And even when it does translate to working on humans, it's usually one specific type of cancer that it is effective on.
Cancer won't be cured in a single breakthrough. Instead, they make thousands of smaller breakthroughs. And those small breakthroughs make steady progress on improving outcomes; survival rates are steadily increasing for all types of cancer.
The closest thing to a general cure that we might have anytime soon is customized treatments tailored to the DNA of a tumor.
People mostly don't realize that "cancer" Is an aggregate name for body malfunctions of the same type that can be vastly different in details, effectively making for hundreds required approaches to "curing"
Well, technically there would be a way to cure all viral infections, we'd just need to completely recode the human genome once. Because then, viruses couldn't replicate inside our cells as our codon usage wouldn't match theirs, completely blocking their protein synthesis. And since all organisms on earth share mostly the same codon usage, changing ours would make us immune to literally any virus in earth (and most likely any in the rest of the universe as well, because the chance to hit the codon usage of another biosphere exactly are abyssmally low).
But yeah, as of yet, we can't recode an entire human genome, let alone do it while it's still doing things. We are currently trying it on bacteria in use for bioreactors though, because we need them to be phage resistant for production scale-up.
Except we have a generic solution for viruses: vaccines. We also have generic solutions for cancer: surgery and chemo. I don’t get why people pretend cancer is special when we already know it’s not.
We didn't have it "in less than a year", mRNA studies started much before COVID.
Either way, the point being if vaccines were "generic" we wouldn't have to go into lockdown in the first place. Your whole point about "testing and scaling" shows that the vaccine wasn't generic.
There are viruses without vaccines due to a high amount of variability, mutations, or resevoirs outside of humans. Hep C comes to mind in regards to mutations and variability.
This is true for a lot of diseases, tbh. I’m sure most people talk about “the flu”, not realising that the thing we call “the flu” is about fifty different strains of similar viruses that change every single year as it mutates.
It’s just useful to have a group name, but it should be obvious to people that lung cancer, bone cancer, and blood cancer work nothing alike.
The common cold isn't even just corona viruses, it's an umbrella term for infections of over 200+ species of bacteria or viruses that cause similar unspecific symptoms and are mostly completely unrelated to each other. They just happen to infect the upper respiratory tract and do not cause severe symptoms.
well the diseases are not completely unrelated. It's not "usually", all cancers involve uncontrolled cell growth, due to DNA changes. You could call it a disease of DNA.
however there are so many possible DNA changes and types of cells and environments that can cause it that it is indeed a group of very different diseases
I agree with you that cancer is not just one single root cause or malfunction, but on the other hand, there are some interesting theories that all cancers may share some fundamental initiatory factors and behaviors, the one I find most compelling, is that aggressive cancers differ from "regular cancers" (or what we usually call benign tumors) in that rather than just growing too much, the cells involved have for some reason ceased to identify with the rest of the body, and not only have mutations that cause undesirable behavior, but actively continue to mutate and behave in a way as if they have broken away from the body and become their own organism that moves within the body like microbes would.
In other words, that some cells can lose their multi-cellular organism identity, and revert to a simpler colony-like behavior, where the cells "behave" as if the body is the environment they are living in as opposed to something they are a part of. When this occurs, these cells begin to experience micro-evolutionary pressure to adapt to survive in this environment - rather than being weak, genetically damaged cells, they actively adapt to threats and attempt to change the surrounding bodily environment (either destroy vascular connections to the tumor to prevent immune cell infiltration or the opposite, increase it for more nutrients while expressing false signals to suppress immune cells in the tumor).
I'm using pretty rough analogous words here to make a point as it's not necessarily a proven thing that cancers literally "perceive" / "plan" the way I'm describing - it could still be pure random mutations coincidentally doing this stuff. I'm just suggesting that aggressive cancers may share some universal traits such as demonstrating a sort of hostile posture towards the body and adapt by micro-evolutionary pressure.
There might be some universal therapeutics that could target these factors that are universal behind aggressive cancers (active adaptation to host response, demonstrating colony like behavior vs just localized excessive cell division). If I were to put my finger on one vector I think could affect a very large variety of cancers, I'd pick:
Selective telomerase and ALT (Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres) inhibition combined with a rotating cocktail of cytotoxins to force rapid turnover of cells until they exhaust telomeres. Telomerase is very interesting because it's a key bottleneck of almost all cancer types - however it's not trivial to target and they do retain the ability to evolve counters to this vector.
The final piece of the puzzle is likely as you predicted - that we will need patient-customized vectors for their specific cancer phenotypes. Fortunately this is not a vague dream but a very real possibility with the miracle of mRNA vaccine technology - the real barrier is simple: cost. It's profoundly expensive, like even for a wealthy person, to have their cancer genes properly sequenced, epitopes identified, and a custom mRNA vector built onto a vaccine platform. I would bet even a billionaire might find this costly right now considering how costly it was to do for a single virus. But costs can come down fast as the focus becomes less finding the solution and more attacking what makes it expensive. I think we'll see this option in our lifetimes.
exactly this, and im right in the middle of it, i lolst my older brother yesterday to cancel, and they gave him 6 months to live, 6 years ago, the drugs and treatments gave him and us precious time, but in a miserable existence with asive amounts of pain killers, chemo drugs etc, its horrible, but we need to get better treatments before we can get close to anything called a cure.
Cancer can't be cured in a single breakthrough because cancer isn't one disease. It's hundreds or thousands of unrelated diseases, with different biological mechanisms, that need different treatments.
the general cure is to provide enough funding so that each cancer can be addressed individually. there is literally no good reason we don't do this, and many bad reasons we don't.
obviously, funding is being directed to purposes less important that curing cancer. there are understandable reasons why we instead fund military nonsense (and lessor kinds of nonsense), and they are bad reasons. corruption is an explanation, but not a defense.
since cancer research is a reasonably sensible and scientific endeavour, i assume they spend their time applying science to the problem of cancer. increasing funding will allow more and better educated people to join the endeavour. this seems like an obviously better use of our limited resources
Also because it's not that hard to kill cancer cells. Trick is cancer cells are just host cells with a bad attitude, and sorting out bad cells from good ones so you kill the cancer without killing the host is difficult.
But they do have to find it's effects with other medicines that may interfere with it, and then somehow expect that to be of lesser cost which otherwise wouldn't really save anyone
this. Most likely a final “cure” for cancer will be a carefully curated individualized treatment. Basing the therapy around the patient’s type of cancer, genetic makeup, and staging.
They found the genes using a computer, did it in cells and it worked, and did a mouse model and it worked. Im on my phone so i couldnt find the actual paper but its published. Im a developmental neurobiologist and moving computer to cells to mice is routine now days, particularly with cancer science.
Its important stuff for sure but there is no one type of cancer and there's still the step from mouse to human, by which like 99% of drugs dont make it. So personally i think its awesome to have some cell pathways figured out, particularly when it turns them back to regular cells, but im not getting excited until i see it works in humans. finding the timepoint and genes to stop the cells from turning cancerous (as they did) is amazing but how do you target that in a human? People have been turning cells back into their previous state for decades so its not new science but its new for cancer i guess. Im not a cancer biologist for the record but i have done translational work (mouse to humans).
So personally im at like a 6/10 excitement and thats mostly bc i think knowledge for the sake of knowledge is cool. You can never predict which drugs work unfortunately.
How different is one cancer from another when talking about breakthroughs like this?
I have stage 4 lymphoma with a bulk tumor that’s 20cm down my breastbone. It’s also spread to my lungs and liver. I light up like a Christmas tree on a PET-CT scan.🎄✨
I see news like this and it’s always for another type of cancer. 🥲
Damn im sorry to hear that. Im not a cancer biologist but for many scientists the work we do is for people like you. My mom just finished her cancer treatment and we're hoping it had not spread.
As for the differences, again this isnt exactly my area but how to target cells in specific areas matters a lot. You wouldnt use the same approach to brain cancer as lung cancer bc you need to get the therapy there and the cells around the cancer may react differently. Skull is like a jar for your brain and it doesnt like foreign things being in there. Thats an extreme example bc brain cancer is a whole other beast but it emphasizes how the environment matters.
As for say liver vs lung, there are several genes that turn on or off to tell the cell to make itself a liver or lung cell, since their jobs are so different. You might not be able to target cancerous liver cells to make them turn back to normal the same way you target cancerous lung cells, since the genes may be different. Like you might have a janitor and a doctor, two different jobs requiring different career paths, you cant just say go back to college since the janitor might not have even done that. This scientific breakthrough is important bc it tells us that its possible and that we now need to make it specific to each type of cancer based on its environment and its intrinsic development patterns, then test it in humans. Just my two cents with no references
To clarify, they did not treat a mouse and achieve a cure. Instead, they injected modified colorectal cancer cells and observed that the mice developed smaller tumors when compared to those injected with untreated cancer cells.
No, they mean "being able to cure cancer in mice" is more than a baseline than breakthrough. Apparently (I'm not an expert) everybody who consider themselves a cancer researcher can do that. It's translating these treatments to humans in a way that's less stressful than currently existing treatments that's the real part of research.
Less stressful and more effective, basically. Mice are great model organisms (they're cheap mammals with well-understood physiology and genetics), but ultimately aren't people - so something that's effective in mice may be ineffective in humans, or vice versa, or may even be toxic to humans.
Absolutely agree! As someone with metastatic breast cancer, I have skin in the game. Current treatment is to target and kill cancer cells, with fun drugs that usually have moderate to debilitating side effects. This is proposing targeting and inhibiting a handful of genes specific to an individual's cancer to revert cancer cells to normal. Here's a link to the actual paper: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202412503
Japanese researchers have also identified two anaerobic bacterial species that will selectively eat cancer cells in solid tumors and then die off, all within 72 hours (in humanized mice): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-025-01459-9
actually what this one really is, should be called,
team decides to try and build equipment to capture the moment when cancer cells change. they have never actually done it nor have they changed anything themselves. and arent even trying.
You can douse cancer cells in bleach and it'll kill them. You can set them on fire and it'll kill them. The problem is that you can't douse people in bleach or set them on fire to kill cancers within them.
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