'Cancer-killing pill' is now being tested on humans

https://news.sky.com/story/cancer-killing-pill-that-appears-to-annihilate-solid-tumours-is-now-being-tested-on-humans-12932133

by HiroProtagonist • 3 years ago

51 31 3 years ago

news.sky.com

ssabev• 3 years ago

This is amazing news! Good to see that progress marches on

omgmajk5• 3 years ago

I hope to see cancer being beaten almost entirely within my lifetime, I want to live forever.

r4indeer• 3 years ago

Not trying to be rude, but what makes you believe that a universal cure for cancer would enable eternal life?

omgmajk5• 3 years ago

No, it was more of a shortened version of I hope we solve aging, cancer, brain diseases and the like. I guess I should've been more clear.

5423542342352• 3 years ago

Not OP, but cancer isn’t a disease as much as it is an inevitable breakdown of our body processes in various ways, which manifest as different kinds of cancer. Our cells need to divide and make new cells, and it isn’t a perfect process. We have natural mechanisms to prevent or destroy any cell that divides wrong, but it’s a numbers game. We have 30 trillion cells in our body, and after a quintrillion divisions something is going to go wrong in a way that becomes cancerous. To be able to “cure” that would mean the ability to understand and manipulate the human body in such precise ways it would almost certainly also allow us to fix/cure/manipulate any body process, including aging.

131012• 3 years ago

Sorry to break it to you, but someday you will die. Better get used to it.

omgmajk5• 3 years ago

Oh, I am well aware but that doesn't mean it still scares me a lot and I'd hope I didn't have to eventually.

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

You’re going to die in an accident eventually. But maybe the likely lifespan is long enough in practice and I’m just being pedantic.

omgmajk5• 3 years ago

You are probably right, the planet is getting wild and traffic happens all the time.

not_the_fda• 3 years ago

The ramifications of everyone living forever would be catastrophic.

stevehawk• 3 years ago

it's a dystopia that only the rich would love

TaupeRanger2• 3 years ago

Another post about this same thing was flagged yesterday. There are zero sources cited in this fluff piece, and there are no major developments released yet in the Phase I trial that is currently underway. In other words, this is just like all of the other failed "cancer pill/cure" articles you've read over the past 4 decades. Just stop posting about it until the trial results are available and we have actual evidence that it helps real patients (or, more likely, not).

ainiriand• 3 years ago

I think that as a rule of thumb we should flag this kind of articles to try to avoid making the front page.

soramimo• 3 years ago

FWIW, Derek Lowe writes about this (and seems excited to see the results of the upcoming trial): https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-mode-cancer-tr...

Wonnk13• 3 years ago

Wrapping up round 9 of Folfirinox chemo protocol, hopefully the last round of my life. This shit is nasty. I hope in the coming decades we can look back and realize how barbaric it is to poison your body and hope for the best.

However, this is just a puff piece, not news at all. Not a single citation etc etc. Cancers are hard, I just hope if I ever have children the science will have advanced beyond what I'm dealing with.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Sorry to hear, wishing you the best outcome. The future can't come fast enough.

bena• 3 years ago

One of the things that makes cancer insidious is that it is essentially you. Most diseases are caused by some foreign agent. Some bacteria or virus that invades your body and shuts down or takes over some critical function.

Cancer can be triggered by a foreign agent, but it itself is not a foreign agent. It is your own body's natural processes gone haywire. That makes differentiating cancer cells from other cells more difficult. Chemotherapy works by essentially killing your most active cells. The cells that are constantly reproducing. Those are your hair follicles, your stomach lining, your cancer, etc. It's why the side effects include hair loss and nausea. It's a chemical shotgun blasted into your body with the hopes that one of the casualties is the cancer.

kylecazar• 3 years ago

I'm really sorry to hear that and I hope it's the last time you'll go through it.

If must depend on the particular treatment and circumstance. I was by a loved one's side for the past several months during chemo (stage IV), and we were pretty shocked how few side effects there were. Basically none.

Radiation, on the hand, was brutal.

pantulis• 3 years ago

I'm sorry to read that you're going through this. I truly wish you the best of luck, fellow hacker.

timbit42• 3 years ago

Radiation is also barbaric.

metiscus2• 3 years ago

As many others have said, this appears to be a puff piece almost entirely devoid of meaningful content. There is currently one ongoing phase 1 trial for the drug in question, AOH1996. That phase 1 trial is scheduled to end in March or April of 2024 so we may have some answers about the safety of the treatment.

It is important to remember, when discussing these things, how clinical trial phases work. There are four main trial phases in a drug development cycle.

A Phase 1 trial is used to determine if a treatment is safe and to determine the maximum dosing. A preliminary result about the effects of the drug is a side product of a Phase 1 trial but this is not sufficient to know if a drug will succeed. Phase 1 trials are primarily about safety.

A Phase 2 trial is used to determine the efficacy of a treatment and to determine the best and most effective way to use that treatment. A drug that has a successful Phase 2 trial is likely to be effective but merely being effective is often insufficient for a drug to be considered a success.

A Phase 3 trial compares the effectiveness of a treatment against the current standard treatments. A new treatment must be better than the existing treatments in some way (e.g. same effect on the disease but lower side-effects, more effective in general, etc) to have a successful Phase 3 trial. A Phase 3 trial is the last regulatory hurdle to the approval of a treatment for use.

A Phase 4 trial, is performed after a treatment is developed and brought to market. The most common type is post-marketing surveillance where data is gathered about the effectiveness of the treatment, side effects, etc from observational studies of the treatment as used. These data are compared with the data developed during the Phase 3 randomized controlled trial to ensure that the treatment is performing like it should in the market. Differences between Phase 3 results and Phase 4 results can result in modifications to the box (e.g. a black box label), prescribing information, or other aspects of the treatment's packaging and marketing.

Hopefully this was helpful.

cowsandmilk• 3 years ago

While phases are a useful classification, looking at the outcome measures for a clinical trial is more useful for understanding the objective of the study and what will be answered.

On https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05227326 , opening up “What is the study measuring?” shows this one has primary outcomes of safety, but also has secondary outcomes around effectiveness of treatment.

Turing_Machine• 3 years ago

A Phase 1 trial is used to determine if a treatment is safe and to determine the maximum dosing.

There are also nuances here. A drug that's effective against some type of cancer can be deemed safe (or at least safe enough) even if it has truly horrific and/or dangerous side effects, because it's cancer, while a drug with the same safety profile would never be approved for, say, athlete's foot.

metiscus2• 3 years ago

Everything in medicine is about weighing comparative risks - nothing is completely safe if you look at it hard enough. Well raised point, thanks.

'Cancer-killing pill' is now being tested on humans

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