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James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo Win Nobel Prize For Medicine (theguardian.com)
An American and a Japanese scientist have won the 2018 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovery of a revolutionary approach to cancer treatment. The Institute -- 50 professors at the Stockholm facility -- chose the winners of the prize honoring research into the microscopic mechanisms of life and ways to fend off invaders that cut it short. From a report: James Allison and Tasuku Honjo will share the 9m Swedish kronor (roughly $1 million) prize, announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The two scientists have been awarded the prize for their discovery that the body's immune system can be harnessed to attack cancer cells.
The immune system normally seeks out and destroys mutated cells, but cancer cells find sophisticated ways to hide from immune attacks, allowing them to thrive and grow. Many types of cancer do this by ramping up a braking mechanism that keeps immune cells in check. The discovery is transforming cancer treatments and has led to a new class of drugs that work by switching off the braking mechanism, prompting the immune cells to attack cancer cells. The drugs have significant side effects, but have been shown to be effective -- including, in some cases, against late-stage cancers that were previously untreatable. The physics prize is to be announced Tuesday, followed by chemistry. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be named Friday. No literature prize is being given this year.
The immune system normally seeks out and destroys mutated cells, but cancer cells find sophisticated ways to hide from immune attacks, allowing them to thrive and grow. Many types of cancer do this by ramping up a braking mechanism that keeps immune cells in check. The discovery is transforming cancer treatments and has led to a new class of drugs that work by switching off the braking mechanism, prompting the immune cells to attack cancer cells. The drugs have significant side effects, but have been shown to be effective -- including, in some cases, against late-stage cancers that were previously untreatable. The physics prize is to be announced Tuesday, followed by chemistry. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be named Friday. No literature prize is being given this year.
>"The immune system normally seeks out and destroys mutated cells, but cancer cells find sophisticated ways to hide from immune attacks"
That is strange wording. Cancer cells are not autonomous, learning, clever, and planning. They are just mutations that "happen", randomly due to replication errors and external events (like radiation, viruses, and chemicals). Sometimes there just happen to be cells that mutate in a way that the immune system doesn't recognize. We all have cancer cells in our bodies, probably all the time, and normally they are caught and killed by our immune systems. The above statement makes it sound like they are planning something with a "will" :)
That is strange wording. Cancer cells are not autonomous, learning, clever, and planning.
It's not strange wording at all. Sophistication is a statement of what something is, not how it was arrived at. Things don't have to have intelligent thought behind them to be sophisticated. Trees do not have what we regard as intelligence but you'd be hard pressed to argue that a tree leaf isn't an astonishingly sophisticated thing. Enormous sophistication and complexity can arise from very simple processes and evolution - no clever learning or planning required.
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What a bunch of losers. Which I at least know how to spell.
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How about some info on how they managed to get immune system to discriminate well enough between cancer and normal cells (which have nearly the same DNA) well enough to make this more good than harmful? What about reasoned discussion of this and alternate approaches? Not here. Disgusting.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
From my lay perspective medical advances in the last 30 years have been weak, AF.
Over the last 30 years, average live expectancy has gone up by 5 years.
The only thing they seem to have become really really good at is billing.
That is an American problem. It doesn't much affect the other 95% of the world.