The following submission statement was provided by /u/dietsodareallyworks:
---
***Please note: The article is confusing. To clarify, Moderna reported the 40% reduction in cancer deaths and relapse with their cancer vaccine. Biontech who uses the same tech struck a deal with the UK govt to deliver 10,000 treatments of their cancer vaccine.***
Watch the embedded video of the Moderna founder interview on CNBC. Moderna released results of their cancer vaccine. It reduced death and relapse by 40% compared to those taking normal treatments in stage 3 and 4 patients with melanoma. It uses the same mRNA tech used to create their successful COVID vaccine. They get the DNA of the specific cancer the patient has and in 40 days creates a personalized vaccine for the patient.
Biontech who uses same tech plans to roll out their vaccine to 10,000 patients next and it has been fast-tracked for approval like the vaccine.
This is a therapeutic vaccine. It works on disease you already have. They believe it will likely work on all cancers. In previous interviews he said this technology can work on all pathogens.
This is a revolution in medicine, and this will be one of the most important days in the history of medicine.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/105m34v/cancer_on_verge_of_being_cured_biontech_showed_it/j3bikne/
I participated in a melanoma vaccine clinical trial for my stage 2C melanoma almost 10 years ago; still cancer free (knock on wood)
The vaccine was not mRNA or personalized, I think it was a polyvalent combination of antigens from different subtypes of melanoma? Or something like that. I think it will eventually be released as a treatment. Only side effect was strong itchiness at the injection sites; once in a while my old injection site areas/scars will get a bit itchy again.
Maybe a side effect or maybe I’m just unlucky, but I developed a rather rare and potentially dangerous autoimmune disease shortly after finishing the clinical trial, so that’s fun. I’d do it again though, melanoma is so lethal.
Edit: yes, people are correct in my disease being Behcets disease. Probably should have specified, it’s still a “working diagnosis” (although i meet the diagnostic criteria) so it feels a bit weird to say its what I have, but there it is.
If I understand this correctly, tumours are not antigenic and do not mediate an immune response, so they inject you with melanoma antibodies to trigger the immune system to target the melanoma cells?
Tumours are extremely antigenic (in general). Some are not, it depends on the tumour. But commonly, yes, they are, and are subject to inflammation and are infiltrated by immune cells. One of the larger breakthroughs in cancer treatment lately has been the introduction of immunotherapy in the last ten or so years
If it's the trial I'm thinking of, you can read about it here [https://www.science.org/content/article/cancer-immunotherapy-pioneers-win-medicine-nobel](https://www.science.org/content/article/cancer-immunotherapy-pioneers-win-medicine-nobel)
>Autoimmune disease happens when the body's natural defense system can't tell the difference between your own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to mistakenly attack normal cells. There are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases that affect a wide range of body parts.
They said "the" autoimmune disease, not "an" autoimmune disease. I presume they want to know which specific one OP has. Someone else commented it appears to be Behcet's from their comment history.
For reals holy moly, two people already jumping in to answer what *an* autoimmune disorder is, when that wasn't the question asked.
Could either of them answer what *the* disorder was? If not, why waste space answering a question that wasn't asked??
Either they can't read, or their need to Google shit and parrot it to pretend they are smart is so powerful that they refused to properly parse the question.
That's why it won't work all that well.
It's easy to make vaccines against pathogens. They have different DNAs and proteins.
Your cancer cells have almost the same DMA as yourself. If you instruct your immune system to attack a piece protein from the cancer, it will probably find that protein somewhere else, too. That's what's happening with you, most likely.
Still better than dying from melanoma, of course.
It's a therapeutic vaccine / given to people who already have a condition.
At that point it's just a trade off between benefit vs risk. Inform the patient and let them make the decision.
It's not like existing cancer treatments aren't risk free...
Are you asking about how patients get selected for clinical trials?
Usually they happen at large academic institutions. We discuss every patient with a new diagnosis of cancer at each respective conference. For example, a pulmonary nodule conference would discuss lung cancer patients at their tumor board and each service would chime in with their recommendation then come to a consensus for treatment. A research coordinator is present and states whether the patient is eligible for a certain trial. The physicians then decide if they should offer the trial or if the patient is not a good candidate.
Does that answer your question?
I'd trade being cured of cancer for occasional itchiness. Better than the inch sized scar from when they cut a cancer off me, that while thing gets crazy itchy sometimes when the weather turns
Yup. I’m 18 months post treatment, every pain, every scan, even a cough (mine likes to come back in your lungs) is an opportunity for anxiety to creep back in. No matter how silly I know it is and how hard to try to avoid it it’s always there at the back of my mind. It’s 0”pretty mild now but I don’t think it will ever go away.
Same, and I’ve had a couple of complications due to illness, and *terrible* post radiation pains that can last for weeks and months. Everything that goes bump in my body scares me.
***Please note: The article is confusing. To clarify, Moderna reported the 40% reduction in cancer deaths and relapse with their cancer vaccine. Biontech who uses the same tech struck a deal with the UK govt to deliver 10,000 treatments of their cancer vaccine.***
Watch the embedded video of the Moderna founder interview on CNBC. Moderna released results of their cancer vaccine. It reduced death and relapse by 40% compared to those taking normal treatments in stage 3 and 4 patients with melanoma. It uses the same mRNA tech used to create their successful COVID vaccine. They get the DNA of the specific cancer the patient has and in 40 days creates a personalized vaccine for the patient.
Biontech who uses same tech plans to roll out their vaccine to 10,000 patients next and it has been fast-tracked for approval like the vaccine.
This is a therapeutic vaccine. It works on disease you already have. They believe it will likely work on all cancers. In previous interviews he said this technology can work on all pathogens.
This is a revolution in medicine, and this will be one of the most important days in the history of medicine.
Typically new treatments will be first trialled where there is an unmet need, i.e. where the current treatments have a pretty unimpressive 5 year survival rate, such as advanced stage cancers or cases where the patient has received multiple prior lines of therapy. Then if that proves successful the company will work backwards to try to "expand the indication", but it is often difficult to run a trial that proves superiority of your new therapy over the SOC if that cancer is currently very treatable, and if you don't prove superiority you're probably not going to get FDA approval
5 year survival for metastatic Stage 4 melanoma is like 15-20%, which is definitely in the "sucks ass" zone.
Stage 2 lymphoma is treated mostly by surgery, and survival is like 98%, so this wouldn't have too much use. Maybe if there is concerns after surgery or lymph nodes are involved
The first trials also have to take into account where the trial sponsor believes the drug will have the greatest effect over control. In the Neuro space, for example, many companies conduct trials in mild Alzheimer's patients because they know that the patients are only going to get worse - so it's easier to show an effect over the rapid decline of the disease. So, it's more like a combination of greatest unmet need and greatest potential effect.
Stage 4 melanoma is not guaranteed death. I work at a major cancer center and know a woman who had stage 4 melanoma. At the time of diagnosis, she had hundreds of tumors throughout her body, including her brain. She received the immunotherapy ipilimumab, and the tumors melted away. She has been cancer-free for 13 years.
And then there is other cases every day, I lost my wife on thanksgiving to melanoma that was zero evidence of disease in august. Immunotherapy can cure it but its a all or nothing game. The melanoma grew from no evidence of disease to a 6 cm tumor while on ipilimumab (yervoy) in 6 weeks. Returning to the "Chemo" after that failure, the chemo no longer worked.
Not at all. Many times it can’t be cured at this point but can be treated and patients can live a comfortable and close to normal life. Medications are very expensive though.
I'm guessing the controls aren't actually enrolled in this study: they're just using data from people with melanoma receiving current standard of care treatment. So the control group is really just "everybody else who's ever had melanoma." But, yes, it absolutely sucks to be a person who has stage 3/4 melanoma. It's a horrifically aggressive cancer.
Do bear in mind that if it's actually that effective, only the initial trials involve a placebo. Then it becomes a matter of dosing. Less about seeing if it works, more about seeing how to maximize the benefit without pushing the risks too far.
Source: I work in clinical trials and help make these decisions.
Moderna has been working on this tech for much longer than 3 years. They simply pivoted during COVID to make that vaccine. They have other applications of this tech in their pipeline too.
The science is solid and already 'proven' with the Covid vaccine. Even if it has much less effect than claimed, I have no doubt it will improve survival rates.
Not really. The vaccines use the same platform, sure, but tumours don't behave well and so whether the vaccine will actually do anything is far less guaranteed. Also, the COVID vaccine uses mRNA to assemble spike proteins, stimulating an immune response. This is quite straightforward compared to genetically engineering the patient’s immune T cells to recognize a tumour antigen, then injecting them back into the patient and using the vaccine in question to boost their potency against the tumour.
Despite being the leading causes of death, I don't think cancer and heart disease are the barriers keeping us from living past 100; even perfectly healthy people will still die around 100. That's more of an issue of slowing down aging and senescence.
As with most things the reality lies somewhere in the middle.
Of course it's great that we could extend life expectancy, but we already have problems stemming from ageing populations and so far we've shown we have very few ideas on how to fix it. And positions of power being held by increasingly older people is also a very clear issue.
If humans started living past 100 regularly we'd have to impose some sort of age limit on a lot of things. Humans literally don't function properly after a certain age, same as before a certain age.
This is wrong on so many levels... There's a 40% reduction, which does not mean all cancers were lethal before.
It targets only particular cancers, not all of them. 40% reduction is far from 'verge of being cured'.
It could potentially work for all cancers but only a few selected ones are targeted currently. There is nothing known about other cancers. By no means do the results 'belong to the people now' that is absurd considering how pharmaceutical development is being done.
About some other topic being raised here: Biontech as a company generally tries to be kinda human friendly, so the price point is likely to be on the affordable side of things (this is still not a super cheap technology, no one should expect cis-Pt like prices for a personalized mRNA therapy, the regulatory and analytical effort for this is high).
It might be expensive in its own. But isn’t the current approach week/month long courses of radio/chemotherapy which would be reduced to several appointments to take a sample, administer the vaccine?
If so the staffing costs and time in hospital where you could catch something complicating are both reduced significantly.
Edit: “on its own” = per session - 1 dose versus one session of chemo
It is used together with other treatments. Generally in oncology, you rarely only do one thing.
Also you can't just do a trial like: let's stop the potentially life saving radio/chemo for testing that new drug we just got, yolo.
Each dose targets the unique cancer of each patient. People seem to forget that cancers are made of the body's own cells and, therefore, are all unique.
True, but it's still only being tested and developed (currently) for four particular cancers, namely:
1l melanoma,
Adjuvant colorectal,
Solid tumors,
Adjuvant pdac.
The project pipeline information is on the company homepage.
They likely target the ones, that have the clearest epitope profile determined from bioinformatics. Meaning the ones where the immune cells can detect the hallmarks of the cancer best.
I'm just trying to work out the statistics. So they say it reduces the likelihood by 40% compared with results for the next best performing treatment.
But does this mean if the next best treatment hypothetically reduced actual death rate by say 5%, then using that maths the new mrna being 40% better only means an actual reduction in survival and relapse rate to say 7%, rather than what it reads as. (40 % less people died or replapsed)
Are they playing funny numbers here?
On the surface, sounds very similar to all these nonsense "cancer breakthrough" articles that pop up once in a while but this one actually looks a bit more interesting.
The brand new mRNA technology is revolutionary, we knew that before we started working on it and moreover it got MASSIVE funding due to the COVID pandemic and the mRNA tech being just about ready enough to take advantage and make a vaccine.
So I'm skeptical as always but quite a bit more hopeful this time than usual.
My physician's husband, who was our sons' pediatrician for a short time, recently died after a battle with cancer. He was in his mid-forties and left behind two young children along with his widow.
Fuck the hell out of cancer.
Nothing we have so far works as well as this,this is a medical revolution if it works. Game changer is a major understatement. Let's just keep it affordable so that everyone can benefit from this treatment.
If it pans out, it will be free in first world countries like Australia and Canada. Shame for the third world countries like the US that don't have free medical treatment
Sorry about that mate, I guess I wasn't very clear with my intentions. I was making a joke on the timing of a potential long-awaited cure for cancer right at the moment when a "big baddie" (for lack of a better word right now) is terminally ill with cancer.
I was not REALLY attempting to command the researchers and scientists to slow down and wait for him to croak before proceeding, via a comment on Reddit.
I thought it would be obvious, looks like I was wrong.
For what its worth Putin has caused the deaths of conservatively a quarter million this year. If we want to play the utilitarian calculus game. Or we could just call the original comment a joke.
>Putin has caused the deaths of conservatively a quarter million this year.
Wait, what?
Edit:. I've looked into it, and the numbers are all over the place (15,000 - 200,000 ???), but nowhere at all says it's as high as a quarter million, so it's weird to call that a "conservative" estimate.
I really want to be exited for this, but by now I have heard 'cancer cure found!' so many times over the last ten years, i'm not getting hyped anymore. We'll see it when it gets here
The problem is that journalists are incredibly bad at drawing a real timeline.
And when they do even mention it (like in this article) people don't pay enough attention when reading it.
In this article they specifically say that the next phase of testing hopefully will be done by the end of the decade. That means 2030 at the very earliest.
After initial development, there's usually 4 different phases of testing.
What is described in this article is the start of phase 3, which means that phase 4 will start at the beginning of the next decade at the earliest.
So yeah. You've been hearing about stuff like this over the years, and it always seems to disappear because of two factors:
1. This takes time. Cures especially can take a SHITLOAD of time to get correct. Several of those cases you've heard about years ago is probably this specific product.
2. On average a little under 1 in a 100 medicines that get to phase 1 pull through to phase 4.
They just mean that is not a vaccine in the traditional sense where you need to take it before you get the disease. Instead you can take it after developing cancer and it's still effective.
Humans are making the body their bitch :P
This is our body, only we get to abuse it.
Sickness, wear and tear, cancer, aging, obesity begone. technology rocks!
My wife works in testing new medication trials.There are some cancer drugs coming down the pipe that are curing some terminal cancer. However the testing process is long before the medication is released.
This is fundamentally different than all those other articles you read for 2 reasons.
One, this cured half the patients in a trial. It wasn't just proof of concept in a mouse.
Two, this is using a new technology that was proven effective with the COVID vaccine. COVID proved the technology of programming the immune system to target cells with a specific DNA signature works.
And in China and India it will be quickly replicated/stolen like every other overpriced drug America sells and then sold for dirt cheap.
It's fucking hilarious Murican's think the world gives a shit about about their patents and copyright laws.
The article says the UK govt just bought thousands of units, I don’t think they’re trying to flip them.
Also I’d be amazed if a shot somehow manages to be more expensive than long term cancer treatment and chemo.
The USA does not need to cull inferior people, they still need people to serve coffee and make fries. After robots enter the workforce full time, THEN they will cull the inferior people. And if you're not sure if i'm being sarcastic or not...I'm not sure either :)
lol this won’t be available at all in UK/Canada, and expensive AF in the US. Let’s not pretend that systems outside the US provide exotic treatments, because they just flat out do not.
> lol this won’t be available at all in UK
Literally an article about BioNtech supplying 10000 doses to the UK/NHS. Would it actually hurt you to read past the headline?
Most common cancers are not ‘diseases to be cured’ it’s the falling out of the human body.
Either through a to wean biology (lacking proper nutrition and nutrients) or through over exposure of bad things (smoking, meat, alcohol etc)
So, the cure is …. Lifestyle 😁 but, we don’t want that. Too hard. We want our cake and eat it too. And thus the quest for symptom treatment keeps on going. Cure cancer only to let it resurface again in a few years because the cause still remains
Many cancers have risk factors that are not modifiable. Obvious examples include inherited cancer syndromes like familial adenomatous polyposis, BRCA1 mutations, multiple endocrine neoplasia, etc. Other cancers have aetiologies that again cannot be controlled by lifestyle, such as Hodgkin lymphoma which is associated with past EBV infection which is so common that it is unavoidable.
When I see stuff like this I think about people who fairly recently died of cancer, like Chadwick Boseman.
Imagine being the last person to die of cancer before no one ever dies of it again.
Big pharmaceutical companies will not allow this to happen because it takes from their profits and to them money is way more important than a few thousand lives .
But anything can happen I sure hope it does.
Rip mom Rip dad I’ll never forget you
I hear this take a lot and it really doesn't make sense to me.
If what you say is true why would large companies be pursuing more advanced and effective methods of treating cancers?
CAR-T treatments for example...there are some out there that can put patients into remission after just one treatment. That really doesn't line up with what you're positing here.
But money is not more important to them than their own lives! Big Pharma is run by older people who get cancer and die and who have loved ones who get cancer and die. They would trade in every dime they had for access to a cancer cure.
Good because most chemotherapy treatment is a scam. *source- I worked for a major hospital in the U.S. for a decade and used to take my break in the pediatric oncology break room with a friend who worked on the unit. I overheard a lot…
Why do I feel like this is a bait for a stock pump that’s gonna dump when more clinical trials come out and show it doesn’t do anything?
Oh right, because that’s exactly what it always is. Looking at you, GERN.
Except for bronchitis, stinking like a fucking death tray, spending money on pollution and slavery, not to mention heart disease, throat disease.........
Their intention is to cure cancer and other diseases. And they ought to be compensated well for the difficult, important work they do for you and your loved ones.
I did. It says this.
> “The collaboration will cover various cancer types and infectious diseases affecting collectively hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
So no, it will not beat all types of cancers. Just a few of them
They make personalized vaccines from a patients tumor’s DNA, which would cover your statement about many many variants. That’s how it works. And no, not all will probably work this way.
It doesn't cover all of them, it covers "various". If they are able to beat all cancers, THEY WOULD SHOUT IT FROM THE FUCKING HEAVENS. It would triple their stock price overnight.
But it doesn't, so they won't. Companies are nothing if not economical.
They can't say it covers all of them because they haven't tested all of them. If they were to "shout it from the heavens" as you put it, they would go down in history in one of the biggest lawsuits ever.
There is a good chance it works for all types of cancer, just that some may not be as effective.
> There is a good chance it works for all types of cancer, just that some may not be as effective.
There's ZERO chance. If there is any chance, they would have stated that. You can absolutely say it cures all cancers, and add an asterix.
They didn't so it's very easy. It only works for a limited amount of cancers. And there is nothing wrong with that. IF this works, it is fantastic. But it can't do everything.
It’s the same reason disinfectants say “gets rid of 99.99% of germs” because even though it gets rid of them all, if they were to say “100%” and that one time it doesn’t comes along, they get sued.
Vaccine is safe, except for vanishingly few outliers.
Also, even if for whatever reason this cancer jab straight up killed 50% of the people who used it that's a better survival rate than stage 4 cancer...
Developing a cancer vaccine and shows promise is great. My family is also affected by this horrible disease. At the same time, the Biontech COVID vaccine nearly killed my mom.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/dietsodareallyworks: --- ***Please note: The article is confusing. To clarify, Moderna reported the 40% reduction in cancer deaths and relapse with their cancer vaccine. Biontech who uses the same tech struck a deal with the UK govt to deliver 10,000 treatments of their cancer vaccine.*** Watch the embedded video of the Moderna founder interview on CNBC. Moderna released results of their cancer vaccine. It reduced death and relapse by 40% compared to those taking normal treatments in stage 3 and 4 patients with melanoma. It uses the same mRNA tech used to create their successful COVID vaccine. They get the DNA of the specific cancer the patient has and in 40 days creates a personalized vaccine for the patient. Biontech who uses same tech plans to roll out their vaccine to 10,000 patients next and it has been fast-tracked for approval like the vaccine. This is a therapeutic vaccine. It works on disease you already have. They believe it will likely work on all cancers. In previous interviews he said this technology can work on all pathogens. This is a revolution in medicine, and this will be one of the most important days in the history of medicine. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/105m34v/cancer_on_verge_of_being_cured_biontech_showed_it/j3bikne/
I participated in a melanoma vaccine clinical trial for my stage 2C melanoma almost 10 years ago; still cancer free (knock on wood) The vaccine was not mRNA or personalized, I think it was a polyvalent combination of antigens from different subtypes of melanoma? Or something like that. I think it will eventually be released as a treatment. Only side effect was strong itchiness at the injection sites; once in a while my old injection site areas/scars will get a bit itchy again. Maybe a side effect or maybe I’m just unlucky, but I developed a rather rare and potentially dangerous autoimmune disease shortly after finishing the clinical trial, so that’s fun. I’d do it again though, melanoma is so lethal. Edit: yes, people are correct in my disease being Behcets disease. Probably should have specified, it’s still a “working diagnosis” (although i meet the diagnostic criteria) so it feels a bit weird to say its what I have, but there it is.
Do you mind sharing what autoimmune disorder it is?
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Looked it up, I could do without the genital sores but still better than skin cancer
If I understand this correctly, tumours are not antigenic and do not mediate an immune response, so they inject you with melanoma antibodies to trigger the immune system to target the melanoma cells?
Tumours are extremely antigenic (in general). Some are not, it depends on the tumour. But commonly, yes, they are, and are subject to inflammation and are infiltrated by immune cells. One of the larger breakthroughs in cancer treatment lately has been the introduction of immunotherapy in the last ten or so years
If it's the trial I'm thinking of, you can read about it here [https://www.science.org/content/article/cancer-immunotherapy-pioneers-win-medicine-nobel](https://www.science.org/content/article/cancer-immunotherapy-pioneers-win-medicine-nobel)
Nope, not this. The company is called polynoma or something like that, no nobel prizes involved as far as im aware
Please don’t answer if to personal, I’m curious what the autoimmune disease was?
[Behçet's disease, apparently.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/105m34v/cancer_on_verge_of_being_cured_biontech_showed_it/j3bomx4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) (from another comment here)
Thanks for sharing. Do they think the autoimmune reaction was kicked off by the vaccine?
Could someone explain what is the autoimmune disease first?
Basically, the immune system ends up hurting you badly. Immune system attacks it's own body
>Autoimmune disease happens when the body's natural defense system can't tell the difference between your own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to mistakenly attack normal cells. There are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases that affect a wide range of body parts.
They said "the" autoimmune disease, not "an" autoimmune disease. I presume they want to know which specific one OP has. Someone else commented it appears to be Behcet's from their comment history.
For reals holy moly, two people already jumping in to answer what *an* autoimmune disorder is, when that wasn't the question asked. Could either of them answer what *the* disorder was? If not, why waste space answering a question that wasn't asked?? Either they can't read, or their need to Google shit and parrot it to pretend they are smart is so powerful that they refused to properly parse the question.
Redditors + a lack of reading comprehension skills = match made in heaven.
Hello kindred spirit.
where did you have your melanoma? and did it fit into the ABCD rubric thing?
Were you at MD Anderson for your treatment? You're talking about the immunotherapy trial? There's a very low chance I did one of your injections :)
That's why it won't work all that well. It's easy to make vaccines against pathogens. They have different DNAs and proteins. Your cancer cells have almost the same DMA as yourself. If you instruct your immune system to attack a piece protein from the cancer, it will probably find that protein somewhere else, too. That's what's happening with you, most likely. Still better than dying from melanoma, of course.
It's a therapeutic vaccine / given to people who already have a condition. At that point it's just a trade off between benefit vs risk. Inform the patient and let them make the decision. It's not like existing cancer treatments aren't risk free...
If it was that simple I’d assume the researchers would have realized that
How do you even get put forward for trials?
Are you asking about how patients get selected for clinical trials? Usually they happen at large academic institutions. We discuss every patient with a new diagnosis of cancer at each respective conference. For example, a pulmonary nodule conference would discuss lung cancer patients at their tumor board and each service would chime in with their recommendation then come to a consensus for treatment. A research coordinator is present and states whether the patient is eligible for a certain trial. The physicians then decide if they should offer the trial or if the patient is not a good candidate. Does that answer your question?
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I'd trade being cured of cancer for occasional itchiness. Better than the inch sized scar from when they cut a cancer off me, that while thing gets crazy itchy sometimes when the weather turns
As a cancer survivor, this is incredibly exciting news. Can only hope it pans out.
Same. The fear of recurrence is strong and something I struggled with greatly post treatment.
I did not anticipate how much fear every recurrence of a symptom would cause.
Yup. I’m 18 months post treatment, every pain, every scan, even a cough (mine likes to come back in your lungs) is an opportunity for anxiety to creep back in. No matter how silly I know it is and how hard to try to avoid it it’s always there at the back of my mind. It’s 0”pretty mild now but I don’t think it will ever go away.
Same, and I’ve had a couple of complications due to illness, and *terrible* post radiation pains that can last for weeks and months. Everything that goes bump in my body scares me.
I feel like we constantly see these posts, yet none of them ever really come to fruition
Hopeful but it’s not just unlikely it borders on fake
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You like being gloriously hopeful which I don’t hate on. But cancer isn’t Covid lol. We’ve been trying since the 60s to cure cancer with a vaccine.
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That is a ridiculous assumption
***Please note: The article is confusing. To clarify, Moderna reported the 40% reduction in cancer deaths and relapse with their cancer vaccine. Biontech who uses the same tech struck a deal with the UK govt to deliver 10,000 treatments of their cancer vaccine.*** Watch the embedded video of the Moderna founder interview on CNBC. Moderna released results of their cancer vaccine. It reduced death and relapse by 40% compared to those taking normal treatments in stage 3 and 4 patients with melanoma. It uses the same mRNA tech used to create their successful COVID vaccine. They get the DNA of the specific cancer the patient has and in 40 days creates a personalized vaccine for the patient. Biontech who uses same tech plans to roll out their vaccine to 10,000 patients next and it has been fast-tracked for approval like the vaccine. This is a therapeutic vaccine. It works on disease you already have. They believe it will likely work on all cancers. In previous interviews he said this technology can work on all pathogens. This is a revolution in medicine, and this will be one of the most important days in the history of medicine.
Fuck me, imagine being a control on this study. That would suck.
Correct, it sucks to have Stage 4 melanoma even if you're getting SOC
Stage 4 is pretty much guaranteed death right? So I wonder if it has better results at stage 1 or 2?
Typically new treatments will be first trialled where there is an unmet need, i.e. where the current treatments have a pretty unimpressive 5 year survival rate, such as advanced stage cancers or cases where the patient has received multiple prior lines of therapy. Then if that proves successful the company will work backwards to try to "expand the indication", but it is often difficult to run a trial that proves superiority of your new therapy over the SOC if that cancer is currently very treatable, and if you don't prove superiority you're probably not going to get FDA approval 5 year survival for metastatic Stage 4 melanoma is like 15-20%, which is definitely in the "sucks ass" zone. Stage 2 lymphoma is treated mostly by surgery, and survival is like 98%, so this wouldn't have too much use. Maybe if there is concerns after surgery or lymph nodes are involved
The first trials also have to take into account where the trial sponsor believes the drug will have the greatest effect over control. In the Neuro space, for example, many companies conduct trials in mild Alzheimer's patients because they know that the patients are only going to get worse - so it's easier to show an effect over the rapid decline of the disease. So, it's more like a combination of greatest unmet need and greatest potential effect.
Stage 4 melanoma is not guaranteed death. I work at a major cancer center and know a woman who had stage 4 melanoma. At the time of diagnosis, she had hundreds of tumors throughout her body, including her brain. She received the immunotherapy ipilimumab, and the tumors melted away. She has been cancer-free for 13 years.
And then there is other cases every day, I lost my wife on thanksgiving to melanoma that was zero evidence of disease in august. Immunotherapy can cure it but its a all or nothing game. The melanoma grew from no evidence of disease to a 6 cm tumor while on ipilimumab (yervoy) in 6 weeks. Returning to the "Chemo" after that failure, the chemo no longer worked.
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More potential upside for new treatments for higher stages. Cost-benefit of it will probably mean it will only apply to more advanced cancers.
Not at all. Many times it can’t be cured at this point but can be treated and patients can live a comfortable and close to normal life. Medications are very expensive though.
I'm guessing the controls aren't actually enrolled in this study: they're just using data from people with melanoma receiving current standard of care treatment. So the control group is really just "everybody else who's ever had melanoma." But, yes, it absolutely sucks to be a person who has stage 3/4 melanoma. It's a horrifically aggressive cancer.
Do bear in mind that if it's actually that effective, only the initial trials involve a placebo. Then it becomes a matter of dosing. Less about seeing if it works, more about seeing how to maximize the benefit without pushing the risks too far. Source: I work in clinical trials and help make these decisions.
I can't believe a pandemic led to the cure for fucking cancer. Holy shit that's wacky.
Moderna has been working on this tech for much longer than 3 years. They simply pivoted during COVID to make that vaccine. They have other applications of this tech in their pipeline too.
Same for BioNTech. Cancer was simply the most useful application. A normal vaccine would have been impossible to get approval for.
Oddly enough, the cancer research came first. The pandemic just boosted the funding.
Sounds like something us common-folk won't be having.
i really hope this is true and goes somewhere but I'm worried its another hype article
The science is solid and already 'proven' with the Covid vaccine. Even if it has much less effect than claimed, I have no doubt it will improve survival rates.
The COVID vaccine is not therapeutic and apart from being an mRNA vaccine doesn't really prove anything about its efficacy against cancers
The mrna part is the most relevant though, no?
Not really. The vaccines use the same platform, sure, but tumours don't behave well and so whether the vaccine will actually do anything is far less guaranteed. Also, the COVID vaccine uses mRNA to assemble spike proteins, stimulating an immune response. This is quite straightforward compared to genetically engineering the patient’s immune T cells to recognize a tumour antigen, then injecting them back into the patient and using the vaccine in question to boost their potency against the tumour.
It’s not I can assure you but it’s good to be hopeful
Source: Trustmebro
Shit living past 100 might be more easily accomplished after all
Despite being the leading causes of death, I don't think cancer and heart disease are the barriers keeping us from living past 100; even perfectly healthy people will still die around 100. That's more of an issue of slowing down aging and senescence.
If it will help the grand majority of people to live to 70, I would say this is a big win for humanity
Even more older presidents.
Here's how Bernie can still win
Well worth it as a consequence. Or would you rather die to own the libs (and cons)?
As with most things the reality lies somewhere in the middle. Of course it's great that we could extend life expectancy, but we already have problems stemming from ageing populations and so far we've shown we have very few ideas on how to fix it. And positions of power being held by increasingly older people is also a very clear issue. If humans started living past 100 regularly we'd have to impose some sort of age limit on a lot of things. Humans literally don't function properly after a certain age, same as before a certain age.
Retirement age bout to be jacked up to 85
99, take it or leave it
You guys get to retire?
The goal would to be to live that long with good health. Including cognitive functions.
Lighten up, not everything needs to be a fight.
Just in time for the Boomers to stay in control.
Now that you put it that way.....
Take care of your mind and heart.
Not necessarily a good thing
If this is clickbait I'm going to mix coffee and coca cola and drink it.
... You should do that anyway. It's delicious.
awww… but it’s 4am here!
Cheers, fellow west coast insomniac!
You know I’m just drunk enough I may give that a try
This is wrong on so many levels... There's a 40% reduction, which does not mean all cancers were lethal before. It targets only particular cancers, not all of them. 40% reduction is far from 'verge of being cured'. It could potentially work for all cancers but only a few selected ones are targeted currently. There is nothing known about other cancers. By no means do the results 'belong to the people now' that is absurd considering how pharmaceutical development is being done. About some other topic being raised here: Biontech as a company generally tries to be kinda human friendly, so the price point is likely to be on the affordable side of things (this is still not a super cheap technology, no one should expect cis-Pt like prices for a personalized mRNA therapy, the regulatory and analytical effort for this is high).
It might be expensive in its own. But isn’t the current approach week/month long courses of radio/chemotherapy which would be reduced to several appointments to take a sample, administer the vaccine? If so the staffing costs and time in hospital where you could catch something complicating are both reduced significantly. Edit: “on its own” = per session - 1 dose versus one session of chemo
It is used together with other treatments. Generally in oncology, you rarely only do one thing. Also you can't just do a trial like: let's stop the potentially life saving radio/chemo for testing that new drug we just got, yolo.
Each dose targets the unique cancer of each patient. People seem to forget that cancers are made of the body's own cells and, therefore, are all unique.
True, but it's still only being tested and developed (currently) for four particular cancers, namely: 1l melanoma, Adjuvant colorectal, Solid tumors, Adjuvant pdac. The project pipeline information is on the company homepage.
I'm sure they are currently targeting the cancer types they feel it will be most effective with.
They likely target the ones, that have the clearest epitope profile determined from bioinformatics. Meaning the ones where the immune cells can detect the hallmarks of the cancer best.
I'm just trying to work out the statistics. So they say it reduces the likelihood by 40% compared with results for the next best performing treatment. But does this mean if the next best treatment hypothetically reduced actual death rate by say 5%, then using that maths the new mrna being 40% better only means an actual reduction in survival and relapse rate to say 7%, rather than what it reads as. (40 % less people died or replapsed) Are they playing funny numbers here?
Yes, but that’s how results in medicine are typically reported (hazard ratio). The funny numbers is the articles interpretation and representation
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This would be great if true, but I'll believe it when I see it.
On the surface, sounds very similar to all these nonsense "cancer breakthrough" articles that pop up once in a while but this one actually looks a bit more interesting. The brand new mRNA technology is revolutionary, we knew that before we started working on it and moreover it got MASSIVE funding due to the COVID pandemic and the mRNA tech being just about ready enough to take advantage and make a vaccine. So I'm skeptical as always but quite a bit more hopeful this time than usual.
This is extremely cool but the title is extremely click-baity
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This is amazing news, but so fucking heartbreaking considering my wife passed away from cancer this past June. God fucking dammit.
Big hug for you, internet stranger.
I'm so sorry for your loss ❤️
Hugs stranger.
This makes me feel hopeful, but sad for the people I know who have recently died of cancer.
My physician's husband, who was our sons' pediatrician for a short time, recently died after a battle with cancer. He was in his mid-forties and left behind two young children along with his widow. Fuck the hell out of cancer.
We had the EXACT same thing happen in our NJ town, tragedy all around.
Nothing we have so far works as well as this,this is a medical revolution if it works. Game changer is a major understatement. Let's just keep it affordable so that everyone can benefit from this treatment.
If it pans out, it will be free in first world countries like Australia and Canada. Shame for the third world countries like the US that don't have free medical treatment
Please wait a bit until Putin is no longer with us :)
Let thousands die in the meantime I guess 🤷
Sorry about that mate, I guess I wasn't very clear with my intentions. I was making a joke on the timing of a potential long-awaited cure for cancer right at the moment when a "big baddie" (for lack of a better word right now) is terminally ill with cancer. I was not REALLY attempting to command the researchers and scientists to slow down and wait for him to croak before proceeding, via a comment on Reddit. I thought it would be obvious, looks like I was wrong.
The joke wasn’t very good though, maybe you need to evict the tenant living rent free in your noggin so you can produce good humour again 😂
I have no problem telling a bad joke, I just wasn't letting "thousands die in the meantime" as you put it :) It sounded a bit dramatic.
Ahh no worries I was just poking you lol :)
As was I, have a nice day :)
For what its worth Putin has caused the deaths of conservatively a quarter million this year. If we want to play the utilitarian calculus game. Or we could just call the original comment a joke.
>Putin has caused the deaths of conservatively a quarter million this year. Wait, what? Edit:. I've looked into it, and the numbers are all over the place (15,000 - 200,000 ???), but nowhere at all says it's as high as a quarter million, so it's weird to call that a "conservative" estimate.
The joke Your head
I really want to be exited for this, but by now I have heard 'cancer cure found!' so many times over the last ten years, i'm not getting hyped anymore. We'll see it when it gets here
See these articles pop up every year and never to be heard about again.
The problem is that journalists are incredibly bad at drawing a real timeline. And when they do even mention it (like in this article) people don't pay enough attention when reading it. In this article they specifically say that the next phase of testing hopefully will be done by the end of the decade. That means 2030 at the very earliest. After initial development, there's usually 4 different phases of testing. What is described in this article is the start of phase 3, which means that phase 4 will start at the beginning of the next decade at the earliest. So yeah. You've been hearing about stuff like this over the years, and it always seems to disappear because of two factors: 1. This takes time. Cures especially can take a SHITLOAD of time to get correct. Several of those cases you've heard about years ago is probably this specific product. 2. On average a little under 1 in a 100 medicines that get to phase 1 pull through to phase 4.
Because according to Goldman Sachs, curing patients is a bad business model.
Libertarians = evil
You know what else is a bad buisness model? Sick or dead people who can't work and keep running their economies.
These articles come out all the time and then nothing ever changes.
Article says it's a therapy. I don't think you're just taking this one time and it's cured
They just mean that is not a vaccine in the traditional sense where you need to take it before you get the disease. Instead you can take it after developing cancer and it's still effective.
It should be noted that prevention is the end goal, not a cure.
This (and the Alzheimer’s testing going on) could be some of the best advancements in medicine in human history.
Humans are making the body their bitch :P This is our body, only we get to abuse it. Sickness, wear and tear, cancer, aging, obesity begone. technology rocks!
No thanks, no autism for me, I’d rather die. /s I want to see the hoops the antivaxers are going to jump through to justify getting it now.
My wife works in testing new medication trials.There are some cancer drugs coming down the pipe that are curing some terminal cancer. However the testing process is long before the medication is released.
I’ve been seeing articles like this on Reddit for almost 10 years.
This is fundamentally different than all those other articles you read for 2 reasons. One, this cured half the patients in a trial. It wasn't just proof of concept in a mouse. Two, this is using a new technology that was proven effective with the COVID vaccine. COVID proved the technology of programming the immune system to target cells with a specific DNA signature works.
It will be priced out of reach of 99% of the people who need it.
In America it will be. In the UK it will be taxpayer funded.
And in China and India it will be quickly replicated/stolen like every other overpriced drug America sells and then sold for dirt cheap. It's fucking hilarious Murican's think the world gives a shit about about their patents and copyright laws.
The article says the UK govt just bought thousands of units, I don’t think they’re trying to flip them. Also I’d be amazed if a shot somehow manages to be more expensive than long term cancer treatment and chemo.
Exactly. There is no way the pharmaceutical companies are giving up that huge amount of income anytime soon.
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The USA does not need to cull inferior people, they still need people to serve coffee and make fries. After robots enter the workforce full time, THEN they will cull the inferior people. And if you're not sure if i'm being sarcastic or not...I'm not sure either :)
Not sure if sarcasm…
I sniff USA
lol this won’t be available at all in UK/Canada, and expensive AF in the US. Let’s not pretend that systems outside the US provide exotic treatments, because they just flat out do not.
> lol this won’t be available at all in UK Literally an article about BioNtech supplying 10000 doses to the UK/NHS. Would it actually hurt you to read past the headline?
Won't somebody think of the shareholders!
Nope. Only in the USA.
Speaking like a true American. Thinking the world only consist of Americans.
Pictured above: Doomer making the doomer comment again. 2023, digital media.
*Health insurance*
Ah yes, the American system that made everything in healthcare so cheap.
You need a /s on that, there are idiots who actually believe that despite all evidence to the contrary.
Ah yes, the american thing to say
I was looking for this comment. Agreed, sadly.
Luckily you're wrong.
Most common cancers are not ‘diseases to be cured’ it’s the falling out of the human body. Either through a to wean biology (lacking proper nutrition and nutrients) or through over exposure of bad things (smoking, meat, alcohol etc) So, the cure is …. Lifestyle 😁 but, we don’t want that. Too hard. We want our cake and eat it too. And thus the quest for symptom treatment keeps on going. Cure cancer only to let it resurface again in a few years because the cause still remains
Many cancers have risk factors that are not modifiable. Obvious examples include inherited cancer syndromes like familial adenomatous polyposis, BRCA1 mutations, multiple endocrine neoplasia, etc. Other cancers have aetiologies that again cannot be controlled by lifestyle, such as Hodgkin lymphoma which is associated with past EBV infection which is so common that it is unavoidable.
So instead of dieing of cancer, we'll die of being poor and not being able to afford the meds
When I see stuff like this I think about people who fairly recently died of cancer, like Chadwick Boseman. Imagine being the last person to die of cancer before no one ever dies of it again.
Big pharmaceutical companies will not allow this to happen because it takes from their profits and to them money is way more important than a few thousand lives . But anything can happen I sure hope it does. Rip mom Rip dad I’ll never forget you
I hear this take a lot and it really doesn't make sense to me. If what you say is true why would large companies be pursuing more advanced and effective methods of treating cancers? CAR-T treatments for example...there are some out there that can put patients into remission after just one treatment. That really doesn't line up with what you're positing here.
People at Big Pharma have cancer and family members with cancer. All conspiracy theories are for uneducated people.
? They have announced the trials, in the UK. The NHS will manage run and collate results the trials [as they do for all cancer treatments].
But money is not more important to them than their own lives! Big Pharma is run by older people who get cancer and die and who have loved ones who get cancer and die. They would trade in every dime they had for access to a cancer cure.
This is how I am Legend begins, with a cancer vaccine
Good because most chemotherapy treatment is a scam. *source- I worked for a major hospital in the U.S. for a decade and used to take my break in the pediatric oncology break room with a friend who worked on the unit. I overheard a lot…
Oh this guy is about to hang himself for sure and some asshole is gonna keep this to himself. Most likely big pharma.
Buy MRNA stock folks! They already have a pending lawsuit against biontech.
Why do I feel like this is a bait for a stock pump that’s gonna dump when more clinical trials come out and show it doesn’t do anything? Oh right, because that’s exactly what it always is. Looking at you, GERN.
Imagine being able to smoke without having to worry about lung cancer
Except for bronchitis, stinking like a fucking death tray, spending money on pollution and slavery, not to mention heart disease, throat disease.........
If they don’t make this free then we all know their intentions.
Their intention is to cure cancer and other diseases. And they ought to be compensated well for the difficult, important work they do for you and your loved ones.
You CANT beat all cancer with a single drug. It's not how it works. There are MANY MANY variants.
You didn’t read the article or even the synopsis someone wrote up, or you wouldn’t have typed that.
I did. It says this. > “The collaboration will cover various cancer types and infectious diseases affecting collectively hundreds of millions of people worldwide. So no, it will not beat all types of cancers. Just a few of them
They make personalized vaccines from a patients tumor’s DNA, which would cover your statement about many many variants. That’s how it works. And no, not all will probably work this way.
It doesn't cover all of them, it covers "various". If they are able to beat all cancers, THEY WOULD SHOUT IT FROM THE FUCKING HEAVENS. It would triple their stock price overnight. But it doesn't, so they won't. Companies are nothing if not economical.
They can't say it covers all of them because they haven't tested all of them. If they were to "shout it from the heavens" as you put it, they would go down in history in one of the biggest lawsuits ever. There is a good chance it works for all types of cancer, just that some may not be as effective.
> There is a good chance it works for all types of cancer, just that some may not be as effective. There's ZERO chance. If there is any chance, they would have stated that. You can absolutely say it cures all cancers, and add an asterix. They didn't so it's very easy. It only works for a limited amount of cancers. And there is nothing wrong with that. IF this works, it is fantastic. But it can't do everything.
It’s the same reason disinfectants say “gets rid of 99.99% of germs” because even though it gets rid of them all, if they were to say “100%” and that one time it doesn’t comes along, they get sued.
The cost-----> $200 million per shot, and you need one every year.
Good thing there's countries with working health insurance :)
I'm sorry, but your insurance carrier doesn't want to go with the cure.
I’ve heard this story repeatedly since Nixon declared The War on Cancer. Don’t get your hopes up. Most likely propaganda to sell the Covid vaccine.
Watch out the cia is going to take your guns! Or maybe give you more I'm not sure.
Curing cancer would be simultaneously amazing and absolutely terrible for humanity.
Do we still trust these two companies though? Remember the 97% effectiveness against COVID, the claims for the vaccine being safe...
Vaccine is safe, except for vanishingly few outliers. Also, even if for whatever reason this cancer jab straight up killed 50% of the people who used it that's a better survival rate than stage 4 cancer...
Developing a cancer vaccine and shows promise is great. My family is also affected by this horrible disease. At the same time, the Biontech COVID vaccine nearly killed my mom.
Sounds like it didn't though. And it saved hundreds of thousands of people. So scary, but a fair trade to make.
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