a big deal worth noting.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So it is much better to focus on the root cause by fixing the immune system rather than just trying to kill the tumor with surgery, radiation, or chemicals.
Having seen what "chemotherapy" (poison the patient and hope the cancer dies first) does to people, I think I would accept an increased risk of allergies and maybe even a mild Leukemia if that is the aftermath of a new and functional treatment.
It is 2018, Societies priorities are way screwed up. Comparing the importance to an iPhone vs Curing cancer is small potatoes. But what is really important is comparing the environmental and social/economic impact of small potatoes vs the larger russet potatoes.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Before anyone asks, we are aware of Apple's developer conference. The company has just unveiled iOS 12, and is describing the new features. Most of the features are yet to be announced, so we will be running that story in about half an hour.
I can't figure out if this was supposed to be a joke or you actually were concerned that people would be upset you posted on a promising cancer treatment instead of Apple product announcements.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The thought of a cure like this being validated and then made ready for the public, only to be priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.
True, but it would make some people a lot of money, and that's what's more important. You just have to keep your perspective.
The thought of a cure like this being validated and then made ready for the public, only to be priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.
Why would that be?
If my understanding is correct this is not like a drug (chemical or compound) that one simply manufactures. Very specific cells from the individual have to be cultured and selected for genetically. The injection that cures you won't cure me; might very well kill me. To that end this all sounds like 100s of man hours that must be expended by some of the most highly talented, best, educated professionals our society produces and they need to utilize millions of dollars in capital equipment to do the work with to boot.
Sorry to break it to you but this the very problem with universal health care. We as a society can't make this type of treatment ( until we invent automation and mass production around it ) available to all. We probably need to make it available to some in order for us to advance the state of the art and develop the technology in hopes of a future were everyone get as many of their cancer specific t-cells cloned up while they wait. In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
Yes as an individual it feels unfair when you are not getting the outcome you'd like personally but remember the governments role is to promote the 'general welfare.' Not that it always does a good job of that given the power of certain special intrests.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Mayhap be that, maybe just within the realm of thought, that perhaps there truly is a 'Creator' who does give a darn about us puny humans. Please, just consider the possibility (for just a short moment in your life, if that's all you have to spare atm), that there may just be a "Higher Power" in our lives, one that loves us since we are His/Her creation. Said Creator gave us the 'tools' to figure out all the problems that go along with this life we were born into.
The answers are there waiting for us to figure out. Are we as smart as we like to proclaim we are? Time will tell that tale...
All chemo does is kill off whatever fast-dividing cells it encounters in your body. There are two kinds of fast-dividing cells: cancer and digestive, which is why when you're on chemo you have to give up on the concept of nutrition and hope that the cancer dies before you starve to death.
How do you know that there wasn't a bit of Divine Inspiration involved?
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Man... I click to read about an "Advanced Breast" and it's... it's about Cancer for freaks sake!!!
Not just breast cancer, metastasized cancer.
This is fucking amazing, should be on every front page, everywhere.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
...instead of continuing to attach leaches to people.
No, hospital billing departments will continue to exist.
I love how we are more than happy to give the glory to God for creating a cure, but some how we over look that it was God that created the cancers in the first place.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Actually the most common male cancer now has an immune therapy:
https://www.cancersupportcommu...
...priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.
I second that. There's all these medical miracles but if you can't afford them, then they don't exist. Like if you can't afford a Ferrari then it doesn't exist (yes, a silly analogy). Reminds me the other weekend a cyclist took a bad spill at a race, helmet had a good size gash but cyclist's head is ok. EMTs examined him, ask questions like what day it is, where he is at. Cyclist first questions are how much is this medical response going to cost? No cost to race participants. But yet some will probably decline medical services even if tramatic of fear that an airlift could bankrupt them for life.
mfwright@batnet.com
right? Give it a few decades (less if we can get people to stop cutting research funds to make way for bigger tax cuts) and you'll see systems that make it so any college grad can whip one of these treatments up in a couple days.
When the manufacturing jobs went away we were all promised jobs in bio-chem. This is what they meant. But of course, you can't have that if only the top 1% get healthcare. I suppose we can have more $8/hr jobs at insurance company call centers to explain why you can't have medical care. I mean, is it a death panel if it's one guy reading from a call center script?
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New medical treatments have a lot of hurdles to jump through to be approved by governments, insurance companies, etc. It may be years before we know if this one will work for a significant percentage of cancer patients, to run the clinical trials and get it approved, whether it's worth mass-producing parts of it to reduce the cost of administering it, etc. Yes, it may be quite some time before it's available to most of us.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
Of course it came out of the Trump administration. So a bunch of lefties think it must therefore be bad (and are already telling stories claiming that). Also: A lot of Democratic politicians voted against it (perhaps out of a desire to hamper the Trump administration no matter how many lives it costs, because they think the idiots in government legislatures and agencies are better able to make medical decisions than those they perceive as morons who happen to be sick, or because one way to avoid bankrupting Social Security and similar programs is to get retirees to die off.)
It will be interesting to see the cognitive dissonance among Democrat supporters who need a not yet approved medical treatment.
Meanwhile: A lot of primaries are tomorrow, and a general election in another few months. If you, a family member, or a friend is ill with a life-threatening condition for which there are no treatments deployed but some under development, you might want to check your Senator and/or Representative's voting record on the Right to Try act before you cast your vote.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, it kills whatever cells are dividing during the active period of the treatment. That is most concentrated in tumors, hair, and digestive cells, but also includes a non-trivial random sampling of other tissues.
Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it
Donald Trump being able to afford a cancer treatment when the lab workers making the treatment can not is nothing resembling fair.
Social Darwinism is false. The only ones left that believe it are, in actuality and not by political affiliation, Neo-Nazis.
I love how we are more than happy to give the glory to God for creating a cure, but some how we over look that it was God that created the cancers in the first place.
Everything that happens, happens for a reason, it is all part of God's plan...
I would have thought that this is the reason universal health care exist. To purchase health care that would be beyond the average person's reach. I'd also point out that government health agencies have greater bargaining power than an individual, and are able to knock down price gouging by massive corporations.
Or let me put it another way. I have a cure for your fatal disease. You and everyone who loves you must give me everything they own, and take on crippling debt to get it.
Wasn't "Keeping the doctor away" the thing that killed Steve Jobs?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
until we invent automation and mass production around it
It should be entirely possible to do that though. DNA profiling of the biopsy is pretty straightforward and the costs have come way down. Identifying the best mutations should be something a computer program can achieve. Screening the cells for those that are effective should be automatable. The man-hours are involved in taking the biopsy and entering it into the system and collecting the cells and giving to the patient. Most of the rest should be leaving it processing in a machine for a few days.
Or do you think the scientists picked up every one of those over 80 billion cells with a pair of tweezers and examined each one individually?
Oh, I agree 100% about the "Right to Try" legislation, and about the Democrats being no better than the Republicans when it comes to caring more about making the other side look bad than about... well, almost anything else. Both sides make me sick at times.
In addition to giving some patients a better chance (and more hope), it will also provide us with more significant statistics more quickly on new treatments earlier, which is a good thing.
In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
I guess all the sane people have finally abandoned /. for this tripe to be at +5. Amazon makes wealth, Jeff Bezos profits. If he dies of cancer next year they'll continue to make money for his estate and heirs. He'd spend millions if not billions of dollars for a cure, but just because it's his own ass. If you think that's efficient allocation you're on so heavy drugs it's amazing you can write a whole sentence. Excuse me while I go to Breitbart for some quality commentary. Or even 4chan...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Interesting notion.
I should note that not a single one of the doctors who did my chemotherapy (including the last time, which was designed to kill off all of my bone marrow) mentioned this. Nor did I have any particular problem eating (and staying overweight) till that last go, and that last go was more due to me being too sick to eat (was touch and go for a while whether the new bone marrow would take hold, of course).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
You knowing what else is so important? Facts. Your last sentence is a complete lie; even without the new legislation, if a terminally ill patient does not qualify for an experimental treatment, they can send a request to the FDA's Expanded Access Program. The FDA approves over 99% of such requests.
TFA doesn't say how much she had to pay for lifesaving treatment. I'd guess it's more than she'll ever make in her entire lifetime.
Nope, sorry, it needs to be available to everyone, right away, on day one or not at all!
So..., not at all I guess. :/
If the treatment saves Jeff's life and not getting the treatment results in his death, then yes it is an extremely efficient allocation of his money.
Resources should go to those creating the most value. In this case Jeff's resources would be going to those who saved his life.
The concern people have with the "right to try" legislation is that it makes it much easier for snake oil salesmen to charge desperate patients insane prices for experimental therapies that have not even started to go through any phase 2 trials to determine if they work. (Phase 1 trials just ensure that the drug doesn't kill you faster.)
The problem is, if folks don't go through the compassionate use program, they don't get the legal limitations on price associated with that program. (Compassionate use fees are limited by law to the actual cost of manufacturing and delivering the drug.) So this almost certainly will lead to desperate patients paying extortionate amounts of money to avoid having to wait for an FDA compassionate use sign-off.
The requirement that someone at the FDA sign off on compassionate use approval was there for a reason, and this legislation could cause serious financial harm to the families of people who truly have no hope of surviving regardless of the treatment. If that sign-off process is too slow, the right fix is to speed that up, not to remove an essential step in preventing egregious abuses in the name of profits. This is a very bad law as written, and IMO, the only winners will be drug companies and profiteers.
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You're missing the point, money doesn't grow on trees.
The public cannot afford to finance an unlimited amount of treatments to prolong others' lives.
I have a cure for your fatal disease. You and everyone who loves you must give me everything they own, and take on crippling debt to get it.
Life is a terminal, sexually transmitted disease. There is no amount of healthcare that will save you from death.
I agree that the government shouldn't force equal allocation for all. Better performers should get greater rewards.
And I'm not saying it should be free to everyone just out of the goodness of our hearts. If it costs $30,000-$40,000 (to cover the "hundreds" of man hours + a healthy cut for the company), then that's good business.
I am saying, however, that your "allocation theory" and modern capitalism have been corrupted. The "right" way to sell such a valuable treatment would be to immediately turn that $30-$40K tab into a $100K bill to get the "warrior class" of salespeople/CEOs golden parachutes. Then they charge $110K the next year, and $120K in the 3rd year, and so on - just to drive up a company's stock price in perpetuity above all other concerns.
No matter what modern economic theories can be penned to support this modern version of business capitalism, it still FEELS wrong. It is innately wrong to put your profits first and your customers last - especially when human lives are what's being lost. In that scenario, are those people still behaving like society's "cream of the crop" that should reap the rewards? I'd say no.
In modern society the sociopathic most wealthy do not generate the most wealth for all. Rather the most wealthy thieve the most value from as many as possible. Failing that they destroy as many other opportunities as possible by "poisoning-the-well" behavior. Modern wealth justly earns a fag, a blindfold, a wall, seven Mauser98s ... and 5 minutes.
He's pointing out that it isn't possible to do that. The math makes it impossible and the cost is part of the proof. 100s of highly trained people working for a long period of time to save one life. There isn't enough of them compared to the amount of people that need them. That's why it and costs so much.
Just to make my view clear, in case it wasn't already, I completely agree with everything you just said.
Agreed. Once the technique has been worked out, the labor needed to produce and administer this treatment should amount to no more than would be needed to administer a standard course of chemotherapy to the same individuals. Less, probably, because I expect fewer sessions would be needed.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Congratulations on being one of the lucky ones. Most chemo patients can't retain any food.
or we can let the market fairly decide.
This is where your comment went astray. The market is never fair. Life is not fair. That's why we live in society, because we want to live in a fair world, but the world is not fair by itself. We have to make it fair.
I know a guy who had a heart attack at my Judo club and was clinically dead, no pulse. My sensei performed CPR and got his heart started before the EMT's arrived to take over. The guy is a devout Catholic and claims that it was God who saved his life.
One could make a philosophical argument either way, but it would be nice if he'd just thank my sensei.
What's iOS again? Was there some sort of announcement? What does that have to do with actual science being done here?
That's because modern drugs are way more selective than the blunt hammers of the initial chemotherapy drugs. They are designed to be selectively taken by certain cell lines, so they would affect only fast-dividing cells of certain type.
This is also why they fail - cancers simply need to evolve to not be sensitive to a particular compound, which usually involves knocking off expression of certain receptors.
I agree too. The main push to change this are the people who want the "cures" that have proven to be worthless or dangerous. There's a whole industry in Mexico with clinics that provide laetrile.
This cure undoubtedly will evolve to be more efficient over time. Why do you expect it to stay the same?
God is a micro-manager? Free-will doesn't exist? To be honest here, there is very little theology to support the simplistic adage of "it's all part of God's plan", Never mind that this phrase to make people feel better about tragedy doesn't actually make anyone feel better.
To bastardize a quote from Penn and Teller. "God works in mysterious, cruel, inefficient, and inhuman ways."
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Yeah the patents have nothing to do with it
If the treatment saves Jeff's life and not getting the treatment results in his death, then yes it is an extremely efficient allocation of his money.
Resources should go to those creating the most value. In this case Jeff's resources would be going to those who saved his life.
His resources will go to the IP owners and shareholders. Very little will go to the people creating the value. Just like Amazon itself. Bezos does not assemble orders, drive trucks, build websites, or even make advertisements. He was the one from a wealthy Ivy league background that muscled out everyone that wasn't using other people's money. Other people like him.
That's capitalism. The people that own the capital keep the value, not the people that create the value. People that pretend its anything else are lying to themselves and others. Those lies are why psychopaths rise to the top. That is why Donald Trump is president. That is why only the wealthy are seen as "deserving" a cure for cancer made by people that will never be wealthy themselves administered by the poor and middle class.
> The public cannot afford to finance an unlimited amount of treatments to prolong others' lives.
Your assumptions are bad. Economy of scale always kicks in. Outsource the entire pharma industry to post grads and they'll be able to eat regularly and virtually all treatments will be within financial reason. The fundamental research is mostly university level already. Subsidize med school with a mandatory clinic based payback and "socialize" (are you triggered yet?) malpractice settlements. It would drastically curtail the insurance industry, a feature not a bug.
While that is a valid point, so is his. It's reasonable to have some type of regulation on inelastic goods with monopoly protection. Do you really want an economy where a company can sell life and death at any price. This is part of why healthcare is such a difficult problem.
Chris Mesterharm
It is merly businesses abuing tech to fit it into their money stealing (taking but not returning equal work equivalent. aka profit) legal but illegitimate crime schemes.
Just like the entire media industry, which is merely a massive leech, hanging on the neck veins of creative people, living entirely off of cocaine made from their lifeblood.
mmm...they still kind of are... Just from the Wikipedia article on CAR T therapy (which sounds much like TFA therapy), CAR T therapy works well on some blood cancers (leukemia, lymphoma), but not solid tumors (sarcomas, etc).
The article mentioned that the patient happened to have enough of the T cells that could go into her breast cell tumors/metastases (most can't), so they could extract those cells, tweak and amplify them. (again, another tumor type factor).
Still, I wonder if her therapy has same potential and significant risks that CAR T has (cytokine response syndrome, et al), and she's lucky she didn't have any of those side effects...
Bullshit. Weed out the fucking middleman leaching insurance companies and the money saved will pay for everyone's care in the nation, and then some. Those insurance parasites sucking on the teat of the sick and infirmed need to go away, post-haste. And good fucking riddance.
There are a lot of factors at play there, including how far gone your immune system is when you start the immune therapy (chemo tends to seriously weaken it) and whether there are bacterial colonies masking the tumor from your immune system (e.g. Fusobacterium nucleatum).
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Based on sample size of one woman? Nope, let's see 100 women treated
I would disagree with you here, social darwinism is absolutely true, it's just that the selection criteria isn't merit, it is actually level of sociopathy, which most reasonable people will agree is not what we want in our "cream".
This is how the zombie apocalypse starts. It starts out as the savior of boobies and mutates into the death of humankind.
It shouldn't be outrageously expensive. There is nothing to patent here, therefore no company can run a monopoly and charge what they like. That is the main reason for sky high medical costs.
Yes, it takes some equipment and skilled workers. Provided this works widely, many people can be trained and before long it will just be another assembly line. The same work can be done all over the world if first world labs try to keep it to themselves.
I am sure that the whole process, which indeed currently involves a lot of manual highly technical and specialized work can some day be automated. Take a biopsy and put a sample in a machine. It will isolate the T cells, divide them by type(there are several) and receptor (just the most common receptors - there are quite many as each receptor targets different disease/antigen ). Then test each isolated T cell/receptor against the tumor cells to find the most successful one and finally grow billions of them.
Is this not a variation of the "common" CAR-T cell treatment used for some Leukemia patients?
If this is the only woman they tried it on an it worked the first time odds are likely the treatment will be effective.
love is just extroverted narcissism
people who don't create wealth (the majority of slashdotters working 9-5) don't care, they want UBI to subsidize corporate wages come hell or high water
we could also as a society mandate such life and eath treatments as critical, take the mans invention pay him a hefty amount and synthesize for all, or create a whole industry of lab techs who can administer this treatment, specialize so they can do a 2 yr speciality school like denture clinics and prostethese and away we go
Most likely the sane persons, like myself, post AC to avoid the inevitable liberal hate. We don't get modded up or get mod points so our voices are unheard. As usual, conservatards are screaming about them being oppressed, targeted, etc when, in fact, they are the ones oppressing us. I'm tired of thier shit.
You're a fucking idiot. Give it to people who are terminally ill, willing, compliant and where no other treatment works, not to random rich people. Problem solved.
You. YOU are worthless according to the liberal-socialist agenda. Most men are fine. It's you conservative sociopaths we aren't fond of.
I think you're not aware of all the failed "treatments" on offer that have made things worse.
There is a logical fallacy that a lot of desperate people are forced to:
(1) Something must be done
(2) X is something
therefore,
(3) We must do X
A lot of people find themselves thinking that they are in a position with nothing left to lose, might as well throw the dice and gamble.
These people often find that they were wrong about having nothing left to lose.
Only in the US.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I knew a girl who thought she had her breast cancer beaten, clean bill of health for the doctors. 5 years later it returned with a vengeance, the second time it finished her.
Sadly I hear stories like this alot for many different types of cancer too. Beating it once is doable quite a bit, and fantastic news advanced stage breast cancer can be beaten too, that gives hope that other real killers like pancreatic cancer can be treated too (claimed the life of my cousin, that one sadly there is no coming back from), but until we figure out why they come back and how to prevent it, cancer treatment is a delay not a cure.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
This is fucking amazing, should be on every front page, everywhere.
It is and it is :-).
At least it's front page on:
http://www.abc.net.au/news
http://www.npr.org/sections/ne...
http://www.theguardian.com/uk
and this legislation could cause serious financial harm
So 100% consistent with the rest of the USA medical industrial complex then?
Sorry to break it to you but this the very problem with universal health care. We as a society can't make this type of treatment ( until we invent automation and mass production around it ) available to all.
No. That's the very problem with your view on universal healthcare. The whole point of socialising the cost is that it becomes trivial to spread across a population. The reality of social healthcare is exactly the opposite: ONLY a society can make that kind of treatment available to all. If left up to individuals you will get non empathetic asshats who think only the rich deserve to live.
Better performers should get greater rewards.
Who judges what performance? Do we need to show our tax statements before we qualify or will it be available to then young too? For the young, do we then ask the opinions of their teachers as to if they will ever amount to anything? Because I agree we shouldn't allow people like Einstein who show no promise to survive. After all someone has declared them a poor performer.
You clearly have no idea how expensive *ANY* cancer treatment is. Google tells me that in the USA breast cancer will cost $24k for the initial treatment and then $2.2k for continuing treatment and this is one of the less expensive cancers to treat.
Right now it is expensive because it is experimental. Don't expect it to stay that way. Heck 10 years ago the analysis of the DNA in the tumor would have cost millions and would have made even the experimental treatment impossible now it would cost around $1k.
The biggest problem with the treatment right now is they have only done it on one patient. As such we have no idea if it was the treatment or just spontaneous remission. Next stage is to replicate the result in a small cohort of patents (~20-30) to see if it really does work more generally. You can then start to look at a wider clinical trial (a few hundred to thousands). All this will take a long time, during which the cost will come down.
Bezos does not assemble orders, drive trucks, build websites, or even make advertisements
No, he's just the one that's been putting in the 80-100 hour weeks for a couple of decades and making the decisions that have turned Amazon from a small online seller of books into an international retail behemoth.
Whether you like his decisions and the company they've created or not, at least acknowledge that he's put some serious fucking effort into this and achieved at an individual level rather more than the people stacking the shelves in his warehouse.
But hey, many of them will go on to have success in their own lives. It's not a zero sum game.
Wasn't "Keeping the doctor away" the thing that killed Steve Jobs?
lols, so funny!
To me, its more of an IT and Engineering problem and can be broken down to (as a rough outline):
- Patient diagnosed with cancer
- Patient has piece of tumor taken out
- Piece of tumor sent to ABC lab, which puts it in TumorComputerSystem
- TumorComputerSystem identifies cells needed
- Patient goes back in, gets hooked up to ImmuneCellSystem
- ImmuneCellSystem extracts cells identified by TumorComputerSystem
- ImmuneGrowthSystem grows new cells, separates needed patient cells
- ImmuneCellSystem injects cells into patient
Hundreds of people cut down to a few lab techs.
Chemo works. It in conjunction in surgery or radiation therapy saves a lot of lives.
Leeches don't do much in the normal case.
This. People does all sort of crazy things when they are about to lose X (X = life, sight, reproductive ability, ...).
For some types of cancer when the doctors say there is no chance in hell to fix it one should seek a second opinion. And perhaps a third.
And then accept that things are what they are, try to minimize pain and suffering and try to spend the remainder of ones life doing whatever one like to do.
For most people that "like" wouldn't involve paying through the nose for surgically inserting monkey balls and injecting oneself with (diluted) hydrogen peroxide.
Most immunotherapies are tested on specific types of cancer, and are not developed to attack just any type of cancer. The whole point of TFA was that this treatment was tailored to this woman's particular tumor. So, no, this particular immunotherapy treatment could not be used on "most types of cancer". In fact, it relied on re-injecting the women's own immune cells, and those cells could not have been used on anyone else even if they had the same type of cancer.
If I have to do a task a few times, it isn't worth my time or trouble to try and automate it, I will just continue to do it in an ad hoc fashion.
If I have to do a task a thousand times, I will spend the time to automate it because, it is difficult to do in an ad hoc fashion.
The reality is somewhere in between without Universal health care, in that there will still be plenty of patients with the money to do it. However with Universal, not only do you increase that amount by a magnitude, but also involve a government which is paying for it which will be looking for the providers to do everything in their power to automate the process to save costs. So it would likely be accelerated by the numbers and incentivized by the method.
If this is the only woman they tried it on an it worked the first time odds are likely the treatment will be effective.
I agree that there are chances that the approach works on others, but I don't count on it yet until enough people have gone through and succeed. Each human is different. She might be one of the most common types of humans, or she is one of extreme types, for now who knows?
I love how we are more than happy to give the glory to God for creating a cure, but some how we over look that it was God that created the cancers in the first place.
Everything that happens, happens for a reason, it is all part of God's plan...
No free will. Just like if there were an omnipotent, omniscient creator - he chooses the start point and knows the end point, humans would have no ability to choose their destiny to be different from what was foreseen before creation.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
Bullshit. Look up snake oil salesman. Right-to-try is a push by pharma to get drugs into the market faster, so they can start recovering costs and making profits. Right-to-try simply opens up a new path to the market that bypasses regulatory control for drugs that haven't been proven to be safe with humans. It was crafted to allow desperately ill people to be exploited, period.
There is already a method in place to allow people to volunteer for unsanctioned therapies, and it protects them against weaponized snake oil. It's called the Expanded Access Program, and it is administered by the FDA.
Everything that happens, happens for a reason, it is all part of God's plan...
If all this is happening because of God's plan then he is a pretty shitty planner and I don't want nothing to do with "his plan."
You've got it! That's the goal. When we get it there than everyone can have the cancers cured universal insurance coverage or no because it will be basically affordable the same way just about everyone can now afford a 42" TV which was considered a toy for rich folks just 25 years ago!
However getting there means doing it some largish number of times to increase the amount of people with first hand expertise; trying labor saving techniques and assessing their results. Right now though its far to pricey to offer anyone who needs it, based on their need alone. So either we let government pick who lives and who dies using some likely very stupid metrics and tax all of us to pay for it - or - we let Rich guys pay with their own money to extend their lives.
Either way we probably get their eventually but one path is a lot easier, and cheaper.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yes, it's very much profitable, in fact, cures are created often, like the cure for hepatitis C. All that you need to make a big profit is market exclusivity for at least 5 years. After your market exclusivity period ends, then your product becomes generic anyways. Besides, there never will be a universal cure for cancer. There are just too many varieties for different cell types, with too many individual strains within them, and each is going to need a different form of treatment. Even if you somehow could come up with a universal cure (honestly, we have far better odds of curing AIDS) people are always going to get cancer.
He does indeed
and one in ten billion might have an evolutionary effect but i still prefer not to unless it gets me instant x-men powers ... its a hail, i get that, but it's a one time achievement ... i wouldnt call this a win until it's common therapy that works (love the apple jokes, ... always funny - sarcasm)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
You must be a blast at parties.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
false, can't make a claim of efficacy of a treatment based on one person. That's not how the scientific method nor clinical trials work
OMG. That is just perfect,:)
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.