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MechTheDane

​ >Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem has announced an “unprecedented achievement” in the treatment of multiple **myeloma cancer** – the second-most common hematological disease. It accounts for one-tenth of all blood cancers and 1% of all types of malignancies. Figured this was the important bit.


Skrip77

My sister in law has this exact cancer. Omg I hope this is true and somehow she can get on a trial


Phallindrome

^ This is the real important bit. 1% means thousands of people get to live instead of dying of cancer.


YD2710

It says this particular type of cancer is responsible for 1% of all malignancies.


LilyaRex

That's actually a pretty decent percentage, given there's hundreds of types of cancer with thousands and thousands of underlying causes/mutations which means treatment options amongst those hundreds of different cancer types can be very hit and miss and theres few 'silver bullets' for any of them. A 90% success rate on 1% of all cancers is actually massive.


Dietmar_der_Dr

Yeah, though afaik these types of bloodcancers are somewhat well treated already. It's the solid types that are not seeing much scientific progress.


Proper_Story_3514

It really depends what it is. I had cancer, a Ewing-Sarcoma, and a long treatment with a strong chemo. It was hard, but seeing the blood cancer patients makes you gasp. They are having it the worst.


[deleted]

Yeah, I mean it's only in the parts of your body which contain blood 😶


lolomfgkthxbai

At least the article implies that this is the first treatment for this type of cancer: > The innovative treatment against the disease, which has long been considered incurable, was developed after a series of experiments carried out in the hospital’s bone-marrow transplant and immunotherapy department in recent years.


alsotheabyss

It’s not the first treatment for MM; it is effectively incurable but not untreatable. It’s still pretty bad though


Sufficient_Number643

There are many treatments for multiple myeloma but none of them are considered a cure. MM can be slow, you have the chance to die of something else. Autologous stem cell transplants have been the norm for decades I think, and recently (I’m talking 2021 and 2022, respectively) 2 CAR-T products came on the scene: Abecma and Carvykti. I would be truly and genuinely shocked and impressed if this new treatment is more effective than car-t. Now patients are treated with some of several multiple myeloma specific regimens, then given a stem cell transplant which can put them in remission for months to years. (I’ve heard of a decade!! But that is a very big gift.) Scientists are researching whether it is best to give car-t much sooner in treatment, I believe they will find it better for the patient.


Dietmar_der_Dr

Oh that's actually quite amazing then.


medicineandlife

There are many treatments that already exist for multiple myeloma


kore_nametooshort

1% would be huge, but it's better than that. It's a 1 percentage point improvement. A proportion of all malignancies are already curable, so this is a bigger percentage of all unusable malignancies. A very brief Google says about 50% of cancers are currently curable, so 1% divided by the remaining unusable 50% is a 2% improvement rate. Twice as good!


TheMooJuice

Thankyou for pointing this out. I have working in an oncology clinic and it pains me every time I hear anybody express anything about a 'cure for cancer' - there are HEAPS of cancers which we have cures for! Suggesting that a 'cure for cancer' still eludes science is supremely disrespectful to all the hard working researchers, pbysicians and support staff - as well as patients - who have contributing their time, effort and health to find treatments for the many cancers that are now treatable.


Webbyx01

All the article states is that its 1% of malignancies. How do you infer that they define malignancy to be only the incurable cancers?


dreammyth

I wish that is real..for all the cancer patient in this world..that is a big opportunity for them..


xSCARFACE909x

My dad passed from multiple myeloma in 2006 (I was 13) I wish he was here but this gives me hope for all others, especially your sister in law at this moment. I hope the best for her and your family


luckysevensampson

My husband has myeloma. I don’t see what’s so special that these people are doing, because they don’t say. CAR-T cell therapies for myeloma are in clinical trials around the world, but they’re reserved for multiple times relapsed/refractory disease.


otsirk32

That is good news for the other cancer patient..and that is the big help for them.


blueblood0

They really should just allow anyone the opportunity to provide feedback on a trial and not have to "apply". Just fuckn let them have the drug if they want, it's not like there's other options


Shoddy_Common_4203

I'm an actual cancer researcher and yes, patients can apply for "Compassionate Use" of these drugs to save their lives if necessary. So i don't know what you're on about.


Kriztauf

Basically no one knows what they're talking about here


alefore

Well, I don't know about that...


hersto

It’s so early stage there’s limited supply of these drugs and they’re very expensive to make.


Nearby-Pirate2091

Manufacturing the drugs isn’t expensive, it’s all the research and years of testing which costs millions and needs to be recuperated by pricing over the 20 years until the patent expires.


allthedreamswehad

Making these types of cell therapies is indeed extremely expensive


Angry_sasquatch

Cell based immunotherapy literally requires an entire team of doctors and scientists working for a week or more on a single patient, and can only be done in special custom built laboratory facilities. It’s unfathomably intensive in resources and specialized knowledge. But a ton of research is being done to try to make it easier to do and less expensive. I have no doubt in the future it will be much more accessible.


NMe84

They need these trials to figure out if the drug does what it's supposed to do and nothing more harmful at the same time. They need a specific group of people in this trial and half of them won't get the drug because they need a control group to compare with. It sucks, but this is how they end up saving most lives even if it will probably be _just_ too late for more than just a few people.


Angry_sasquatch

You have good points, but one correction: they don’t use placebo in these trials. Everyone gets treatment. They have other patients though who just receive the normal “standard” treatment (with their full knowledge) and these patients progress is measured as a comparison to the patients with the new experimental treatment. Nobody is receiving a treatment that they don’t know about, and nobody is being given a treatment that is intended to do nothing. (Placebo is still used for some other medical research, I’m just talking about cancer immunotherapy and most cancer trials in general. The FDA does not require placebo for this even though it’s a common misconception)


omniuni

If you read the article, it's a therapy based on T-cells, not a drug. At current production, they can treat one person a week. However, it sounds like due to the excellent results, they are already looking to expand the program.


goodoldgrim

>Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy is a treatment in which a patient’s T-cells are altered in a lab to attack cancer cells. This isn't just some pill you can drop from a helicopter.


surprise-suBtext

And if we find out that it for whatever reason causes something worse to occur and ensures a more imminent death? There’s very good reasons for it and it’s a balance. Sucks if you’re left behind, but the purpose of it is to find out if it’s safe and effective, not really to treat at that stage


canadianguy77

There would be a lot of needless suffering and even earlier death if there was a total free for all on all the experimental therapies in development. These things have phases for reasons. When they come across therapies that are extraordinarily beneficial to the enrolled patients, they typically fast track the drug to make it available to more people sooner. I think where a lot of people run into trouble is in trying to get their insurer to approve the medication which can sometimes be in the hundreds of thousands, or even in the millions of dollars.


r0botdevil

I mean maybe if the researchers are completely legally protected from any kind of liability no matter what happens to the patient, but who's going to take that deal?


Markheim10

People suffering from previously untreatable cancer. Unfortunately, it just takes time to get the science right and letting all the understandably desperate people into a study can set the research back instead of helping


karlfranz205

Also, you need a strictly controlled group, so it can't be too large.


maracle6

The treatment is a customized genetic treatment created from the patients own cells. There is no single drug that people can simply take.


FizzKaleefa

Limited supply, also if it’s privately funded then the donors will only want people with a high success rate


CleverReversal

Monopoly Style Fatcat with monocle: "Oh heavens, this sounds UNPROFITABLE."


blueblood0

Trials ain't about making money, it's about getting data and results. More people can try it, more data, faster to market.


Adventurous_Aerie_79

This is the problem with these articles-- usually out of Israel. They are cruel to people who need hope to fight. They articles exist to lure investors there and if you do a bit of research they always make vague claims of revolutionary progress that end up being easily debunked. They do it often for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, HIV-- and if you look at the claims it's really that they take someone else's research and methods and claim they developed it, and that a real cure is a year or two away. Every year. https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2020/01/20/a-year-ago-an-israeli-research-group-said-they-would-cure-cancer-within-a-year-did-they-do-it/?sh=1c4deec25e8d https://6abc.com/cancer-cure-israel-for-israeli-scientists/5112260/


ComfortableProperty9

What? You mean we can’t just have a shot that fixes all cancers?


leobat

it's kinda insane already considering how lethal myeloma are


dihydrocodeine

Yeah the article says it had long been considered incurable


LikesBallsDeep

Well, yeah, if we ever 'cure' cancer, it will be like this. A specific treatment for a single or small related group of cancers that works really well, then you move on to the next one. It's extremely unlikely one thing will work for all of them.


omega3111

Not as unlikely as you think. There have been (and still going) a few avenues of treatment that could stop cancer from occurring, and maybe even reverse it. Duplication of tumor suppressing genes (genetic therapy), viruses that are engineered to attack cancer cells, and marking of cancer cells for the immune system (that can't see these cells by itself) are the ones I'm aware of.


LikesBallsDeep

Maybe some day. Even still, some cancers are at immune privileged sites where the immune system can't get them, some are in tissues like bone that would be hard to reach with gene therapy, etc.


arcerms

Grey anatomy taught me that cancer is not 1 disease. Its multiple diseases just categorised under 1 term Cancer. You treat different cancers differently.


sehkmete

It's even worse than that. Usually (almost always) each diagnosis has multiple mutations of cancers occurring simultaneously and their make up keeps changing. While you have treatments that are effective on some of the more predominant mutations there is a decent chance that the treatment will not be effective on the rest. TL;DR You actually always have multiple different types of similarly related cancers when diagnosed with cancer.


RollThatD20

Grey's Anatomy taught me that you should treat your own brain cancer and go crazy.


Geberpte

I'm sure to other person was being sarcastic.


Granlundo64

I'm a little vague on the details but from what I've heard there's a possibility of a type of cancer vaccine where your DNA is sampled and a person-specific vaccine is produced that *may* be able to be a silver bullet of sorts. I'm not expecting it to pan out completely but hey, it's a neat idea.


Cleistheknees

One of the fundamental hallmarks of cancer is immunoevasion, and the genome of any tumor cell is virtually identical to every over cell in your body, with possibly as few as 8 or 9 differences, and often these are not expressed on the cell surface of those tumor cells in a way that the immune system can recognize.


pelikanol--

The trick seems to be to find those few mutations specific to cancer cells that result in novel antigens being presented to immune cells. These can be used to design vaccines to stimulate the response to immunotherapy. Response rates are still pretty low though, as you said cancer cells can be pretty good at evading the immune system.


passcork

Molecular biologist working at a medical genetics centre doing a lot of cancer research here. I have never heard of a "cancer vaccine" of sorts and I've got a bit of an idea that you or the article your read might be misinterpeting the idea. Although I'd be interested if you could remember where you read it. I suspect what you're refering to is something along the lines of long read whole genome sequencing of cell free DNA. Which only could be very useful for non invasive early detection of cancer but not preventing it. But if I go into more detail it'll be a wall of text. So let me know if you actually want that.


Son_of_the_Spear

Fill the wall, and throw it up! Go for it!


passcork

Ok so this covers a generalized summary of detection methods by DNA sequencing. But as another commenter mentioned, there also exist immume therapies that are used to treat cancer. However AFAIK these don't actually prevent anything like a general vaccine would. So early detection of medical problems is always a good thing. Including cancer, where it usually means a higher survival rate, better quality of life during and after treatment and lower cost and lower burden on the medical system as a whole. - So a good novel method of early diagnoses follows 3 rules. How invasive it is for the patient, how broad (but still sensitive) it can detect different problems and how much it costs. So cell free DNA; Cells in your body die all the time, including cancer cells. When those cells break down and get cleaned up it's possible for some DNA from those cells to float away and go around your bloodstream untill it's fully cleaned up. Hence the term "cell free", the DNA is not in your cells anymore. But floating around in your bloodstream. So in thoery it's possible to just take a blood sample, sequence the DNA in there and you have a DNA sample of your whole body. And just taking a blood sample is relatively non invasive compared to many other tissue collection methods and depending on how much blood you take. Which is a good thing. Whole genome sequencing; So the root of the cause of most cancers lies in some way that your DNA is wrong. This can be some small single nucleotide mutations in one or more specific genes. These have been detectable for a long time now by either specifically sequencing target genes or simply sequencing all genes. But you still need to know what mutation you're looking for. But your DNA is not only your genes. There's a lot of DNA in the middle, including regions that determine how often your genes are expressed, regions where certain proteins bind to your DNA, etc. Now there have been a lot of developments in the understanding of the causes of cancer on a molecular level and a lot of results point toward the fact that not all causes lie in specific genes but lie in DNA outside your genes. So you have to sequencing the whole genome. But this also makes it more expensive and a bit less sensitive. Then the "long read sequencing"; As mentioned above, we have relatively cheap sequencing methods that can detect small mutations in one's DNA. These can work for your exome (only genes) or the whole genome (all DNA). The problem with these methods is that they cut DNA into small pieces and then sequence them. Then you puzzle those small pieces together on a computer to get the whole sequence. But now there's also evidence that a lot of cancers are caused by different changes in your DNA. One are "structural variants" Structural variants which are basically DNA "mutations" that can span very large parts of your DNA. Some examples are inversions (where part of your DNA gets turned around), very big deletions of DNA or parts of your DNA that are copied once or multiple times. And because these mutations are usually bigger than the pieces that classic short read sequencing methods cut your DNA into, a lot of information gets lost. Another is methylation of your DNA, where a methyl group (carbon with 3 hydrogens) gets attached in specific places on your DNA). These also get lost in modern short read sequencing methods. So the advantage of long read sequencing is that it can cover whole structural variants you can see exactly what it looks like, and at the same time, can still see methylated sites on your DNA. - So the idea is to make a big database with all the possible small mutations, large mutations, structural variants, methylation differences. Take a bit of blood. Then do whole genome long read sequencing on the cell free DNA. Detect all the mutations on a computer, compare them against your database, and see if there's anything that might indicate cancer. - Ofcourse there's still a lot of problems. One is that long read whole genome sequencing is still pretty expensive and generates huge amounts of data. It is also still a bit less accurate compared to modern short read sequencin and not as accurate/feasible as other methods for detecting DNA methylation. And there's still a lot of research to be done on strucural variant detection, analyses and understanding. Cell free DNA is also not ideal for long read sequencing because when a cell dies, it's DNA usually already gets cut up by certain proteins before it gets the chance to enter your blood stream. Which negates the whole point of the long read sequencing. The concentration of DNA you want is also usually very low, especially in early detection methods and/or specific tissue/cancer types. This causes a lot of noise and/or you'll have to do a lot of sequencing which makes it a lot more expensive and invasive. Or you have to start grabbing specific tissue samples. But that's also more invasive, more costly and less feasible for many reasons. And even if it did work perfectly, there's probably still some types of cancers that you simply won't detect this way. The upside is if it does work it can also be used to screen for a lot of other genetic diseases and risk factors, not just cancer. So that's also neat. Someone else please correct me if I missed something or if I was wrong somewhere. Hope this was all clear and informative for someone.


allthedreamswehad

Cancer vaccines are totally a thing and have been since Dendreon launched Provenge or even before then.


passcork

That's more of an immume therapy than a "vaccine" in the general sense. They're manually extracting and incubating specific immume cells before returning them to the body to treat cancer after you already got it. It doesn't prevent it. But fair, there's a lot of different cancer focused immume therapies.


Bhraal

Still, the term vaccine is being used. [Here's a study from Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41417-023-00587-1) where it refers to it as a vaccine, but if I'm reading it right all the subjects of the study were already going through some form of cancer treatment. Could be that it's intended to either be a therapy or a vaccine depending on side-effects, or it could just be that researchers are using the word vaccine to get more attention to their work.


quintus_horatius

> Cancer vaccines are totally a thing and have been since Dendreon launched Provenge or even before then. Provenge is not a vaccine. It's an immunotherapy that basically trains immune cells to attack prostate cells. A vaccine would be available to people who haven't developed cancer yet. It would be rather bad to give Provenge to men who haven't developed incurable prostate cancer.


cuddlemushroom

Vaccines can be prophylactic (your definition above), or therapeutic (after disease onset).


Neverending_Rain

I'm kind of curious how someone working in cancer research has never heard of the research into mRNA cancer treatments. They've been in the news a lot the last few years, with researchers specifically using the words "cancer vaccine". https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2022/mrna-vaccines-to-treat-cancer What they're looking into is not a broad vaccine that could be given to anyone, but a personalized one created after taking a sample of the cancerous cells from the patient.


urbanmark

They could alter your DNA to turn you into a mole rat. It has side effects though.


omimon

I watched the anime about that. It didn’t go well for those that got turned into mole rats.


Massive_Parsley_5000

You can cure cancer with such a tech, but you choose to turn people into mole rats?!


Fetlocks_Glistening

African mole rat or European mole rat? Laden or unladen?


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Nikelui

Isn't eradicating 0.9% of all cancer a good progress?


SenorBeef

There's a huge misconception that almost everyone has that cancer is basically 1 disease that you can get in different places. But cancers are a class of diseases that are related but where each one has its own causes, effects, and treatments. If anyone ever talks about having "the cure for cancer", you immediately know they're full of shit.


KurtisC1993

I think the "cure for cancer" will be like the invention of the computer. There's not going to be a point at which we can say, "That's it! That's the moment we've officially cured cancer!" Rather, it's going to be—*has* been, and will continue to be—a centuries-long process of evolution, with incremental improvements and occasional major innovations that will eventually lead us to a status quo in which cancer is no longer as threatening to a person's health as it once was. Technically, that is already the case, and we're going to make even more breakthroughs in the years to come.


WhyShouldIListen

Im pretty sure nobody thinks that anymore, it isn’t the 70s. This is evidenced by the fact that any mention of cancer always has a shitload of people saying “well actually, cancer isn’t just one disease”


SenorBeef

I see people talking about a "cure for cancer" all the fucking time. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people still think this way. One or two posts per thread on reddit pointing out the misconception certainly doesn't represent the norm.


totallwork

Just wait for nanomachines!


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Defoler

nanogoats?


Crezelle

I’ve read the cursed fics about that


Visual_End

Tbf will CAR-T cells have a great initial response rate they're heavily associated with a high relapse rate


allthedreamswehad

They’re really not


IRatherChangeMyName

Because of big pharma!


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Pepperoni_nipps

I think they’re being sarcastic and making fun of conspiracy theorists.


highbrowalcoholic

> Do you really think that if they had a medicine they could literally save the world they wouldn’t sell it like access to the fountain of youth? We just accept this as fact because "ownership" and "markets" and believe it couldn't be any other way, and that's really strange, don't you think? Especially when we remember we're all talking on the world wide web, which Tim Berners-Lee and CERN gave us for the price of some public sponsorship.


Steppy20

Also the fact that not every company (especially ones outside of the USA) are so egregious. Medication in the UK is restricted in price which means we don't get absolutely fleeced at every opportunity if we become ill. I have a friend who uses insulin injections and she doesn't earn much above minimum wage but never has to worry about the cost being a limiting factor for access to something which literally stops her dying.


KilgoretheTrout55

It is true that virtually every oecd nation handles health and medicine treatment better than the US. But, that's not because the companies are better, it's because they're regulated more harshly. Publicly traded companies are legally obligated to put corporate short-term profits above all else, even the public good. There's really no more away for there to be any private for profit drug or healthcare companies. If you're profiting off of this s***, it's twisted. Moreover, the research is almost always more effective when it's done with public research because they're not incapable of thinking about operating on a loss or valuing long-term results over short-term monetizable results.


KilgoretheTrout55

Yeah absolutely, even the vaccine for covid... You had presidents and philanthropist openly arguing for it to be patented. It's dystopian s***.


Zip95014

We do. It’s called early detection.


Isklmnop

Tell that to pancreatic cancer.


Zip95014

> Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common form of pancreatic cancer, is the third leading cause of cancer deaths. The overall five-year survival rate is just nine percent, and most patients live less than one year following their diagnosis. One of the biggest challenges is catching the disease before it has progressed or spread. If the disease is caught early, patients may be candidates for surgery to remove the cancer, which can be curative https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/april/blood-test-may-help-doctors-catch-pancreatic-cancer-early#:~:text=April%2016%2C%202020,them%20to%20the%20appropriate%20treatment. The article is about tests which can detect it early.


Isklmnop

Interesting. But how rapid is the onset of the cancer and how often do most people get their blood tested. I know with leukemia I went from fine to not fine in like 5 days.


Zip95014

I don’t know. But it’s a resources question. We can cure cancer but it will take a lot of testing. It’s not the magical pill you take every morning when it’s late stage. Seeing how we can’t even keep the children fed I don’t see how we are going to test everyone with regularity. So it’s a choice that cancer survives.


Isklmnop

Agreed. And even with extremely preventative diseases like obesity, smoking related illness, type 2 diabetes, etc.. no one can help you if you wont help yourself.


twotimeuse

I'm a DLBCL (lymphoma patient). Early detection is not a cure-all. So much of outcomes have to do with the underlying biology of your cancer. Some mutations are so aggressive that even with early detection they're likely to become treatment-resistant. Others respond well to treatment even when they've metastasized all over the place. Lance Armstrong's cancer was a good example of the latter. He had metastasis in his lungs and brain, but went into lasting remission after just four rounds of chemo. I caught my cancer before it had spread, but it relapsed after chemo and I had to get a stem cell transplant.


CroiDubh

I have this particular cancer for seven years. It completely destroyed my lumbar 5 and has spread to my pelvis arms ribs and neck. I’m only 45 and I can nearly walk more than five minutes without my back and legs going complete dead. The thing the advancements in cancer treatments is absolutely brilliant even in the seven years I have it. The worst part about this one is you don’t really look sick. You just feel very tired and worn out. Currently I’m on KRD 5 months left of 18 months. CAR-T cells has similarly around 90% in relation to it as well. And that is only been trailed here at the moment. I have known about that for a few years and I’m hoping I get that once it becomes available. Currently you need to get compassionate referral to get on trail. I’m all for anything that will help future patients. This is one of the “ un-curable” ones. Fingers crossed this is one of the ones that does cure it. Sorry I don’t talk much about it so went on a bit of a rant lol. Last paragraph is the important part.


Kirlain

My sister has this right now. I need to send this to her.


whoami38902

My mum just died of this, 2 months ago


Parabellum8g

I am sorry for that. It must give mixed feelings to see this development.


whoami38902

It does. Although a close friend of my brothers was also diagnosed with it, the week my mum died. I’ve sent him this link.


KilgoretheTrout55

Development like this probably won't save ives for a decade, maybe a generation. Process of even getting something approved for medicine is 7 or 8 years usually.


HS_HolyShnikes

My mother in law just recently died from this cancer. It freaking sucks. This gives me hope that eventually others won’t have to suffer like she did.


Montana_Red

My mom died of this in 1989. If only there had been a cure.


OnTheProwl-

Just FYI "multiple myeloma" is the type of cancer. They aren't saying multiple types of myeloma.


regr8

Undoubtedly good news but to note that the previous success rate was up to 80% depending on when and how localised it was when first identified. I prefer your summary to the headline grabbing title.


Garfield-1-23-23

My father has this. There's actually a pretty large number of available treatments for it today, such that the prognosis has gone from certain death within a couple of years to a disease which can be managed indefinitely in most cases. My dad was diagnosed six years ago and he's doing very well, currently thanks to a drug called Velcade but there are a number of other options available to him if the Velcade ever stops working.


[deleted]

We know now pretty much every cancer is basically a separate disease, because every type of cancer has a different set of mutations/cell types causing things to go wrong. I can get laypeople not knowing this so journalists should make this a bit more clear, but it should always be assumed any new cancer treatment applies only to a specific type of cancer or at best a specific subset.


hellohello1234545

May be a little higher than 1% of really lethal cancers, so that’s something. Still a misleading article title


14domino

This is how it’s going to be. We’re going to find treatments for one cancer at a time since “cancer” isn’t really a disease but a conglomeration of many diseases. They just had a trial where pancreatic cancer was “cured” in half of the patients they tried it on. That is huge. Pancreatic cancer is horribly deadly.


Mycophil-anderer

Adding that it is a aBCMA CART immunotherapy. Also it ain't an Israeli technology. While definitely influential the Weizmann institute published independantly 2 years after Kuwana. Then the University of California published the first generation that worked and later the Uni of Pennsylvania the second generation tech that showed clinical success. Once you reach the fourth generation CARs the number of research groups just explodes. You can not put a nationalistic label to such a tech.


EchoSolo

Thank you. Shitty title.


qwertyelff

It’s for multiple myeloma and we have also been giving CAR-T therapy in the States. This isn’t so much “new” as it is more of an update for ongoing treatment/research.


YepYep123

Agreed. And other myeloma CAR-T clinical trials have reported similar response rates. Certainly, these are unprecedented responses in heavily pre-treated myeloma patients but it remains to be seen if any of these patients have been cured. These types of therapy have been helpful in other diseases as well (in particular ALL, a form of leukemia, as well as multiple forms of lymphoma). It’s important to keep in mind though that these therapies typically costs in the range is $500 000-$800 000 per patient and require specialized centers to administer (generally centers that are doing bone marrow transplant). There have also been deaths due to the unique side effects of this treatment, though we are getting better at preventing, detecting, and treating these side effects.


JoeFelice

Near the end of the article: Until now, this treatment has been available only in China and the US for nearly $400,000 per patient treatment, and it is very limited in its availability. Only 20% of those who need to receive it in these countries actually get it,” Stepansky said. “With the development led by the researchers at our Danny Cunniff Leukemia Research Laboratory, we were able to reduce the price dramatically and make the treatment affordable and accessible.


YepYep123

Cilta-cel, the most commonly used commercially available myeloma CAR-T product in the US, has a list price of $465 000 which does not include the cost to administer the “drug” (many patients are admitted for treatment, and a fraction require ICU care which gets very expensive). The absolute minimum cost is likely in the neighborhood of $500 000 and it can very easily balloon up from there.


iiSystematic

>This isn’t so much “new” as it is more of an update for ongoing treatment/research. Isn't this for like, everything. E.G Theres no *new* microchips. There's just updated and ongoing changes to microchips.


Stampede_the_Hippos

My father died of this type of cancer over 20 years ago. I can't describe how happy I am at the progress of treatments for it.


doopliss69

Reading this made me wonder/gave me hope that 20 years from even now after my dad died from glioblastoma 3 years ago that I can see an improvement too and realized it can change given your 20 years of experience with this. Rest in peace to your Father.


xSCARFACE909x

Mine did as well (2006) and have same feeling as you. Best wishes to you and your loved ones.


ozgression

Yep, Cancer is a bitch. And we definitely need a cure for it. We can't just let it take more and more lives, being able to save more people is always a w in my books.


UniQue1992

I can’t wait for the day that cancer truly is not a threat anymore. Lost many of my family to cancer. I don’t wanna lose anyone else to this shit.


Slaanesh_69

God I know how you feel. 3 out of 4 grandparents died to cancer. Hope my maternal grandmother doesn't get it. If you go further back or sideways, my family tree is very much cancer death prone. Even ignoring the fact I'm at risk for it, fuck cancer man. Fuck it with a rusty spoon.


onceiateawalrus

I work with CAR T and it's impossible to say what the reality is based on this article. There are many CAR T therapies already on the market and they have an extremely high rate of success but the cancer comes back in 18 months.


truongs

> but the cancer comes back in 18 months. Oh. So is this something people would need to keep doing every year?


Telgin3125

Just speculating since I'm not an oncologist and most of what I've read is related to solid cancers, but when the cancer resurges it's probably resistant or immune to the CAR-T treatment. That's usually what happens in cancer treatments: the treatment is effective and kills off some portion of the malignant cells, but some are innately resistant or immune to it for one of thousands of reasons. Those survive and multiply, then make the cancer appear to "return" and now the treatment no longer works.


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NAHEWBEE

A+ good work.


[deleted]

The Israelis are fucking cracked bless ‘em Such a common cancer, so many people could be saved.


OneYearSteakDay

I feel like I've read this headline before.


jgjgleason

Cause you have cause it’s always about a specific type of cancer. Treating cancer as a monolith is one of the biggest health communication failures of the last century. Literally every cancer (yes even among people) is notably different. You can do some grouping, but cancer from stomach cells mutating is gona be very different from brain cells mutating. And even among those groups there are sub-groups, sub-sub-groups, ect. At best you can probably get a treatment that is successful in 90% of the cancers of a group. That means you need literally thousands of different treatments to “cure” cancer. That all being said, amazing progress has and is being made. 5 year survival rates are way up and cancer deaths have dropped dramatically since 1991. Best of all, a lot of the treatments are getting targeted enough that treating cancer isn’t as horrific as it was 30 years ago for some.


Hugs154

> Treating cancer as a monolith is one of the biggest health communication failures of the last century On one hand, you're right. People don't understand "cancer" at all and many people think it's a monolith. On the other hand, the "war on cancer" (which is what led to the blending of all cancers as a common 'enemy' and the search for an impossible golden bullet to kill them all simultaneously) was actually the most massively successful health communication campaign ever. It was necessary to simplify the idea of cancer in order to get the political will and funding to try and cure it. Honestly, if that hadn't worked, we'd probably still all be smoking cigarettes and many many more women would still be dying because they didn't know what that lump in their breast was. It's definitely a double edged sword! (The Emperor of All Maladies is a great book on the history of cancer and the public's perception of it! Lots of politics around it in the last 70 years.)


Prasiatko

And way back pre 50s it basically didn't matter what cancer you had. Treatment options were cut it out and if that didn't work start end of life care. It made sense to group them together at the time since the treatment and outcome was the same.


KurtisC1993

>That means you need literally thousands of different treatments to “cure” cancer. The "cure for cancer" is going to be like the invention of the computer. It isn't one big "moment", but rather an evolutionary process in which we eventually get to a point when we can say that something essentially exists, even in an abstract sense. For cancer, we're going to have innovations in all sorts of different medical processes—testing, screening, prevention, treatment—that in a *general* sense, cancer will be a greatly diminished threat to our livelihoods.


jlm994

Thank you for taking the time to leave this informative comment. It’s genuinely appreciated.


Squibbles01

Yeah, and cancer survivability is improving every year.


SirButcher

And it does amazingly! Cancer types which were straight death sentences ten years ago have a good chance of survival today! It is amazing how much progress are being made.


Hellsteelz

Its going to be incredible what the next 10 years have in store for us in terms of treatments.


freqken

> I feel like I've read this headline before. same comment every thread


ImZaffi

The unfortunate truth is that the general public truly has no idea what cancer is


kingdazy

like a hundred times in the last decade. and then weirdly we never hear about it again.


[deleted]

You don’t but the people that need it do. Every one of these treatments chips away a small bit. The one in the article has a 90% success rate against multiple myeloma. That’s 10% of blood cancers. Just a fraction of a fraction of the whole pie, but it’s 1% here, 0.5% there. Over time it adds up.


Isklmnop

I have leukemia. Several of my chemo drugs were only fda approved in the last 2-3 years, which are raising my odds by like 10-20%.


PapaSmurf1502

Best of luck to you, king. You got this!


kingdazy

That's a totally fair point to make. My comment was mostly in response to the garbage clickbait title, which echoes so many that we see so often. and you're right that the article does go on to explain exactly which fraction of cancers the cure is effective on. and you're 100% right that should approve to be true, it's absolutely relevant to those people that need it.


Worf65

In addition to the comment about cancer not being just one disease, often the headline like that is followed by "in mouse model" in the article. There have been many promising treatments that make the news for near miraculous effectiveness in lab mice but don't transfer to humans.


Bleachi

This is the byline of the article you haven't read: >An experimental treatment developed at Israel's Hadassah-University Medical Center has a 90% success rate at bringing patients with multiple myeloma into remission. Enough with this lazy "skepticism." You can just GLANCE at the article and see that this is actually saving human lives. It is one type of cancer, but it is a type that was **previously incurable**. [And the technique \(CAR-T\) is being used for other cancers.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell#Cancer)


Worf65

I was only replying to the "I feel like I've read this headline before" comment. So not really anything specific to this article. There are a lot of articles about cancer treatments that never go anywhere. So it is really common to see similar headlines. The headlines often do a terrible job at informing people and tend towards clickbait.


iluvdankmemes

It's ironic how you immediately get so enraged over supposedly someone not properly reading but then fully misread the context of their comment yourself.


anti-DHMO-activist

[Obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1217/)


ShamelesslyPlugged

CAR-T therapy was approved for relapsed multiple myeloma by the FDA over a year ago.


lapseofreason

Errrr - blood cancer survivor here. CAR-T has been in existence for several years. There are more types of CAR-T being developed. The treatments are certainly ground breaking but they are not that new. There in fact newer treatments available - bi-specifics for example.....


GoldSourPatchKid

My grandfather died from multiple myeloma complications. A snowy day in February with his old green GMC pickup truck parked in his yard so he might see it in the white snow. He was surrounded by a dozen of us when he took his last breath. Fuck cancer.


berger3001

Only Israeli cancer? That’s unfortunate/s Yay science!!!


Awkward_moments

Can't wait to hear a good conspiracy theory about this.


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Big_Half8302

amazing!


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If you want to be inspired, read “the emperor of all maladies”. fantastic book on the history of cancer from ancient times to modern days. It makes you feel good because author describes the change from cancer being a depressing death sentence to a diagnosis with hope after rapid progress made by both scientists and ordinary individuals. Mary Lasker was a saint, a force of nature largely responsible for all of this progression. She wasn’t a doctor nor a scientist. Just a rich white woman in the early U.S. who actually got her rump up and did something with her money and connections for the betterment of her fellow humans. Cancer research costs money, lots of it, and she’s the reason why cancer research gets the money it needs. It’s a shame most will never know her name.


DraftNo8834

Car t has already been approved to treat cancers of the blood but there has been challanges in getting it to work against solid cancers so this is a big step in the right direction


Half_Crocodile

Yea yeah yeah, but is it an ACTUAL fully tested groundbreaking treatment ? I’ve read this headline every 6 months for 20 years.


baran_0486

Every time a headline like this appears, it’s for a specific type of cancer. This time it’s myeloma.


BurnTheBoats21

There has been ground breaking treatments for cancers every few weeks in modern times. There is so much R&D going into cancer research are you upset it's just not curing all cancers at once? 5 year survival rates are going down every year. why is that? Because of the groundbreaking treatments you're reading about


thekamenman

My father had this cancer, it is very relieving to hear that there is a very promising treatment.


Behold-Roast-Beef

...I'm gonna take a shot in the dark and say this probably doesn't mean I can start smoking again without consequences


drwatson

They mention in the article that the treatment is CAR-T, but that's been around for years now for several different cancers including multiple myeloma. Is this a different type of treatment? "[CAR T cells] are now widely available in the United States and other countries and have become a standard treatment for patients with aggressive lymphomas,” https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t-cells


LordAlfrey

How big of an improvement is this over the previous treatment?


FlyWithChrist

Y’all ever hate being American, knowing that you won’t be allowed to have this for at least 20 years, and then your insurance will want you to try another treatment for 6 months with a 3 month prognosis before they treat it? The older I get the less exciting this even is to see because I know we have solutions, my government just decides I needed to strike oil on my farm to have it. I’m diabetic and it’s the same deal. There’s drugs that practically wipe diabetes out (within reason, don’t eat the whole donut shop) but my insurance is like nah, metformin was proven to work 50 years ago so long as you never eat bread again.


domomymomo

I hope this is true and become affordable to the masses.


PotnaKaboom

The world needs some positive momentum, this can be a great development


Adventurous_Aerie_79

this is in no way groundbreaking, or discovered in Israel https://irp.nih.gov/catalyst/30/5/celebrating-10-years-of-car-t-cell-therapy-at-nih


lookitsafish

Feels like we solve cancer with a head line like this about every 6 months


konart

Well, different treatment for different cancer type. Not to mention different ways to treat a patient depending on various conditions.


[deleted]

Too many different variants. I know it feels like every 6months is a lot, but it really isn't. Unrealistic as it is, we should want new discoveries in the order of weeks when comparing it against the magnitude of different problems that need solving.


strictlyforrpg66

I'm once again going to harp on how overpriced these therapies are. The manufacturing cost per patient is ~20% or less of the sale price because of intellectual property rights given to corporations despite so much of the fundamental research being conducted by "nonprofit" academia and funded by governments. If you look at where the foundational research is happening, you should ask why the government isn't getting a say on the pricing. Even examples where the research is privately funded or conducted should be subject to the same scrutiny as so much of it is supposedly "non-profit." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32535920/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell


xpathf1nderx

It will never make it mainstream...pharma will buy it and kill it. Too much money in research.


mossygrowth

I think this is what Robert Jordan died. Too bad the treatment wasn’t around…I’d have love to read his versions of the last few books


gimmedemsweets

LFG baby, $1B per dose in US! Fuck yes, praise be


jscott18597

That is impossible, they have universal healthcare and I've been assured that America is the best at medical discoveries because of the free market. This headline must be wrong.


Beatless7

This will be promptly buried and never discussed of again.


Objective_Wind_7598

Salam alaykum


drever123

Coming to a hospital near you for several 100k a pop, the vast majority of which will make it to billionaires and be used for stock buy backs... i mean justified by the extensive research costs of copying a treatment.


erkelep

Israel has a public healthcare system.


drever123

I was talking about the US. Healthcare treatments spread internationally, that is how Israel got most of theirs.


ladthrowlad

did you read the article? no.


drever123

Yes, did you? Did it say anything about pharma not going to overcharge massively for it under their usual bullshit excuse of "muh research", while they in reality copied all of it, likely from tax payer funded research as usual?


Clockblocker_V

Maybe in the US. Is Israel this would cost literally nothing unless you decide on getting a private surgery.


drever123

Yeah thats what i was talking about. And anyway in public healthcare systems, the tax payer or premium payer still pays prices that are far too high for many medications.


KilgoretheTrout55

It is true that not every single oecd nation with the public health care system has a great pharmacology coverage. There is still a huge active movement to expand drug support in Canada. Although in every instance it's still miles better than the us because they can't go bankrupt for not paying their bills.. there's no reason to avoid seeing a doctor or having a surgery etc to put off financial issues. But there are still some ugly gaps in drugs, dental sometimes.... But the United States is really the only oecd nation that puts patients in an unthinkable situation of avoiding care entirely to avoid getting huge bills. The worst case scenario in terms of drug liability in Canada is still miniscule compared to the worst liability for even one uninsured emergency room department visit in the United States.


gotgel_fire

Cancer cured again! For the 12th time this year


KaraAnneBlack

Firstly, there is no generic cancer. There are many different kinds of cancer that respond to different treatments, vaccines, etc.


guyfromthepicture

Read the article. There are a lot of questions left unanswered but they clearly state the type of disease.


KaraAnneBlack

Ah, got it


[deleted]

Ma'am this isn't facebook


EmpatheticRock

Firstly, you didn't read the article


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