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#mice#cancer#https#more#humans#com#connery#here#title#bacteria

Discussion (115 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

gus_massaabout 1 hour ago
Previus discussion (from the university press release) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 (498 points | 6 months ago | 140 comments) I'll rehash my comment

They used mice, because they are good for early tries. The researchers had 9 bacterias and only 1 was successful. Experiments in mice are cheaper and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans. (Hey! They even injected the cancer cells in mice and waited a week until it grow. Nobody will approve something like that in humans.)

The title claims that the tumos were eradicated. The title hides that it was a small tumor they injected in the mice and more importantly that it disappeared for two weeks until the experiment ended. It's difficult to guess if it will be useful for humans with bigger tumors because they are harder to detect, and it would work for a interesting enough period like 5 years.

There is also and old comment by octaane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308732 I'll quote it partially:

> Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote:

>> "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)"

> PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are PD-L1 positive. [...] Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive.

> Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo.

> [...]

simonreiff6 minutes ago
I disagree that the title "hides" that the title was small and that it disappeared for two weeks. The surviving contingent on the E. americana strain was evaluated for 60 days, and the tumor doesn't look particularly small based on the picture on page 8 of the paper. I think the study size is small (n=5) so we'd like to see more large-scale studies next, but it's already a strong result to show 5/5 (100%) at p < 0.0001 for multiple primary endpoints and the absence of success from comparable bacteria is helpful to frame future research. The absence of long-term side effects and only transient weight-loss followed by 15-day weight gain is also intriguing. I'm not a doctor, oncologist, or cancer researcher, but the methodology looks sound and appropriate to me, as does the title, based on reading the paper.
bcjdjsndon25 minutes ago
> and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans

More like, what's a mouse gonna do about it?

1234letshaveatw25 minutes ago
I think you overestimate the "interesting enough period". How much would it be worth for some patients to go into remission for a year? or even 6 months? The answer is a lot
frellus36 minutes ago
I kid you not, there was a movie with Sean Connery called "Medicine Man" (1992) with this exact same theme.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104839/?ref_=fn_t_1

In it, Connery finds what looks to be a rare natural cure to all cancer in the Rain Forest (spoiler: not a frog, but equally as weird), and is literally battling the nearby deforesting and bulldozers. For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre (As a young teen, I saw it in the theaters.. quite a bit less action than a 007 movie but good drama and dramatic Sean Connery acting).

6P58r3MXJSLi18 minutes ago
I've seen the movie several times. In Italian, the title was translated simply as Mato Grosso, which makes it oddly geographically specific. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Connery definitely starred in even weirder movies. Have you seen Zardoz?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmI2NjI2OWYtMzU5NS00...

tclancy30 minutes ago
>For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre

Buddy, if you're trying to tell me it's weirder than Darby O'Gill and the Little People, I am going to need more than Sir Connery in a ponytail.

frellus22 minutes ago
Yeah, with a movie like that in his credits, it seems a miracle he was ever selected to be James Bond. His radar for picking great movies was equally bad as it was good.
stogot20 minutes ago
He had to pay his bills
RockyMcNuts8 minutes ago
You're the man now, dog!
SideburnsOfDoom26 minutes ago
> I am going to need more than Sir Connery in a ponytail

Check out Zardoz: Connery with a ponytail, a pistol in hand, wearing thigh-high boots and a mankini.

And a giant flying stone head that vomits guns.

I am not joking.

Geee21 minutes ago
Very cool research. They just injected mice with 45 different bacterial strains, and then isolated and cultivated the ones that had the best performance. It seems that it might be quite easy to cultivate these strains to target different tumors / specific tumor samples.

Ewingella Americana itself is a quite common bacterial species, but it seems that the effective strain is the frog-derived and cultivated one. So don't go injecting yourself with a random E. Americana.

Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2...

tiffanyhabout 1 hour ago
To give more credit to this blog post, the NIH published findings on this same subject last year.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/

scoot15 minutes ago
Doesn’t that simply make this blog spam?
functionmouseabout 2 hours ago
Mice are having a great year
hootzabout 1 hour ago
To be honest, they are pretty cute, they don't deserve cancer.
tclancy27 minutes ago
Spoken like someone who has never had to rebuild a generator or find out the hard way car wiring is mainly soy-based nowadays.
giglamesh11 minutes ago
I owned a riding mower once. Mice built nests in the engine, blocking enough of the air cooling to result in overheating and blowing the main seal. After fixing that twice I got in the habit of removing enough of the shroudy bits to expose and remove the nests. That took as long as actually mowing the lawn. After a season of that I gave the mower away and now we pay a neighbor to cut the grass. We did consider trying to mouseproof the shed or the mower itself, but we are either too busy or too lazy, depending on who you ask. My long term (probably fantasy) solution is a robotic mower - but we have not much budget for it, are chronically absentee and the property has a lot of odd strips of discontinuous turf.

EDIT: we did revert about 50% of the lawn to native wetland/prairie and we aim to raise that number over time.

anticorporate12 minutes ago
Wrapping your wiring harness in capsaicin tape works pretty well. Unfortunately, this is a discovery I made after multiple annoying and expensive repairs.
bcjdjsndon24 minutes ago
"Spoken like"? God I hate rick and Morty that boring show
rich_sashaabout 1 hour ago
The ones genetically engineered to get Alzheimer's or the ones engineered to get cancer?
CuriouslyC43 minutes ago
Plot twist, doesn't matter, even the control group is going to be dead soon if it's not already.
vitally3643about 1 hour ago
Trick question, all lab rodents are so inbred that they get cancer anyway
N_Lensabout 2 hours ago
Century*
psychoslaveabout 1 hour ago
Hmm, mice get much impressive medical results to be linked to here and there, but overall it’s not certain the species benefit that much in happiness and fulfilment.
hack1312about 1 hour ago
They told me they’re happy enough when I was delivering them cookies.
eks3918 minutes ago
Did you have milk too? If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk.
jagaergladabout 1 hour ago
The pride and sense of achievement they ought to feel that members of their kind did something should be enough to feel superior though
patchtopic8 minutes ago
rest of the site has the usual "cooker" insane brainrot ivermectin, etc crap
romx-cellabout 1 hour ago
We are destroying ecosystems so fast that there will be no frogs and we will regret it. The same with all the nature
slibhb27 minutes ago
There will, in fact, continue to be frogs.

One theory of where posts like this come from: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2527316123

bcjdjsndon20 minutes ago
> We are destroying ecosystems so fast

Definitely changing, I'm not so sure about destroying. Your house displaced an ecosystem so you could live there but I bet in your ethical system that's fine right? What a surprise

amanaplanacanal11 minutes ago
As they say, "there is no ethical consumption." I've done my part by not having any kids.
slibhb8 minutes ago
Following this logic, isn't "your part" undone until you commit suicide?
sevenzeroabout 1 hour ago
We get what we deserve. We let the top 1% destroy our planet and also let them live the longest in their bunkers, while we deal with the repercussions of not having done enough. But I've noticed that folks on HN are very very fond of capitalism, so it's no point arguing against it on here and on the effects of wealth accumulation and greed.
CuriouslyCabout 1 hour ago
The distribution here is bimodal. There are plenty of Elon-shilling exploit the solar system types, but also plenty of skeptical types who see all the futurism bullshit as a lever to maintain control.
notact33 minutes ago
Can you help me understand how alternatives to capitalism, such as central planning, would necessarily be better at preserving the planet?
someonebaggy31 minutes ago
The alternatives to capitalism are a wide spectrum, ranging from totalitarian dictatorship (aka central planning) all the way to free markets with sensible regulations. What they all have in common is not being capitalism, i.e. not putting power solely in the hands of the wealthiest.
vrganjabout 1 hour ago
People here strive to be the ones hiding in the bunkers as the world burns.
bell-cot38 minutes ago
Most humans would prefer hiding in a bunker to burning.

And far better to be hiding, than watching and playing a fiddle from atop some convenient high wall. Or plotting how to destroy your fellow alpha arsonists next.

1234letshaveatw22 minutes ago
Ban AC!
ajkjkabout 1 hour ago
people are very fond of it here -> there's no point arguing against it here?

Backwards logic. If they're fond of it then they're the people to be arguing against, no?

sevenzeroabout 1 hour ago
Resource exploitation and destruction of ecosystems are direct results of capitalism and greed and neglect. I stopped bringing up arguments against capitalism on here generally due to the sheer amount of people in privileged circumstances that wouldn't change a thing about their ways. Also doesn't help that people in tech often times have no sense of empathy whatsoever, so its no use to argue about this on here.
Leonard_of_Qabout 1 hour ago
Yeah, sure, capitalism, 1%, etc. Spoken like a 15yo who just saw some DSA- agitprop on TikTok and is now ready to solve the world's problems.
buellerbueller23 minutes ago
Solving the world's problems is certainly a more laudable goal than the accumulation of wealth, don't you think?
sevenzeroabout 1 hour ago
Just proves my point :)
ballenfabout 2 hours ago
I wonder if animals have always seen frogs as unpleasant medicine they need to eat occasionally. My dog would happily scarf them down if I let him. Or does it have to be IV administered?

Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?

There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.

micromacrofootabout 1 hour ago
> unpleasant

> happily

I think you answered your own question really, a lot of animals just enjoy eating them (humans included!)

psychoslaveabout 1 hour ago
Humans can go very far in exploring all kind of variation in whatever craze they get addicted to, all the more if they get all the room and resources to do so.
cyanydeezabout 1 hour ago
maybe your dog is chasing a high from some rare toad mutation...
giwook19 minutes ago
Great news for mice everywhere.
lizardking24 minutes ago
Never been a better time to be a mouse
VMGabout 1 hour ago
Crank blog, very skeptical
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cedwsabout 2 hours ago
Bryan Johnson might be interested in IV’ing frog gut bacteria.
VladVladikoffabout 1 hour ago
Is Bryan Johnson a mouse with cancer?
cedwsabout 1 hour ago
Not yet.
N_Lensabout 2 hours ago
How rude! Bryan is no labrat /j
jimnotgymabout 2 hours ago
100 years of trying everything to kill bacteria, and we find they can be jolly useful
gpderettaabout 2 hours ago
humanity has been producing useful things from bacteria for thousands of things already.
degamadabout 2 hours ago
Cheese!
pestatijeabout 2 hours ago
lager
usrnmabout 2 hours ago
Yeast are not bacteria, though
GaProgManabout 1 hour ago
So the Bursar at Unseen University was on to something this whole time? And we all thought was mad!
oofbeyabout 1 hour ago
The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal.

Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.

So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.

algoth1about 1 hour ago
When my mother was fighting cancer, I recall the many disappointments of finding research shrinking tumours in animal models, only to find out the human research showing it didnt work in humans. This was in the 2010s, before llms, but when google search actually searched the web. Then, once you found something that seemed to work in humans, you were hit with the realization that ‘cancer’ is an umbrella term, and you need to account for cell type, and its numerous mutations.. I think the best approach is to collect a sample of the cancer, genotype it, test it against all known anticancer compounds, similar to how you’d deal with a bacterial infection sample, and then hope that the compound that worked for that specific cancer cell will work inside the human
tekacsabout 1 hour ago
I'm astounded that this thread doesn't contain at least one 'eat the frog' joke.

https://asana.com/resources/eat-the-frog

paulryanrogers34 minutes ago
Because this is HN and not Reddit?
pennomiabout 2 hours ago
The AI- generated diagram is plausible but horribly wrong the more you look at it. Thank goodness the original paper didn’t use that, it’s just this awful blog post that makes the research look like slop.
therobots927about 2 hours ago
AGI is clearly right around the corner. It might not be able to make an accurate diagram of a cancer research study but it’s gonna cure cancer in no time…
xingpedabout 2 hours ago
~~I wouldn't be so sure about "clearly". We're still very squarely in the "fancy auto-complete" stage of "AI", the name of which I still consider more branding than reality.~~

Edit: Ignore me, I'm sleepy and can't read, lol

hack1312about 1 hour ago
The person you’re replying to was being glib
TaupeRangerabout 1 hour ago
How in the world did you miss such obvious sarcasm?
BigTTYGothGFabout 1 hour ago
Before anybody gets too excited they should check out some of the other reporting on that site, such as "COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection" and "Trump Signed a Directive to Accelerate 6G Deployment to Operate "Implantable Technologies"
andrewstuartabout 1 hour ago
Mice are so goddam healthy.

They get all the good medical breakthroughs.

bell-cot34 minutes ago
From what I've heard of murine health and life expectancy stats, all those "good medical breakthroughs" aren't actually doing them much good.

Vs. there's a whole lotta of money to be made in mouse medicine.

Symbolic, perhaps?

petesergeantabout 2 hours ago
The blog articles (6 weeks old) describes this as new, but the linked paper is closer to 6 months old. Random report of the same bacteria giving a chemo patient sepsis: https://www.cureus.com/articles/342789-sepsis-caused-by-ewin... which seems unfortunate
degamadabout 1 hour ago
Yep, I found that one too - this paper <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/> assumes immunocompetent mice, while the sepsis one was in a patient who was immunocompromised (both by the cancer and by chemo).

Given that many cancer sufferers are immunocompromised, this isn't necessarily a silver bullet, although it is an interesting result.

jmorenoamorabout 1 hour ago
Sorry but the site looks too sensationalist for me.

Is there any other source?

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tristanjabout 2 hours ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/
plasticeagleabout 2 hours ago
The paper states that the results are in vivo, not in vitro. The bacteria seemed to literally have cured colorectal cancer in mice. Mice are apparently strikingly similar to human beings in ways that matter, and so this research is very encouraging.

Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.

p0w3n3dabout 2 hours ago
this one is in mice. I guess we're running in circles now.
hahahaa6 minutes ago
"in mice" as a non-perjorative, wow ;)
boxedabout 2 hours ago
Not really the same in this situation though.
drcongoabout 1 hour ago
As in 99.9% of cases of people who rush to the comments desperate to post a link to xkcd because, erm, actually I dunno. Why the hell do half the threads on HN have someone desperately posting an unrelated xkcd?
hootzabout 1 hour ago
It's our Nostradamus Prophecies, just like having an old Star Trek episode for everything that is happening today.
hahahaa5 minutes ago
no idea as there is always a relevant xkcd to be had instead.
cheschireabout 2 hours ago
Mice tumors, the scourge of humanity.
aa-jvabout 2 hours ago
Wow, this is humorous .. whats next, the eye of the newt cures wistfulness? I sure hope so.

Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft.

I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..

criddellabout 1 hour ago
You might like this episode of Radiolab:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/best-medicine

They followed a 1100 year old medicine recipe and found the resulting salve was effective against MRSA in their test.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6261618/

vixen99about 2 hours ago
Sure thing! Plenty of possibilities here for instance: 'Bioactive Compounds in Ficus Fruits, Their Bioactivities, and Associated Health Benefits: A Review'. (It's a pretty extensive list).

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/06ab/f83d30ec00bb902bb1aa37...

rimworldabout 2 hours ago
lol