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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
“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.)
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.
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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
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
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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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.