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Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
That said, I'll happily take "we discovered a key weakness in 20% of cancers," please and thank you.
One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.
This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.
This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.
So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.
I know this is a popular "well actually" to do, but it is not always useful in a conversation. Yes, all cancers are different, but yes, cancer is also one thing: unchecked, harmful division of cells.
Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once. It is reasonable to talk about bacteria and antibacterial medications, it is also reasonable to talk about cancer and cancer treatment. I truly hope cancer will meet its "penicillin" one day (yes I know this is unlikely).
Can you help disambiguate this? Are there treatments now, or are there potential treatments with trials in 1-5 years?
It most likely will help if you get pancreatic cancer. It might help if you get one of the other types of cancers with this mutation.
And it will likely lead to new treatments for some of the worst kinds of cancer.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
The bigger deal about this is that KRAS was considered an "undruggable" target.
Recent advancements have allowed us to design biologics to do things we previously thought impossible, which broadens the horizons for other treatments in the future.
Baby steps.
"oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daraxonrasib
This subthread there is a fascinating explainer about one user's journey into funding and incentivizing research into their own rare form of blood cancer, and how they are able to push forward the state of the art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506997 - something of a modern-day (and more accurate) Lorenzo's Oil!