alt Hacker News100% response, zero side effects?
This sounds like world changing news. Can anyone with domain expertise explain the catch, if any?
Replies
Certainly good news for mice.
I wonder if anyone has tried to engineer a mouse that lives forever by applying all these life enhancing mouse therapies at once.
It looks like they screened 45 strains of bacteria to find 9 that passed their safety tests, and then only one of those had a 100-percent response. The sample size is also small: 5/5 sounds a lot less impressive than 100%. I'd expect the true response rate to be substantially lower ("winner's curse").
The bar for an acceptable side effect profile in an FDA-approved drug would also be a lot higher than "five genetically near-identical mice did not show evidence of pathology in a single study."
I'm not saying this work is bad (skimming, it seems fine for what it is, though haven't read in detail), but it's quite preliminary if we're talking about developing a medical treatment that could eventually be deployed in humans. There's a reason it ended up in a mid-tier microbiome journal.
Very small sample size and only in mice. Most experimental treatments don't make it to the clinic, and this could be another in a long list of exciting early results that don't lead to anything. However... These results seem too good to be true, but the paper actually seems pretty good. There have been other attempts to use anaerobic bacteria to treat cancer (as solid tumors tend to be hypoxic environments), this is the first I've seen that interacts with PD-1/PD-L1 pathway. This is the most promising cancer treatment I've seen in quite a while. Maybe we can be cautiously optimistic!
I hesitate to link directly to a single podcast dealer, but if you search for Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly's podcast with Stripe brothers, there's some alpha in there.
A few years ago we also had 100% effective medication with zero side effects. Now birth rates are down, mortality up, and young people misteriosly die from cancer and hearth attacks.
The catch is that there are thousands of promising therapies in animal models/pre-human testing. A very very tiny fraction of them will ever make it to market for a variety of both good and not-good reasons.