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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
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
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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